Human history is inseparable from the history of nature, so dialectics cannot exclude nature
Evidence
The youthful Marx expressed the unending entwinement of the two elements with an extremist vigor bound to irritate dogmatic materialists: ‘We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be considered from two sides, divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. Yet there is no separating the two sides; as long as men exist, natural and human history will qualify each other.’ The traditional antithesis of nature and history is both true and false – true insofar as it expresses what happened to the natural element; false insofar as, by means of conceptual reconstruction, it apologetically repeats the concealment of history’s natural growth. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1339 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
In seeking to understand how, between 1500 and 1700, the organic conception of the cosmos gave way to a mechanistic model, an ecological perspective is essential. Focusing on early modern Europe as an ecosystem means more than discovering that today’s kind of environmental crisis has occurred in the past. It means a special sensitivity to the dialectical relationship between human behavior and institutions, on the one hand, and the natural environment, on the other. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 251 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Social Darwinism, the ‘hopeless rhythm of coming to be and passing away – or of eating and being eaten’, is a rhythm in which ‘[n]othing changes’: ‘The historical link between predator and prey is essentially unhistorical’. In the words of Adorno from one of his seminars, the ‘brilliance of Marx lies in the fact that although he conceives of history as a continuation of natural history, he opposes precisely the condition in which Darwinism becomes elevated to a worldview. His critique of political economy is one of the heteronomous domination of relations of production, a domination from which human beings should liberate themselves’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1346 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Nature and history are inseparable and mutually qualifying — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1339; Nature’s qualities are historical, not fixed, under human mastery — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 825; Human society is a historical reality that appropriates nature rather than submitting to it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142 (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Nature and history are inseparable and mutually qualifying
#corroborates(0.95) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1339 - Human culture and the natural environment form an interdependent dialectical system.
#corroborates(0.90) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 251 - Human society is a historical reality that appropriates nature rather than submitting to it
#corroborates(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142 - Lukacs’s dialectic is historically monist, not dualist between nature and humanity
#corroborates(0.85) - Marx conceived history as natural history without endorsing Social Darwinist worldview
#expands(0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1346 - Nature’s qualities are historical, not fixed, under human mastery
#corroborates(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 825 - History is neither purely objective nor purely subjective, being pervaded by a dialectical anti-dialectic
#qualifies(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 420 - Historical materialism is fundamentally historicist, not metaphysical
#corroborates(0.75) - Rejecting reason-nature dualism must not banish the mechanical to a new lower class
#expands(0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 504 - Domination of nature, not capitalism, is the decisive event in human cultural history
#complicates(0.70) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1397 - Human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, not a fixed essence.
#corroborates(0.70) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 617