Very specific forms of nature — very specific ecosystems — constitute the ground for very specific forms of society. At the risk of using a highly embattled phrase, I might say that a “historical materialism” of natural development could be written that would transform “passive nature” — the “object” of human labor — into “active nature,” the creator of human labor. Labor’s “metabolism” with nature cuts both ways, so that nature interacts with humanity to yield the actualization of their common potentialities in the natural and social worlds. Here, I would like to emphasize that my views on nature are linked by a fairly unorthodox notion of reason. As Adorno and Horkheimer have emphasized, reason was once perceived as an immanent feature of reality, indeed, as the organizing and motivating principle of the world.
Rather, it occurs in those times of transition when justice is extricating itself from the parochial world of organic society. This is the heroic moment of innocence, before the materiality of equivalence in the form of the commodity reclaims an early idealism. At this time, justice is emergent, creative, and fresh with promise — not worn down by history and the musty logic of its premises.
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The racial ethos of fascism and the scientistic “dialectics” of Stalinism, both based on very particularistic images of nature, have claimed a toll in life and suffering that beggars the most barbarous eras of human history. We no longer need a “nature” (that is, an authoritarian sociobiology) that advances an ideological rationale for ethnic arrogance and concentration camps under the aegis of “inevitability” or “blind law.” But nature is not a homogeneous fabric that is woven from a single thread. The nature to which we can now address ourselves is neither bloody nor blind; it provides no ideological refuge for a mythos of irrationality, race, or, like Marxism, a contrived mechanism that passes itself off as a “social science” concealed under the shroud of Hegel. In dealing with the ambiguities of freedom, I shall begin with reason, for reason has always formed the secular hallmark of every specifically human achievement. Presumably, it is by virtue of our rationality that we are unique in the “mute” world around us and can achieve our “mastery” over it. The Enlightenment’s generous commitment to reason — its vast faith in the human enterprise as the outcome of thought and education — has never been lost even on its most severe critics, nearly all of whom have deployed reason in the very act of denigrating it.
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Nearly all the basic tasks of the community, from planting to food preparation, were done cooperatively. At every age level, the individual was charged with a sense of responsibility for the community. So all-pervasive were these group attitudes that Hopi children, placed in schools administered by whites, could be persuaded only with the greatest difficulty to keep score in competitive games. The absence of coercive and domineering values in organic cultures is perhaps best illustrated by the syntax of the Wintu Indians, a people that Lee studied very closely.
Its criterion for citizenship was not whether a man had been baptized, but whether he heard the fraternal spirit in himself. What applies to the individual, in Bentham’s view, can be extended to the community as the sum of all good and bad tendencies to which each of its members is exposed. Most small-scale economies have a way of scrambling wealth to inhibit reinvestment in technical advance, and this prevents crystallization of class lines on an economic base. Every aspect of nature, plants and rocks and animals, colors and cardinal directions and numbers and sex distinctions, the dead and the living, all have a cooperative share in the maintenance of the universal order.
Then they fail to get it until Bob uses his powers the put the sword out of stone (based of a book) that makes him king. Just like the rest of the Minions, they appear as cute, little, yellow men with one of twos eyes, but for these minions, Kevin is tall minion with two eyes, Stuart is medium sized minion with one eye and Bob is a small minion, with two eyes as well. Still, the movie wouldn’t work, even as a jamboree, were it not for Coffin and Balda’s understanding of their seemingly inscrutable characters. Kevin’s would-be manliness and covert adolescent joshing, Stuart’s fantasies about becoming a star, and Bob’s prepubescent exuberance inform the action even when it becomes frantic.
Terms like wholeness, totality, and even community have perilous nuances for a generation that has known fascism and other totalitarian ideologies. The words evoke images of a “wholeness” achieved through homogenization, standardization, and a repressive coordination of human beings. These fears are reinforced by a “wholeness” that seems to provide an inexorable finality to the course of human history — one that implies a suprahuman, narrowly teleological concept of social law and denies the ability of human will and individual choice to shape the course of social events.
Conversely, in societies where plows, animals, grains, and great irrigation systems formed the bases for agriculture, primordial communal institutions were still retained together with their communal distributive norms. These societies and their values persisted either without developing classes or by coexisting, often ignominiously, with feudal or monarchical institutions that exploited them ruthlessly — but rarely changed them structurally and normatively. Accumulated wealth, now conceived as the sum of humanity’s material sacrifices to the deities, was divested of the demonic traits that organic society had imputed to treasure.
As I have already noted, early hierarchies and ruling classes staked out their claims to sovereignty not only by a process of elevation but also by a process of debasement. Accordingly, labor’s destiny is irrevocably tied to the primordial vision of the earth as a living being. Nonhuman life labors together with humanity just as bears are believed to cooperate with hunters; hence both are drawn into a magic sphere of cooperation that daily nourishes primordial mores of usufruct and complementarity. In organic society, it would seem that no one could fully “possess” a material bounty that had been bestowed as much as created. Thus, nature itself was the grand “leveller” that provided the compensatory rationale for adjusting the equality of unequals in the material world, like “natural law” and “natural man” were to be for adjusting the inequality of equals in the juridical and political worlds. A providing nature was one whose “labor” was manifestly expressed in the rich variety of phenomena that clothed the natural landscape.
From the biochemical responses of a plant to its environment to the most willful actions of a scientist in the laboratory, a common bond of primal subjectivity inheres in the very organization of “matter” itself. In this sense, the human mind has never been alone, even in the most inorganic of surroundings. Art has expressed this message more poignantly than science, particularly in those abstract paintings evacuated of virtually all sensory experience beyond color and form; for here we recognize the primal affinity of mind with form itself.
Cuneiform writing, the basis of our alphabetic script, had its origins in the meticulous records the temple clerks kept of products received and products dispersed, in short, the precise accounting of goods, possibly even when the land was “communally owned” and worked in Mesopotamia. The early cuneiform accounting records of the Near East prefigure the moral literature of a less giving and more despotic world in which the equality of unequals was to give way to mere charity. No longer was it the primary responsibility for society to care for its young, elderly, infirm, or unfortunates; their care became a “private matter” for family and friends — albeit very slowly and through various subtly shaded phases. On the village level, to be sure, the old customs still lingered on in their own shadowy world, but this world was not part of “civilization” — merely an indispensable but concealed archaism. Choice, will, and individual proclivities could be exercised or expressed within confines permitted by the environment. Under benign circumstances, behavior might enjoy an extraordinary degree of latitude until it was restricted by the emergence of blatant social domination.
We feel that identifiable human beings imprinted their personalities on these goods; that they possessed a highly attuned sensitivity to the materials they handled, the tools they used, and to the age-old artistic norms their culture established over countless generations. Ultimately, what arouses us emotionally is the fact that these objects attest to a fecund human spirit, a creative subjectivity that articulated its cultural heritage and its wealth in materials that might otherwise seem pedestrian and beyond artistic merit in our own society. Here, the surreal halo around everyday things — the reconquest of everyday life by a pulsating integration of hands, tools, mind, and materials — was actually achieved not merely as part of the metaphysical program of European intellectuals but also by the common folk who lived that life. Science’s defense against this kind of critique is that order may imply a rational arrangement of phenomena that lends itself to rational comprehension, but that none of this implies subjectivity, the capacity to comprehend a rational arrangement. To all appearances, nature is mute, unthinking, and blind, however orderly it may be; hence it exhibits neither subjectivity nor rationality in the human sense of self-directive and self-expressive phenomena. Nevertheless, subjectivity, even in its human sense, is not a newly born result, a terminally given condition.
Gerrard Winstanley is perhaps best known as the leader and theorist of the Diggers, a miniscule group of agrarian communists who in 1649 tried to cultivate the “free” or waste lands on St. George’s Hill near London. Actually, these experiments, which were conceived as an “exemplary” effort to promote communal ideals, were ignored in their day. What really swept the Digger movement into historical accounts of radical movements was Winstanley’s own pamphlets, and these received most recognition long after Winstanley himself had passed https://datingrated.com/ into history. The “double meaning” of these chiliastic visions did not escape the eyes of the Church fathers. Augustinian Christianity ruthlessly purged the now-established religion of its millenarian fantasies by turning them into spiritual allegories — the device par excellence that the Church was to use repeatedly against any undesirable literal interpretations of the Bible. Official Christianity elevated the vision of an earthly paradise to heaven and suppressed as “heresies” any departure from its otherworldly focus.