Desires Are Not Instincts

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Intended Meaning

Shahrur explains that desires are not instincts: desires are conscious human inclinations that arise from knowledge and the social environment. Instincts, by contrast, are unconscious inclinations, physiologically grounded, and shared by humans and animals.

The Atom’s Structure in the Atlas

  • Type of argument: Distinguishing
  • Argument movement: It separates conscious desires from physiological instincts.
  • Core terms: desires, instincts, consciousness, origin.
  • Degree of centrality: Central.

It presents desires as conscious human inclinations and places instincts at another level shared with animals. This distinction is important for understanding moral obligations as a conscious act.

Basis

  • Supporting text: “Desires: conscious human inclinations of cognitive and social origin. Instincts: unconscious inclinations of physiological origin shared with animals.”

Place of the basis in the book

  • Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
  • Location: within the treatment of the distinction between “love of desires” and what falls under human consciousness as inclinations.
  • Type of basis: Close witness.
  • Marker that helps verification: Desires are conscious human inclinations
  • Reading note: This passage works as evidence because it explicitly states that desires are “conscious human inclinations,” which is very close to the atom’s content.

Degree of documentation

  • Level: Directly documented
  • Meaning of the level: The atom relies on an explicit witness close to the formulation of the claim.
  • Limits of reading: The formulation above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted word for word.

Its function in the book

Its function here is definitional; it fixes a meaning or conceptual distinction that Shahrur relies on to build the idea.

Editorial note

The atom adheres to the distinction between consciousness and origin.

Graph View

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Muhammad Shahrur Atlas