Michael,
You wrote . . .
>
> Mike, I wondered whether "dominance over nature" is not a rhetorical
> . . .from a dialectical materialist perspective, we are
> always and already nature ourselves, even if some of us think
> differently.
Two things: (1) yes, from a dialectical materialist perspective, we are
always within nature, nature is a subsumed element within the basic
historical dimension that results from "labor" in which we take nature as
our object. But, unlike some theories (notably Alfred Lang's ecological
approach) there is an ontological distinction between nature and history.
The historical dimension is not a simple "mental" construct. This is the
essential insight that Ileynkov and Lukacs (in the Ontology) developed. (2)
One of the fundamentally valid (IMHO) criticisms of dialectical materialism
and what Marx himself wrote is that he and his followers adopted a position
that viewed the natural world ("nature's storehouse") as a raw material for
human use but did not understand human specific, historical existence within
nature in any systematically ecological way.
I believe that the great challenge to contemporary dialectical materialism
is to more fully develop an understanding of the specific character of
human/social/historical existence within the inorganic and organic systems
while ridding ourselves of the bias that we are on top of some evolutionary
pyramid and replacing that fallacy with an understanding of our existence in
terms of complexity rather than hierarchy but without losing consciousness
of historical telos. Sounds contradictory, no?
Paul H. Dillon
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