Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto

Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault,

Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa

The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for

broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in

a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on

social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from

the point of view of their normative justication or political eects alone, but also with

reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the dismantle-

ment of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With

this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientic social

critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to

inner and outer nature.

Abstract:

Nature, Society, Critique, Crisis, Future

Keywords

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38637

DOI

Licence

Krisis 42 (1):108-124.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC

108

Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto

Federica Gregoratto, Heikki Ikäheimo, Emmanuel Renault,

Arvi Särkelä and Italo Testa

Preamble

This manifesto is an invitation. It invites varying practices of philosophical, artistic, and

scientic social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face

with regard to inner and outer nature. It has three parts. The rst part consists of the

eleven theses of Critical Naturalism. The second part is conceptual. It identies the

historical crises and catastrophes that Critical Naturalism seeks to respond to, dispels

the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, sketches out the

notions of nature and naturalism, and anchors Critical Naturalism in the history of

Critical Theory. We understand this history, initially, as that of the Frankfurt School,

which must then be expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. The

last part consists of fragments for models and projects of Critical Naturalism. They are

exemplary sketches of the varying ways to practice naturalist social critique. The hope

is that the list will be extended by those who want to join us.

Section One: The Theses

Nature, whose concept and reality once seemed overcome, returns by force of its

own repression as a signature of our present historical situation.

Nature spilling over, populations spilling over, hospitals spilling over, climate anxiety

spilling over: The symptoms of the repression become unbearable. Yet, catastrophes

do not mean social transformation. They can be perpetuated by administration.

2020 might continue.

Concepts and theories of nature are not innocent. They participate in bringing

the disasters forth and contribute to perpetuating them. A rational response to the

current catastrophes must include attempts to grasp both these new realities of life

and the dead ways of thinking that sustain them. Such has been Critical Theory’s

claim. Critical Naturalism carries it into our times.

The so-called naturalistic fallacy is hardly a greater peril than global warming,

metabolic rift, and zoonotic spillover. On the contrary, a social philosophy which

abstracts from nature is a mirror image of the lethal practical illusion of indepen-

dence from nature.

Independence from nature and domination of nature are two sides of the same

coin. There is no emancipation without liberation within nature.

Most Critical Theory has hitherto only denaturalized the social in various ways,

the point is also to renaturalize it. Relations of domination in society are embodied

materially, biologically, technologically, habitually, and institutionally, and so is the

resistance to them.

Normativist critical theory has reconstructed the norms of social critique, naturalist

109

critical theory pushes forward. It reconstructs social life, especially the relation of

societies to their natural environments and constituents, and it understands itself as

part and parcel of social transformation.

Natural (inter)subjective determinations – drives, impulses, aects – can operate as

critical forces of liberation. Even if always socialized, they are not innitely mal-

leable and they can work against encrusted social norms and structures. Critical

Naturalism cares as much for our natural determinations as for our dispositions to

redirect them.

Nature has contingent and plural histories. It is geared to mutability and variation.

Critical Naturalism acknowledges nature as ordered and disordered, in between

stability and precariousness. It has a transient character.

Traditional naturalism’s illusion of the One Nature of the One Science mirrors

the destructive tendency of capitalist societies to reduce nature to resource, and

it ignores the irreducible plurality of both science and our everyday and aesthetic

experiences of nature. It also impoverishes the ethnographic and cultural variety

of experiences of nature. This plurality is a resource for naturalistic social critique.

Critical Naturalism harbors the utopian drive of reimagining the relationship

between nature and society. It calls for articulation of, and experimentation with,

human social forms of life that can be sustained and freely armed by their individ-

ual members.

Section Two: The Need for Critical Naturalism

Historical diagnoses and theoretical obstacles

We are living in a time when the challenges of the present exert immense pressure on

social critique. Notably, this means that models of social critique should not be discussed

from the point of view of their normative justication or political eects alone, but also

with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary challenges. The dismantlement

of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the healthcare crisis are three

of the most pressing issues of our time, and each of them can be addressed separately

by specic critical models, but as long as they are addressed separately, the reactions to

them are doomed to suer from political one-sidedness.

A rst historical diagnosis, concerning the neoliberal attacks against the welfare

state, can be articulated within the framework of a theory of social freedom. As Axel

Honneth has argued in Freedom’s Right (Honneth 2015) a welfare state is required to

institutionalize the conditions of social freedom. As such, the project of a critical theory

of social freedom is clearly relevant. However, this approach is exclusively society-cen-

tered, and thus not able to capture what is at stake in the current environmental disaster

and care crisis. Moreover, it draws, at least in Honneth’s case, on a Durkheimian con-

ception of the social as a sui generis reality, a conception that makes it almost impossible

to interconnect the social conditions of freedom with the society-nature relationship.

A second way of articulating the critique of the dismantlement of the welfare

state is presented by social reproduction theory (SRT), as seen for instance in Nancy

10.

11.

110

Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018) and in the Feminism for the 99

% Manifesto (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). In a Polanyian way, Neoliberalism

is here depicted as an attack on the conditions of social life, that is, not only on the welfare

state as a condition for social freedom, but on the very conditions of the reproduction

of social life. This is important since this attack is indeed experienced everywhere on

our planet, and not only in countries where welfare institutions have regulated social

reproduction. Indeed, social life cannot reproduce itself without reproducing its relations

to natural environments, and without biological reproduction in the sense of procre-

ation of humans by humans. Insofar as the SRT approach considers society-environ-

ment relations, it does support ecosocialist and ecofeminist projects. The problem with

this approach, however, is that the concept of “reproduction” is dened through the

contrast between “productive” and “reproductive” work, and between “societal” and

“social reproduction” (where “societal” refers to the reproduction of the capitalist system

as a whole, and “social” to the activities, attitudes, emotions, and relationships directly

involved in maintaining life; see Brenner and Laslett 1991). What is required today is the

overcoming of both these dualistic and schematic distinctions. We must reconstruct the

reciprocal impact of productive and reproductive work in novel ways. Furthermore, we

must investigate the deep and intimate relationship not only between societal and social

dynamics, but also, systematically, between such dynamics and their natural environments

(focusing also on how these environments condition societal and social dimensions).

The second historical diagnosis concerns the environmental crisis. Here, the tradi-

tion of critical theory can attempt an endemic articulation by drawing upon the Marxist

notion of “metabolic rift”. This concept suggests that the interactions between human

societies and their natural environments are analogous with the metabolic processes of

animal bodies. According to this approach, the reciprocal transfers between societies

and their environments are depicted as metabolic processes that can break down. The

result is the destruction of the social forms of life that depend on it. Here, the main issue

touches upon the environmental conditions of social life. When societies overuse the

resources of their natural environments, or when they eject too much waste into the

environment, these can no longer reproduce or reintegrate the waste. On this diagnosis,

it is important to consider how the processes of societal reproduction are organized: the

dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, as well as the types of consumption associated with

contemporary social inequalities, are the main culprits (see Foster 2020; 2021).

However, the problems, in our era of extreme inequalities, exceed those to do

with the metabolic exchanges with natural environments. This becomes painfully clear

with the third historical diagnosis, that of “the era of pandemics”. Indeed, the fact that new

viruses emerge ever more frequently and that they are becoming ever more dangerous

is linked with the contemporary overexploitation of natural environments, as stated by

metabolic rift theories (see Malm 2020); yet it is not reducible to that. The temporality

of the diagnosis cast in terms of an “era of pandemics” is namely dierent from that

cast in terms of an “environmental crisis”: whereas global warming is catastrophic for

its medium-term impact on sea level, meteorological disasters, biodiversity, and mass

migration, the healthcare crisis creates a state of emergency here and now. The content

of this diagnosis is also dierent from the previous one since it sheds a dierent light

111

on society-nature relations: the pandemic makes it painfully evident that despite social-

ization human individuals remain natural organisms, belonging to the same realm as all

other species. Humans are just as vulnerable to “zoonotic spillover” as other species are.

Moreover, the healthcare crisis is intimately linked with the destruction of the welfare

state. Dismantling the public health system is a very bad idea in general, but it is even

worse under pandemic circumstances, where it leads to outright global emergencies. It

is striking how poorly equipped critical theory is for articulating this third diagnosis.

Critical theory has rarely been concerned with issues of health in its critical models,

and when it has, this has been only in terms of mental health. Even when elaborating

on the idea of ‘social pathology’, pathologies in the literal medical meaning of the term

have rarely been given serious consideration.

Most of the proponents of the above-mentioned critical models agree that

from a political point of view, the conjunction of these three diagnoses calls for some

kind of socialism with an ecological focus as a remedy to the neoliberal destruction

of the welfare state, to metabolic rifts, and to the healthcare consequences of environ-

mental overexploitation. The contemporary crises deepen not only class inequalities

and domination, but also gender and racial inequalities, as well as inequalities between

rich countries with comparatively ecient healthcare sectors, vaccination capacities, and

highly destructive environmental impact on the one hand, and poor countries more

vulnerable to crises they are not responsible for on the other. The demand is for a

socialism with a feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist focus as well. These political

desiderata can of course be articulated in dierent strategic and programmatic ways.

Their justication depends on political arguments as well as on sociological and eco-

logical facts rather than philosophical reection. Nevertheless, philosophical reection

can also play a role, and one of the useful tasks in this respect is to draw together

the ontological, anthropological, and social-theoretical implications of the three above

mentioned diagnoses in a consistent way that can be informative of, and experimented

in, political practice. Critical Naturalism is the label we use to denote this kind of

philosophical reection.

The challenges of our times call for the Critical Naturalist approach. Importantly,

they also put in serious doubt a number of accepted assumptions in various strands of

contemporary critical social science and philosophy. Let us mention some of the most

obvious ones:

Abstract social constructivism. According to abstract social constructivism, health should

be analyzed as a social construct. One should avoid referring to it from a critical point

of view, as that would mean falling into the traps of biopower. By contrast, Critical

Naturalism addresses health as well as the body as both social constructs and something

irreducible to social construction. When biological organisms are transformed into

social and cultural agents able to express and address organic problems by means of

social norms, these problems do not thereby cease to be biological problems. Critical

Naturalism rejects the symmetrical pitfalls of a social constructivism that reduces society

to social construction and abstracts from its relatedness to nature on the one hand, and

a biological reductionism on the other.

112

Technologicalism. Some forms of social critique based on abstract constructivist accounts

end up conating criticism with the search for technological solutions. For sure, repur-

posing technologies for emancipative ends is a valuable strategy for progressive politics.

Techno-utopian agendas such as the Accelerationist Manifesto (Williams and Srnicek

2013) have rightly diagnosed the sense of the future having been erased from political

imagination in the last decades. However, by not considering the dialectics between

society and nature, such positions eventually endorse a form of articialism in con-

ceiving the role of technology that is both ontologically incoherent and ecologically

dangerous. The future is already here, and it is accelerating in a direction that dreams

of collective self-mastery through technological acceleration will not account for. The

abstract, disembodied character of rationalist social engineering implemented by neo-

liberalism is precisely part of the problem.

Articialism. Abstract constructivist models of social emancipation, also shared by post-

humanists and accelerationist feminists such as the Xenofeminist Manifesto (Cuboniks

2018), conceive of social emancipation as a matter of incrementally bootstrapping

ourselves into articial existence. As such, they are essentially anti-naturalist, believing

that we can simply leave nature behind. This is unsustainable already with regard to

the ontology of artifacts, which in order to be enacted in the world must be materi-

ally embodied, situated in the environment, and adapted to our bodily habits. Social

criticism has rightly denounced the ideological nature of commonsense essentialist

naturalism, which deems unnatural anyone who does not conform to posited biological

or theological norms, and thinks of nature as invariant. However, this does not do

away with naturalness. The Xenofeminist slogan “if nature is unjust, change nature”

should not be taken ad absurdum. Critical Naturalism understands naturalness precisely

as something open to change and to plural orders of transformation, or even as what

allows change! However, this does not mean that nature can change indenitely, that it

can be manipulated without limits.

Flat ontologism. It is tempting to combat the modern denial of the natural conditions of

social and human life by rejecting the society-nature distinction altogether. According

to Bruno Latour, the very idea of society depends on such denial. But rejecting the

social-natural divide should not lead to a rejection of the social-natural distinction and to

relinquishing the very concepts of nature and society1. Such conation of nature and

society ends up missing the critical potential of their relative non-identity. Here again,

Critical Naturalism is an attempt to avoid symmetrical pitfalls: society is neither a reality

sui generis, essentially detached from nature, nor merely a set of specic networks with

other natural entities.

Conation of naturalism with ideology. A powerful source of worries concerning naturalism

within contemporary critical social science and philosophy stems from the fact that “nat-

uralism” is conated with an ideological formation that seeks to justify social inequality

and domination by an appeal to nature. The suspicion is that any reference to nature

in a context where social critique is at stake runs the risk of involving such ideological

113

justication. One good example is the famous distinction between “sex” and “gender”,

understood as a distinction between biological (sex) and social (gender) denitions of

human beings. Initially, this distinction had the critical function of distinguishing social

norms, which vary historically and geographically, from the biological descriptions of

sexual dierence. What was at stake was the struggle against the ideological justica-

tion of these norms by presenting them as derived from natural dierences. In other

words, this distinction was initially a critique of ideological naturalism. Judith Butler

then famously contended that the biological distinction between the sexes actually

also amounts to a normative construction, and thus to ideological naturalism (Butler

1990). However, as feminist biologists teach us (e.g. Fausto-Sterling 2012), studying the

nature of our sexual bodies leads us to discover a rich range of possibilities, which goes

well beyond the simple gender dualism (cis-male vs. cis-female). Similarly, studying

the nature of our sexual desires points us to a rich range of possibilities that goes well

beyond the heteronormative regimes. Trans, transitioning, non-binary, third gendered,

queer, etc. bodies can be seen both as natural variations and as social, human, interac-

tional projects or, as in a Deweyan sense, experimentations. The same goes for gay, lesbian,

queer, non-monogamous, polyamorous, kinky, anarchist or otherwise non-conventional

forms of sexual, intimate, erotic encounters and relationships.

We are not convinced by arguments for dropping all references to nature in

social sciences or social and political philosophy as these would allegedly amount to

ideological naturalism. These arguments render any form of naturalism incompatible

with the very project of a critical theory of society. On the contrary, there are good

reasons to believe that such reference plays a pivotal and inalienable role in contemporary

critical theories. Even when gestures and practices of denaturalization are still needed,

an understanding of the nature of our bodies can have a role in debunking prejudices,

challenging widespread assumptions, and thus contributing to changing norms and

structures of oppression. For instance, comparing racialized groups from a biological

point of view can be a powerful weapon for dismantling any justication for oppression,

discrimination, or even dierentiations based on socially constructed notions of “race”.

On this point – that race does not exist biologically – every social constructionist

appears to be a critical naturalist too! Regarding disability and aging, embodied and

extended cognition – a broadly naturalist approach, sometimes also critical (see e.g.

Gallagher 2020) – can show how institutions, norms, and thus domination are incorpo-

rated in bodily habits and skills and create embodied exclusions and inclusions.

Critical Naturalism, as we can see, is critically sensitive to the dierent issues

at stake in domination based on gender, race, and disability. It doesn’t come with a

pre-packaged solution for all of them. It suggests approaching these areas without the

nature-culture and mind-body dualisms that have long blocked critical inquiry.

Nature and Naturalism

If the very notion of Critical Naturalism sounds paradoxical to many, this is not only

because of the above-mentioned assumptions and prejudices in critical social science

and philosophy. Another reason is a set of conceptual worries about “nature” and

“naturalism”.

114

Some of the worries about “nature” relate to the fact that it is thought to be

legitimate, for social sciences and philosophy, to focus on what makes contemporary

societies irreducible to their natural conditions and components. Society should be

thought of independently of nature, so the thinking goes. The validity of this claim

depends on a particular way of dening “nature”, “society” and “irreducibility”.

In ordinary language, the meaning of the term “nature” is often linked to

the need to distinguish things: nature-convention (rules and norms), nature-culture,

nature-history, nature-artifacts, and nature-nurture. It makes sense to consider all

these distinctions intersecting and together comprising the nature-society distinction.

Whereas such distinctions work ne in most situated language games, they should

not be hypostatized, that is, posited as xed metaphysical divides. For one thing, there

is culture and social life in non-human nature too. And conversely, in some language

games it makes sense to describe “human societies” as part of “nature”.

The distinction between nature and human society can be understood in two

dierent ways: thinking of nature and society either as two separated realities, or as

various aspects of the same reality. Thinking of them as two separate realities is not

feasible since it would then hardly be conceivable that human societies have natural

elements and conditions. Such a conception also suggests that the nature-society dis-

tinction is analogous to another distinction involved in the ordinary uses of the word

“nature”: the natural-supernatural distinction. Critical Naturalism rejects this outdated

metaphysical dualism, i.e., all views that make a categorical distinction between natural

and supernatural realms of existence.

Critical Naturalism also opposes dening and analyzing societies merely in

terms of their allegedly distinctive characteristics (rules, norms, culture, artifacts, nurture),

without considering their relations with the naturalness from which they might be dis-

tinguished. In other words, Critical Naturalism does not reject all distinctions between

nature and convention, nature and history, nature and culture, nature and artifacts, or

nature and nurture. Rather it strives to bridge the gap between the distinguished terms

and use them critically, conscious of their role in our natural and cultural forms of life.

In this respect, what matters is not so much the question as to whether or not, or to

what respect and degree, human societies are natural, but rather a twofold fact: rstly,

there is a continuity between human forms of life and non-human forms of life, as well

as between forms of life and non-living natural phenomena; secondly, these continuities

are present within human forms of social life.

“Continuity”, in this sense, is a concept coined by John Dewey, a natural-

ist philosopher whose signicance for critical theory is now widely acknowledged.

Continuity means refusal of both reductionism and dualism. In fact, Critical Naturalism

recognizes a plurality of forms of continuity: genetic continuity, relational continuity,

and dynamic continuity. Genetic continuity is a point made by evolutionary theory.

Living beings have come about through a series of transformations of inanimate beings,

and human forms of life are a product of a series of transformations of non-human

forms of life.

Relational continuity is a socio-ontological claim: social entities cannot be

abstracted from their natural environments, and their relations to these environments

115

are not only external but also internal. For instance, human labor activities do not only

mediate between societies and their natural environments, but also structure social life,

shaping both the natural environments and the inner nature of the workers.

Most crucial for critical theory is the third continuity, namely dynamic con-

tinuity. According to this idea, continuity also includes constraints on convention,

culture, nature, artifacts, and nurture. In present times, it should be all too obvious that

healthcare crises would not occur were our biological naturalness not an inescapable

constraint on us, or that ecological crises would not occur were our natural environ-

ments limitlessly malleable. It should not be provocative to point out that artifacts are

produced in conformity with mechanical and chemical laws, and that social individ-

uals whose behavior is mediated by conventions and cultural symbols remain animals

subjected to death and disease. And yet it is taken to be controversial to claim that the

human body is not a tabula rasa where culture leaves its print, or that drives, and psychic

defenses are deeply rooted in the history of our species and still produce structuring

eects in contemporary culture. Evolutionary naturalism, as well as Freud’s drive theory,

inicted wounds to human narcissism by highlighting that humans remain animals.

Aligned with technological optimism, social and cultural conservatism, and traditional

dualistic thinking, human narcissism has proved to be strong enough to patch over these

wounds. Critical Naturalism does not provide rst aid for blows to fantasies of human

omnipotence. It cares for vulnerable, embodied, interdependent humans in natural and

social environments over the long term.

Further worries about “nature” have to do with its widespread association

with the ideas of eternal laws of physical phenomena, invariable forms of the living

species, reied genus concepts, and unchanging structures of human nature. Thinking

of societies in their relation to their natural conditions and constituents would then be

incompatible with any project of radical social transformation. But as contemporary

physical cosmology shows, the universe is a result of processes. Biology tells us that

organic species should not be understood as unchanging structures, but as changing

patterns of adaptation to, and adjustment of, changing environments. Contemporary

philosophy of science can therefore support a processual naturalism, in which nature is

seen as composed of interacting processes generating innovations rather than of phe-

nomena subjected to universal and unchanging regularities (see Dupré 2015; 2018).

Critical Naturalism draws lessons from these accounts. It rejects the static conception

of nature that identies nature with a set of unchanging laws and species, and takes

nature to involve both stability and precariousness, to be a mixture of necessity and

contingency, ever in the making.

Naturalism and critical theory

Critical Naturalism aims to be critical in the sense of the traditions of critical social

theory. If one understands critical theory in the broadest sense, these traditions can be

specied by a focus on what is going wrong in our societies, and by attempts to par-

ticipate in shaping social practices. They contrast, rstly, with a traditional conception

of theory where the focus is on the “rst principles” of knowledge, the denition of

the most fundamental traits of reality, or the rationality of the real and an attempt to

116

discern what is irrational in a specic historical situation. They contrast also with a

conception of theory that has its aim in itself, truth being an end in itself, and replaces

this with a conception of theory as a tool for making the world less wrong. Within the

Frankfurt School tradition, this conception of critical theory was famously articulated

in Horkheimer’s article “Critical Theory and Traditional Theory”, as well as by Marcuse,

Adorno, and others. But the conception can be traced back even further to Hegel

and Marx, who both historicized philosophical theorizing and emphasized a close and

reective connection between theory and practice. These two moves also played a deci-

sive role for Dewey who claimed that “philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a

device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated

by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men”. Such a conception of critical

theory is also illustrated nowadays, outside contemporary contributions rooted in the

Frankfurt School tradition, in various branches of critical thought, be they inspired by

Foucault (for instance in discussions about biopolitics), by pragmatism (for instance in

discussions on racial integration and epistemic injustices; see Anderson 2013; Medina

2013), or by Marx (such as in the metabolic rift theories), or be they feminist theories,

theories elaborated in critical race studies, critical disability studies, or critical environ-

mental studies.

In the history of critical theory the type of critical naturalism we are advocating

has often played a crucial, even if nowadays neglected, role. Since Hegel is one of the

starting points of the traditions of critical theory – both Marx and Dewey having

started their intellectual lives as Hegelians, and the Frankfurt School trying to synthesize

Hegel, Marx and Freud – it is reasonable to start these brief historical remarks with him.

Contemporary critical theories inspired by Hegel2 generally read him as an anti-natu-

ralist philosopher. They typically emphasize his deconstructions of the theory-practice,

individual-society, and moral-politics dualisms, without taking seriously the fact that he

also criticized the nature-spirit dualism. Hegel presented this latter criticism from an

anthropological as well as a socio-ontological point of view.

From the anthropological point of view, Hegel criticized the mind-body

dualism and emphasized that humans have both a “rst” and a “second nature”: their

internal nature is transformed by the process of socialization in the social world which

is organized by social norms that are a result of a historical process. A similar anthro-

pology played a decisive role for Dewey, for whom human nature is characterized by

a set of plastic impulses, resulting from natural selection and environmental pressure,

as well as by habits or second nature, which direct these impulses. Important for the

critical naturalist orientation here is the idea that even though impulses are always

socially channeled, contradictions can occur between the impulses and the social norms

which condition habit formation, and such contradictions can critically contribute to

undermining the norms. One nds a similar critical naturalist anthropology in the early

Frankfurt School reception of Freud’s drive theory. Though the drives are plastic and

socially channeled, they are also repressed, and their repression can retroact in various

ways on social life, both by contributing to pathological developments (for instance by

generating the “authoritarian personalities” analyzed by Adorno) as well as by dening

emancipatory potentials (for instance in Marcuse).

117

From a socio-ontological point of view, Hegel already contended that society

should not be analyzed as a normative realm disconnected from external nature and

the internal nature of individuals. What denes the sociality of human life is a transfor-

mation of the rst nature of human organisms into a second nature, which also makes

individual and collective freedom compatible. Furthermore, for a society to reproduce

itself, it must satisfy the needs of its members via a transformation of external nature

operated by a system of division of labor (a “system of needs” in Hegel’s terminology).

This latter ideal is taken up by Marx who denes work as the “metabolism between man

and nature”, or “between society and nature”, with reference to the possibility of “met-

abolic rifts”. Similar ideas are expressed by Dewey, who denes the economic process as

a human transformation of the biological process of mutual adaptation and adjustment

of organism and environment. In various ways, the relations between societies and their

natural environments are also crucial in the rst generation of the Frankfurt School.

The reference to these relations is loaded with both negative and utopian dimensions.

For instance, in the young Adorno’s text “The idea of Natural-History”, the notion

of second nature has an ontological connotation, expressing the transient and plural

character of naturality: “nature” acquires historical contingency. Acknowledging this

character makes it possible to give expression to those aspects of fragmentariness and

appearance that are proper to the second-natural being of human social life and that

are simultaneously concealed and amplied by reication. For Adorno, the key concept

for a critical social philosophy that makes this task its own proves to be that of “second

nature”: it allows us to think of a social concept of nature and a natural concept of history.

Here, second nature brings to light that reciprocal reference of nature and history, that

contamination between the two poles of the eccentric trajectory of human life which

thwarts any attempt both to hold them fast in isolation and to reduce one to the other.

The history of critical theory is a source of inspiration for Critical Naturalism

in many other respects as well. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno

highlighted that domination of nature results in domination in society. However, they

did not consider that the domination of nature could result in the kind of natural

feedback eects we are currently experiencing in the form of environmental disasters

and public health crises. Alfred Schmidt put emphasis on Marx’s theory of the soci-

ety-nature relation, and on the concept of “metabolism between society and nature”

(Schmidt 2013). Schmidt also demanded that Feuerbach’s sensuous naturalism be taken

seriously by critical theory (Schmidt 1977). A similar point was made by Honneth

and Joas (1989) by now four decades ago, before they elaborated their less naturalistic

mature programs.

Critical naturalist motives have not played a major role in the recent devel-

opments of critical theory. Critical Naturalism is a learning process. It aims to bring

these motives back to the fore, in a form adjusted to the challenges of our time.

Notably, it must overcome the Eurocentric bias of critical theory and outline diverse,

non-reied, multiple, complex ideas and practices of nature and naturalness. Critical

Naturalists must practice self-criticism and avoid the traps of colonizing and imperialist

dynamics. Critical theorists have already made some resources available for a richer

and more inclusive approach to nature: in particular, Adorno’s notion of “mimesis”, his

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critique of identity thinking, and his essayistic and micrological methods (indebted to

Walter Benjamin), as well as Dewey’s idea of pluralistic, multi-layered and changeable

natures, and his fallibilist method of inquiry, are promising starts in this respect. Critical

Naturalism’s concepts remain to be hybridized, aected, integrated, revised.

Section Three: Fragments

Critical Naturalism is not a theory. Like the nature it refers to, and the forms of life

it critically engages with, it appears in plural forms. This last section of the Manifesto

exemplies directions of Critical Naturalism by sketching out some of its models and

intents in fragmentary form. The list of fragments is open-ended and contains an implicit

invitation to grow in number and depth and extend all the way into the fragmentary

experience of everyday life.

The task of critical theory

“What is the most central task for critical theory today?” – “Who are we to say?

Philosophers always come late. They don’t write manifestos. It will be up to the readers

of tomorrow to say what was our most important task today.” Bad question, right

answer. Yet the current catastrophic relationship between nature and culture has ren-

dered the right answer impossible and the bad question necessary. As things stand today,

the old answer has become ominous. It might well be that there will be no readers

of philosophy tomorrow. To contribute to preventing that from happening, to help

achieve natural and cultural conditions, which allow for humanity to survive and to

care for its forms of life is, if not the most central, then certainly an imperative task for

critical theory today.

Nature, culture and care

Culture means care, it derives from the Latin colere. Adorno once remarked that this

colere originally meant the activity of the peasant, the agricola, that is, a certain way of

relating to nature, the care for nature. The fact that we set dierent relations to nature, that

we have dierent forms of life, dierent ways of caring for nature within and without

us, means a chance for us, by mutual criticism, to come to terms with ourselves, to grow by

reconciling ourselves with something dierent than ourselves. Culture means care of

nature. Critique means care of the relationship between culture and nature. Critique

must not be thought of as a judgment, but as a coming to terms with oneself and each

other as natural and cultural beings. Critique promises a non-violent mode of cultural

transformation, the possibility of transforming our lives with care.

It is written in the face of our current form of life that it is failing in this regard.

We nd ourselves in a new historical constellation of nature/culture: a contradiction

between the continuation of our capitalist form of life and the survival of humanity

as we know it. And we nd ourselves completely unable to react collectively to this

enormous challenge ahead of us. The fact that global warming has reached a point of

no return means that the ecological disaster that we are facing is not merely a crisis. It

is a permanent catastrophe, a mutation of our relationship with the environment, of our

culture. We simply have no choice but to permanently alter our relationship with nature.

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How should students and teachers of philosophy react? There are two options:

we can either ignore the fact that global warming has reached the point of no return,

that is, try to suppress the fact that our culture will change, try to, as it were, “engineer”

ourselves into a new form of life, or we can go about this change reectively, react to

the disaster creatively, go through our mutation with care.

One such attempt at a creative reaction has been to create a completely new

vocabulary for nature/culture. Critical Naturalists agree that we need a radically new

beginning. However, a radically new beginning does not mean suppressing the past.

Such reactions end with implausible and abstract vocabularies that cannot be continued

in ordinary language and guide everyday life. They will be either powerless or violent

in the face of prevailing habits and customs. Therefore, Critical Naturalists believe that

suppressing the past isn’t radical at all, it is supercial. Instead, Critical Naturalism pro-

ceeds negatively, by a critique of what is given, the prevailing forms of life. Reacting

with care means being sensitive to the needs and powers our form of life has developed,

it involves redigesting our history from the perspective of the contemporary disasters.

No culture can be created from scratch. New forms of life are assembled from old forms

of life. We can only react creatively from pre-existing habits by cultivating those habits

further and redirecting them from the point of view of the disaster and the objective

possibilities at hand.

Niche constructors

As a particular animal species, humans are distinguished by the fact that work is the

mediator of their adaptation to their natural environment. Work can fulll this mediating

function only with a division of labor which involves a stock of technical knowledge

and norms of cooperation – even in cases where division of labor is structured by

social domination. This also means that, from an evolutionary point of view, work plays

both productive and reproductive roles: it is both a productive activity of transforming

materials into consumption goods that can satisfy our vital needs and make our human

forms of life ecologically sustainable, and it is the reproductive activity of educating to

social norms and technical knowledge, as well as providing the services required by the

cooperative structure of society that has made human forms of life possible.

Productive work consists of uses of natural environments in order to satisfy a

set of biological needs, but it also produces transformations in natural environments,

turning them into partly articial ones, which then generate new needs and new uses of

natural environments. Representations, including representations of nature, are crucial

for orienting productive work and therefore crucial for the quality of the human

eect on human environments too. All of this means that, more than any other animal,

humans are niche constructors. Nowadays, the implications of this anthropological fact

are denoted by the term “anthropocene”, even if the problem with the anthropocene

is not the specicity of human niche construction, but the forms it has taken since the

emergence of capitalism.

Work can either sustain, as in foraging societies, or destroy these environments,

as under capitalism. The challenge is to transform destructive work into sustaining work

without returning to foraging. What is required for tackling this challenge is not only

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a critical theory of capitalism – the existing economic system of production for prot

rather than for use, and instrumentalization of social cooperation to benet the rich at

the expense of the poor. Additionally, there is a need for a critical theory of our uses

of the natural and articial environments, a reactualized theory of “use value”, as well

as for a critical theory of the norms of cooperation, a theory that would question the

allocation of wages and prestige, something which is currently far from being based on

the ecological and social value of the professions. What is demanded is also a critical

theory of work that undermines the hegemonic denition of work as a consumption

of raw materials, including one’s body, rather than as a fruitful use of these material

and bodily instrumentalities. In fact, this hegemonic denition provides an ideological

justication both for the exploitation of nature and for the exploitation of workers.

Reconstruction and experimentation

When intellectuals no longer have the opportunity to be organic intellectuals of a

massive social movement, yet they still want to be sincere, the task remaining for them

is chiey critical. Hence, the philosophical industry in critical theory is today mass pro-

ducing norms and models of social critique, and a great many empirical inquiries from

a critical sociological point of view. Although their value should not be underestimated,

for naturalist critical theory the various normative, epistemological, and empirical con-

tributions to social critique are not enough. What matters is also the reconstruction of

the criticized state of aairs. Our relations to our natural and articial environments,

our drives, our habits of conduct and thought, our systems of institutions, all have to

be reconstructed. Working towards these goals requires elaborating new critical models

which take into account the ecological, technological, and economic constraints at play

in our relations to our natural and articial environments, as well as the anthropological

constraints dened by our psyche and the inertia of our habits, and the sociological

constraints bearing on the practice of social transformation. What is required is devel-

oping models of social critique that are also models of social experimentation, models

that are intimately linked with knowledge of these constraints and with practical imag-

ination of solutions.

Beyond ideological naturalism and ideological antinaturalism

Theorists and theories have a tendency to overshoot. The exaggeration has a tendency

to become habitual and unreective over time and with academic socialization. Critical

theory is especially prone to this process of ossication as it comforts itself by the assurance

of being “critical” by default: what begins as critique turns easily into dogma. The critique

of “naturalism”, “essentialism”, “naturalistic fallacy” and so on has become an automatic

reex to an extent that it is an obstacle for addressing global warming, metabolic rift,

zoonotic spillover, and the myriads of ways in which culture is essentially related to

nature. Whereas the evils of social thought implicated in, or explicitly preaching, ideolog-

ical forms of naturalism are well-known and forever something to be vigilant about, the

current situation forces a clear-headed assessment of social thought which abstracts from

nature, thereby forming a mirror image and contributing to the lethal practical illusion of

independence from nature. All of the original worries concerning naturalism need to be

121

revisited without prejudice, so as to achieve a perspective which is neither ideologically

naturalist, nor ideologically anti-naturalist, but that of Critical Naturalism.

Freedom and life

Freedom is an inescapable ideal for critical and emancipatory thought and action, but

the dominant models of freedom are at best inadequate for grasping the constitutive

connectedness of humanity with nature, and at worst complicit with the current crisis

or ongoing catastrophe. The concept of freedom as autonomy or self-determination is

in this regard no less problematic than the simpler concept of negative freedom: it easily

lends itself to the hubristic fantasy of independence from nature. Such independence can

never be actually given, and practical attempts to bring it about can only take the form

of increasingly drastic attempts to dominate nature, to keep its irreducibly independent

dynamics and indierence to human concerns at bay and out of mind. The psychoan-

alytic lesson about the folly of attempts to force internal nature into submission apply

even more so in the relation with external nature. So does its lesson about freedom:

the abstract concept of freedom as independence or abstraction from what necessarily

determines us is self-subversive and destructive when applied in practice. The only real,

concrete form of freedom with regard to what we are constitutively related to and thus

determined by is reconciliation that acknowledges its otherness but overcomes the

hostility in the relationship. It is this unity of dierence and unity, or being with oneself

in otherness—to use the famous Hegelian formula—that characterizes the ideal of a

free relation of a human individual with her body, as well as of a human community

with external nature. As processes of life never cease, freedom in this sense is never given

once and for all, but is always a task to dene the specications of, and to aspire to. If

we fail in this task, we will die out. As Hegel reminds us: the ends of freedom cannot be

separate from the ends of life.

Affects and critique

The emotional and aective dimensions of our habits, institutions, norms, and practices

are of crucial importance, both for philosophy and for life. Living, social, human and

nonhuman beings are shaped and driven by non-cognitive, non- or pre-intentional,

non-linguistic, non- or pre-rational aects. Beings try to articulate aects in specic

emotions (fear, hope, joy, anger, love, hate, guilt, shame, enthusiasm, etc.). Aective and

emotional aspects of individual and collective selves, of their bonds and associations, of

their interactions with the environments, are not only a fact – they can also contribute

to imaginative, critical, and transformative practice. Critical Naturalism, contrary to most

positions in the contemporary landscape of critical theory and social philosophy, tries to

understand the imaginative, critical, and transformative dynamics of aects and emotions.

Aective experiences are vague, incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inchoate,

confusing, at least in many phases of experience. As such, they can signal a non-

alignment between our present and future selves, between given orders (patterns of

action, meanings, values, norms) and what these orders could be and become, how

habits are disrupted and must be readjusted. But they can also be destructive, harboring

anti-social forces. Emotions, for their part, are conscious signs of breaks and disruptions

122

– they express awareness of how things should not be, or how they could be dierent.

We are sensual beings in the sense of the young Marx and of Dewey: our task

is to explore the critical and transformative powers of the aects and emotions that all

our senses generate in non-alienated and non-reied transactions with other human

and nonhuman beings, with organic and nonorganic environments.

Natural vulnerability

Aects and emotions reveal the specic and contextual ways in which human (and

nonhuman) beings are vulnerable, the extent to which vulnerability is concretely

and contextually shared. They indicate possible venues for acknowledging, taking up

and organizing socio-natural bonds so that vulnerability can become a possibility for

alternative, radical social and political experiments. Aects and emotions reveal how

dierent beings are vulnerable in dierent ways – also on the basis of socio-natural

determinations like sexuality, gender, race, disability, etc. – and indicate ways in which

such dierences can come to produce, increase, and share knowledge and mutual care,

instead of perpetrating and strengthening mechanisms of domination, oppression, and

exploitation. The recognition of vulnerability is not giving in to politics of precarious-

ness, tendencies to produce ‘victims’ and reify the discriminated, misrecognized, and

invisible: on the contrary, the recognition of vulnerability supports the critique of these

policies and tendencies.

Cherishing the opaque, uncommendable, impulsive, and thus vulnerable sides of

our lives calls into question current neoliberal imperatives of self-optimization, “enforced

happiness”, positive thinking in the face of catastrophes, practices of mindfulness as indi-

vidual(ized) strategies against systemic and structural problems. We cannot eectively

manipulate and control ourselves (our internal nature) in order to obtain the desired

goals, we are not merely the object of constant creation and invention. But aects and

emotions are not just limits; they also entail positive contents from which we can learn.

In this sense, Critical Naturalism can be the metaphysical spring- (or surf)board for new

ethical projects (some ideas: ethics of passivity, ethics of ambiguity, ethics of ignorance).

Third natures

The contrasting use of the notions of nature and society, rst and second nature, does

not refer to metaphysically given, separate, domains of objects, but rather articulates an

expressive vocabulary for developing social analysis. Nature and society, rst and second

nature, are dialectically intertwined place-holder concepts, to be lled pragmatically

in relation to dierent contexts, concepts which disclose certain congurations of

experience and action. In this sense their distinction is a dispositive, which needs to be

deployed anew in relation to the contexts we need to map, operate within, and critically

transform. Hence, the distinction between rst and second nature is contextual and

positional and has not only descriptive, but also critical and dialectical power. It deploys

the perspective from which, from time to time, we can critically re-describe processes of

associated life. But the breaking down of given social categories, by the application and

determinate negation of the notions of rst and second nature, is also future oriented,

and has a utopian moment, aimed at a trans-categorial, armative re-description of our

123

forms of life and of their emerging, dynamic, yet undecided orders of possibilities. One

could say that third nature is what Critical Naturalism, with the place-holder notions

of rst and second nature, aims at. The re-congurative task of Critical Naturalism is

confronted today, in the face of the ecological catastrophe and the entropic transfor-

mations of contemporary landscapes, with the problem of anticipating the future while

grasping a third way between primordial nature and reied second nature, wild nature

and humans’ enslaved nature: the problem of re-imagining natures, through cultural and

technological means, and conversely, of reinventing third natures as plural, contingent,

hybrid orders. In his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter

Benjamin raised the question of how we can free ourselves from the historical cage of

a given second nature as it has been shaped through a relation – labelled as “rst tech-

nology” – to naturalness as to an external material to be dominated. Whereas second

nature, as it is historically given, is a distorted mirror of human beings’ domination over

rst nature, the utopian moment of Critical Naturalism envisages a third possibility,

whose anticipated gure could let us catch a glimpse of a dierent relation, which goes

beyond both the mere naturalization of human beings, and the humanization of nature.

Benjamin named “second technology” a dierent project of our relation to natural-

ness, whose objective correlative, in the horizon of the future, could be aesthetically

anticipated through the gure of third natures. Their traces can be detected in those

interstitial, undecided territories Gilles Clement names “third landscapes”, which are

left over, unattended by human beings and their historical constructions, and appear as

undetermined fragments, ciphers of the planetary garden.

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References

Notes

1 As happens in Bruno Latour, in Jason Moore’s

(2015) monist world ecology, and in Timothy

Morton’s (2009) ecology without nature.

2 Such as by Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, or

Slavoj Zizek.

124

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Morton, Timothy. 2009. Ecology Without Nature:

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Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.”

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accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-

politics/

Federica Gregoratto is habilitated lecturer

(Privatdozentin) in social and political philosophy

at the University of St Gallen. She has published in

English, German, French and Italian on a variety

of topics in social and political philosophy, such

as the philosophy of love and sex, critical theory

(including the monograph on Habermas: Il doppio

volto della comunicazione, Mimesis, 2013), pragmatism,

recognition and power theories, debt-guilt debates,

gender and intersectionalist studies. She is now

working on a book about erotic love as a social

space of power, freedom and transformation.

Heikki Ikäheimo is Senior Lecturer at the University

of New South Wales, Sydney. His research areas

include Hegel, German idealism, theories of

recognition, intersubjectivity, subjectivity, personhood,

the human life-form, critical social philosophy. He

published the monograph Anerkennung (De Gruyter

2014), the edited collections Recognition and Social

Ontology (Brill 2011) and Recognition and Ambivalence

(Columbia University Press 2021), as well as

Handbuch (Springer 2021). His next monograph

Recognition and the Human Life-form is forthcoming by

Routledge in 2022.

Emmanuel Renault is professor of philosophy

at University of Paris-Nanterre. His research

interests include Hegel, Marx, The Frankfurt School,

Pragmatism, philosophy of nature, the theory

of recognition and of work. His books in English

include: The Experience of Injustice (Columbia

University Press, 2019), Marx and Critical Theory

(Brill, 2018), Social Suffering: Sociology, Psychology,

Politics (2017) and The Return of Work in Critical

Theory: Self, Society, Politics (Columbia, 2018, with C.

Dejours, J.-P. Deranty and N. Smith).

Arvi Särkelä is Lecturer at the University of Lucerne

and Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zürich. His

research interest include Spinoza, Hegel, Emerson,

Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Adorno, social

philosophy, philosophy of culture and methodology

of the history of philosophy. He has published the

monograph Immanente Kritik und soziales Leben

(Klostermann 2018), co-edited (with Axel Honneth)

the German Edition of Dewey’s Lectures in China

(Sozialphilosophie, Suhrkamp 2019) and co-edited

(with Martin Hartmann) the volume Naturalism and

Social Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield 2022).

Italo Testa is Associate Professor at the University

of Parma. His research interests include Ger