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Robert Wood wrote:
> I think some work needs to be done to link this with a claim
> about instincts towards a 'heterosexual instinct' among humans.
> This is
> also true about the Feuerbach/Marx material, which seems to be
> missing a
> few steps.
Feuerbach's "materialism" isn't Marx's.
^^^^ CB: As we know from Marx's critique of Feuerbach in the "Theses on Feuerbach" and Engels book _Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy_
^^^^^
It's the degree to which this potential is actual that's socially "constituted" (through social relations understood as "internal relations"), ^^^ CB: Thank you for this clarification of what you mean by "internal relations"
^^^^
So, when Marx makes a "sexual" relation - "the relation of man to woman" - a measure "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," he's making it a measure of the extent to which the "human essence," elaborated as the potential for a "will proper" and a "universal will," has become actual and acknowledging the strength of
the sexual "instinct" and the consequent difficulty of making sexual relations "relations of mutual recognition" (in Marx's sense, not Butler's). All such relations require is that those involved in them
be rationally as opposed to instinctively determined; no other restriction is implied.
^^^^^ CB: The instinct for heterosex _is_ rational. It does not contradict mutual recognition. We might even say it is mutual recognition. We might even say that the general sense of mutual recognition is _modelled_ on the heterosexual instinct. Heterosex is a unity and struggle of opposites, which is the structure of . The critical aspect of your "mutual recognition" is that the mutual recognizers are different from each other yet they give each other mutual respect despite their difference. This mutual recognition between different individuals in fundamental to the structure of love between opposites of heterosex.
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