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Communication with the Environment? Non-human Nature in the Theories of Jrgen Habermas
Andrew Whitworth 1
The theories of Jrgen Habermas provide us with a powerful analytical tool for the analysis of politics, including social movements. However, they are lacking in one particular area, the analysis of environmental politics. The reasons behind these difficulties can be traced through the development of Habermass work and lie in the inability of non-human nature to participate in language-based discourse. The dilemma is acute the ecocentric moral position needs grounding in the rationality of discourse if it is not to slip into possibly dangerous irrationality, but how can such a grounding occur? This article reviews the development of discussion in this area and investigates advocacy as a possible resolution of the problem. communicative action (1984 and 1987) attempt to ground political activity in the rational presuppositions of language and provide us with strong explanatory gains in the analysis of phenomena such as social movements. One of the most significant contemporary problems that we might expect social movement theory to address is the environmental crisis, but Habermas has struggled to incorporate environmentalism into his framework. He is criticised for being anthropocentric the perspective that only the human world has intrinsic value rather than ecocentric where all things have innate value (see Eckersley, 1992, ch. 5; Whitebook, 1979, p. 52). Without assigning value to nonhuman nature, how can its particular needs and interests be addressed? However, the tensions encountered when attempting to conceive of ecocentrism through Habermass framework are strong, some would say intractable. This article reviews the development of this debate.

Introduction
Jrgen Habermas is one of the most influential living political theorists. His discourse ethics (1990, pp. 43115) and theory of

Andrew Whitworth, University of Leeds

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The Frankfurt School

Habermass position has its ancestry in the works of German critical theorists, known collectively as the Frankfurt School, amongst them Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse (see Jay, 1973: Eckersley, 1992, pp. 97106). Their concern, reacting to the failure of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union to bring about emancipation, was to extend Marxs critique to the relations of social domination writ large. The problem with society lay not merely with its relations of production but its entire foundation on the rationalising premises of the Enlightenment, the appliance of principles of reason and scientific method espoused by such thinkers as Newton, Descartes, Locke and so on. Both inner (human) nature and outer (non-human) nature were subordinate to these principles (Vogel, 1997, p. 175), and modes of thought and action that serve these ends have become valorised (Kellner, 1989, pp. 8990). Horkheimer and Adorno perceived Enlightenment as a dialectic (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). Whilst it aims to supersede mythological and irrational worldviews, it itself becomes myth, and the institutional, technological and philosophical tools for bringing about liberation science, the state and so on instead become channels of increased domination (Marcuse, 1964). Unlike Marx, who believed his future communist society was unavoidably prefigured in the onward march of history, Horkheimer and Adorno stressed a radical discontinuity (Eckersley, 1992, p. 103) between what is and what should be. With the individual so dominated by instrumental reason, the conflict between humanity and nature replaced class struggle as the axle upon which turned the wheels of domination, but this meant that the possibility of a historical subject capable of ushering in the revolutionary age disappeared (Jay, 1973, p. 279). The Frankfurt School did suggest a way to break free of such problems; that the solution to the historical impasse of our time
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however unlikely [was] reconciliation with nature (Whitebook, 1979, p. 41). However, as they conceived of Enlightenment rationality as so dominant, there was no way of conceiving of such a reconciliation theoretically (Habermas, 1984, pp. 380382). Horkheimer and Adorno could locate the spontaneity that was not yet in the grips of the reifying force of systemic rationalisation only in irrational powers in the charismatic power of the leader or in the mimetic power of art and love (Habermas, 1987, p. 333).

Early Habermas
Habermas rejected the mysticism (Di Norcia, 1974/1975, p. 85) of this view, and also Marcuses New Science, which suggested that a more co-operative, aesthetic relationship to nature was the road to emancipation (Marcuse, 1964). According to Habermas, Marcuse could not theoretically envisage from where such a New Science would arise (Habermas, 1971, pp. 8587). Habermas argued that different forms of knowledge are determined by the different human interests they serve (Di Norcia, 1974/ 1975, p. 86), with control a key element of the technical human interest. In his work, he sought to avoid such an instrumental rationality dominating the social world in the same way it had dominated the natural world (Di Norcia, 1974/1975, p. 89: Alford, 1985, p. 77). This projects agent was not reconciliation with Nature but the use of the rational structures of human language and communication. Towards the end of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas presents his most significant aphorism on the human/nature relationship: What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language (Habermas, 1972, p. 314). Although the full shape of Habermass theories had yet to emerge, critics had already picked up on certain problems. Di Norcia pointed out that Habermas was simply not
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addressing the nature and causes of ecological crisis. It was precisely the human interest in technical control over nature that led to environmental problems (Di Norcia, 1974/1975, pp. 9091). His division of interests into social and technical was too simplistic. If the social domain was exclusively reserved for speaking subjects, where would the biological sciences, particularly ecology, reside (Whitebook, 1979, pp. 5659)? Only in the technical, instrumental domain, thus assuring their domination. This criticism strongly prefigures those who believe Habermass later theory of communicative action to be unavoidably anthropocentric in its consideration of nature. Habermas responded to these criticisms and recognised that Knowledge and Human Interests had left the contradictions of the Frankfurt School unresolved (Holub, 1991, p. 8). His solution was to break free of the restrictions of the philosophy of consciousness. Ideas of reconciliation and freedom needed to be seen as codes for a form of intersubjectivity (Habermas, 1984, p. 391) rather than as individually subjective ideals. Consciousness becomes allied to a philosophy of communication and a communicative rationality that would provide a rational alternative to the problems caused by instrumental rationality: It is only this communicative rationality that gives an inner logic and not merely the impotent rage of nature in revolt to resistance (Habermas, 1987, p. 333). This was to form the basis of The Theory of Communicative Action.

communicative power of bureaucratic or capitalistic, undemocratic institutions on the one hand, and the collective enabling power of democratic political criticism, mutual understanding and self-determined consensus on the other (Forester, 1985, p. 204). Society should be considered not as made up of atomised individuals but as intersubjective, communicative relations. When institutional processes disable free communication Habermas terms this colonisation. Colonised society is steered, not by language, but by money and power, which come to substitute for it (Habermas, 1984, p. 342: 1987, pp. 180185). Transactions taking place through these media fall outside the intersubjectivity of language, becoming objectified or reified (Habermas, 1984, p. 358), leading to alienation, lack of meaning, loss of freedom and so on. This process is partly a natural result of the increasing complexity of society, but also comes about because of the inappropriate application of instrumental reason, and efficiency-oriented actions, to the communicative sphere of the lifeworld. Social movements arise as a reaction to this alienation and loss of meaning (Habermas, 1987, pp. 392396: much of this passage also appears in Habermas, 1981). Where particular groups feel systematically excluded from decision-making processes (Forester, 1985, p. 205), they may undertake collective action to rectify this situation. Amongst such movements is environmentalism (Habermas, 1987, p. 394). However, the explanatory gains Habermass theories offer us in the field of social movement analysis are not extended to environmentalism. Habermas is unsatisfied about environmentalisms potential to be truly emancipatory. To a large extent this is due to the difficulties involved in including non-human nature in communicative action processes. Environmentalism is only allowed for when considered as humans acting in their own
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The environment and communicative action

The best brief summary of this theory is provided by Forester (1985, pp. 204206). As he says: The spinal element of Habermass critical communications theory lies in [the] contradiction between the disabling
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interests, as a response to colonisation: not in the interests of nature-in-itself, as a response to the domination of nature and the resultant environmental damage. Early critics pointed out the need for human society to combine its anthropocentric interests with an appreciation of natural limits: the natural human interest must be seen as an interest in the proper form of cognitive and practical interaction with the natural environment, one which will allow benefit to men [sic] securing their goals with the minimum harmful interference in natural processes (Di Norcia, 1974/ 1975, pp. 9192). As Habermass ethics stood at that time, the only way the theory allowed for such an expression of environmentalism was its non-causal association with the socially emancipated world Habermass theories intended to bring about: or, in other words, that a society with more harmonious humanhuman relationships would implicitly be one in greater harmony with nature (Whitebook, 1979, p. 61), if environmentalism were addressed at the level of social psychology (Whitebook, 1979, p. 64). Habermas did accept that his ethic was anthropocentric and therefore did not address these socio-psychological necessities; that is, the transition to a morality that includes the compassionate relation of humans to nature as a cosmically expanded solidarity . He recognised that The ethics of animal protection extends the circle of ones neighbours even beyond the potential participants in a communication community to all affected living creatures with whose suffering we can empathise (Habermas, 1982, pp. 247248). Nevertheless, the matter of humannon-human relations still had to be addressed within the anthropocentric framework of a discourse ethic (Habermas, 1982, p. 247). Whilst attempts to open up a moral access to naturein-itself are by no means absurd we should not permit ourselves to be cajoled by these intuitions into ignoring the difficulties that we encounter here (Habermas, 1982,
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p. 248). Because of non-human natures fundamental inability to participate in languagebased discourse, there remain limits to our empathy with it, a lack of reciprocity in the relationship and an inability to ground the morality in anything other than faith, metaphysics or mysticism (Habermas, 1982, p. 248). Habermas therefore takes the problems experienced by Horkheimer and Adorno as indicating that the idea of a reconciliation with Nature has no theoretical meaning. As it does not and cannot share our systems of language and rational thought, non-human nature cannot contribute to the normative grounding of society (Vogel, 1996, p. 6). Giving our relationship with the natural world an ecocentric, non-objective dimension would not be theoretically fruitful (Habermas, 1982, p. 246). The natural world cannot engage in moral discourse alongside the human agents of change. A change in the human/nature relationship, let alone any sense of reconciliation with it, is thus not a precondition for emancipation. It is just not possible for us to know non-human nature and thus be able to incorporate it successfully into our discourses. But the fundamental dilemma remains: Vogel goes so far as to suggest it might be irresolvable (Vogel, 1997, p. 175). Eckersley, for instance, stresses that society must acquire some form of ecocentric sensibility in order to combat environmental crises (Eckersley, 1992), and while there are those that disagree (see, for instance, Barry, 1999), Habermas himself recognises the moral validity of ecocentricity: Compassion for tortured animals and the pain caused by the destruction of biotopes are surely manifestations of moral intuitions that cannot be fully satisfied by the collective narcissism of what in the final analysis is an anthropocentric way of looking at things (Habermas, 1990, p. 211). But at the same time, ecocentricity possesses an irrational dimension that has
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the potential to create a distinctly distasteful politics if unclipped from anthropocentric foundations: a spiritual politics that claims neither to be left nor right but out in front can easily mutate into authoritarianism, misanthropy or even fascism (Zimmerman, 1996, p. 63; Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1995). Such an association is in no sense inevitable, but it is precisely to guard against such mutations that environmentalism needs to root itself at least partly in what it means to be human: while deep ecologists rightly criticise those theories that portray humankind as having no relation to nature other than a domineering one, they should be wary of the possible implications of theories that say humankind is no more than a clever animal (Zimmerman, 1996, p. 74: Dryzek, 1990, p. 200 also makes this point). According to Habermas, such rooting can be found in communicative action which brings the dilemma back into focus. Ecocentricity and communicative action must be drawn closer together, to the benefit of both. But how?

Advocacy
If nature cannot be included in consensual discourse then its domination is inevitable. Such a domination would be total yet, empirically, nature does have a presence in human discourse. There is no societynature dichotomy: The real problem with Habermass account of nature is not that it fails to capture natures otherness but rather that it does not sufficiently see that nature too is simply part of the social or communicative realm (Vogel, 1997, p. 177). Not only Habermas himself, but his critics, according to Vogel, have fallen into this trap
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(ibid.). Nature is not capable of discourse, but is socially constituted regardless: it is an integral part of our communicative world, and therefore has value (ibid., p. 188). Its interests must at times be taken into account, even though these are not expressible in the same way as human interests, as nature has no Habermasian validity claims. But laws protecting species or threatened landscapes or anti-cruelty legislation are not irruptions of irrationality. Nor, however, can they be dismissed as purely utilitarian representations of human, and only human, interest. Not only does nature have a presence in human discourse, the exact extent of this presence is itself a subject for discourse; debate about new legislation to protect animals takes place or legal protection is removed from certain areas to allow a road to be built. This is environmentalism: representations made in discourses on behalf of non-human nature. Nature has advocates in discourse. John Dryzek has most fully explored this possible closing of the ecocentricity/ communication gap (Dryzek, 1990). What advocacy might mean in practical terms is considered by Dobson (1996) and Goodin (1996). The principle of advocacy is based on two sub-principles. First, the idea that a quasi-communicative relationship with non-human nature can be achieved (Bookchin, 1986) and, indeed, is an inescapable element of our society (Di Norcia, 1974/1975, p. 90). Feedback signals inform us of natures reaction to human activity (see Dryzek, 1987, p. 207); if a plant has not received enough water, it tells us this by wilting. Such feedback signals can be included in discourse. Environmental actors can also introduce assertions based on scientific evidence for disappearing species, the aesthetic value of a treasured landscape, or moral beliefs about the right of all living beings to avoid unnecessary suffering. In each case, the particular assertion might be expressed in anthropocentric or ecocentric terms, or be one of individual or collective
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interest. In all cases, however, the assertion will ultimately have value in the discourse only once it has been expressed as language. Interpretations of the same phenomenon might differ between participants, and in any case there is no way of knowing the relationship of these interpretations and the true needs of non-human nature, which remain completely unknowable. Strong communication in the Habermasian sense with nature is therefore impossible (Vogel, 1997, p. 185), but this also applies to other groups on whose behalf we may act as advocates in discourse, such as babies (see Goodin, 1996, p. 843). Eckersley says: The fact that the non-human world cannot participate in human speech should be no barrier to their special interests always being considered and respected by those who can participate in the dialogue (1992, p. 112). Secondly, the fact that advocates are humans, and thus use language and rational thought, qualifies them to make rational assertions in any communicatively free discourse in which they participate. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is qualified to take part in a discourse and to introduce any assertion they can validate (Habermas, 1990, p. 89). Advocates recognise that non-human nature cannot fulfil this criterion but that without some alternative representation in discourse, domination of it would be total they choose to act as advocates because of a recognition that such domination is undesirable and should be mitigated if possible. Non-human nature is identified as a systematically excluded group and this is considered by environmentalists as having a negative impact both on our relations with the natural world and our relations with each other, just as early critical theorists viewed these dominations as being twinned. Advocacy cannot be fully grounded in discourse. It remains extrinsic to the principles of rational discourse, just as would economic efficiency or social harmony if these principles were taken as the overriding telos
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of society (Dryzek, 1990, p. 204). But it may prove to be the only possible compromise for the dilemma we have mentioned. No, nature does not share our rational, communicative nature, nor raise validity claims. But why should it always be irrational, spiritual or even fascist to raise them on natures behalf? If an advocate does so in rational discourse, is their position undermined because they hold ecocentric morals?

Conclusion
The idea that nature and society are wholly separate concepts should be reconsidered. Rather, the fundamental question of environmental politics should be: what is the relationship between human and nature, and to what extent is the one accommodated within the other (Zimmerman, 1996, p. 75)? What is required is not a reconciliation with nature, but the accommodation of it in decision-making. Only through considering such a question, and actively seeking to resolve it, might we establish a workable environmental ethic that is both rational and tolerant of ecocentricity as a moral position. If Habermass discourse ethics is to continue to apply to environmentalism, then some form of accommodation with its ecocentric aspects must be found. The tensions here are acute, but cannot be swept under the carpet however complex the philosophical difficulties. Because we cannot know non-human nature we cannot talk about it having interests in the same sense as human interests, which are expressible in discourse. However, this does not mean that advocates for nature do not suggest, or base their positions on, interpretations of the natural interest whether they express these interpretations in terms of nature in its own right, or in conjunction with their own interests as political actors. In all discourses, interests can be excluded for reasons deliberate or accidental, strategic or benign, but if an environmentally
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aware society is to come about, the particular exclusion of non-human nature must somehow be addressed. Throughout the development of Habermass theories, he has consistently allowed this one particular imperfection to assume the status of a major flaw. It is impossible to remove the flaw entirely but the presence of advocates for environmental interests may mitigate it in certain real discourses. And the fact that they include themselves in such discourses will mitigate any tendencies the environmentalist position might have towards irrationality, with all the negative consequences this could entail.

Note
1 Thanks to Dr Ricardo Blaug and one anonymous referee for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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