Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >Hey, what's tragic about dance: achieving beauty by giving one's own
> >limbs economy, precision, & purposiveness without purpose?
>
> That's not tragic. What's a little creepy about the passage you quoted is this:
>
> >Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise
> >his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them
> >transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses,
> >and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher
> >social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
>
> I'd say that that notion of transparency is a fantasy - that our
> "instincts" can never be that unambiguously known to us.
I'm balanced between Doug and Yoshie on this one. But I think the word "instincts," with or without scare quotes, is a bad one. The word has been horribly misused on this list (and, of course, everyplace else) and I'm not competent to clear it up much. But I suspect that whatever instincts are, they are quite transparent. Salmon swim back to their place of spawning to spawn. That is instinct. It is transparent to us, and our instincts (if we have any) would be equally transparent to us. Our reflexes are, and I think instincts are related to reflexes. Throw something at me and I will blink. That is, instincts and reflexes are both merely facts, not very interesting ones at that.
(I stand ready to be corrected on this by someone who actually knows something about the topic. Perhaps Maureen can say something sensible when she returns to the list.)
So if we are going to either support or attack Trotsky, the first step is to fill in that word "instinct" with some description that makes minimal sense in the context.
Carrol