Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (54 of them)
because the idea of nature is itself historical, nature as we tend
to think of it cannot exist.
"No less delusive is the question about nature as the absolute first,
as the downright immediate compared with its mediations. [...] it
would be up to thought to see all nature, and whatever would install
itself as such, as history, and all history as nature"
ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything
apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This
must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified
universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is
no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this
was undialectical.)
― alext, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I guess the relevance to the culture industry argument would be that
there is nothing natural about our likes and dislikes (historical);
but that there is no natural like or dislike against which to compare
it. The idea of spontaneous and natural appreciation of what is in
fact a manufactured entertainment product is the ideological frosting
on the cultural cup-cake.
― alext, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
"ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything
apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This
must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified
universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is
no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this
was undialectical.)"
I am a good deal keener on this formulation. But I think your
reservations are the best bit. We should indeed see nature and
history as interdependent and not wholly separate; but we had better
not collapse the concepts of nature and history together, because
it's clear that both of them, as they stand, do a useful work of
definition that would be lost if we ran them together.
That is, yes, human experiences of nature are certainly (radically?)
historical; indeed it can be argued that nature itself is historical,
even beyond human existence ('natural history') (and I think that's
what you are arguing?). But we should still reserve a conceptual
space for Nature which is different from the one we reserve for
History. (As for History as Natural - well, yes, but this is really
the claim that Everything is Natural - which is so true as to be
relatively unhelpful. Right?)
― the pinefox, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
He wants to be your father, the great Librarian. ask yourself why
you give him the time of bleeding day. Don't seek another father,
leave home. Allow neither opinion or belief into your brilliant
mind, they will only let you down.
― Graham C, Saturday, 11 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link