On Sep 2, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 2, 2009, at 1:37 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
>>> Of course the practice of science is a social activity, but
>>> collective
>>> humanity confronts nature, which is outside of man, as a singular
>>> subject.
>> Why the dualism? What in "man," individually or collectively, is
>> not also
>> "nature?" And why should whatever human activity you choose to call
>> "science" not be seen to be just as "natural" as activities like
>> talking and
>> killing?
> Shane, I'm a little concerned that your approach utterly collapses
> humanity
> into nature, making both terms useless... I tried to make clear in
> earlier
> exchanges how I differentiate human beings from other, related,
> species
> without appealing to singular univeralist terms... but I DO think the
> distinction is important.
Let me try to make clear why those two terms retain real meaning without any "man/nature" dualism. First "humanity:" if humans are exactly as "natural" as termites then they can be studied just as scientifically--they are no more "collapsed" into nature than are termites etc. And as to "nature" (gr. physis), as the root meaning of the term makes clear, it refers to all that which, in the broadest sense, is "begotten, born, and dies:" the constantly changing material reality in which we are comprised. But that is not all of reality. Equally essential are the "monuments of unageing intellect"-- the "ideal" (invariant) mathematical structures ("laws") through which alone we can (though only approximately) comprehend and master *in practice* the changing material reality ("nature"), in a future whose correspondence to our past experience would be inexplicable without those structures.
Is there, then, no nonphysical differentiation of humans from other natural species? The answer that Marx derived from Hegel and Feuerbach is that Man is a "gattungswesen," a "species-being." This recondite term seems meaningless--who among us consciously directs individual activity toward the evolutionary interests of the human race as such? But that is not what Marx meant. The essence of "communism," in his terms, is that the *proletariat*, having raised its consciousness to the level of a class "an und für sich" (unto and for itself), has the historical potential to make the evolutionary destiny of the human species the practical object of collective human conscious activity (I refrain from using the fine term "eugenic" to describe such activity only in order not to set off another chorus of hysterical caterwaulings). In Marx's view, and my own, no other species has, at the present stage of planetary evolution, such a potentiality.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos