Abstract

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to

instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role

(and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and

inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contempo-

rary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto.

This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assump-

tions and arguments of the manifesto.

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC

BY 4.0). © 2023 The author(s).

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The manifesto for a “Critical Naturalism” recently published in Krisis is an important call for

a concerted effort to develop a form of social critique adequate to the challenges of our mo-

contest the ongoing “administration of catastrophe” by governments across the globe, and to

rationally reassess our responses to, for example, the pandemic and climate crisis. According

to Critical Naturalism, such crises represent the return of the repressed. In treating nature as

an object outside of us which we mastered long ago, we neglect our own embodiment in the

natural world. Consequently, we inadvertently unleash forces that undermine the very “mas-

tery” we are supposedly exercising – like a virus we allow to proliferate through our own

institutionalized indifference to the environmental consequences of advanced industrial pro-

duction. According to the manifesto, contemporary critical theory must overcome its narrow

focus on the “normative justification and political effects” of our models of critique and ex-

pand its remit to encompass the question of the material conditions of social freedom.

way of talking about human development. According to their view, we are born “bio-

logical organisms” that, through a process of socialization, become “social and cultural

agents” irreducible to the “nature” we share with the other animals (111). In another

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mation of the first nature of human organisms into a second nature” (117). Yet this

“dual-aspect” account of human being gives rise to a tangle of conceptual difficulties.

If we are born mere animals, what renders us susceptible to the process of socialization?

A dual-aspect approach does not articulate the “link” between animality and rationality

so much as “leap” over the gap between them that it leaves in place. On my Aristote-

lian-Hegelian view, which builds on the work of Sebastian Rödl and Andrea Kern, we

are born distinctively rational animals, with the embodied potential to learn to be self-

integrity itself hinges on our ability to give reasons for our actions and beliefs that other

rational agents can share. According to my transformative perspective, our first, bio-

logical, nature just is our capacity for acquiring a second nature.

It could be that the proponents of Critical Naturalism would ultimately affirm this view,

but many of the formulations in the manifesto remain ambiguous. For example, the

authors rightly seek to overcome the antinomy of “biological reductionism” and “social

constructivism,” grasping “health as well as the body as both social constructs and

something irreducible to social construction” (111). Yet, arguably, this already con-

cedes too much to both constructivism and reductivism in assuming that rationality is

extra-biological and that our social “essence” is a matter of construction. To take an

reared, and so on.

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constructivist view. This is the perfect juncture to turn to the second limitation of Crit-

ical Naturalism, in order to address the larger political stakes of the difference between

an additive and a transformative understanding of rational animality. As noted, the

transformative view conceives rationality as a distinctive way of being an embodied

organism, not as something “over and above” organic form. This means that what

counts as flourishing for animals like us is a matter of what we take to count as flour-

ishing. Yet this is not a matter of free-wheeling “social constructivism,” whereby what-

of the task of a critical theory of the present.

As the authors rightly note, “for a naturalist critical theory, the various normative, epis-

temological, and empirical contributions to social critique are not enough. What mat-

ters is also the reconstruction of the criticized state of affairs” (120). While the term

“capitalism” does occasionally appear in the manifesto, it is not a fundamental category

in the authors’ analysis, which focuses instead on “neoliberalism.” The authors con-

demn the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and identify its revitalization as

one of their core political aims. Yet in my view, this account suffers from a major blind

spot: Marx’s critical theory of capitalist production. As Marx shows, the way social

wealth is distributed is fundamentally dependent on the way it is produced; the wage

duction. Because the Critical Naturalist view is irresolute in its conceptualization of

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normative criteria for our biological reproduction. In sharp contrast, the transformative

view I sketched above shows that not only the form of distribution, but the very form

of production itself, must be subject to rational reassessment and revolution.

In a collaborative effort, philosopher Martin Hägglund and I argue in recent and forth-

coming work that the “missing link” and the “missing category” identified above can

be recovered by a naturalism that is not only critical but also dialectical. On the account

that we are developing, a resolute naturalist view must be (1) transformative in its con-

ception of rational animality, and (2) radical in its critique of the capitalist form of life.