Dominating nature chiefly becomes power over other humans
Evidence
- Effectively summarizing the second part of William Leiss’s The Domination of Nature, W. Warren Wagar observes: “As Bacon and his followers never understood, the struggle for mastery over nature in a world divided into rival classes and nations becomes, above all, a struggle for power over one’s fellowmen. This brutal struggle for existence negates the gains made by technical progress. ‘The more actively is the pursuit of the domination of nature undertaken, the more passive is the individual rendered; the greater the attained power over nature, the weaker the individual vis-a-vis the overwhelming presence of society.’ The central fact of our time is not wealth or freedom, but the persistence of social conflict at all levels, to which science and technology are insatiably subordinated. We are as far as ever from mastery of ourselves.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 703
Categorization
- XREF: Mirrors the ‘interpellation/discipline’ dynamic in Foucault and echoes the mastery-of-nature as mastery-of-others theme in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. — connects to: Enlightenment’s mastery over nature exceeds anything nature itself threatened humans with. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 258; Controlling nature and controlling humans advance together within science — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 614; Scientific quantification of nature parallels society’s reduction of humans to abstract labor power. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 583 (+11 more)