重建自由:生态灾难时代的人类能动性

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Maeve Cooke
{"title":"重建自由:生态灾难时代的人类能动性","authors":"Maeve Cooke","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12681","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today is anthropogenic ecological disaster on a global scale. I assume, furthermore, that <i>radical</i> changes are needed in order to arrest our current disastrous trajectory and, in the best case, redirect it. However, as things stand, human agents seem unable to bring about the radical changes that are required. As a first step toward remedying this, I postulate the need for a fundamental transformation of ethical perceptions, on both individual and collective levels: If humans globally are to grasp how the dominant modes of thinking and acting are ecologically disastrous, there has to be a radical shift in their ideas about the ethically good life.<sup>1</sup> Although the requisite shift in ethical perceptions will not, on its own, suffice for radical social change, I see it as its precondition. This leads me to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency.</p><p>For a number of years I have been concerned to reimagine and rearticulate the concept of freedom as a mode of ethically self-determining human agency in a democratic political context. In these reflections, my focus has been on self-directing agency as a distinctive form of <i>social</i> freedom, in the general sense of a mode of agency dependent on human relations within society. Recently, however, I have come to realize that this perspective is inadequate. It is insufficiently attuned to the multiple and complex relational contexts, nonhuman as well as human, in which humans exercise their agency.</p><p>The thesis driving my current endeavor is that the contemporary ecological disaster calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of human freedom as it has been understood by modern Western political thinking and embodied in everyday thought, behavior, and social practices. I offer a utopian vision of human agency, and the terms in which to articulate it, that would motivate a fundamental reorientation of thinking, behavior, and social practices globally. On a general level, I seek to show the importance at certain times in history of radical reimagining what it means to lead an ethically good life, and the need for new ethical-political vocabularies to accompany such reimaginings (Lear, <span>2008</span>). My specific aim is to create a new field of possibilities amidst the dire circumstances of ecological disaster in a context where it may seem impossible even to imagine what these might be.</p><p>I use the term “utopian” advisedly, in order to stress that I do not propose an alternative account of freedom that is normative in a prescriptive sense; rather I issue an invitation to reimagine a particular conception of human agency that became dominant within capitalist modernity. However, my proposal is not abstractly idealistic: it has a basis in actual and historical impulses and aspirations, both within Western capitalist cultures and in religious and cultural thinking and practices elsewhere.<sup>2</sup></p><p>In recent times, the term “The Anthropocene” has gained widespread currency in popular and academic discourse to describe the anthropogenic aspect of the contemporary environmental disaster. It is now widely used as a name for a new epoch of human evolution characterized by human-induced change to the biosphere and to convey the unprecedented rapidity and unparalleled capacity of humans to destroy the ecosystems on which their survival depends. Despite disputes among geologists concerning the degree to which the present period can be identified as the successor epoch to the Holocene, there is overwhelming scientific agreement that rapid anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity constitute grave threats to the future of the human species; indeed, there is widespread scientific agreement that human activity, amplified by the rapid development of capitalist industrialization and the unchecked pursuit of affluence, has unleashed uncontrollable natural forces that leave contemporary humans as vulnerable to the devastating power of nature as their earliest ancestors. There are good reasons to think that the predominant conceptions of human agency, particularly within contemporary Western cultures, have facilitated this anthropogenic environmental devastation. Here I connect with recent thinking in Earth System Science, where conceptions of human agency have come to be seen as part of a larger interconnected biosphere: scientists, recognizing conceptions of human agency as a significant factor in anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity, now invite scholars and researchers from the humanities and social sciences to help them address the challenges of ecological disaster (Thomas et al, <span>2020</span>). Following this line of thought, technological advances, even revolutionary breakthroughs in geoengineering and CO<sub>2</sub> removal, will be insufficient to halt our current perilous trajectory and redirect it for the better. Technological advances will need to be accompanied by a new perspective on human agency, at an individual and collective level.</p><p>Since it was first coined (Crutzen &amp; Stoermer, <span>2000</span>), the use of the “Anthropocene” concept to characterize the contemporary global ecological situation has attracted criticism in the humanities and social sciences, particularly among theorists concerned with radical social transformation (Bonneuil, <span>2015</span>; Haraway, <span>2015</span>; Hornborg, <span>2019</span>; Malm, <span>2018a</span>; Moore, <span>2016</span>; Stengers, <span>2015</span>). Their criticisms are directed primarily at implicit assumptions about human nature and sociopolitical relations characteristic of some prominent interpretations of the concept. The main objections are that the concept of the Anthropocene naturalizes, depoliticizes, and conceals. It <i>naturalizes</i> the ecological disaster by rendering it a natural outcome of the sort of species that humans are. It <i>depoliticizes</i> by flattening social, political, and economic relations, grouping together all humans under one umbrella, implying that no particular group of humans is to blame. It depoliticizes further due to its implicit message that little can be done to avert disaster. It <i>conceals</i> factors important for understanding the ecological crisis such as economic inequalities, cultural asymmetries, colonialism, mass media, and social media, thereby distracting from their role in the crisis and hindering reflection on how to address them and the ecological iniquities with which they are intimately connected. Critically engaged theorists who take this stance toward the concept of the Anthropocene propose alternative framing concepts, by means of which they attempt to reveal and capture the central components it neglects or obscures. Influential alternative proposals include <i>Capitalocene, Plantationcene</i>, and <i>Urbanocene</i>. I view these not as rival concepts but as narratives driven by shared concerns. I take seriously the dangers to which critics draw attention, while nonetheless insisting that ecological devastation is the larger context within which challenges such as capitalism, colonialism, and urban expansion must be addressed.</p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has been a grim reminder of the hubristic attitude expressed in the modern ideal of freedom. Despite enormous scientific achievements that led to the production of new vaccines in a remarkably short time, the pandemic shook confidence in the view that technological ingenuity can master nature and finally put an end to virulent disease. The increasing frequency and violence of flash floods, wildfires, and heat waves has further contributed to a growing perception of human vulnerabilities to natural forces. However, the new humility is ambivalent. On the positive side, it offers the prospect of a fundamental change in thinking about human agency in its relations to self and others, human and other-than-human. On the negative side, it is frequently coupled with feelings of human powerlessness that are expressed in blustering defiance (libertarianism), violence (eco-terrorism), or resignation. Such responses leave untouched the patterns of thought and behavior that have led to ecological devastation. This is one reason not to jettison the concept of freedom entirely but rather to seek to reimagine and rearticulate it. For, lacking a sense that self-determining agency is possible, humans are all too likely to vacillate between regressive feelings of human powerlessness and the delusional belief in human supremacy.</p><p>There is a further reason why I consider it important to retain the idea of freedom, despite its troubling history within capitalist modernity. I hold that the concept of freedom, if reimagined and rearticulated in the right way, is indispensable for socially transformative agency of the right kind. In my utopian projection, this means ecologically attuned, self-determining, and self-transforming agency.<sup>3</sup> Moreover, as social change for the better is a never-ending process, I see freedom not only as necessary in order to <i>achieve</i> a better society on a once-off basis but as an indispensable element of <i>any</i> good society.</p><p>Nonetheless, following Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, my starting position is that within capitalist modernity, the dominant ideal of freedom has been based on a view of human agency that expresses an attitude of mastery and control (Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>).<sup>4</sup> In this book, published in the 1940s, the authors make clear how the view of agency dominant within capitalist modernity reduces both human and other-than-human nature to inanimate matter to be mastered and manipulated by humans at will. Whether it is understood negatively (as freedom from external interference) or positively (as self-determination or self-legislation), the dominant modern ideal of freedom celebrates human sovereignty, specifically the possession and exercise of a will that chooses and determines as it pleases, subject only to certain general moral and legal constraints. Intimately connected with a belief in the limitless potential of human agency, this ideal has assumed a plenitude of inexhaustible resources enabling an ever-expanding range of human choices, self-gratifying consumption, and uninhibited self-expression. For this reason, I seek to develop an alternative conception of human freedom that decisively breaks with the ideal of human sovereignty and the valorization of subjective choice and decision to which it is closely tied.</p><p>In earlier work, as previously mentioned, I sought to elaborate a conception of freedom as a mode of self-determining agency that develops within social relationships and is internally connected with a critically reflective concern for the good. This integral ethical component distinguished my conception from most other versions of social freedom.<sup>5</sup> At the same time, alert to the risk of suppressing the plurality of perspectives on the good and attendant danger of ethical authoritarianism, in my earlier writings I insisted that the meaning of the good is an open-ended question: a matter to be worked out contextually by human agents in agonistic processes, in which competing conceptions of the good life are opened to vibrant critique. In my current endeavor, I continue to conceptualize freedom as internally related to a concern for the good. As before, I take the view that the meaning of the good is an open question in principle for social and political theory. However, I now adopt the stance of an <i>engaged</i> critical social theorist and issue an invitation to imagine the good in a certain way. Specifically, I invite humans globally to imagine freedom as self-directing and self-transforming agency motivated by a concern to live a life that is good in the sense of ecologically attuned.</p><p>In the proposed picture of freedom, ecological attunement calls for nonhierarchical relations between humans and other-than-human entities in both an epistemological and an ethical sense. It is incompatible with perspectives and practices in which human knowledges are deemed superior in principle to the knowledges of other-than-human entities, in which humans are held to be the sole source of ethical validity , in which humans are viewed as in principle commanding more respect than other-than-human beings and are accorded a privileged status within their natural environments. Developing a line of argument sketched in earlier work, I describe such theories and practices as epistemologically and ethically anthropocentric in a pernicious sense (Cooke, <span>2020a</span>). Ecological attunement is my name for theoretical approaches and modes of human agency that are characterized by a relatively benign anthropocentric stance. It calls for attentiveness to the specific ethical characteristics and qualities of each particular entity, be it human or other-than-human. In this imagining of the good, human knowledges of the good are not in principle superior to nonhuman knowledges; moreover, the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, but has a partial independence of them. Since the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, it is not entirely produced through human activity. Even though knowledge of it is available to humans only through the filter of human thinking and action, they attribute to it some ontological independence of human thinking and action.<sup>6</sup> Put differently, the idea of the good is held to be partially human-transcending, , even though human interpretations of the good are inevitably through a human lens. Without some ontological independence of human concerns and interests, we humans could not learn more about the meaning of the good from our encounters with other-than-human entities: They could not be vehicles for new ethical meanings.<sup>7</sup></p><p>An ecologically attuned perspective, and the orientation toward a (partially) human-transcending idea of the good required for this, is a central feature of my reimagining and rearticulation of the idea of freedom. A further key feature is critically engaged self-direction. In elaborating this idea, I draw on Karl Marx's writings on alienation in his 1844 <i>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts</i> (Marx, <span>1997</span>). One of the forms of alienation Marx describes in these early writings is the alienation of humans from their species-being. By this, he means alienation of humans from their capacity for freely purposive, creative, and self-reflective activity. More concretely, he understands freedom not only as the capacity of humans to set goals and pursue them without being bound by biological necessity—as the capacity to create according to the laws of beauty; he also understands it as the capacity of humans to make their life activity into the object of their will and consciousness. However, Marx does not satisfactorily develop this thought in his early manuscripts. Charles Taylor's view of the modern self as a strong evaluator can help to explicate it (Taylor, <span>1989</span>).</p><p>Taylor holds that humans are self-interpreting creatures. By this he means that human relationships to the world are never simply given, but are constantly articulated, reconstituted, negotiated, and transformed through individual and cultural processes of interpretation. Furthermore, human interpretations of the world are always also an interpretation of self (and vice versa). The process of self-interpretation is driven by what Taylor calls strong evaluations. At any given time, these strong evaluations constitute evaluative roadmaps for human individuals. Stable identities and methodical human action are inconceivable without such roadmaps, which depict substantial ethical conceptions that embody ideas of the good: ideas about <i>what is important</i>, <i>what really matters</i> (Taylor, <span>1989</span>). Strong evaluation has an integral <i>receptive</i> element, calling for openness to experiences in which the power of transcendent moral sources makes itself present in a full-bodied way to human subjects, requiring in turn flexibility, open-mindedness, sensitivity to others, and imaginativeness. Nonetheless, strong evaluation is also a mode of self-direction. This is because it requires human agents to ascertain <i>for themselves</i> what kind of person they would like to be and what paths they should pursue if they are to become that kind of person; furthermore, to take <i>responsibility</i> for their evaluative judgments. In addition, it has a crucial moment of critical reflection: In the context of strong evaluation, self-direction calls for evaluative discrimination by human agents among the aims in life they consider worth pursuing. Put differently, it calls for critical evaluation by human agents of the ethical quality of their actions, judgments, and life-trajectories.</p><p>However, although strong evaluation presupposes an orientation toward the good, it leaves open the question of whether this orientation is ecologically attuned. Nor does strong evaluation necessarily involve self-transformation. Thus, in interpreting freedom in terms of ecologically attuned self-determining and self-transforming agency, I move beyond Taylor's conception of strong evaluation.</p><p>Why do I connect freedom with self-transformation? Without a self-transforming component, freedom could not be construed as potentially transformative of society. Due to internalized patterns of thought and behavior, even critically engaged self-determining human agency might simply reproduce the socially prevailing patterns. Within Frankfurt School Critical Theory, this difficulty is thematized with the help of the concept of ideology. Early theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition proposed an understanding of ideology as a structurally induced, deeply entrenched, widespread false consciousness that prevents human agents, individually and collectively, from perceiving the need for fundamental social change and grasping the kind of change that is necessary (Adorno <span>1972</span>; Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>; Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>; Marcuse, <span>1991</span>; see Cooke, <span>2006b</span>).<sup>8</sup> This helps to explain why even in societies in which many people pay lip service to the reality of ecological disaster, everyday practices continue to rely heavily on the appropriation of natural resources that are treated as unlimited (Brand &amp; Wissen, <span>2021</span>).</p><p>Social transformation is tied to self-transformation for a further reason: There is a strong likelihood that self-transformation will be necessary to <i>actualize</i> my proposed vision of human agency. This is because the current globally dominant social practices and patterns of everyday behavior are based on a logic of manipulation and control that is antithetical to ecologically attuned self-directing agency. Consequently, actualizing the envisaged mode of agency requires widespread fundamental self-transformations, if it is to become part of habitual behavior and everyday social practices on both individual and collective levels globally.</p><p>The question of self-transformation calls for the exploration of aesthetics. One of the distinctive features of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is its connection of the question of social change with art. However, rather than adopting a Kantian interpretation of aesthetics as “appreciation of beauty,” as is common in the Frankfurt School tradition, I consider it more fruitful to retrieve and rearticulate the ancient Greek understanding of <i>aesthesis</i> as responsiveness to stimulation of the senses (“sensibility”), taking <i>aesthesis</i> to mean affectively based perceptual change. This widens the scope of aesthetics beyond the domain of art as it has been institutionalized in modern Western cultures and invites exploration of the nonauthoritarian transformative potentials of a multiplicity of social practices and experiences.</p><p>What are the main drivers of the ethical–aesthetic self-transformations that I advocate? There is no easy answer to this. It seems clear that there are multiple forces and factors. Certainly, all kinds of social institutions have a part to play: for example, economics, religion, the law, sport, family life, parliaments, schools, and art. Noninstitutionalized actions such as civil disobedience and related forms of activism may likewise be important contributing factors. Critical social theories themselves may play a part (I come back to this in my concluding remarks). Important, too, are life-changing experiences resulting, for example, from experimental life practices, encounters with different cultures, deep existential crises, and epiphanic spiritual conversions. Although we must acknowledge the multiplicity of forces and factors contributing to fundamental changes in ethical perceptions, not all are equally good from the point of view of my conceptualization of human agency as a mode of <i>freedom</i>, understood in terms of ethically motivated self-direction and self-transformation. This excludes authoritarian forces and factors. Simply prescribing ethical behavior, attitudes, and principles without endeavoring to engage the will and reason of each human globally would be a violation of freedom thus understood.<sup>9</sup> In consequence, the advocated ethical transformations must take place in a nonauthoritarian manner that permits the agents concerned to accept their ethical validity for reasons they can come to embrace as their own. As I have argued in earlier writings, social institutions are potential forces for nonauthoritarian ethical transformation of self and society (Cooke, <span>2020b</span>). Let me briefly explain what I mean.</p><p>What are social institutions? Classical sociological accounts of social institutions define them as socially constructed, supraindividual entities (Berger &amp; Luckmann <span>1967</span>). Examples include families, parliaments, religious bodies, trade unions, sports clubs, courts of justice, the internet, schools, the World Bank, the printed media, the United Nations, and cultural institutes.</p><p>I follow Luc Boltanski in using the term “institution” to refer to entities that primarily serve the semantic function of shaping and stabilizing social meanings (Boltanski, <span>2011</span>). They have other important functions, such as policing and administration, but their primary role is to shape and stabilize meanings. In his words, “To institutions falls the task of saying and confirming what matters” (Boltanski, <span>2011</span>); furthermore, they give an <i>enduring</i> semantic shape to reality, “they seem removed from the corruption of time” (p. 75).</p><p>However, although Boltanski's account of social institutions is helpful for its emphasis on the semantic shaping and stabilizing functions of social institutions, it pays no attention to the specifically <i>ethical</i> character of the meanings they shape and stabilize. By contrast, I emphasize the role of social institutions, individually and in configuration, in constituting webs of ethical meaning (cf. Jaeggi, <span>2009</span>). In my account, social institutions are incorporations of—often diverse and sometimes conflicting—ethical values. As such, they have (more or less stable) ethical identities. The incorporated ethical values shaping their identities form a multilayered and multidimensional ethical sedimentation. This ethical sedimentation is the complex historical product of human interactions within the institution, as well as the institution's interactions with its environments, but it may pass unnoticed by the institution's members (broadly understood). Nonetheless, by way of their webs of ethical values, social institutions, more or less tacitly, provide their members with ethical orientation and guidance: they point them in certain ethical directions, thereby impacting on their particular identities as ethical beings, and provide concrete guidance in the everyday conduct of life.</p><p>This ethically orienting and guiding power defines the authority of social institutions. Its concrete manifestations include laws, ordinances, policies, prescriptions, recommendations, and doctrines. These are authoritative for particular human agents in particular life situations, whenever they affirm their importance as guides for living an ethically good life.</p><p>Authority is a distinctive form of power, differing, in particular, from domination. In contrast to power as domination, authority depends on acknowledgment of obligation, tacit or explicit, on the part of those over whom it is exercised. The 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen captures this feature when he describes the force of authority as “more than advice and less than a command, an advice that one may not safely ignore” (Mommsen, cited in Arendt, <span>1961</span>).<sup>10</sup> Furthermore, it is an obligation that is in some sense self-imposed. This means that it has an integral moment of freedom. Hannah Arendt draws attention to this, making explicit a connection between authority and freedom that others, too, have noted (e.g., Marcuse, <span>2008</span>). As she puts it: “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom” (Arendt, <span>1961</span>). At a minimum, authority involves freedom in the sense of <i>voluntary</i> recognition and affirmation of the bearer of authority.</p><p>If social institutions are to exercise power that is authoritative, yet nonauthoritarian, they must be open to change in response to the ethical challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges may be directed at various aspects of the institution's ethically inflected identity: at its operation, its organization or its incorporated ideas of the good life. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction through contestation: They must recognize the inherent instability of their institutional identities. Social institutions must acknowledge, furthermore, that the process of construction is ethically motivated: driven by a (usually unarticulated) concern by their members to shape a particular institution's identity through the incorporation of particular ethical values. Since in the societies of democratic modernity, the ethical values orienting the members of social institutions are often plural and sometimes conflicting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, the institution's members are potentially able to consider themselves part of a common project of construction—as coauthors of a common good that constitutes the (unstable) identity of the social institution in question, as well as coauthors of their own ethically self-determining, self-transforming agency. In short, for institutions to be nonauthoritarian, yet authoritative, they and their members must engage in a perpetual process of mutual identity construction.</p><p>This picture of institutional authority, too, could be described as utopian; however, once again, it is not abstractly idealistic. It resonates with many historical initiatives and social movements that sought to reconfigure social institutions along these lines. Think, for example, of the English, American, and French revolutions between the 17th and 19th centuries, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of government and the law; think of Pestalozzi in the late 18th and W. von Humboldt in the early 19th century, who sought, respectively, to reconfigure the institutions of early childhood education and the university; think of the successive waves of feminism from the 19th century onward, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of bourgeois marriage and the nuclear family; think of movements such as Lutheranism, Calvinism, Pietism, and Liberation Theology, which sought to reconfigure the institution of the Christian Church. This is not to deny that institutions are primarily forces for social inertia rather than ethical transformation. This is due in part to their functions of semantic shaping and stabilization. Coupled with their functions of policing and administration, this makes them susceptible to entrenched power hierarchies whose authoritative judgments and decisions appear to be unshakable. In consequence, the authority of social institutions tends to be authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing, demanding unquestioning acceptance of the institution's ethical values and submission to the social practices and ways of thinking and acting that follow from these. Although, following Mommsen and Arendt, we may criticize authoritarian authority as a perversion, this does not alter the fact that social institutions are, at best, sites for a struggle between social inertia and authoritarianism, on the one side, and ethically transformative impulses, on the other, with the balance weighted toward the former side. Although this is true of all social institutions, some may be constitutionally better equipped than others to stimulate ethical-political transformations and promote freedom.<sup>11</sup> But to repeat, this is not to deny that <i>all</i> social institutions tend toward social inertia and are prone to exercise authority in an authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing way.</p><p>Let me conclude with some words on the aesthetic-ethical power of critically engaged sociopolitical theorizing. Such theorizing has a nonauthoritarian transformative force, which resides in its capacity for disclosure. Qua disclosure, it is an invitation to think, behave, and inhabit the world differently. Qua invitation (rather than a command), it is inherently nonauthoritarian. Adorno's writings are helpful in this respect. To be sure, the disclosive power of critical theorizing is rarely thematized explicitly in his writings; instead, it is <i>manifested</i> in them, for instance when he uses a wide range of rhetorical strategies to drive home his philosophical theses. It is particularly striking in <i>Dialectic</i> of <i>Enlightenment</i> (cf. Honneth, <span>2000</span>), but it is also evident in Adorno's later work, where he employs linguistic resources, such as condensing or shifting meanings, suggestive metaphors and narrative presentations in order to disclose “pathologies” of social reality that hitherto have been unperceived or obscured. It seems to me fruitful to further elaborate this Adornian model of nonauthoritarian, transformative, critically engaged theorizing through comparison and contrast with the disclosive power of critically engaged <i>political oratory</i>. A good example here is Martin Luther King's public speeches and letters in his campaign of civil disobedience protesting against the existing societal order in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. They display a highly developed talent for “civil translation,” a practice that employs the semantic codes dominant in the existing societal order to create a narrative that makes it possible for the majority to identify with the grievances of the protestors (Cooke, <span>2019</span>). The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes civil translation as first and foremost a mediating activity (Alexander, <span>2006</span>). However, a closer examination shows that, in addition, it has a <i>disclosive</i> force: the potential to enable people to perceive suffering that they had previously not recognized as such (Cooke, <span>2021</span>). In these times of ecological disaster, contemporary critical social theories should reaffirm this potential. Indeed, I see disclosure as a core task of any critically engaged mode of reflection on society that is geared toward ethically motivated, radical social change for the better. Radical change of this sort calls for changing our ways of relating to ourselves and others, human and nonhuman, and developing new pictures of agency and corresponding vocabularies. Without such fundamental transformations, we humans have no prospect of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12681","citationCount":"1","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Reenvisioning Freedom: Human Agency in Times of Ecological Disaster\",\"authors\":\"Maeve Cooke\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/1467-8675.12681\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today is anthropogenic ecological disaster on a global scale. I assume, furthermore, that <i>radical</i> changes are needed in order to arrest our current disastrous trajectory and, in the best case, redirect it. However, as things stand, human agents seem unable to bring about the radical changes that are required. As a first step toward remedying this, I postulate the need for a fundamental transformation of ethical perceptions, on both individual and collective levels: If humans globally are to grasp how the dominant modes of thinking and acting are ecologically disastrous, there has to be a radical shift in their ideas about the ethically good life.<sup>1</sup> Although the requisite shift in ethical perceptions will not, on its own, suffice for radical social change, I see it as its precondition. This leads me to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency.</p><p>For a number of years I have been concerned to reimagine and rearticulate the concept of freedom as a mode of ethically self-determining human agency in a democratic political context. In these reflections, my focus has been on self-directing agency as a distinctive form of <i>social</i> freedom, in the general sense of a mode of agency dependent on human relations within society. Recently, however, I have come to realize that this perspective is inadequate. It is insufficiently attuned to the multiple and complex relational contexts, nonhuman as well as human, in which humans exercise their agency.</p><p>The thesis driving my current endeavor is that the contemporary ecological disaster calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of human freedom as it has been understood by modern Western political thinking and embodied in everyday thought, behavior, and social practices. I offer a utopian vision of human agency, and the terms in which to articulate it, that would motivate a fundamental reorientation of thinking, behavior, and social practices globally. On a general level, I seek to show the importance at certain times in history of radical reimagining what it means to lead an ethically good life, and the need for new ethical-political vocabularies to accompany such reimaginings (Lear, <span>2008</span>). My specific aim is to create a new field of possibilities amidst the dire circumstances of ecological disaster in a context where it may seem impossible even to imagine what these might be.</p><p>I use the term “utopian” advisedly, in order to stress that I do not propose an alternative account of freedom that is normative in a prescriptive sense; rather I issue an invitation to reimagine a particular conception of human agency that became dominant within capitalist modernity. However, my proposal is not abstractly idealistic: it has a basis in actual and historical impulses and aspirations, both within Western capitalist cultures and in religious and cultural thinking and practices elsewhere.<sup>2</sup></p><p>In recent times, the term “The Anthropocene” has gained widespread currency in popular and academic discourse to describe the anthropogenic aspect of the contemporary environmental disaster. It is now widely used as a name for a new epoch of human evolution characterized by human-induced change to the biosphere and to convey the unprecedented rapidity and unparalleled capacity of humans to destroy the ecosystems on which their survival depends. Despite disputes among geologists concerning the degree to which the present period can be identified as the successor epoch to the Holocene, there is overwhelming scientific agreement that rapid anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity constitute grave threats to the future of the human species; indeed, there is widespread scientific agreement that human activity, amplified by the rapid development of capitalist industrialization and the unchecked pursuit of affluence, has unleashed uncontrollable natural forces that leave contemporary humans as vulnerable to the devastating power of nature as their earliest ancestors. There are good reasons to think that the predominant conceptions of human agency, particularly within contemporary Western cultures, have facilitated this anthropogenic environmental devastation. Here I connect with recent thinking in Earth System Science, where conceptions of human agency have come to be seen as part of a larger interconnected biosphere: scientists, recognizing conceptions of human agency as a significant factor in anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity, now invite scholars and researchers from the humanities and social sciences to help them address the challenges of ecological disaster (Thomas et al, <span>2020</span>). Following this line of thought, technological advances, even revolutionary breakthroughs in geoengineering and CO<sub>2</sub> removal, will be insufficient to halt our current perilous trajectory and redirect it for the better. Technological advances will need to be accompanied by a new perspective on human agency, at an individual and collective level.</p><p>Since it was first coined (Crutzen &amp; Stoermer, <span>2000</span>), the use of the “Anthropocene” concept to characterize the contemporary global ecological situation has attracted criticism in the humanities and social sciences, particularly among theorists concerned with radical social transformation (Bonneuil, <span>2015</span>; Haraway, <span>2015</span>; Hornborg, <span>2019</span>; Malm, <span>2018a</span>; Moore, <span>2016</span>; Stengers, <span>2015</span>). Their criticisms are directed primarily at implicit assumptions about human nature and sociopolitical relations characteristic of some prominent interpretations of the concept. The main objections are that the concept of the Anthropocene naturalizes, depoliticizes, and conceals. It <i>naturalizes</i> the ecological disaster by rendering it a natural outcome of the sort of species that humans are. It <i>depoliticizes</i> by flattening social, political, and economic relations, grouping together all humans under one umbrella, implying that no particular group of humans is to blame. It depoliticizes further due to its implicit message that little can be done to avert disaster. It <i>conceals</i> factors important for understanding the ecological crisis such as economic inequalities, cultural asymmetries, colonialism, mass media, and social media, thereby distracting from their role in the crisis and hindering reflection on how to address them and the ecological iniquities with which they are intimately connected. Critically engaged theorists who take this stance toward the concept of the Anthropocene propose alternative framing concepts, by means of which they attempt to reveal and capture the central components it neglects or obscures. Influential alternative proposals include <i>Capitalocene, Plantationcene</i>, and <i>Urbanocene</i>. I view these not as rival concepts but as narratives driven by shared concerns. I take seriously the dangers to which critics draw attention, while nonetheless insisting that ecological devastation is the larger context within which challenges such as capitalism, colonialism, and urban expansion must be addressed.</p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic has been a grim reminder of the hubristic attitude expressed in the modern ideal of freedom. Despite enormous scientific achievements that led to the production of new vaccines in a remarkably short time, the pandemic shook confidence in the view that technological ingenuity can master nature and finally put an end to virulent disease. The increasing frequency and violence of flash floods, wildfires, and heat waves has further contributed to a growing perception of human vulnerabilities to natural forces. However, the new humility is ambivalent. On the positive side, it offers the prospect of a fundamental change in thinking about human agency in its relations to self and others, human and other-than-human. On the negative side, it is frequently coupled with feelings of human powerlessness that are expressed in blustering defiance (libertarianism), violence (eco-terrorism), or resignation. Such responses leave untouched the patterns of thought and behavior that have led to ecological devastation. This is one reason not to jettison the concept of freedom entirely but rather to seek to reimagine and rearticulate it. For, lacking a sense that self-determining agency is possible, humans are all too likely to vacillate between regressive feelings of human powerlessness and the delusional belief in human supremacy.</p><p>There is a further reason why I consider it important to retain the idea of freedom, despite its troubling history within capitalist modernity. I hold that the concept of freedom, if reimagined and rearticulated in the right way, is indispensable for socially transformative agency of the right kind. In my utopian projection, this means ecologically attuned, self-determining, and self-transforming agency.<sup>3</sup> Moreover, as social change for the better is a never-ending process, I see freedom not only as necessary in order to <i>achieve</i> a better society on a once-off basis but as an indispensable element of <i>any</i> good society.</p><p>Nonetheless, following Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, my starting position is that within capitalist modernity, the dominant ideal of freedom has been based on a view of human agency that expresses an attitude of mastery and control (Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>).<sup>4</sup> In this book, published in the 1940s, the authors make clear how the view of agency dominant within capitalist modernity reduces both human and other-than-human nature to inanimate matter to be mastered and manipulated by humans at will. Whether it is understood negatively (as freedom from external interference) or positively (as self-determination or self-legislation), the dominant modern ideal of freedom celebrates human sovereignty, specifically the possession and exercise of a will that chooses and determines as it pleases, subject only to certain general moral and legal constraints. Intimately connected with a belief in the limitless potential of human agency, this ideal has assumed a plenitude of inexhaustible resources enabling an ever-expanding range of human choices, self-gratifying consumption, and uninhibited self-expression. For this reason, I seek to develop an alternative conception of human freedom that decisively breaks with the ideal of human sovereignty and the valorization of subjective choice and decision to which it is closely tied.</p><p>In earlier work, as previously mentioned, I sought to elaborate a conception of freedom as a mode of self-determining agency that develops within social relationships and is internally connected with a critically reflective concern for the good. This integral ethical component distinguished my conception from most other versions of social freedom.<sup>5</sup> At the same time, alert to the risk of suppressing the plurality of perspectives on the good and attendant danger of ethical authoritarianism, in my earlier writings I insisted that the meaning of the good is an open-ended question: a matter to be worked out contextually by human agents in agonistic processes, in which competing conceptions of the good life are opened to vibrant critique. In my current endeavor, I continue to conceptualize freedom as internally related to a concern for the good. As before, I take the view that the meaning of the good is an open question in principle for social and political theory. However, I now adopt the stance of an <i>engaged</i> critical social theorist and issue an invitation to imagine the good in a certain way. Specifically, I invite humans globally to imagine freedom as self-directing and self-transforming agency motivated by a concern to live a life that is good in the sense of ecologically attuned.</p><p>In the proposed picture of freedom, ecological attunement calls for nonhierarchical relations between humans and other-than-human entities in both an epistemological and an ethical sense. It is incompatible with perspectives and practices in which human knowledges are deemed superior in principle to the knowledges of other-than-human entities, in which humans are held to be the sole source of ethical validity , in which humans are viewed as in principle commanding more respect than other-than-human beings and are accorded a privileged status within their natural environments. Developing a line of argument sketched in earlier work, I describe such theories and practices as epistemologically and ethically anthropocentric in a pernicious sense (Cooke, <span>2020a</span>). Ecological attunement is my name for theoretical approaches and modes of human agency that are characterized by a relatively benign anthropocentric stance. It calls for attentiveness to the specific ethical characteristics and qualities of each particular entity, be it human or other-than-human. In this imagining of the good, human knowledges of the good are not in principle superior to nonhuman knowledges; moreover, the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, but has a partial independence of them. Since the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, it is not entirely produced through human activity. Even though knowledge of it is available to humans only through the filter of human thinking and action, they attribute to it some ontological independence of human thinking and action.<sup>6</sup> Put differently, the idea of the good is held to be partially human-transcending, , even though human interpretations of the good are inevitably through a human lens. Without some ontological independence of human concerns and interests, we humans could not learn more about the meaning of the good from our encounters with other-than-human entities: They could not be vehicles for new ethical meanings.<sup>7</sup></p><p>An ecologically attuned perspective, and the orientation toward a (partially) human-transcending idea of the good required for this, is a central feature of my reimagining and rearticulation of the idea of freedom. A further key feature is critically engaged self-direction. In elaborating this idea, I draw on Karl Marx's writings on alienation in his 1844 <i>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts</i> (Marx, <span>1997</span>). One of the forms of alienation Marx describes in these early writings is the alienation of humans from their species-being. By this, he means alienation of humans from their capacity for freely purposive, creative, and self-reflective activity. More concretely, he understands freedom not only as the capacity of humans to set goals and pursue them without being bound by biological necessity—as the capacity to create according to the laws of beauty; he also understands it as the capacity of humans to make their life activity into the object of their will and consciousness. However, Marx does not satisfactorily develop this thought in his early manuscripts. Charles Taylor's view of the modern self as a strong evaluator can help to explicate it (Taylor, <span>1989</span>).</p><p>Taylor holds that humans are self-interpreting creatures. By this he means that human relationships to the world are never simply given, but are constantly articulated, reconstituted, negotiated, and transformed through individual and cultural processes of interpretation. Furthermore, human interpretations of the world are always also an interpretation of self (and vice versa). The process of self-interpretation is driven by what Taylor calls strong evaluations. At any given time, these strong evaluations constitute evaluative roadmaps for human individuals. Stable identities and methodical human action are inconceivable without such roadmaps, which depict substantial ethical conceptions that embody ideas of the good: ideas about <i>what is important</i>, <i>what really matters</i> (Taylor, <span>1989</span>). Strong evaluation has an integral <i>receptive</i> element, calling for openness to experiences in which the power of transcendent moral sources makes itself present in a full-bodied way to human subjects, requiring in turn flexibility, open-mindedness, sensitivity to others, and imaginativeness. Nonetheless, strong evaluation is also a mode of self-direction. This is because it requires human agents to ascertain <i>for themselves</i> what kind of person they would like to be and what paths they should pursue if they are to become that kind of person; furthermore, to take <i>responsibility</i> for their evaluative judgments. In addition, it has a crucial moment of critical reflection: In the context of strong evaluation, self-direction calls for evaluative discrimination by human agents among the aims in life they consider worth pursuing. Put differently, it calls for critical evaluation by human agents of the ethical quality of their actions, judgments, and life-trajectories.</p><p>However, although strong evaluation presupposes an orientation toward the good, it leaves open the question of whether this orientation is ecologically attuned. Nor does strong evaluation necessarily involve self-transformation. Thus, in interpreting freedom in terms of ecologically attuned self-determining and self-transforming agency, I move beyond Taylor's conception of strong evaluation.</p><p>Why do I connect freedom with self-transformation? Without a self-transforming component, freedom could not be construed as potentially transformative of society. Due to internalized patterns of thought and behavior, even critically engaged self-determining human agency might simply reproduce the socially prevailing patterns. Within Frankfurt School Critical Theory, this difficulty is thematized with the help of the concept of ideology. Early theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition proposed an understanding of ideology as a structurally induced, deeply entrenched, widespread false consciousness that prevents human agents, individually and collectively, from perceiving the need for fundamental social change and grasping the kind of change that is necessary (Adorno <span>1972</span>; Horkheimer, <span>1973</span>; Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, <span>2002</span>; Marcuse, <span>1991</span>; see Cooke, <span>2006b</span>).<sup>8</sup> This helps to explain why even in societies in which many people pay lip service to the reality of ecological disaster, everyday practices continue to rely heavily on the appropriation of natural resources that are treated as unlimited (Brand &amp; Wissen, <span>2021</span>).</p><p>Social transformation is tied to self-transformation for a further reason: There is a strong likelihood that self-transformation will be necessary to <i>actualize</i> my proposed vision of human agency. This is because the current globally dominant social practices and patterns of everyday behavior are based on a logic of manipulation and control that is antithetical to ecologically attuned self-directing agency. Consequently, actualizing the envisaged mode of agency requires widespread fundamental self-transformations, if it is to become part of habitual behavior and everyday social practices on both individual and collective levels globally.</p><p>The question of self-transformation calls for the exploration of aesthetics. One of the distinctive features of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is its connection of the question of social change with art. However, rather than adopting a Kantian interpretation of aesthetics as “appreciation of beauty,” as is common in the Frankfurt School tradition, I consider it more fruitful to retrieve and rearticulate the ancient Greek understanding of <i>aesthesis</i> as responsiveness to stimulation of the senses (“sensibility”), taking <i>aesthesis</i> to mean affectively based perceptual change. This widens the scope of aesthetics beyond the domain of art as it has been institutionalized in modern Western cultures and invites exploration of the nonauthoritarian transformative potentials of a multiplicity of social practices and experiences.</p><p>What are the main drivers of the ethical–aesthetic self-transformations that I advocate? There is no easy answer to this. It seems clear that there are multiple forces and factors. Certainly, all kinds of social institutions have a part to play: for example, economics, religion, the law, sport, family life, parliaments, schools, and art. Noninstitutionalized actions such as civil disobedience and related forms of activism may likewise be important contributing factors. Critical social theories themselves may play a part (I come back to this in my concluding remarks). Important, too, are life-changing experiences resulting, for example, from experimental life practices, encounters with different cultures, deep existential crises, and epiphanic spiritual conversions. Although we must acknowledge the multiplicity of forces and factors contributing to fundamental changes in ethical perceptions, not all are equally good from the point of view of my conceptualization of human agency as a mode of <i>freedom</i>, understood in terms of ethically motivated self-direction and self-transformation. This excludes authoritarian forces and factors. Simply prescribing ethical behavior, attitudes, and principles without endeavoring to engage the will and reason of each human globally would be a violation of freedom thus understood.<sup>9</sup> In consequence, the advocated ethical transformations must take place in a nonauthoritarian manner that permits the agents concerned to accept their ethical validity for reasons they can come to embrace as their own. As I have argued in earlier writings, social institutions are potential forces for nonauthoritarian ethical transformation of self and society (Cooke, <span>2020b</span>). Let me briefly explain what I mean.</p><p>What are social institutions? Classical sociological accounts of social institutions define them as socially constructed, supraindividual entities (Berger &amp; Luckmann <span>1967</span>). Examples include families, parliaments, religious bodies, trade unions, sports clubs, courts of justice, the internet, schools, the World Bank, the printed media, the United Nations, and cultural institutes.</p><p>I follow Luc Boltanski in using the term “institution” to refer to entities that primarily serve the semantic function of shaping and stabilizing social meanings (Boltanski, <span>2011</span>). They have other important functions, such as policing and administration, but their primary role is to shape and stabilize meanings. In his words, “To institutions falls the task of saying and confirming what matters” (Boltanski, <span>2011</span>); furthermore, they give an <i>enduring</i> semantic shape to reality, “they seem removed from the corruption of time” (p. 75).</p><p>However, although Boltanski's account of social institutions is helpful for its emphasis on the semantic shaping and stabilizing functions of social institutions, it pays no attention to the specifically <i>ethical</i> character of the meanings they shape and stabilize. By contrast, I emphasize the role of social institutions, individually and in configuration, in constituting webs of ethical meaning (cf. Jaeggi, <span>2009</span>). In my account, social institutions are incorporations of—often diverse and sometimes conflicting—ethical values. As such, they have (more or less stable) ethical identities. The incorporated ethical values shaping their identities form a multilayered and multidimensional ethical sedimentation. This ethical sedimentation is the complex historical product of human interactions within the institution, as well as the institution's interactions with its environments, but it may pass unnoticed by the institution's members (broadly understood). Nonetheless, by way of their webs of ethical values, social institutions, more or less tacitly, provide their members with ethical orientation and guidance: they point them in certain ethical directions, thereby impacting on their particular identities as ethical beings, and provide concrete guidance in the everyday conduct of life.</p><p>This ethically orienting and guiding power defines the authority of social institutions. Its concrete manifestations include laws, ordinances, policies, prescriptions, recommendations, and doctrines. These are authoritative for particular human agents in particular life situations, whenever they affirm their importance as guides for living an ethically good life.</p><p>Authority is a distinctive form of power, differing, in particular, from domination. In contrast to power as domination, authority depends on acknowledgment of obligation, tacit or explicit, on the part of those over whom it is exercised. The 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen captures this feature when he describes the force of authority as “more than advice and less than a command, an advice that one may not safely ignore” (Mommsen, cited in Arendt, <span>1961</span>).<sup>10</sup> Furthermore, it is an obligation that is in some sense self-imposed. This means that it has an integral moment of freedom. Hannah Arendt draws attention to this, making explicit a connection between authority and freedom that others, too, have noted (e.g., Marcuse, <span>2008</span>). As she puts it: “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom” (Arendt, <span>1961</span>). At a minimum, authority involves freedom in the sense of <i>voluntary</i> recognition and affirmation of the bearer of authority.</p><p>If social institutions are to exercise power that is authoritative, yet nonauthoritarian, they must be open to change in response to the ethical challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges may be directed at various aspects of the institution's ethically inflected identity: at its operation, its organization or its incorporated ideas of the good life. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction through contestation: They must recognize the inherent instability of their institutional identities. Social institutions must acknowledge, furthermore, that the process of construction is ethically motivated: driven by a (usually unarticulated) concern by their members to shape a particular institution's identity through the incorporation of particular ethical values. Since in the societies of democratic modernity, the ethical values orienting the members of social institutions are often plural and sometimes conflicting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, the institution's members are potentially able to consider themselves part of a common project of construction—as coauthors of a common good that constitutes the (unstable) identity of the social institution in question, as well as coauthors of their own ethically self-determining, self-transforming agency. In short, for institutions to be nonauthoritarian, yet authoritative, they and their members must engage in a perpetual process of mutual identity construction.</p><p>This picture of institutional authority, too, could be described as utopian; however, once again, it is not abstractly idealistic. It resonates with many historical initiatives and social movements that sought to reconfigure social institutions along these lines. Think, for example, of the English, American, and French revolutions between the 17th and 19th centuries, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of government and the law; think of Pestalozzi in the late 18th and W. von Humboldt in the early 19th century, who sought, respectively, to reconfigure the institutions of early childhood education and the university; think of the successive waves of feminism from the 19th century onward, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of bourgeois marriage and the nuclear family; think of movements such as Lutheranism, Calvinism, Pietism, and Liberation Theology, which sought to reconfigure the institution of the Christian Church. This is not to deny that institutions are primarily forces for social inertia rather than ethical transformation. This is due in part to their functions of semantic shaping and stabilization. Coupled with their functions of policing and administration, this makes them susceptible to entrenched power hierarchies whose authoritative judgments and decisions appear to be unshakable. In consequence, the authority of social institutions tends to be authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing, demanding unquestioning acceptance of the institution's ethical values and submission to the social practices and ways of thinking and acting that follow from these. Although, following Mommsen and Arendt, we may criticize authoritarian authority as a perversion, this does not alter the fact that social institutions are, at best, sites for a struggle between social inertia and authoritarianism, on the one side, and ethically transformative impulses, on the other, with the balance weighted toward the former side. Although this is true of all social institutions, some may be constitutionally better equipped than others to stimulate ethical-political transformations and promote freedom.<sup>11</sup> But to repeat, this is not to deny that <i>all</i> social institutions tend toward social inertia and are prone to exercise authority in an authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing way.</p><p>Let me conclude with some words on the aesthetic-ethical power of critically engaged sociopolitical theorizing. Such theorizing has a nonauthoritarian transformative force, which resides in its capacity for disclosure. Qua disclosure, it is an invitation to think, behave, and inhabit the world differently. Qua invitation (rather than a command), it is inherently nonauthoritarian. Adorno's writings are helpful in this respect. To be sure, the disclosive power of critical theorizing is rarely thematized explicitly in his writings; instead, it is <i>manifested</i> in them, for instance when he uses a wide range of rhetorical strategies to drive home his philosophical theses. It is particularly striking in <i>Dialectic</i> of <i>Enlightenment</i> (cf. Honneth, <span>2000</span>), but it is also evident in Adorno's later work, where he employs linguistic resources, such as condensing or shifting meanings, suggestive metaphors and narrative presentations in order to disclose “pathologies” of social reality that hitherto have been unperceived or obscured. It seems to me fruitful to further elaborate this Adornian model of nonauthoritarian, transformative, critically engaged theorizing through comparison and contrast with the disclosive power of critically engaged <i>political oratory</i>. A good example here is Martin Luther King's public speeches and letters in his campaign of civil disobedience protesting against the existing societal order in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. They display a highly developed talent for “civil translation,” a practice that employs the semantic codes dominant in the existing societal order to create a narrative that makes it possible for the majority to identify with the grievances of the protestors (Cooke, <span>2019</span>). The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes civil translation as first and foremost a mediating activity (Alexander, <span>2006</span>). However, a closer examination shows that, in addition, it has a <i>disclosive</i> force: the potential to enable people to perceive suffering that they had previously not recognized as such (Cooke, <span>2021</span>). In these times of ecological disaster, contemporary critical social theories should reaffirm this potential. Indeed, I see disclosure as a core task of any critically engaged mode of reflection on society that is geared toward ethically motivated, radical social change for the better. Radical change of this sort calls for changing our ways of relating to ourselves and others, human and nonhuman, and developing new pictures of agency and corresponding vocabularies. Without such fundamental transformations, we humans have no prospect of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":51578,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.2000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-05-26\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12681\",\"citationCount\":\"1\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12681\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12681","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1

摘要

我从批判社会理论的角度来探讨人的能动性问题。批判社会理论试图在伦理-政治意义上改变社会现实,其基础是对现有社会的错误进行批判。此外,它们还提供了一种关注历史、社会和地缘政治背景的视角,以更好地改变社会现实。我的出发点是,今天的突出背景是全球范围内的人为生态灾难。此外,我认为,为了阻止我们目前的灾难性轨迹,并在最好的情况下,改变它的方向,需要进行彻底的变革。然而,就目前的情况来看,人类代理人似乎无法带来所需的根本变化。作为补救这一问题的第一步,我认为需要在个人和集体层面上对伦理观念进行根本性的转变:如果全球人类都想了解主导的思维和行为模式是如何造成生态灾难的,那么他们对道德美好生活的看法就必须发生根本性的转变尽管道德观念的必要转变本身不足以实现彻底的社会变革,但我认为这是社会变革的先决条件。这让我提出了一种重新想象、重新表述的概念,即人类自由是一种生态协调、自我导向、自我转化的政治机构。多年来,我一直在关注重新想象和重新阐述自由的概念,将其作为民主政治背景下道德上自我决定的人类能动性的一种模式。在这些反思中,我的重点一直放在作为社会自由的一种独特形式的自我指导代理上,即一般意义上依赖于社会内部人际关系的代理模式。然而,最近我开始意识到这种观点是不充分的。它对人类行使其能动性的多重和复杂的关系环境(非人类的和人类的)没有充分的调谐。推动我当前努力的论点是,当代生态灾难要求对人类自由进行根本性的重新概念化,因为现代西方政治思想已经理解了人类自由,并体现在日常思想、行为和社会实践中。我提供了一个关于人类能动性的乌托邦愿景,以及表达它的术语,这将激发全球思维、行为和社会实践的根本重新定位。在一般层面上,我试图展示在历史上的某些时期,激进地重新想象过一种道德上的美好生活意味着什么,以及需要新的道德政治词汇来伴随这种重新想象(Lear, 2008)。我的具体目标是在生态灾难的可怕环境中创造一个新的可能性领域,在这个环境中,甚至可能无法想象这些可能是什么。我谨慎地使用“乌托邦”这个词,是为了强调,我并没有提出另一种对自由的描述,这种描述在规定性意义上是规范的;相反,我邀请大家重新想象在资本主义现代性中占主导地位的人类能动性的特定概念。然而,我的建议并不是抽象的理想主义:它有现实的和历史的冲动和愿望的基础,既在西方资本主义文化中,也在其他地方的宗教和文化思想和实践中。近年来,“人类世”一词在大众和学术话语中得到广泛使用,用来描述当代环境灾难的人为方面。它现在被广泛用作人类进化新时代的一个名称,其特征是人类引起的生物圈变化,并传达了人类破坏其赖以生存的生态系统的前所未有的速度和无与伦比的能力。尽管地质学家对当前时代在多大程度上可以被确定为全新世的后继时代存在争议,但科学界一致认为,人为造成的气候迅速变化和生物多样性的丧失对人类物种的未来构成了严重威胁;事实上,科学界普遍认为,由于资本主义工业化的快速发展和对富裕的不加节制的追求,人类活动已经释放出无法控制的自然力量,使现代人和他们最早的祖先一样,在大自然的毁灭性力量面前不堪一击。有充分的理由认为,人类能动性的主流观念,特别是在当代西方文化中,助长了这种人为的环境破坏。 在这里,我与地球系统科学的最新思想联系在一起,其中人类代理的概念已被视为更大的相互关联的生物圈的一部分:科学家们认识到人类代理的概念是人为气候变化和生物多样性丧失的重要因素,现在邀请人文和社会科学的学者和研究人员帮助他们应对生态灾难的挑战(Thomas等人,2020)。按照这种思路,技术进步,甚至是地球工程和二氧化碳去除方面的革命性突破,都不足以阻止我们目前的危险轨迹,并将其转向更好的方向。在个人和集体层面上,技术进步需要伴随着对人类能动性的新观点。自从它第一次被创造出来(Crutzen &Stoermer, 2000),使用“人类世”概念来描述当代全球生态状况的做法已经引起了人文和社会科学领域的批评,尤其是关注激进社会转型的理论家(Bonneuil, 2015;》,2015;Hornborg, 2019;白垩土,2018;摩尔,2016;轮,2015)。他们的批评主要针对关于人性和社会政治关系的隐含假设,这些假设是对这一概念的一些突出解释的特征。主要的反对意见是,人类世的概念是自然化的、非政治化的和隐藏的。它将生态灾难自然化,使之成为人类这类物种的自然结果。它通过扁平化社会、政治和经济关系,将所有人聚集在一个保护伞下,这意味着没有特定的人类群体应该受到指责,从而去政治化。它进一步去政治化,因为它隐含的信息是,避免灾难几乎无能为力。它掩盖了理解生态危机的重要因素,如经济不平等、文化不对称、殖民主义、大众媒体和社交媒体,从而分散了人们对它们在危机中的作用的注意力,阻碍了人们对如何解决这些问题以及与之密切相关的生态不公平现象的思考。对人类世的概念持这种立场的批判性理论家提出了另一种框架概念,通过这种概念,他们试图揭示和捕捉它忽略或模糊的核心组成部分。有影响力的备选方案包括Capitalocene、planationcene和Urbanocene。我认为这些不是对立的概念,而是由共同关注驱动的叙述。我认真对待批评家们引起注意的危险,尽管如此,我坚持认为生态破坏是更大的背景,资本主义、殖民主义和城市扩张等挑战必须得到解决。2019冠状病毒病大流行严峻地提醒我们,现代自由理想所表现出的傲慢态度。尽管取得了巨大的科学成就,在极短的时间内生产出了新疫苗,但这场大流行病动摇了人们对技术智慧能够控制自然并最终消灭致命疾病的信心。山洪、野火和热浪发生的频率和强度不断增加,进一步加深了人们对自然力量对人类脆弱性的认识。然而,这种新的谦卑是矛盾的。从积极的方面来看,它提供了一种前景,即在思考人类能动性与自我和他人、人类和非人类的关系方面发生根本性的变化。消极的一面是,它经常伴随着人类无能为力的感觉,表现为咆哮的蔑视(自由意志主义)、暴力(生态恐怖主义)或辞职。这样的反应没有触及导致生态破坏的思想和行为模式。这是不应该完全抛弃自由概念的一个原因,而是要寻求重新想象和重新表述它。因为,由于缺乏自我决定的意识,人类很可能在人类无能为力的倒退感和人类至高无上的妄想信念之间摇摆不定。尽管自由在资本主义现代性中有着令人不安的历史,但我认为保留自由的概念很重要,还有一个更深层次的原因。我认为,自由的概念,如果以正确的方式重新构想和重新表述,对于正确的社会变革机构是不可或缺的。在我的乌托邦式设想中,这意味着生态协调、自我决定和自我转化的机构此外,由于社会向好的转变是一个永无止境的过程,我认为自由不仅是一次性实现更好社会的必要条件,而且是任何良好社会不可或缺的要素。尽管如此,在马克斯·霍克海默和西奥多·W。 在阿多诺的《启蒙辩证法》中,我的出发点是,在资本主义现代性中,占主导地位的自由理想是基于一种人类代理的观点,这种观点表达了一种掌握和控制的态度(霍克海默&安培;阿多诺,2002)。4在这本出版于20世纪40年代的书中,作者清楚地阐明了在资本主义现代性中占主导地位的代理观是如何将人性和非人性都降低为无生命的物质,任由人类随意掌握和操纵。无论是消极地理解(不受外部干涉的自由)还是积极地理解(自决或自我立法),占主导地位的现代自由理想都颂扬人类的主权,特别是拥有和行使随心所欲地选择和决定的意志,只受某些一般道德和法律约束。这一理想与人类能力无限潜力的信念密切相关,它假定有大量取之不尽的资源,使人类的选择范围不断扩大,自我满足的消费和不受约束的自我表达得以实现。出于这个原因,我试图发展一种人类自由的替代概念,这种概念果断地打破了人类主权的理想,以及与之密切相关的主观选择和决定的价值。在早期的工作中,如前所述,我试图阐述自由的概念,将其作为一种自我决定的代理模式,在社会关系中发展,并与对善的批判性反思联系在一起。这个不可或缺的伦理成分使我的概念有别于大多数其他版本的社会自由与此同时,在我早期的著作中,我警惕压抑关于善的多元观点的风险,以及随之而来的道德威权主义的危险,我坚持认为善的意义是一个开放式的问题:一个由人类行动者在竞争过程中在语境中解决的问题,在这个过程中,美好生活的相互竞争的概念被开放给充满活力的批评。在我目前的努力中,我继续将自由概念化为内在的对善的关注。如前所述,我认为善的意义原则上是社会和政治理论的一个悬而未决的问题。然而,我现在采取了一个积极参与的批判社会理论家的立场,并邀请大家以某种方式想象善。具体地说,我邀请全球的人类把自由想象成一种自我引导和自我转化的机构,这种机构的动机是关心过一种生态调谐意义上的美好生活。在提出的自由图景中,生态协调在认识论和伦理意义上都要求人类和非人类实体之间的非等级关系。这与一些观点和实践是不相容的,在这些观点和实践中,人类的知识在原则上被认为优于其他人类实体的知识,在这些观点和实践中,人类被认为是道德有效性的唯一来源,在这些观点和实践中,人类在原则上被认为比其他人类更受尊重,并在其自然环境中被赋予特权地位。我发展了早期工作中概述的一系列论点,将这些理论和实践描述为有害意义上的认识论和伦理人类中心主义(Cooke, 2020a)。生态调谐是我对人类能动性的理论方法和模式的称呼,其特点是相对良性的人类中心主义立场。它要求注意每个特定实体的具体道德特征和品质,无论是人类还是非人类。在这种对善的想象中,人类对善的认识原则上并不优于非人类的认识;此外,善不是完全由人类的关切和利益决定的,而是部分独立于它们的。既然善不是完全由人类的关心和利益决定的,它也不完全是通过人类活动产生的。尽管人类只有通过人类思维和行动的过滤才能获得关于它的知识,但他们认为它具有某种人类思维和行动的本体论独立性换句话说,善的概念被认为是部分超越人类的,即使人类对善的解释不可避免地是通过人类的镜头。如果人类的关注点和兴趣没有某种本体论上的独立性,我们人类就无法从与非人类实体的接触中更多地了解善的意义:它们不能成为新的伦理意义的载体。一个与生态相协调的视角,以及为此所需要的(部分地)超越人类的善的观念的取向,是我对自由观念的重新想象和重新表述的一个核心特征。另一个关键特征是批判性参与的自我导向。 在特定的生活情境中,这些准则对于特定的人类主体具有权威性,只要它们肯定了它们作为过一种合乎道德的美好生活的指南的重要性。权威是一种独特的权力形式,尤其不同于统治。与作为支配的权力相反,权力依赖于对被行使权力的人的义务的承认,无论是隐性的还是显性的。19世纪的德国历史学家Theodor Mommsen抓住了这一特点,他将权威的力量描述为“比建议更多,比命令更少,是一种人们不能安全地忽视的建议”(Mommsen,引自阿伦特,1961)此外,在某种意义上,这是一种自我强加的义务。这意味着它有一个完整的自由时刻。汉娜·阿伦特(Hannah Arendt)引起了人们的注意,她明确指出了其他人也注意到的权威与自由之间的联系(例如,马尔库塞,2008)。正如她所说:“权威意味着人们保持自由的服从”(阿伦特,1961)。至少,权威包含着对权威的持有者的自愿承认和肯定意义上的自由。如果社会机构要行使权威而非专制的权力,它们就必须对变革持开放态度,以应对来自其成员的道德挑战;这些挑战可能针对机构在道德上受到影响的身份的各个方面:其运作、其组织或其所包含的美好生活理念。这意味着,反过来,社会机构必须看到自己,并被他们的成员看到,作为一个通过争论的永久建设过程:他们必须认识到他们的制度身份的内在不稳定性。此外,社会机构必须承认,建设的过程是有道德动机的:由其成员(通常是未明确表达的)关注驱动,通过结合特定的道德价值观来塑造特定机构的身份。由于在民主现代性社会中,指导社会制度成员的伦理价值往往是多元的,有时甚至是相互冲突的,建构过程将是对立的,而不是和谐的。尽管如此,该机构的成员仍有可能将自己视为共同建设项目的一部分——作为构成(不稳定的)社会机构身份的共同利益的共同作者,以及他们自己在道德上自我决定、自我转化的机构的共同作者。简而言之,要使机构既不专制又具有权威性,它们及其成员必须参与一个永久的相互认同构建过程。这种制度权威的图景也可以被描述为乌托邦;然而,再一次,它不是抽象的理想主义。它与许多历史倡议和社会运动产生共鸣,这些倡议和社会运动试图沿着这些路线重新配置社会制度。例如,想想17至19世纪之间的英国、美国和法国革命,这些革命试图重新配置政府机构和法律;想想18世纪末的裴斯泰洛齐(Pestalozzi)和19世纪初的洪堡(W. von Humboldt),他们分别试图重新配置幼儿教育机构和大学;想想19世纪以来的女权主义浪潮,它们试图重新配置资产阶级婚姻和核心家庭的制度;想想路德教、加尔文主义、虔诚派和解放神学等运动,它们试图重新配置基督教会的机构。这并不是否认制度主要是社会惰性的力量,而不是道德变革的力量。这部分是由于它们的语义塑造和稳定功能。再加上他们的警察和行政职能,这使得他们容易受到根深蒂固的权力等级的影响,这些权力等级的权威判断和决定似乎是不可动摇的。因此,社会制度的权威往往是专制的,而不是促进自由的,它要求人们毫无疑问地接受制度的道德价值观,并服从由此产生的社会实践和思维方式。尽管按照蒙森和阿伦特的观点,我们可以批评专制权威是一种变态,但这并不能改变这样一个事实,即社会制度充其量是社会惰性和威权主义与道德变革冲动之间斗争的场所,天平偏向前者。虽然所有的社会机构都是如此,但有些机构可能在宪法上比其他机构更有能力促进道德-政治转型和促进自由。 但要重申的是,这并不是否认所有的社会制度都倾向于社会惰性,并倾向于以一种专制而不是促进自由的方式行使权力。让我总结一下批判性社会政治理论化的美学-伦理力量。这种理论化具有一种非威权的变革力量,这种力量存在于它的揭露能力之中。作为一种披露,它是一种邀请,让你以不同的方式思考、行为和生活在这个世界上。作为一种邀请(而不是命令),它本质上是非威权主义的。阿多诺的著作在这方面很有帮助。可以肯定的是,在他的著作中,批判性理论的揭露力很少被明确地主题化;相反,它体现在他们身上,例如,当他使用广泛的修辞策略来阐述他的哲学论点时。这在《启蒙辩证法》(参见Honneth, 2000)中尤为引人注目,但在阿多诺后来的作品中也很明显,他利用语言资源,如浓缩或转移意义,暗示性隐喻和叙事呈现,以揭示迄今为止未被察觉或模糊的社会现实的“病态”。在我看来,进一步阐述阿多主义的非威权主义的,变革性的,批判性的理论化的模式,通过与批判性的政治演讲的揭露力的比较和对比,是卓有成效的。一个很好的例子是马丁·路德·金在20世纪50年代和60年代的公民不服从运动中对美国现有社会秩序的公开演讲和信件。他们在“民事翻译”方面表现出高度发达的才能,这种做法利用在现有社会秩序中占主导地位的语义代码来创造一种叙事,使大多数人有可能认同抗议者的不满(Cooke, 2019)。社会学家杰弗里·亚历山大(Jeffrey Alexander)将民事翻译首先描述为一种中介活动(Alexander, 2006)。然而,更仔细的研究表明,除此之外,它还有一种揭示力量:有可能使人们感知到他们以前没有意识到的痛苦(Cooke, 2021)。在这个生态灾难的时代,当代批判社会理论应该重申这种潜力。事实上,我认为披露是任何批判性参与的社会反思模式的核心任务,这种反思模式是面向道德动机的、激进的社会变革。这种彻底的改变需要改变我们与自己和他人、人类和非人类的关系,并发展新的能动性图景和相应的词汇。如果没有这种根本性的转变,我们人类就没有希望迎接人类世的挑战。
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Reenvisioning Freedom: Human Agency in Times of Ecological Disaster

I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today is anthropogenic ecological disaster on a global scale. I assume, furthermore, that radical changes are needed in order to arrest our current disastrous trajectory and, in the best case, redirect it. However, as things stand, human agents seem unable to bring about the radical changes that are required. As a first step toward remedying this, I postulate the need for a fundamental transformation of ethical perceptions, on both individual and collective levels: If humans globally are to grasp how the dominant modes of thinking and acting are ecologically disastrous, there has to be a radical shift in their ideas about the ethically good life.1 Although the requisite shift in ethical perceptions will not, on its own, suffice for radical social change, I see it as its precondition. This leads me to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency.

For a number of years I have been concerned to reimagine and rearticulate the concept of freedom as a mode of ethically self-determining human agency in a democratic political context. In these reflections, my focus has been on self-directing agency as a distinctive form of social freedom, in the general sense of a mode of agency dependent on human relations within society. Recently, however, I have come to realize that this perspective is inadequate. It is insufficiently attuned to the multiple and complex relational contexts, nonhuman as well as human, in which humans exercise their agency.

The thesis driving my current endeavor is that the contemporary ecological disaster calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of human freedom as it has been understood by modern Western political thinking and embodied in everyday thought, behavior, and social practices. I offer a utopian vision of human agency, and the terms in which to articulate it, that would motivate a fundamental reorientation of thinking, behavior, and social practices globally. On a general level, I seek to show the importance at certain times in history of radical reimagining what it means to lead an ethically good life, and the need for new ethical-political vocabularies to accompany such reimaginings (Lear, 2008). My specific aim is to create a new field of possibilities amidst the dire circumstances of ecological disaster in a context where it may seem impossible even to imagine what these might be.

I use the term “utopian” advisedly, in order to stress that I do not propose an alternative account of freedom that is normative in a prescriptive sense; rather I issue an invitation to reimagine a particular conception of human agency that became dominant within capitalist modernity. However, my proposal is not abstractly idealistic: it has a basis in actual and historical impulses and aspirations, both within Western capitalist cultures and in religious and cultural thinking and practices elsewhere.2

In recent times, the term “The Anthropocene” has gained widespread currency in popular and academic discourse to describe the anthropogenic aspect of the contemporary environmental disaster. It is now widely used as a name for a new epoch of human evolution characterized by human-induced change to the biosphere and to convey the unprecedented rapidity and unparalleled capacity of humans to destroy the ecosystems on which their survival depends. Despite disputes among geologists concerning the degree to which the present period can be identified as the successor epoch to the Holocene, there is overwhelming scientific agreement that rapid anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity constitute grave threats to the future of the human species; indeed, there is widespread scientific agreement that human activity, amplified by the rapid development of capitalist industrialization and the unchecked pursuit of affluence, has unleashed uncontrollable natural forces that leave contemporary humans as vulnerable to the devastating power of nature as their earliest ancestors. There are good reasons to think that the predominant conceptions of human agency, particularly within contemporary Western cultures, have facilitated this anthropogenic environmental devastation. Here I connect with recent thinking in Earth System Science, where conceptions of human agency have come to be seen as part of a larger interconnected biosphere: scientists, recognizing conceptions of human agency as a significant factor in anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity, now invite scholars and researchers from the humanities and social sciences to help them address the challenges of ecological disaster (Thomas et al, 2020). Following this line of thought, technological advances, even revolutionary breakthroughs in geoengineering and CO2 removal, will be insufficient to halt our current perilous trajectory and redirect it for the better. Technological advances will need to be accompanied by a new perspective on human agency, at an individual and collective level.

Since it was first coined (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), the use of the “Anthropocene” concept to characterize the contemporary global ecological situation has attracted criticism in the humanities and social sciences, particularly among theorists concerned with radical social transformation (Bonneuil, 2015; Haraway, 2015; Hornborg, 2019; Malm, 2018a; Moore, 2016; Stengers, 2015). Their criticisms are directed primarily at implicit assumptions about human nature and sociopolitical relations characteristic of some prominent interpretations of the concept. The main objections are that the concept of the Anthropocene naturalizes, depoliticizes, and conceals. It naturalizes the ecological disaster by rendering it a natural outcome of the sort of species that humans are. It depoliticizes by flattening social, political, and economic relations, grouping together all humans under one umbrella, implying that no particular group of humans is to blame. It depoliticizes further due to its implicit message that little can be done to avert disaster. It conceals factors important for understanding the ecological crisis such as economic inequalities, cultural asymmetries, colonialism, mass media, and social media, thereby distracting from their role in the crisis and hindering reflection on how to address them and the ecological iniquities with which they are intimately connected. Critically engaged theorists who take this stance toward the concept of the Anthropocene propose alternative framing concepts, by means of which they attempt to reveal and capture the central components it neglects or obscures. Influential alternative proposals include Capitalocene, Plantationcene, and Urbanocene. I view these not as rival concepts but as narratives driven by shared concerns. I take seriously the dangers to which critics draw attention, while nonetheless insisting that ecological devastation is the larger context within which challenges such as capitalism, colonialism, and urban expansion must be addressed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a grim reminder of the hubristic attitude expressed in the modern ideal of freedom. Despite enormous scientific achievements that led to the production of new vaccines in a remarkably short time, the pandemic shook confidence in the view that technological ingenuity can master nature and finally put an end to virulent disease. The increasing frequency and violence of flash floods, wildfires, and heat waves has further contributed to a growing perception of human vulnerabilities to natural forces. However, the new humility is ambivalent. On the positive side, it offers the prospect of a fundamental change in thinking about human agency in its relations to self and others, human and other-than-human. On the negative side, it is frequently coupled with feelings of human powerlessness that are expressed in blustering defiance (libertarianism), violence (eco-terrorism), or resignation. Such responses leave untouched the patterns of thought and behavior that have led to ecological devastation. This is one reason not to jettison the concept of freedom entirely but rather to seek to reimagine and rearticulate it. For, lacking a sense that self-determining agency is possible, humans are all too likely to vacillate between regressive feelings of human powerlessness and the delusional belief in human supremacy.

There is a further reason why I consider it important to retain the idea of freedom, despite its troubling history within capitalist modernity. I hold that the concept of freedom, if reimagined and rearticulated in the right way, is indispensable for socially transformative agency of the right kind. In my utopian projection, this means ecologically attuned, self-determining, and self-transforming agency.3 Moreover, as social change for the better is a never-ending process, I see freedom not only as necessary in order to achieve a better society on a once-off basis but as an indispensable element of any good society.

Nonetheless, following Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, my starting position is that within capitalist modernity, the dominant ideal of freedom has been based on a view of human agency that expresses an attitude of mastery and control (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002).4 In this book, published in the 1940s, the authors make clear how the view of agency dominant within capitalist modernity reduces both human and other-than-human nature to inanimate matter to be mastered and manipulated by humans at will. Whether it is understood negatively (as freedom from external interference) or positively (as self-determination or self-legislation), the dominant modern ideal of freedom celebrates human sovereignty, specifically the possession and exercise of a will that chooses and determines as it pleases, subject only to certain general moral and legal constraints. Intimately connected with a belief in the limitless potential of human agency, this ideal has assumed a plenitude of inexhaustible resources enabling an ever-expanding range of human choices, self-gratifying consumption, and uninhibited self-expression. For this reason, I seek to develop an alternative conception of human freedom that decisively breaks with the ideal of human sovereignty and the valorization of subjective choice and decision to which it is closely tied.

In earlier work, as previously mentioned, I sought to elaborate a conception of freedom as a mode of self-determining agency that develops within social relationships and is internally connected with a critically reflective concern for the good. This integral ethical component distinguished my conception from most other versions of social freedom.5 At the same time, alert to the risk of suppressing the plurality of perspectives on the good and attendant danger of ethical authoritarianism, in my earlier writings I insisted that the meaning of the good is an open-ended question: a matter to be worked out contextually by human agents in agonistic processes, in which competing conceptions of the good life are opened to vibrant critique. In my current endeavor, I continue to conceptualize freedom as internally related to a concern for the good. As before, I take the view that the meaning of the good is an open question in principle for social and political theory. However, I now adopt the stance of an engaged critical social theorist and issue an invitation to imagine the good in a certain way. Specifically, I invite humans globally to imagine freedom as self-directing and self-transforming agency motivated by a concern to live a life that is good in the sense of ecologically attuned.

In the proposed picture of freedom, ecological attunement calls for nonhierarchical relations between humans and other-than-human entities in both an epistemological and an ethical sense. It is incompatible with perspectives and practices in which human knowledges are deemed superior in principle to the knowledges of other-than-human entities, in which humans are held to be the sole source of ethical validity , in which humans are viewed as in principle commanding more respect than other-than-human beings and are accorded a privileged status within their natural environments. Developing a line of argument sketched in earlier work, I describe such theories and practices as epistemologically and ethically anthropocentric in a pernicious sense (Cooke, 2020a). Ecological attunement is my name for theoretical approaches and modes of human agency that are characterized by a relatively benign anthropocentric stance. It calls for attentiveness to the specific ethical characteristics and qualities of each particular entity, be it human or other-than-human. In this imagining of the good, human knowledges of the good are not in principle superior to nonhuman knowledges; moreover, the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, but has a partial independence of them. Since the good is not determined exclusively by human concerns and interests, it is not entirely produced through human activity. Even though knowledge of it is available to humans only through the filter of human thinking and action, they attribute to it some ontological independence of human thinking and action.6 Put differently, the idea of the good is held to be partially human-transcending, , even though human interpretations of the good are inevitably through a human lens. Without some ontological independence of human concerns and interests, we humans could not learn more about the meaning of the good from our encounters with other-than-human entities: They could not be vehicles for new ethical meanings.7

An ecologically attuned perspective, and the orientation toward a (partially) human-transcending idea of the good required for this, is a central feature of my reimagining and rearticulation of the idea of freedom. A further key feature is critically engaged self-direction. In elaborating this idea, I draw on Karl Marx's writings on alienation in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx, 1997). One of the forms of alienation Marx describes in these early writings is the alienation of humans from their species-being. By this, he means alienation of humans from their capacity for freely purposive, creative, and self-reflective activity. More concretely, he understands freedom not only as the capacity of humans to set goals and pursue them without being bound by biological necessity—as the capacity to create according to the laws of beauty; he also understands it as the capacity of humans to make their life activity into the object of their will and consciousness. However, Marx does not satisfactorily develop this thought in his early manuscripts. Charles Taylor's view of the modern self as a strong evaluator can help to explicate it (Taylor, 1989).

Taylor holds that humans are self-interpreting creatures. By this he means that human relationships to the world are never simply given, but are constantly articulated, reconstituted, negotiated, and transformed through individual and cultural processes of interpretation. Furthermore, human interpretations of the world are always also an interpretation of self (and vice versa). The process of self-interpretation is driven by what Taylor calls strong evaluations. At any given time, these strong evaluations constitute evaluative roadmaps for human individuals. Stable identities and methodical human action are inconceivable without such roadmaps, which depict substantial ethical conceptions that embody ideas of the good: ideas about what is important, what really matters (Taylor, 1989). Strong evaluation has an integral receptive element, calling for openness to experiences in which the power of transcendent moral sources makes itself present in a full-bodied way to human subjects, requiring in turn flexibility, open-mindedness, sensitivity to others, and imaginativeness. Nonetheless, strong evaluation is also a mode of self-direction. This is because it requires human agents to ascertain for themselves what kind of person they would like to be and what paths they should pursue if they are to become that kind of person; furthermore, to take responsibility for their evaluative judgments. In addition, it has a crucial moment of critical reflection: In the context of strong evaluation, self-direction calls for evaluative discrimination by human agents among the aims in life they consider worth pursuing. Put differently, it calls for critical evaluation by human agents of the ethical quality of their actions, judgments, and life-trajectories.

However, although strong evaluation presupposes an orientation toward the good, it leaves open the question of whether this orientation is ecologically attuned. Nor does strong evaluation necessarily involve self-transformation. Thus, in interpreting freedom in terms of ecologically attuned self-determining and self-transforming agency, I move beyond Taylor's conception of strong evaluation.

Why do I connect freedom with self-transformation? Without a self-transforming component, freedom could not be construed as potentially transformative of society. Due to internalized patterns of thought and behavior, even critically engaged self-determining human agency might simply reproduce the socially prevailing patterns. Within Frankfurt School Critical Theory, this difficulty is thematized with the help of the concept of ideology. Early theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition proposed an understanding of ideology as a structurally induced, deeply entrenched, widespread false consciousness that prevents human agents, individually and collectively, from perceiving the need for fundamental social change and grasping the kind of change that is necessary (Adorno 1972; Horkheimer, 1973; Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002; Marcuse, 1991; see Cooke, 2006b).8 This helps to explain why even in societies in which many people pay lip service to the reality of ecological disaster, everyday practices continue to rely heavily on the appropriation of natural resources that are treated as unlimited (Brand & Wissen, 2021).

Social transformation is tied to self-transformation for a further reason: There is a strong likelihood that self-transformation will be necessary to actualize my proposed vision of human agency. This is because the current globally dominant social practices and patterns of everyday behavior are based on a logic of manipulation and control that is antithetical to ecologically attuned self-directing agency. Consequently, actualizing the envisaged mode of agency requires widespread fundamental self-transformations, if it is to become part of habitual behavior and everyday social practices on both individual and collective levels globally.

The question of self-transformation calls for the exploration of aesthetics. One of the distinctive features of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is its connection of the question of social change with art. However, rather than adopting a Kantian interpretation of aesthetics as “appreciation of beauty,” as is common in the Frankfurt School tradition, I consider it more fruitful to retrieve and rearticulate the ancient Greek understanding of aesthesis as responsiveness to stimulation of the senses (“sensibility”), taking aesthesis to mean affectively based perceptual change. This widens the scope of aesthetics beyond the domain of art as it has been institutionalized in modern Western cultures and invites exploration of the nonauthoritarian transformative potentials of a multiplicity of social practices and experiences.

What are the main drivers of the ethical–aesthetic self-transformations that I advocate? There is no easy answer to this. It seems clear that there are multiple forces and factors. Certainly, all kinds of social institutions have a part to play: for example, economics, religion, the law, sport, family life, parliaments, schools, and art. Noninstitutionalized actions such as civil disobedience and related forms of activism may likewise be important contributing factors. Critical social theories themselves may play a part (I come back to this in my concluding remarks). Important, too, are life-changing experiences resulting, for example, from experimental life practices, encounters with different cultures, deep existential crises, and epiphanic spiritual conversions. Although we must acknowledge the multiplicity of forces and factors contributing to fundamental changes in ethical perceptions, not all are equally good from the point of view of my conceptualization of human agency as a mode of freedom, understood in terms of ethically motivated self-direction and self-transformation. This excludes authoritarian forces and factors. Simply prescribing ethical behavior, attitudes, and principles without endeavoring to engage the will and reason of each human globally would be a violation of freedom thus understood.9 In consequence, the advocated ethical transformations must take place in a nonauthoritarian manner that permits the agents concerned to accept their ethical validity for reasons they can come to embrace as their own. As I have argued in earlier writings, social institutions are potential forces for nonauthoritarian ethical transformation of self and society (Cooke, 2020b). Let me briefly explain what I mean.

What are social institutions? Classical sociological accounts of social institutions define them as socially constructed, supraindividual entities (Berger & Luckmann 1967). Examples include families, parliaments, religious bodies, trade unions, sports clubs, courts of justice, the internet, schools, the World Bank, the printed media, the United Nations, and cultural institutes.

I follow Luc Boltanski in using the term “institution” to refer to entities that primarily serve the semantic function of shaping and stabilizing social meanings (Boltanski, 2011). They have other important functions, such as policing and administration, but their primary role is to shape and stabilize meanings. In his words, “To institutions falls the task of saying and confirming what matters” (Boltanski, 2011); furthermore, they give an enduring semantic shape to reality, “they seem removed from the corruption of time” (p. 75).

However, although Boltanski's account of social institutions is helpful for its emphasis on the semantic shaping and stabilizing functions of social institutions, it pays no attention to the specifically ethical character of the meanings they shape and stabilize. By contrast, I emphasize the role of social institutions, individually and in configuration, in constituting webs of ethical meaning (cf. Jaeggi, 2009). In my account, social institutions are incorporations of—often diverse and sometimes conflicting—ethical values. As such, they have (more or less stable) ethical identities. The incorporated ethical values shaping their identities form a multilayered and multidimensional ethical sedimentation. This ethical sedimentation is the complex historical product of human interactions within the institution, as well as the institution's interactions with its environments, but it may pass unnoticed by the institution's members (broadly understood). Nonetheless, by way of their webs of ethical values, social institutions, more or less tacitly, provide their members with ethical orientation and guidance: they point them in certain ethical directions, thereby impacting on their particular identities as ethical beings, and provide concrete guidance in the everyday conduct of life.

This ethically orienting and guiding power defines the authority of social institutions. Its concrete manifestations include laws, ordinances, policies, prescriptions, recommendations, and doctrines. These are authoritative for particular human agents in particular life situations, whenever they affirm their importance as guides for living an ethically good life.

Authority is a distinctive form of power, differing, in particular, from domination. In contrast to power as domination, authority depends on acknowledgment of obligation, tacit or explicit, on the part of those over whom it is exercised. The 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen captures this feature when he describes the force of authority as “more than advice and less than a command, an advice that one may not safely ignore” (Mommsen, cited in Arendt, 1961).10 Furthermore, it is an obligation that is in some sense self-imposed. This means that it has an integral moment of freedom. Hannah Arendt draws attention to this, making explicit a connection between authority and freedom that others, too, have noted (e.g., Marcuse, 2008). As she puts it: “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom” (Arendt, 1961). At a minimum, authority involves freedom in the sense of voluntary recognition and affirmation of the bearer of authority.

If social institutions are to exercise power that is authoritative, yet nonauthoritarian, they must be open to change in response to the ethical challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges may be directed at various aspects of the institution's ethically inflected identity: at its operation, its organization or its incorporated ideas of the good life. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction through contestation: They must recognize the inherent instability of their institutional identities. Social institutions must acknowledge, furthermore, that the process of construction is ethically motivated: driven by a (usually unarticulated) concern by their members to shape a particular institution's identity through the incorporation of particular ethical values. Since in the societies of democratic modernity, the ethical values orienting the members of social institutions are often plural and sometimes conflicting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, the institution's members are potentially able to consider themselves part of a common project of construction—as coauthors of a common good that constitutes the (unstable) identity of the social institution in question, as well as coauthors of their own ethically self-determining, self-transforming agency. In short, for institutions to be nonauthoritarian, yet authoritative, they and their members must engage in a perpetual process of mutual identity construction.

This picture of institutional authority, too, could be described as utopian; however, once again, it is not abstractly idealistic. It resonates with many historical initiatives and social movements that sought to reconfigure social institutions along these lines. Think, for example, of the English, American, and French revolutions between the 17th and 19th centuries, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of government and the law; think of Pestalozzi in the late 18th and W. von Humboldt in the early 19th century, who sought, respectively, to reconfigure the institutions of early childhood education and the university; think of the successive waves of feminism from the 19th century onward, which sought to reconfigure the institutions of bourgeois marriage and the nuclear family; think of movements such as Lutheranism, Calvinism, Pietism, and Liberation Theology, which sought to reconfigure the institution of the Christian Church. This is not to deny that institutions are primarily forces for social inertia rather than ethical transformation. This is due in part to their functions of semantic shaping and stabilization. Coupled with their functions of policing and administration, this makes them susceptible to entrenched power hierarchies whose authoritative judgments and decisions appear to be unshakable. In consequence, the authority of social institutions tends to be authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing, demanding unquestioning acceptance of the institution's ethical values and submission to the social practices and ways of thinking and acting that follow from these. Although, following Mommsen and Arendt, we may criticize authoritarian authority as a perversion, this does not alter the fact that social institutions are, at best, sites for a struggle between social inertia and authoritarianism, on the one side, and ethically transformative impulses, on the other, with the balance weighted toward the former side. Although this is true of all social institutions, some may be constitutionally better equipped than others to stimulate ethical-political transformations and promote freedom.11 But to repeat, this is not to deny that all social institutions tend toward social inertia and are prone to exercise authority in an authoritarian rather than freedom-enhancing way.

Let me conclude with some words on the aesthetic-ethical power of critically engaged sociopolitical theorizing. Such theorizing has a nonauthoritarian transformative force, which resides in its capacity for disclosure. Qua disclosure, it is an invitation to think, behave, and inhabit the world differently. Qua invitation (rather than a command), it is inherently nonauthoritarian. Adorno's writings are helpful in this respect. To be sure, the disclosive power of critical theorizing is rarely thematized explicitly in his writings; instead, it is manifested in them, for instance when he uses a wide range of rhetorical strategies to drive home his philosophical theses. It is particularly striking in Dialectic of Enlightenment (cf. Honneth, 2000), but it is also evident in Adorno's later work, where he employs linguistic resources, such as condensing or shifting meanings, suggestive metaphors and narrative presentations in order to disclose “pathologies” of social reality that hitherto have been unperceived or obscured. It seems to me fruitful to further elaborate this Adornian model of nonauthoritarian, transformative, critically engaged theorizing through comparison and contrast with the disclosive power of critically engaged political oratory. A good example here is Martin Luther King's public speeches and letters in his campaign of civil disobedience protesting against the existing societal order in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. They display a highly developed talent for “civil translation,” a practice that employs the semantic codes dominant in the existing societal order to create a narrative that makes it possible for the majority to identify with the grievances of the protestors (Cooke, 2019). The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes civil translation as first and foremost a mediating activity (Alexander, 2006). However, a closer examination shows that, in addition, it has a disclosive force: the potential to enable people to perceive suffering that they had previously not recognized as such (Cooke, 2021). In these times of ecological disaster, contemporary critical social theories should reaffirm this potential. Indeed, I see disclosure as a core task of any critically engaged mode of reflection on society that is geared toward ethically motivated, radical social change for the better. Radical change of this sort calls for changing our ways of relating to ourselves and others, human and nonhuman, and developing new pictures of agency and corresponding vocabularies. Without such fundamental transformations, we humans have no prospect of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene.

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