OUR PLACE IN NATUREPenny Cole

InternationalFriends of Ilyenkov April 2014Helsinki

Nature is•A whole of which we are a part•Existing independently of us•Outside of us – inside of us•Acts through us – we act through it•Both self and other

From chapter 2, Dialectical Logic

"Yes, only Nature as a whole, understood as an infinite whole in space and time, generating its own partial forms from itself, possesses at any moment of time, though not at any point of space, all the wealth of its attributes, i.e. those properties that are reproduced in its makeup of necessity and not by a chance, miraculous coincidence that might just as well not have happened.”

The Ideal of our place in Nature

• We are part of the whole of nature and our consciousness arises from our interaction with nature as we take from it what we need in order to live. In us nature thinks of itself.

• And therefore our consciousness can grasp the whole of nature in the Ideal..which contains past interactions as well as current contradictions.

• “The ideal as the crucible of change.”

The contradictions in the Ideal of our place in Nature

Deepening contradictions in our relation with nature in the objective world are overthrowing the existing “capitalist” hegemony over the Ideal of our Place in Nature.•Anthropogenic climate change•The extinction of species•State legitimacy non-existent on these issues•Resistance, longing and imagining, testing the future•Scientific advance

How the current Ideal arose and was conditioned

• Our common inheritance transformed into private property - capitalist property forms overwhelming all former forms of ownership

• In ideology – Locke: the individual’s privatising relationship with Nature

• The possessive individual becomes the “natural human” in bourgeois ideology

• No return to nature

The “fully-formed” Ideal of Nature in global capitalist

hegemony• Nature as an external – everything not in

commodity production is an external• Humans are a unity and conflict with nature.

Capitalism raises the conflict to an absolute and transforms the unity into an empty abstraction not connected to economy or the generation of use values.

A transformed Ideal of our Place in Nature

• Reassertion of the Commons (substance)• Our labour part of the Commons (nature

acting through us)• Negation of capitalist mode/state• The development of an Ideal of global

stewardship (unity) as the social/political framework within which economy takes place