SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

Eric S. Nelson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480251
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life.

Part One

After Nature

Ethics, Natural History, and Environmental Crisis

Chapter One

Toward a Critical Ecological Model of Natural History

Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and humans appears in such a way that the restricted relation of humans to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines humans’ restricted relation to nature.

—Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Introduction to Part One

It is said that we live today in the epoch of the Anthropocene (which is very much determined as the Capitalocene) and after the “end of nature.” But the denial that nature is a reality independent of human construction is a typical gesture of modern Western philosophy and its underlying rationalism (as identity thinking) and idealism (as the prioritization of the constitutive individual or a collective subject). Due to the complex and mediated tensions between human animals and their own nature as well as with animals and nonhuman nature, which are rooted in the material conditions of human life and the desire to master them, nature is reduced to a lesser stage or condition to be overcome by spirit, a concept to be posited and constructed by individual or collective human subjects, or—as in naturalistic and pragmatic models—an object to be controlled through instrumental techniques. Given these antagonisms, it might be the case that nature is not yet over but has not yet arrived.

“Nature,” in Adorno’s use of the word, does not name an essence, substance, or set of laws. It is mediated by, while remaining nonidentical and subaltern with, human thought and action, as “natural history,” a concept that Adorno inherits and modifies from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin. Marx revealed how, despite positivistic and social Darwinist elements in his thought, “[t]he objectivity of historic life is that of natural history” (Naturgeschichte) and “the development of society’s economic formation of society [is] a process of natural history.”1 Marx’s naturalistic interpretation of natural history, and the subsequent misappropriations that falsified Marxist natural law (see chapter 9), “does not rob Marx’s talk of natural history of any part of its truth content, i.e., its critical content.”2 Marx’s natural history discloses the historical-material interactions and entanglements of human subjects such that nature is also a social concept, and society a natural one: “The thesis that society is subject to natural laws is ideology if it is hypostatized as immutably given by nature.”3 Marx’s notion of natural history, with its ethical dimensions inherited from the philosophy of natural law and radical republican politics, retains its critical potential in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and in the argument of the present work. Critical natural history challenges naturalism (which neglects natural historical subjects) and idealism (which feels itself to be the most immediate and certain vis-à-vis the object and the other that it posits derivative), and part 1 delineates a natural historical response to current ecological crisis tendencies as sedimented entanglements of nature and history.

Natural history is a primary critical model in the chapters of part 1, but not the only one: materiality, sensuous life, and alterity will also be addressed. Nature in its materiality, as well as in its “other-power” (tariki 他力) in contrast to “self-power” (jiriki 自力) to adopt a distinction deployed in Pure Land Buddhist and Kyōto school discourses that is related to the idea of “other-constitution” in the present work, for the most part is not experienced or conceptualized as an ethical reality in modern Western philosophy or moral theory.4 Nature has become in globalized modernity primarily a disenchanted scientifically knowable order of efficient causes to be instrumentally managed by human subjects. Given the realities of current ecological crisis tendencies, which will be explored throughout part 1, one can pose the question of whether an appropriate culture and ethics of nature is possible, even if the existing environmental situation and disaster have established the need. What might a culture and an ethos of nature mean?

To offer preliminary heuristic definitions for the time being, which can be concretized only in the course of their exposition, it might be said that nature is the dynamic material transformation of things; culture a way of symbolically, linguistically, and intersubjectively relating to others, oneself, and one’s world; and ethos a comportment or orientation in the midst of all this. “Ethics” is often defined as a normative discourse concerning norms and values about relations between human subjects, a definition that will be questioned in the following pages. Ethics is first and foremost concerned about someone else; that is, the (materially and sensuously embodied) others who are prior to (unconditionally prior in Levinas’s language) and presupposed by imperatives, prescriptions, and values.

Alienated nature and reified culture are entangled phenomena such that a new culture, ethics, and political economy of nature and material relations are requisite.5 The prospect of an ethics and culture of (nourishing or cultivating) nature might appear useless and senseless given that ethics is predominantly conceived as human-oriented and anthropocentric, and modern capitalist societies are primarily concerned with calculative means-oriented exchange and economic and bureaucratic forms of instrumental rationality. The very idea of an ethics of nature seems to hearken back to premodern sensibilities as well as to violate the “naturalistic fallacy” that posits a separation and abyss between the natural and the normative.6 The current work contests the separation of the natural and normative, and the conflict between naturalism and normativism in ethics and social theory, since each is a one-sided expression of a more complexly entangled reality that is shot through with facticity and normativity. Nonhuman animals and ecosystems have had at best a secondary ethical status conceived through human affects and interests, and typically less than this in modern societies. However, the significant counterexamples of historically recent movements toward ecological, environmental, and animal rights illustrate how critical social theory and philosophy can take alternative routes.

The five chapters of part 1 will respond to this dire intellectual and existential-material situation by indicating alternative ways of encountering and interpreting nature and animals as an ethical reality and ethical demand. part 1 will proceed through an interpretive analysis of the discourse of nature and animals in the works of Adorno (chapters 2 through 5) and Levinas (chapters 4 and 5) in relation to conflicting visions of ethical life (in particular Habermas). These discussions of nature suggest a solidarity of material life that will lead us to further question the encounter with life—in its damages, traumas, and sufferings—through the prism of hope and prophecy in part 2 and social-political justice in part 3.

Natural History and the Politics of Nature

Jürgen Habermas is a representative example of a contemporary critical social theorist who has neglected the ethical import of nature due to an interhuman characterization of ethics as communicative intersubjectivity. While Habermas insightfully recognizes advanced capitalism’s antagonistic and destructive relationships with the environment in works such as Legitimation Crisis, and appreciates the important roles of environmental movements and green politics in the public sphere, he has at the same time limited the formation of critical models in regard to animals, ecosystems, and environments by emphasizing how issues concerning them are either derivative and secondary to interhuman communicative understanding or merely pragmatic decisions about nature as a realm of objects and resources governed by anthropocentrically defined human needs and the logic of instrumental means-ends rationality.7 Habermas’s articulation of postmetaphysical reason fails to overcome the neo-Kantian bifurcation of facticity and validity and the natural and the normative. It consequently anthropocentrically marginalizes the in- and nonhuman in eliminating possibilities of an ethics of nature as a metaphysical or romantic remnant.

This problematic is deeper than Habermas. Even thinkers suspicious of the philosophy of the constitutive subject and pure historicity have adopted constructivist positions that take nature and human anthropology to be socially and discursively determined. Benjamin claimed that “philosophical anthropology” is a bourgeois category and that the Marxist understanding of human beings demands recognizing their thoroughgoing historicity.8 The interpretation of Marxism as socially constructivist, such that the bodily senses are radically revised in each new social configuration, misses the complex nexus of history and nature that is arguably addressed more consequently in Marx and Adorno. Benjamin himself introduced this mediation elsewhere through the dialectical concept of natural history irreducible to either nature or historicity. Such interpretations minimize the anthropological dimensions of Marx’s historical materialism. Marx did not claim that human nature is historically relative, an idea he criticized in culturally oriented historicism, but rather that human nature, driven by its natural and socially modified drives and needs, historically and environmentally changes and adopts.

Problematic ideas concerning the ahistorical objectivity of natural processes underwrites the dichotomy between the natural and the ethical. Within more recent analytic Marxist theory, Jon Elster has claimed that the most fantastic element in Marx’s philosophy is the idea of the domination of nature and the thesis of humans drastically transforming the natural world through labor, industry, and technology. Elster contends, “Marx’s views [about the human relationship with nature] in this respect are either rambling and incoherent, or inherently trivial.”9 Benjamin rejected in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” the vulgar Marxism that only perceives “progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society,” as the mastery of nature is commentary to the exploitation of labor.10 Nature is more than the heavens above, distant stars, and the vastness of the cosmos; nature encompasses the local places and spaces that have been rearranged and reconstructed through human activities. From small beginnings in agriculture and housing through industrialization and its effects, human activities have had massive effects on a planetary scale. Deniers of climate change contend that human activity cannot modify nature in any radical way. This prejudice has been repeatedly disproven by the disappearance of species, the destruction of ecosystems, drastic fluctuations in climate, and the increasingly chaotic weather patterns that are already underway.

Natural History and a Nature Still to Come

Nature is often presupposed to be an archaic past overcome by human activities, history, and spirit, resulting in the human-defined world and socially and economically determined ecologically destructive societies of the Anthropocene. There is a significant sense though in which nature is futural and yet to come. Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume clarify how Adorno’s notion of natural history is not a fantastic metaphysical thesis by reconsidering the asymmetrical and dissonant mediations, without reconciliation or synthesis, of nature and history in the works of Adorno, who adopted this thesis from Marx and Benjamin. Given the current unrelenting and needful ecological crisis situation, in which human self-preservation is at stake, the hegemonic ideological separation between humans and nature is in need of reevaluation. Natural conditions and environments and humans are bound together in the changing configurations of natural history. Natural historical entanglements have led to our present environmental crisis-conditions. The “nature” that we encounter and experience is mediated by far-reaching social-historical transformations of environments and the human condition itself. Much has been undertaken in the last half century to attempt to change our thinking and modify destructive practices toward ecosystems, environments, and nonhuman and human animals. But this remains insufficient. Even the change in attitudes, discourses, and practices achieved appear to be too little and too late. Often the problems have been rearranged to soothe guilty consciences and shifted from the wealthy to the poor, and from the so-called developed to the developing world.

In part 1 of this work, I propose considering a noneliminative (i.e., nonreductionist or expansive) and dialectically inflected conception of nature. This conception is dialectical in the sense, inspired by Adorno, of the dynamic of nonidentity in which mediation is asymmetrical with itself, resisting closure into identity and totality. The strategy of natural history offers a revisable point of orientation and a “critical model” for confronting the ethics, politics, and political economy of animals and environments in contemporary global social-economic arran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On the Way to an Ethics of Material Others
• Part I After Nature: Ethics, Natural History, and Environmental Crisis
• Part II Unsettling Religion: Suffering, Prophecy, and the Good
• Part III Demanding Justice: Asymmetrical Ethics and Critical Social Theory
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover