> Is _reason_ itself _instinctive_ to humans (uniquely) ? This is what I
> was trying to get at when I asked whether there is a biological
> component in
> the unique human capacity to form relations of mutual recognition.
>
> On the other hand, Marx doesn't anticipate that all human instinct
> will be
> obliterated in communist society, does he ? Some willing and acting
> will be
> instintive ( other than reason, if it is also instinctive) even
> after people
> have mutual recognition and self-determination. For example, humans
> will
> still have sexual instincts, eating instincts. Surely sexual
> instinct is
> within some mutual recognition.
>
> But the main question here is, don't humans reason better than apes
> ( or at
> all) because humans have an instinct to reason, have different
> biological
> equipment than apes ?
As the passage from Hegel I recently quoted indicates, human development understood within this ontology is a "struggle" of reason with instinct. Human being is separated off from other animal being by identifying it with the capability of fully mastering instinct. The attainment of such mastery is elaborated, among other ways, as the actualization of a "will proper" and a "universal will". Hegel's definitions of these concepts (appropriated by Marx) exclude the determination of the content of the will by instinct. As I've pointed out before, this idea is also found in Kant who explicitly mentions, as the starting point for the historical process of development that substitutes reason for instinct, the beginnings of such substitution in the cases of food and sex. <http://mailman.lbo- talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20051114/025199.html>
Marx makes the nature of the sexual relation a measure of the degree to which human beings have actualized themselves as "conscious species-beings", i.e. actualized their potential for a "will proper" and a "universal will" and, on this basis, self-consciously constructed their relations as relations of mutual recognition.
"In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species- relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man.
"From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>
That this conception of human being is embedded in an ontology different from the scientific materialist ontology underpinning modern evolutionary biology means that the conception of all other forms of being, e.g. ape being, is also transformed. The attribution of these capacities to human being requires, as a logical matter, their presence as a potential in “being” in general and in the particular “beings” from which human being evolved.
So the meaning of "nature" becomes "nature alive". What's involved in a transformation of the ontological foundations of science in this way is summarized in Whitehead's Modes of Thought. The transformation "sublates" the positive content of modern science.
Ted