On the colonization of the environment

Abstract

In this article, I apply the colonization thesis from Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action to capitalist societies’ relationships with their natural environment. Resolving the fixation of his critique of capitalism on the so-called lifeworld ( Lebenswelt) to include questions of the environment ( Umwelt) opens up new vistas in the ongoing ecological reorientation of Critical Theory. If we think about the exploitation of the natural environment in Habermasian terms, the paradoxical irrationality of the expansion of instrumental rationality from the market mechanism becomes evident, providing us with normative leverage against the systemic devastation of external nature. The conversed colonization thesis calls for promoting the ecological preconditions for self-determined societal development through the collective containment of capitalist dynamics: since it undermines the enabling capacities of the ecosystems based on which the ‘project of modernity’ thrives, economic instrumentalization of nature can no longer proliferate.

The Banality as a Mood of Contemporary Society in Contrast to the Artist's Mood

“…Man recognises everything around him as means: natural resources, animals, other men, and even instrumentalises interpersonal relationships of great spiritual value such as love or friendship to adapt them to the purpose of progress (Kämper, 2024). This type of relationship that sees everything in the environment merely as means is the main characteristic of instrumentality, this procedure that certainly has very ontic characteristics, has taken root so deeply in contemporary man that it is already expressed structurally as the background for the operation of life (Dahbour, 2023).…”