The Concept of Nature in Marx Quotes

“Benjamin was right when he wrote that in view of the crimes men daily commit against themselves and against external nature, instead of realizing the correct practice, there is good sense even in the most eccentric fantasies and extravagant utopias. Today, when men’s technical possibilities have outstripped the dreams of the old Utopians many times over, it appears rather that these possibilities, negatively realized, have changed into forces of destruction, and therefore, instead of bringing about an albeit always humanly limited salvation, lead to total destruction, a grim parody of the transformation intended by Marx, in which Subject and Object are not reconciled, but annihilated.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The free social individual can only come into existence with the abolition of the division of labour, and the division of labour is fundamentally identical with the division of society into classes.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The development of the forces of production was never an end in itself for Marx. The saving of labour-time, he said, should in the last analysis result in a restructuring of man: The free time – which is both leisure time and time for higher activity – has naturally changed its owner into another Subject, and as this other Subject he then enters directly into the process of production.70 Thilo Ramm points out correctly that this theory of the origin of a new man constitutes the innermost kernel of Marx’s teaching.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“It belongs essentially to the advance of civilization as more and more organized increasing domination, that nature takes revenge on the men who have degraded it to mere material for human aims, by ensuring that men can only buy their domination by an ever-increasing suppression of their own nature. The division of nature and man in labour is reflected in the irreconcilability of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“What is remarkable is that Marx, precisely because he agreed with Hegel in rejecting the construction of abstract utopias, became probably the greatest utopian in the history of philosophy”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“Man can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The knowing consciousness is a form of the social consciousness, and should not therefore be viewed in isolation from psychology and human history.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“As man’s organized intervention into natural processes becomes more comprehensive, that conception knowledge which consists exclusively of the passive imitation of objective structures becomes more inadequate. Kant’s talk of nature as the existence of things subject to laws presupposed a transcendental-philosophical reflection upon the forms innate in the Subject, for only on this condition could an ordered world of experience come into existence. The idea of the conceptual mediation of the immediate through the Subject became a leading theme of post-Kantian speculation, in which the transcendental philosophy passed over into the idealist dialectic.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“It is ‘the work of history’, said Marx, ‘to discover the various uses of things’.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“The use-values coat, linen, etc., in short the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, material and labour. If we subtract the total sum of useful labour embodied in the coat, linen, etc., a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature without the help of man.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that man experiences and gets used to what is really human and that he becomes aware of himself as man.… If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.… If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx

“It is the socio-historical character of Marx’s concept of nature which distinguishes it from the outset. Marx considered nature to be ‘the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour’,3 i.e. he saw nature from the beginning in relation to human activity. All other statements about nature, whether of a speculative, epistemological, or scientific kind, already presuppose social practice, the ensemble of man’s technologico-economic modes of appropriation.”
― Alfred Schmidt, The Concept Of Nature In Marx