Maybe I'm being a pedant, but the knee thing is a reflex, not an instinct, unless I am misremembering the exact meaning of the words. Instincts are things like beavers building dams or birds flying south -- complicated behavior.
--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> Human beings obviously have instincts. You hit the
> right part of the
> knee, the leg goes up. However, there are a few
> steps missing from the
> argument if we want to argue for what you are
> arguing for. What I would
> not accept is that there are instincts that somehow
> structurally determine
> human existence. (ie when you try to make this a
> socially meaningful
> claim, it loses validity very quickly.) As a last
> note, there are a lot of
> things that we do 'instinctively' and are part of
> our 'second nature' that
> could be classified as ideology (within Althusser's
> use of the word)
> robert wood
>
Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes, mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.