Publication Details

Abstract

The history of society is a continuation of the history of nature, it is an elevation of nature itself to a new level; in it man finds his „human world“ in which he constitutes himself as a social and practically transforming being. Human history is thus, in Marx’s words, „a real part of the history of nature, the history of transformation of nature by man“. Naturally, it is a mutual dialectical (and thus not a onesided conception) operation among man, society and nature. That is to say it is a process of hominization of the outer world, a process of man’s seizing nature and at the same time a process of naturalizing history, i. e. that it is connected with penetration of the natural into the human, the historical, and it expresses in each stage of histoty a specific type of synthesis, resp. of unity of the natural and the social. Such a dialectical conception of the relation of the natural and the human, of man and nature was achieved by Marx on the basis of the new philosophical starting point, namely the real, materially active human individuals, their real objective life process. This starting point implies Marx’s practical conception of reality, of being as practice, as the real life process of people in which the dialectical unity of subject and object, of being and consciousness, of „the human“ and „the natural“ is materialized. By delimitating this philosophical standpoint and the suppositions implying this standpoint Marx achieved the dialectic-materialistic conception of hominization of nature. It is such a process of seizing nature, of its adaptation, of imposing human seal to it that expresses the essentially revolutionary activity of man and in which his practical — transforming substance is materialized and positively objectivized. It is the material activity of really existing men (and not the creation or alienation of spirit). In a thus conceived conception of hominization of nature Marx, at the same time, delimitates the very principle of the materialistic conception of history.