Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca wrote:
>
> [clip]
> >From what I know, however, social
> relations (or species that had no existence independently of their
> social relations) long pre-date homo sapiens: or to put it otherwise,
> human society is several million years older than humanity.
>
> Yes, I do agree with this statement, although I wouldn't use the term "human
> society" to describe "societies" of like animals (e.g. chimps, elephants,
> predatory mammals) who live, find food, observe the world and each other all
> together.
I wasn't precise enough. By pre-human I meant those species (now extinct) who were direct predecessors of homo sapiens: homo habilis and homo erectus. One may dramatize it by saying that the very first homo sapiens always already found themselves enmeshed in history, in an ensemble of social relations which were a direct continuation of earlier pre-human relations. Whenever and wherever we find ourselves (ourselves being either the individual or the species) we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations. Consider as just one example: by the time anyone realizes that he/she is speaking, he/she has already been speaking for many months or years.
Gordon could also ask his bizarre individualist interlocutors to explain who the "I" is that enters into relations. That is: identify and describe an "I" in abstraction from all social relations.
The big question is how much is instinctual behaviour and how
> much is learned?
What do you mean by "instinct"? A bird sits on her eggs without knowing they are eggs or that they are going to hatch. Migratory birds follow a route without knowing they are following a route. What do humans do without knowing they are doing it? I don't claim to have the foggiest notion of what an "instinct" is, and I have never seen anyone on lbo use the word in any remotely sensible way.
Antonio Damasio uses the words "drives" and "instinct" in his neurological works, and I presume he uses them correctly, but as a non-neurologist I can't derive a clearcut meaning for the words, so I prefer not to use them myself.
Some posters on this list speak of "desire" in the abstract, but that only makes sense to me as a Platonic denial of the reality of any concrete person's concrete desires -- i.e. as a radical denial of physical reality.
Carrol
>
> Todd