ABSTRACT
In the “participatory universe”, where man is both actor and spectator and rediscovers a basic continuity in his relationship with nature, his historical dimension coincides with that of nature itself. This regained common historical dimension of nature’s time and man’s is reflected in the properties which characterize their conjunction, on the one plane as on the other. The relations established in the process of change in the system have pronounced historical character. Historical evolution itself can be represented in terms of the process of crisis and transformation. The basic character of the nature-knowledge nexus at each degree and level of the evolutionary process, natural and socio-historical, is confirmed. Essentially for historical phenomena as for natural phenomena, it happens that, in the presence of new conditions, an identical type of non-linearity that characterizes a particular structure can profoundly alter that structure, giving rise to a new one.
