Ethics and politics in the Anthropocene

The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the ‘web of life’, the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence that the strongest contemporary ecological threat is anthropogenic climate change resulting from the increasing warming of the atmosphere, caused by cumulative CO₂ and other emissions due to collective human activity over the past few 100 years. This process of climate change is accompanied and reinforced by further ecological problems such as pollution of land, air and sea, depletion of resources, land degradation and the loss of biodiversity. In May 2019 a new report from the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with probable grave impacts on people around the world. ¹ While many of these destructive changes are now irreversible, it may still be possible to halt some of the changes, to prevent further disastrous changes occurring and to respond in the right way to the consequences of those changes that are irreversible.

The name rapidly gaining currency for this emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth systems is the Anthropocene. In a recently published book, The Politics of the Anthropocene, John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering argue that it calls for a categorical shift in thinking about the place of humanity within the Earth systems, suggesting that it requires humans to think about social–ecological systems in novel terms, in which the non-human is an active participant. ² I agree with Dryzek and Pickering that our ineluctable situation within the Anthropocene calls on humans globally fundamentally to rethink our ethics and our politics; I contend, furthermore, that any politics we develop must be transformative. My specific question is: What would an appropriate ethical frame for a transformative politics look like? In response, I make a proposal for an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics.

Some preliminaries: By ‘ethical’ I mean the idea and conduct of a good human life in association with other entities, human and non-human. I hold that an ethically good life calls for a reflective attitude by individual humans towards their particular ideas of the good, in which reflection is guided by a concern for ethical truth. ³ (This is a formal definition: I leave open the question of which particular ideas of the good are ethically valid.) I use the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ interchangeably in the following.

By ‘transformative’ politics I mean thinking and action that is permanently alert to the possible need for societal change. At times, the required thinking and action will be radically transformative: societal transformation ‘from the roots up’. Radical transformation extends to society’s fundamental structuring principles and to social institutions as well as to collective and individual identities and self-understandings. Transformative politics are ethical enterprises in the sense that they are concerned to establish social conditions that enable humans to live good lives, for example, lives of freedom, happiness and/or spiritual well-being. Accordingly, ethics and politics are intimately entwined.

By ‘ethical frame’ I mean imaginative projections of a good society that orient theories in their critical analyses of what is wrong with particular forms of societal life. Social and political theories that engage in critical analyses of this kind are by their very nature ethical enterprises. However, today, many such theories have become reluctant to speak in explicitly ethical terms and tend to obscure their particular ethical commitments. This is regrettable since it hinders the kind of self-reflexivity and openness to learning from other theories that every social and political theory requires in order to avoid what I call epistemological and ethical authoritarianism. ⁴ I take the view that critical social and political theories must be upfront about their ethical orientation and be prepared to make their particular ethical commitments explicit.

In my attempt to develop an appropriate ethical frame for transformative politics in the Anthropocene, I draw on the resources of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment, jointly written by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and on some of Adorno’s subsequent writings. ⁵ I contend that their critique of enlightened reason, although in need of differentiation and supplementation, can help to develop an ethical frame for political thinking, action and behaviour that would break with the current disastrous trajectory of human life on this planet and reorient it in new, better directions. As I will explain, the required ethical frame must be ethically non-anthropocentric. For the purposes of developing such a frame, the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment is a good starting point.

The well-known opening lines of the book proclaim: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear […]. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’. For, the authors claim, the knowledge that enlightenment fosters is a power that knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. They continue:

Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labour of others, capital […]. What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. ⁶

In short, Horkheimer and Adorno see the triumph of technology as the triumph of an all-encompassing instrumentality that is identical to the blind mastery of nature. ⁷

This instrumentality has its origins in human fear of nature: in a terror of nature arising from human vulnerability to natural forces that threaten human survival. Over the course of millennia, it expands and intensifies, ultimately leaving no room for non-dominating, non-destructive modes of thinking and behaving. It reaches its apex in capitalist modernity, where its expansion and intensification is boosted by the development of science and technology and by the capitalist system of economic production that emerges in tandem with these developments. As a result, humankind, instead of entering a truly human condition, has sunk into a new kind of barbarism. But no alternative form of societal life seems possible. The authors confront us with an apparently irresolvable dilemma: They hold that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightened thinking, but that enlightened thinking is inherently dominating and destructive. As a result, the genuinely rational organization of society that would enable the free development of individuals, which Horkheimer posits as the emancipatory aim of Critical Theory in his earlier writings, ⁸ becomes a utopian projection that could never be realized within human history.

It has become commonplace to criticize Horkheimer and Adorno’s book for its bad utopianism: for its narrative of the negative progress of history that allows us to imagine a truly rational society only as a condition outside of history. It thereby stands accused of abandoning Critical Theory’s fundamental concern to ‘liberate humans from slavery’, reneging on the emancipatory promise that is a defining feature of such theory, again according to Horkheimer in his earlier writings. ⁹ This is the influential objection voiced by Jürgen Habermas in his 1981 two volume work, Theory of Communicative Action. ¹⁰ According to Habermas’ diagnosis, Horkheimer and Adorno make the destructive, alienating effects of instrumental reason intrinsic to the world-historical process of human civilization as a whole: They trace this mode of reasoning back to the very beginnings of hominization, not merely to the capitalist beginnings of modernity. In consequence, their ‘critique of instrumental reason […] denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness; this is because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason’. ¹¹ Habermas acknowledges that Horkheimer and Adorno have a name for what instrumental reason destroys: mimesis – a movement of the human mind in which thought does not distance itself from the world but makes the world resemble the human mind. But because mimesis escapes the conceptual framework of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis, in which reason is conceived solely as the instrumental activity of a subject on an object, mimesis counts as the sheer opposite of reason, as mere impulse. Habermas holds that the rational core of mimesis can be laid open only if we give up this instrumentally construed, subject–object paradigm of rationality, on which Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis is fixated. He calls for its replacement by a communicative, linguistic, paradigm of intersubjective understanding, in which subjects relate to other subjects linguistically about something in the world by way of the mutual exchange of reasons. Within this alternative paradigm, cognitive–instrumental rationality is put in its proper place as just one component of a more encompassing communicative rationality.

Habermas is right to argue the need to move beyond Horkheimer and Adorno’s dyadic model of cognition and action in terms of a relation between a subject and an object. However, his alternative triadic, intersubjective, model is at best merely a partial answer to the problem. The problem, we will recall, is how to criticize the negative effects of the historical path taken by ‘enlightened reason’ in the course of human history and to envision for it a different trajectory. The negative effects of particular concern today are the destructive transformation of Earth’s ecosystems. I will suggest that transformative politics in the Anthropocene needs a theoretical model of human cognition and action that retains some central features of both Horkheimer and Adorno’s subject–object model and Habermas’ intersubjective model, while acknowledging their respective limitations. On its own, neither model is suitable for developing the kind of ethical frame required in order to respond in the right way to contemporary ecological challenges.

The general ethical trajectory I propose for transformative politics in the Anthropocene is ethically non-anthropocentric. I add the qualifier ‘ethically’ in order to distinguish between two forms of anthropocentrism: epistemological anthropocentrism and ethical anthropocentrism.

This distinction is implicit in an essay by Habermas published in 1982. Responding to objections raised against his formalistic discourse ethics from an ecological standpoint, Habermas declares his suspicion with regard to ideas of ‘nature-in-itself’. ¹² Against tendencies to conflate the epistemological and ethical aspects of such ideas, he proposes to treat them separately. Epistemologically, taking his lead from Kant, he insists that nature-in-itself is accessible to us only in cognitively processed form, through the mediations of human consciousness and knowledge. Accordingly, he is prepared to accept the idea of nature-in-itself only as an ‘ironic refrain’ on the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself: a postulate ‘meant to preserve in the nature constituted “for us” the realistic connotations of a contingently existing reality independent of us’. ¹³ This epistemological point is also an argument against any ethical appeals to ‘nature-as-an-end-in-itself’, for such appeals imply the possibility of unmediated knowledge of the ‘orders of nature’. I agree with Habermas’ epistemological position: I too take the view that humans have no unmediated knowledge of ‘nature-in-itself’ or the ‘orders of nature’. This implies that all social, political and ethical theories are unavoidably anthropocentric in an epistemological sense. However, the epistemological argument is not an argument against the possibility of an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics. Habermas does not claim that it is. Nonetheless, in his subsequent remarks, he resolutely endorses the framework of his discourse ethics, which is ethically anthropocentric. He does not see its ethical anthropocentricity as an objection, however, maintaining that discourse ethics is readily compatible with an attitude of compassion to nature. By this he means a ‘cosmically expanded solidarity with everything that is capable of suffering and that in this vulnerability calls for reverence’, pointing out that we can derive from this precepts for a vegetarian way of life and precepts against experimenting on animals, for example. ¹⁴ He points out, further, that in discourse ethics, the correct moral standpoint is one of ‘caring-for’ (Fürsorge), in the sense of protection for less able beings. ¹⁵ Non-human animals are treated by humans as part of the circle of ‘neighbours’, by which he means beings with whom they interact in an ideal communication community, but they are treated as neighbours released from autonomy and responsibility. ¹⁶ He concedes that this idea of protection is ‘rather paternalistic’, ¹⁷ but he sees no way of avoiding it. His conclusion is that there is a ‘yawning gap’ between discourse ethics and any naturalistic ethics. ¹⁸ As he sees it, the gap exists not only because, in discourse ethics, humans are enjoined to speak on behalf of non-human animals affected by their moral codes. In addition, there are limits to their sympathetic solidarity with non-human natural entities; for otherwise, he writes, their sympathetic solidarity would ‘come into conflict with the firmer imperatives of the self-preservation of the human race’. ¹⁹ Finally, Habermas sees no prospect of adequately grounding a naturalist ethics without recourse to the substantial reason of religious or metaphysical world views – but doing so, he observes, would be to fall back below the threshold of learning attained in the modern understanding of the world. ²⁰

Let us consider more carefully the ‘yawning gap’ Habermas sees between his discourse ethics and any kind of naturalistic ethics. More specifically, let us look more closely at what makes his discourse ethics ethically anthropocentric. Habermas follows Joel Whitebook’s definition of anthropocentrism according to which ‘man is the only locus of value and the only being that commands respect in the universe’. ²¹ In basic agreement with this definition, I call an ethics ‘ethically anthropocentric’ when it asserts an ethically hierarchical relationship between humans and non-human natural entities: It makes humans the centre of ethical value in the universe, posits them as beings commanding more respect than other beings and accords to them a privileged ethical status within their natural environments. By ‘centre of ethical value’ I mean the primary locus of all that is good in a universalizing sense. It should be noted that making humans the centre of ethical value does not necessarily imply that humans are the source of ethical value: their central place in the ethical universe could be divinely ordained, for example. The converse is more complicated: making humans the source of ethical value either makes them simultaneously the centre of ethical value or grants them the divine power to make non-human beings the centre of value. In both cases, however, the result would be an ethically anthropocentric ethics for, in both cases, humans would stand in an ethically hierarchical relationship to non-human entities.

At first glance, the ethical anthropocentricism of discourse ethics may seem to reside in what Habermas refers to as its paternalism. In discourse ethics, as mentioned, the correct moral relation between humans and non-humans is one of ‘caring-for’ (Fürsorge), in the sense of protection for beings who lack autonomy and responsibility (this is because the ability to articulate one’s thoughts and feelings in humanly intelligible language is a necessary precondition of autonomy and responsibility in Habermas’ theory). Accordingly, protection calls for a ‘speaking on behalf’ of those who lack this ability. I agree with Habermas that speaking on behalf of others who cannot speak for themselves is a form of ‘paternalism’, or perhaps better, ‘parentalism’. I also agree that it is not necessarily a pernicious one. However, a more differentiated perspective is called for here. From the point of view of ethical (non-) anthropocentrism, parentalism is not inherently pernicious. It becomes so when it places greater ethical value on the person who speaks on behalf of others who cannot speak for themselves and grants such persons a privileged position vis-à-vis their human and non-human others. But it is not always cause for ethical concern. On occasion, caregivers must speak on behalf of humans when they are as yet unable to articulate their thoughts and feelings in humanly intelligible language. On occasion, caregivers must speak on behalf of humans who have lost their ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings in humanly intelligible language. Many humans, on occasion, will have to speak on behalf of entities, for example, fish or trees, who never had and never will have the ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings in humanly intelligible language, at least not for the foreseeable future. Such speaking on behalf of others who cannot speak for themselves is not in itself perniciously parentalistic. I contend that speaking on behalf of others becomes perniciously parentalistic only when it is coupled with a disregard for the distinctive separateness of other beings from the speaking subject, in the sense of a lack of attentiveness to their specific constitution and their particular qualities; importantly, such attentiveness entails relating to the specificities of others as putative embodiments of ethical good, the source of which is not human powers but transcendent of them. For, if humans are seen as the source of ethical value, the relationship between human and non-human beings becomes ethically hierarchical and, in consequence, perniciously parentalistic.

This suggests that it is not the parentalism per se of discourse ethics that makes it ethically anthropocentric, but rather its parentalism coupled with rejection of ‘the substantial reason of religious or metaphysical worldviews’. For, non-pernicious parentalism calls for a relationship to the other (human or non-human) in which the other is the embodiment of ethical good, the source of which is transcendent of human powers. In other writings, I argue that Habermas fails to show convincingly that appeals to a ‘transcendent other’ to human reason are inevitably signs of historical regression. I claim that he does not adequately substantiate his thesis that such appeals to a transcendent other constitute a reversal of the secular learning process that he sees as an intrinsic part of the unfinished (and perhaps unfinishable) project of Western modernity. ²² Against Habermas, and especially in the light of the ecologically disastrous consequences of this particular modern trajectory, I call for a position of openness with regard to the metaphysical or religious sources of moral (“ethical”) validity. Habermas’ discourse ethics is closed to this possibility. Habermas embraces a version of postmetaphysical thinking according to which the postmetaphysical character of moral validity resides in the ‘innerworldly’ constitution of its transcendent quality. ²³ Its immanent character is due to its construction in idealized human practices of argumentation. Habermas defines moral validity as an agreement reached argumentatively in an idealized communicative situation. ²⁴ The validity of moral norms is not just tested in an (idealized) procedure of argumentation, it is generated within an (idealized) procedure of argumentation. In other words, moral validity has its source in an (idealized) procedure of argumentation. It does not matter that this procedure is an idealization of actual human practices of argumentation. What matters is that the very concept of moral validity is defined in terms of this idealizing projection, since this means that there can be no non-human source of moral validity in Habermas’ discourse ethics. This makes it inherently ethically hierarchical when it comes to relations between human and non-human beings and, hence, unsuitable as the ethical frame for critical social and political theories in the Anthropocene.

For this reason, I propose that we return to Horkheimer and Adorno, whose critique of enlightened rationality can help to develop an ethically non-anthropocentric critical theory. Its helpfulness is due to the very subject–object model of cognition and action that Habermas rejects in favour of an intersubjective paradigm. As I later make clear, I endorse a version of Habermas’ intersubjective account of communicative rationality. My contention is that critical theories in the Anthropocene need to think of reason also in terms of the relationships between subjects and objects. However, I argue that we need to move beyond Horkheimer and Adorno in two respects. First, their account of the instrumental exercise of reason is insufficiently differentiated. Second, their subject–object model allows for no non-authoritarian response to the question of the epistemic unreliability of subjective experiences by humans of (human and non-human) objects. This is why we need Habermas.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a philosophical critique of a certain kind of thinking that the authors refer to as ‘enlightened’. To recall: enlightened thought or rationality is an instrumental mode of thought and behaviour that originates in human fear of the natural world; it has its roots in the earliest attempts by humans to overcome this fear by controlling the natural forces that they see as threatening them. Thus, at least incipiently, enlightened rationality is co-original with human history (this raises the problem of how to criticise it, the problem to which Habermas draws attention). Furthermore, enlightened reason’s aim is emancipatory: it aims to liberate humans from a fear of the natural world that inhibits the kind of creative, conscious activity that the human species requires for its development. To all appearances, Horkheimer and Adorno endorse this emancipatory aim. As they put it, famously, in the Preface to their book:

[F]reedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment [‘dieses rückläufige Moment’], it seals its own fate. ²⁵

What do they mean when they speak of a regressive moment?

The most straightforward answer is enlightenment’s regression to mythology. As the authors also tell us in the Preface to the book, their thesis is: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’. ²⁶ With every step, they maintain, enlightenment entangles itself ever more deeply in mythology. By this they mean principally that enlightened thought imprisons itself in a cycle of repetition. For, the principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself. ²⁷ Enlightened thought, like myth in this respect, is a form of arid wisdom that allows for nothing new under the sun: ‘Whatever might be different is made the same’. ²⁸

What might it mean for enlightened thought to assimilate reflection on its own regressive moment and, by doing so, avoid its self-destruction? We are told that this is a matter of ‘modestly confessing itself to be power’. ²⁹ With this confession, ‘mind rids itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to nature’. ³⁰ By modestly confessing itself to be power, enlightened thought is ‘taken back into nature’. ³¹ Note the distinction here between ‘being taken back into nature’ and ‘enslavement to nature’. The distinction rests on the authors’ view of the proper relationship between the subject and the object. Properly conceived, the relationship between the subject and the object is one between two entities that are forever distinct, yet forever bound together in a relationship of mutual determination. We could say that subject and object are constitutively connected, in the sense that the subject is constituted by way of its relationship with the object and the object is constituted by way of its relationship with the subject. However, as the authors emphasize, the gap between the subject and the object is unbridgeable. All mystical union between the subject and the object is a deception. ³² To bridge the gap is to liquidate the subject, whose emergence within human history depends on its separation from nature: on its power to assert itself vis-à-vis nature through the instrumental operations of enlightened thought. As Adorno later puts it in his essay ‘Subject and Object’: the formation of the subject is the necessary condition for human emancipation from ‘terror of the blind nexus of nature’. ³³ Adorno writes in the same essay: ‘Were [the subject] liquidated […] the result would be not merely a regression of consciousness but a regression to real barbarism’. ³⁴

We can infer from this that it is not instrumental thought that is the main problem. To the contrary, for Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental rationality is a necessary condition of human freedom since it enables humans to assert their independence from a hitherto all-powerful nature (and, as we have seen, they endorse the value of human freedom). The problem, rather, is instrumental rationality when it denies its constitutive connectedness with the objects over which it exercises power. Thought becomes dominating when it is forgetful of its constitutive connection with its objects. Furthermore, it becomes illusory, whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing and objectifying and its controlling functions in general. ³⁵ As I read the passage in question, therefore, ‘taking thought back into nature’ does not mean relinquishing its instrumental character, but rather remembering its constitutive connectedness with the natural objects that it instrumentalizes.

In the same vein, Horkheimer and Adorno call on enlightened thought to recollect ‘nature within the subject’, while insisting that the nature to be remembered is a ‘nature divided within itself’. ³⁶ Thus, it is not nature in the guise of mana, which is a principle of omnipotence. ³⁷ Mana is that

murky, undivided entity worshipped at the earliest known stages of humanity […] Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. ³⁸

The nature to be remembered within the subject is not the omnipotent and hence terrifying mana – the source of human fear of nature. Rather it is a nature that is no longer fearsome, because it is now subjected to human power and, as a result, irreversibly separated from the subject. This explains the authors’ insistence that the nature to be remembered is a nature divided within itself, alienated from the subject. As they put it, enlightened thought’s remembrance of nature within the subject is a matter of making nature ‘audible in its estrangement’. This seems to me the crucial point. Taking my lead from Horkheimer and Adorno, but moving beyond them, I want to say that enlightened thought will halt its current trajectory of self-destruction only if human subjects, irreversibly separated from nature and necessarily exercising power over it, cultivate their ability to hear the voices of non-human natural entities in their distinctive separateness even as they are subjected to human instrumentality. I move beyond Horkheimer and Adorno, not just because their remarks are cursory and cryptic; I move beyond them because the nature they wish to render audible is a brutalized nature, ‘blind and mutilated’. Apparently, it is not just a nature irreversibly estranged from humans, it is a nature irretrievably robbed of its distinctive qualities. They write: ‘In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature, as in prehistory, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its supposed name, which, in the guise of mana, means omnipotence, but as something blind and mutilated’. ³⁹ The development of enlightened rationality, in their view, inevitably and irreversibly reduces nature to sheer matter, destroying its particular qualities. If this is so, then the kind of attentiveness to the specificities of non-human natural entities, which I earlier suggested was important for an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics, would be impossible. What humans would hear, when listening to the voice of nature, would be undifferentiated cries of suffering. But the thesis of an inevitable and irreversible reduction of nature to sheer matter does not follow automatically from their thesis of constitutive connectedness, and the estrangement from nature that this thesis implies. Horkheimer and Adorno posit the inevitable destruction of particular qualities only because of their specific interpretation of the thesis of constitutive connectedness. It is their specific interpretation that we should question.

Horkheimer and Adorno construe the relation between the subject and the object as not just estranged but as inherently hostile. As mentioned, the power of nature is perceived by primitive humans as mana, as a terrifying threat, setting in train a process of hominization in which the human subject emerges as the new threatening force. Ultimately, the subject overcomes its fear of nature through consciousness of its ability to destroy it. Thus, in their account, the formation of the subject simply inverts the earlier relationship between humans and nature: it does not change its inherently hostile character. This is why nature can be experienced by human subjects only as dominated nature, as nature ‘blind and mutilated’. Enlightened thought, it seems, and any action connected with it, is inevitably mastery in the form of tyrannical subjugation. Habermas is right to reject this conclusion as unsatisfactory. But, as we have seen, his alternative paradigm is not an option for an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics either, since it establishes an ethically hierarchical relationship between human and non-human natural entities. It makes humans the centre of ethical value in the universe, posits them as beings commanding more respect than other beings and accords to them an ethically privileged status within their natural environments. In order to avoid this, discourse ethics would have to relinquish a core component of the versions in which it has been articulated so far: it would have to give its claim that humans are the source of moral (ethical) value and see human and non-human natural entities as putative embodiments of good in an ethical sense, the source of which is radically transcendent of human powers. It is certainly worth developing discourse ethics along these lines. But it also requires development in a different direction. Again, as already mentioned, Habermas holds that his proposed shift in paradigm, from a subject–object model of cognition and action to an intersubjective model, enables critical theory to give instrumental reason its proper place within a more encompassing idea of reason, which he calls communicative rationality. I hold that he is right to see instrumental reason, and the subject–object mode of relationship corresponding to it, as one part of a broader conception of rationality in which the mutual exchange of reasons between human subjects has an important place. However, Habermas simply takes over Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of instrumental reason as inherently dominating, as tyrannical subjugation of a nature that is reduced to sheer matter, devoid of all distinctive qualities. I suggested that Horkheimer and Adorno arrive at this conclusion because they construe the relationship between human subjects and non-human natural objects as inherently hostile. I also suggested, however, that embracing Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis of the constitutive connectedness of subject and object, and the separation of humans from nature and instrumental stance towards nature that it implies, does not require us to accept their view that separation inevitably and irreversibly leads to domination. But not only does Habermas not question this view, he has never explored alternative interpretations of the thesis of constitutive connectedness of subject and object, with the result that his writings are of limited help to the project of an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics.

What his writings do offer is a powerful argument for the importance of the mutual exchange of reasons between humans in their efforts to relate to non-human natural entities in the ethically right way. If epistemological anthropocentricism is unavoidable, as I think it is, then humans have no unmediated access to ‘nature-in-itself’. This means that human experiences of non-human natural entities are epistemically unreliable. No humans can claim indisputable knowledge of what the voices of nature tell them, no matter how intensively they experience these voices. To do so is to stand accused of what I call epistemological authoritarianism. When modified along the lines I proposed, whereby ethical validity is granted a source that is non-human, Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality allows us to avoid this. It permits us to grant the ethical significance of human interpretations of their experiences of nature, while at the same time calling for critical engagement with claims to the validity of such interpretations.

For the purposes of an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics, however, this is not enough. Required, in addition, is further exploration of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis of the constitutive connectedness of subject and object. It is noteworthy that Adorno, in his essay ‘Subject and Object’, hints at an alternative interpretation. In contrast to Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the separation between subject and object is construed as subjugation of the object by the subject, in his later essay, Adorno envisages the communication of what is differentiated. Only then, he writes, would the concept of communication come into its own by taking on the sense of agreement between human beings and things. Communication in this sense is ‘peace’. He continues:

In its proper place […] the relationship of subject and object would lie in a peace achieved between human beings as well as between them and their Other. Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other. ⁴⁰

If developed along these lines, the thesis of the constitutive connectedness of subject and object allows for a different approach to the problem of instrumental reason. For, certainly, it is a problem. Although I reject Adorno and Horkheimers’ view that instrumental reason is inherently destructive, I agree that its effects over the course of human history have been disastrous. I also agree with their claim that it has expanded and intensified through the rise and advance of capitalism in a way that inhibits alternative modes of thinking and behaving. Furthermore, at least for the moment, I am willing to grant their hypothesis that instrumental reason is a necessary condition of human freedom. If it is true, and assuming that human freedom (in some sense) is ethically valuable, then the proposed more differentiated account of instrumental reason calls for a rearticulation of the concept of freedom in which one of its components would be an instrumental relationship towards our natural impulses. However, this instrumental relationship would not be a relationship of domination – it would not be tyrannical subjugation of our natural impulses – but rather a matter of working on our natural impulses as part of ongoing practices of ‘care for the self’, practices that Michel Foucault in his later work describes as the work of freedom. ⁴¹

I have taken some preliminary steps towards developing an ethical frame for social and political theories in the Anthropocene and for the transformative politics connected with them. In critical engagement with Horkheimer and Adorno, and also Habermas, I have proposed an approach in which relations between the subject and the object are as important as relations between the subject and the subject. The posited relationship between the subject and the object is one of constitutive connectedness. The thesis of constitutive connectedness implies both separation and connection. The subject’s separation from the object is taken as the precondition for practices of ‘work on the self’ that are in turn part of the ‘work of freedom’. Work is inherently instrumental. However, this work on the self – and, more generally – the subject’s working on nature – is construed not as tyrannical subjugation but rather as a kind of action that is guided by the particular qualities of the objects over which it is exercised. Work of this kind is a mode of instrumental action that forms, shapes and orders its objects responsively, attuned to their distinctiveness. We could think of the kinds of instrumental action practiced by master carpenters or master cooks or, indeed, artists and craftspeople in general. Furthermore, it is action that acknowledges its objects, human and non-human, as putative embodiments of a good that transcends the powers of human or non-human natural entities, for only such a conception of ethical value allows for non-hierarchical ethical relations.

I will conclude by drawing some implications for transformative politics in the Anthropocene of the ethically non-anthropocentric ethics I have sketched in the foregoing.

The proposed ethically non-anthropocentric ethics, centred on a conceptualization of ethical truth as radically transcending, has multiple implications for critical theorizing and for activism. Specifically, it has implications for political protest, for resistance and for transformative social action in general. For instance, its ethical non-anthropocentricity supports the kind of non-violent direct action advocated by activists such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, which seeks to bring about radical societal change through conversion: through opening the eyes, ears and hearts of those against whom it struggles. ⁴² Such action is forceful but draws its strength from love rather than violence: it is a ‘soul-force’ that gives activists the power to convert rather than destroy their opponents. This requires activists to work on themselves, to engage in bodily and mental practices, in order to be able to respond forcefully but lovingly to the challenges they encounter in their efforts to bring about radical social transformation.

The proposed ethical frame also provides a basis for critical interrogation of the currently dominant political response to impending ecological disaster: intensifying investment in green technologies. ⁴³ The ethically non-anthropocentric ethical approach proposed in my paper encourages openness to green technologies but implies the need for caution. Green technologies run the risk of reproducing the technocratic rationality that is a primary cause of the problem to which they are responding. I agree with Horkheimer and Adorno when they see technology as the essence of the destructive, dominating rationality which, fostered by capitalism, has led to calamity. Technology is blind mastery of nature, essentially indifferent to particular qualities. Its logic is thus diametrically opposed to the ethically non-anthropocentric ethical frame I have outlined in the foregoing.

This ethical frame also provides a basis for critical interrogation of the kind of response to the ecological threat that has been given the name ‘Ecological Modernisation’. ⁴⁴ Ecological Modernisation projects a technological picture of the future, in which the resources of technology, enabled by science, radically disconnect relations between humans and nature. In addition to the worry already mentioned, the inherent blindness of technology to particular qualities, there are further reasons for caution here. To begin with, it is noteworthy that these efforts to create entirely technological, non-nature-dependent forms of human existence are financed and supported by multiple political and economic interests. There is a strong likelihood that the technological response will benefit only the very small portion of humanity at the top of the steep human pyramid created by global capitalism. The same holds for proposals to solve the problem by seeking new planets for human habitation, as advocated, for example, by the late Stephen Hawking. A further disturbing consequence of the technological response is the generation of humanly disempowering new myths (e.g. of humanoid and non-humanoid robots replacing human agency) that hold cultural imaginations in thrall, blocking imaginative exploration of post-post-humanist visions, and, again, tend to favour those already privileged by their place within the global capitalist economy.

Finally, the proposed ethical frame reinforces the view of the early Critical Theorists that no good life is possible under conditions of capitalism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, as we saw earlier, Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the blindly instrumentalizing power of technology knows no limits when in the services of capital. Here, clearly, they are echoing Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, who write: ‘The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’. ⁴⁵ There is a great deal of evidence that this need for constant expansion is not just a contingent consequence of the capitalist economy but an inherent feature. But if the limitless expansion of a blindly instrumentalizing power and capitalism go hand in hand, a capitalist economy is unlikely to be an option for an ethically non-anthropocentric ethics.