Dialectical Modes of Nature in Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’

In Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx it is argued that dialectical materialism introduced a ‘completely new understanding of man’s [sic] relation to nature (and) went far beyond all the bourgeois theories of nature presented by the Enlightenment’. Essentially this new understanding showed that nature is real but also something that exists in relation to human subjectivity, history, and ideology. Indeed, as Schmidt expresses it, the challenge Marx set for his contemporaries was to dialectically engage with nature as both a product of the human mind as well as an object external to mental abstractions, an object that could be physically changed by human action but which also never ceased to exist beyond human endeavour.