编辑对特别部分的介绍:人类世的伦理和政治

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Maeve Cooke, John McGuire
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Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.</p><p>This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, “the Anthropocene” names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned  relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of self-determining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, however, he views the human capacity for self-reflection as crucial for moral agency and, in particular, for transformative political agency. His focus is on actualizing this capacity, which may involve painful work on the self in which individual agents seek to break free from the kind of unfavorable existential states that are conducive to a pernicious egocentrism.</p><p>Hardly surprisingly, there are many crucial questions toward which the five contributions merely point. These include the question of whether the very concept of societal change for the better is inextricably tied to a belief in sociocultural superiority. This question—often addressed as the question of historical progress—is central for critical social theorizing of any variety. It challenges it to conceive of historical progress in ways that do not simply reproduce the dominant ideologies and are not committed to an imperialist belief in the superiority of Western modernity.</p><p>A related cluster of questions concerns eurocentric biases. Yann Allard-Tremblay's contribution invites critical interrogation of concepts such as self-determination through engagement with North American Indigenous thinking on agency, in particular political agency. What might critical theory in the Western tradition learn from such engagement? By way of a learning process, critical theorists might achieve, for example, a more complex perspective on the strengths and limitations of the concept of the Anthropocene, a richer understanding of how claims to self-determination, and the rights claims associated with them, could fit with a nonsupremacist model of ethical and political relations between humans and other-than-humans, and insight into ways in which Indigenous activism could provide a model for ecologically motivated, effective thought and action within the cultures of capitalist modernity.</p><p>Difficult questions arise, too, from the apparent dependence of self-determining human agency, however understood, upon a level of material affluence that can be maintained only through the continued exploitation of natural resources. Vetlesen challenges the indifference of contemporary mainstream political philosophy, including the theories of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, toward questions about the ecological limits of material abundance that many conceptions of freedom and rights take for granted. But even the ecologically attuned conception of self-determining, self-transforming agency proposed by Cooke involves self-reflective, creative activity that has evident material and social prerequisites: it presupposes, for instance, a certain level of education and the satisfaction of basic needs for food, accommodation, and clothing. These prerequisites raise the question whether technology is indispensable in order to meet such needs. McGuire alerts us to dangers arising from reliance on technology. He unmasks the ideology of possessive ingenuity that underlies the tendency for government agendas to reflect the priorities of technology monopolists (Bill Gates, Elon Musk) over the needs of ordinary citizens. He also criticizes the uncritical pursuit of “novel” answers to all-too-familiar problems, particularly when the valorization of habitations beyond Earth comes at the expense of ensuring that the Earth itself remains habitable. In this regard, it is not easy to counter Horkheimer and Adorno's objection in <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i> that technology is inherently manipulative, essentially indifferent to the distinctive qualities of the matter it manipulates. An additional problem is the close connection between technology and unequal socioeconomic power relations. It is likely that advances in “sustainable” technology will benefit only the smallest portion at the top of the steep human pyramid created by global capitalism. To date, the promised transition to a “greener” economy has served to reinforce the hoarding of scientific and technical benefits in the global North, while the global South is left to serve as the site for industrial manufacturing and tourist-friendly nature reserves.</p><p>Yet another set of difficult questions have to do with the challenges to democracy posed by the <i>urgency</i> of the need to avert ecological disaster. Some political theorists argue that any viable response to the ecological crisis must be part of a democratic process. But other theorists contend that the time has passed for a democratic response to the crisis. Rather, the urgency of the task, coupled with its global nature, calls for strong leadership, “top-down” government and extensive use of the resources of state bureaucracy. This antidemocratic position finds support in the “Sixth Assessment Report” of the 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which effectively states that climate change is now inevitable and that it falls to governments and other “strong actors” to meliorate the consequences without further delay—regardless of potential political or ideological opposition.</p><p>Does the Anthropocene have specific implications for contemporary critical social theories? Vetlesen and Allard-Tremblay discern troubling forms of anthropocentrism and eurocentrism within the Frankfurt School tradition. While such implicit biases are always a matter of grave concern, remedying them is complicated; important work is already underway in this respect. But the Anthropocene raises questions, too, about the normative underpinnings of critical social theorizing. The early Frankfurt School theorists relied on a broadly Marxist position as the normative foundation for their critical diagnoses and emancipatory projections. JürgenHabermas appeals to the normative presuppositions of everyday language use. His successors in the tradition tend either to seek alternative strong normative foundations (Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst) or to embrace a variant of Rorty's radical contextualism (Amy Allen). Cooke sidesteps these competing justificatory strategies by presenting her critical discussion of human freedom as an open invitation to imagine new ways of thinking about human agency and to seek new vocabularies for articulating those new imaginings. Drawing attention to the critically disclosive powers of Adorno's writings, she invites us not only to reimagine and rearticulate the idea of freedom, she also invites us to reimagine and rearticulate pathways for social critique.</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/10.1111/1467-8675.12682","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Editors’ introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene\",\"authors\":\"Maeve Cooke,&nbsp;John McGuire\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/1467-8675.12682\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>In recent years “the Anthropocene” has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. 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Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned  relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of self-determining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, however, he views the human capacity for self-reflection as crucial for moral agency and, in particular, for transformative political agency. His focus is on actualizing this capacity, which may involve painful work on the self in which individual agents seek to break free from the kind of unfavorable existential states that are conducive to a pernicious egocentrism.</p><p>Hardly surprisingly, there are many crucial questions toward which the five contributions merely point. These include the question of whether the very concept of societal change for the better is inextricably tied to a belief in sociocultural superiority. This question—often addressed as the question of historical progress—is central for critical social theorizing of any variety. It challenges it to conceive of historical progress in ways that do not simply reproduce the dominant ideologies and are not committed to an imperialist belief in the superiority of Western modernity.</p><p>A related cluster of questions concerns eurocentric biases. Yann Allard-Tremblay's contribution invites critical interrogation of concepts such as self-determination through engagement with North American Indigenous thinking on agency, in particular political agency. What might critical theory in the Western tradition learn from such engagement? By way of a learning process, critical theorists might achieve, for example, a more complex perspective on the strengths and limitations of the concept of the Anthropocene, a richer understanding of how claims to self-determination, and the rights claims associated with them, could fit with a nonsupremacist model of ethical and political relations between humans and other-than-humans, and insight into ways in which Indigenous activism could provide a model for ecologically motivated, effective thought and action within the cultures of capitalist modernity.</p><p>Difficult questions arise, too, from the apparent dependence of self-determining human agency, however understood, upon a level of material affluence that can be maintained only through the continued exploitation of natural resources. Vetlesen challenges the indifference of contemporary mainstream political philosophy, including the theories of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, toward questions about the ecological limits of material abundance that many conceptions of freedom and rights take for granted. But even the ecologically attuned conception of self-determining, self-transforming agency proposed by Cooke involves self-reflective, creative activity that has evident material and social prerequisites: it presupposes, for instance, a certain level of education and the satisfaction of basic needs for food, accommodation, and clothing. These prerequisites raise the question whether technology is indispensable in order to meet such needs. McGuire alerts us to dangers arising from reliance on technology. He unmasks the ideology of possessive ingenuity that underlies the tendency for government agendas to reflect the priorities of technology monopolists (Bill Gates, Elon Musk) over the needs of ordinary citizens. He also criticizes the uncritical pursuit of “novel” answers to all-too-familiar problems, particularly when the valorization of habitations beyond Earth comes at the expense of ensuring that the Earth itself remains habitable. In this regard, it is not easy to counter Horkheimer and Adorno's objection in <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i> that technology is inherently manipulative, essentially indifferent to the distinctive qualities of the matter it manipulates. An additional problem is the close connection between technology and unequal socioeconomic power relations. It is likely that advances in “sustainable” technology will benefit only the smallest portion at the top of the steep human pyramid created by global capitalism. 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This antidemocratic position finds support in the “Sixth Assessment Report” of the 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which effectively states that climate change is now inevitable and that it falls to governments and other “strong actors” to meliorate the consequences without further delay—regardless of potential political or ideological opposition.</p><p>Does the Anthropocene have specific implications for contemporary critical social theories? Vetlesen and Allard-Tremblay discern troubling forms of anthropocentrism and eurocentrism within the Frankfurt School tradition. While such implicit biases are always a matter of grave concern, remedying them is complicated; important work is already underway in this respect. But the Anthropocene raises questions, too, about the normative underpinnings of critical social theorizing. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

西方传统的批判理论可以从这种参与中学到什么?通过学习过程,批判理论家可能会获得,例如,对人类世概念的优势和局限性的更复杂的观点,对自决的要求以及与之相关的权利要求如何与人类与非人类之间的道德和政治关系的非至上主义模型相适应的更丰富的理解,以及对土著行动主义如何为生态动机,资本主义现代性文化中的有效思想和行动。然而,无论如何理解,人类的自主能力显然依赖于一定程度的物质富裕,而这种物质富裕只能通过不断开发自然资源来维持,由此也产生了一些难题。维特勒森挑战了当代主流政治哲学的冷漠态度,包括约翰·罗尔斯(John Rawls)和约尔根·哈贝马斯(jrgen Habermas)的理论,这些理论对许多自由和权利概念视为理所当然的物质丰富的生态极限问题持冷漠态度。但是,即使是库克提出的自我决定、自我转化机构的生态协调概念,也涉及具有明显物质和社会先决条件的自我反思、创造性活动:例如,它以一定程度的教育和对食物、住宿和衣服的基本需求的满足为前提。这些先决条件提出了这样一个问题:为了满足这些需求,技术是否不可或缺?麦圭尔提醒我们警惕依赖科技带来的危险。他揭露了占有欲的意识形态,这种意识形态是政府议程倾向于反映技术垄断者(比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)、埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk))优先考虑普通公民需求的基础。他还批评了不加批判地追求“新奇”的答案来解决太熟悉的问题,特别是当地球以外的居住地的稳定以确保地球本身仍然适合居住为代价时。在这方面,要反驳霍克海默和阿多诺在《启蒙辩证法》中的反对意见并不容易,他们认为技术本质上是操纵性的,本质上对它所操纵的物质的独特品质漠不关心。另一个问题是技术与不平等的社会经济权力关系之间的密切联系。“可持续”技术的进步很可能只会使全球资本主义创造的陡峭的人类金字塔顶端的最小一部分人受益。迄今为止,向“绿色”经济转型的承诺加强了全球北方对科技利益的囤积,而全球南方则成为工业制造业和旅游友好型自然保护区的所在地。然而,另一组难题与避免生态灾难的迫切需要对民主构成的挑战有关。一些政治理论家认为,任何应对生态危机的可行措施都必须是民主进程的一部分。但其他理论家认为,民主应对危机的时机已过。相反,这项任务的紧迫性,加上它的全球性,需要强有力的领导,“自上而下”的政府和广泛使用国家官僚机构的资源。这种反民主的立场在联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会2021年的“第六次评估报告”中得到了支持,该报告有效地指出,气候变化现在是不可避免的,政府和其他“强有力的行动者”有责任立即减轻后果,而不考虑潜在的政治或意识形态反对。人类世对当代批判社会理论有特殊的影响吗?Vetlesen和Allard-Tremblay在法兰克福学派传统中发现了令人不安的人类中心主义和欧洲中心主义形式。虽然这种隐性偏见总是令人严重关切的问题,但纠正它们是复杂的;这方面的重要工作已经在进行中。但是,人类世也提出了关于批判性社会理论的规范基础的问题。早期的法兰克福学派理论家依靠广泛的马克思主义立场作为他们批判性诊断和解放预测的规范基础。j<s:1>根·哈贝马斯求助于日常语言使用的规范性前提。他的传统继承者倾向于要么寻求另一种强有力的规范基础(阿克塞尔·霍尼特,雷纳·福斯特),要么接受罗蒂激进语境主义的一种变体(艾米·艾伦)。Cooke回避了这些相互竞争的辩护策略,她提出了对人类自由的批判性讨论,作为一种公开邀请,让人们想象思考人类能动性的新方式,并寻求表达这些新想象的新词汇。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Editors’ introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene

In recent years “the Anthropocene” has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. There is a widespread consensus that industrialization processes within capitalist modernity have ushered humanity into a new geological epoch bearing little resemblance to the climatic stability of “the Holocene,” the roughly 10,000-year span within which all known human civilizations were established. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, “the Anthropocene” names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned  relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of self-determining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, however, he views the human capacity for self-reflection as crucial for moral agency and, in particular, for transformative political agency. His focus is on actualizing this capacity, which may involve painful work on the self in which individual agents seek to break free from the kind of unfavorable existential states that are conducive to a pernicious egocentrism.

Hardly surprisingly, there are many crucial questions toward which the five contributions merely point. These include the question of whether the very concept of societal change for the better is inextricably tied to a belief in sociocultural superiority. This question—often addressed as the question of historical progress—is central for critical social theorizing of any variety. It challenges it to conceive of historical progress in ways that do not simply reproduce the dominant ideologies and are not committed to an imperialist belief in the superiority of Western modernity.

A related cluster of questions concerns eurocentric biases. Yann Allard-Tremblay's contribution invites critical interrogation of concepts such as self-determination through engagement with North American Indigenous thinking on agency, in particular political agency. What might critical theory in the Western tradition learn from such engagement? By way of a learning process, critical theorists might achieve, for example, a more complex perspective on the strengths and limitations of the concept of the Anthropocene, a richer understanding of how claims to self-determination, and the rights claims associated with them, could fit with a nonsupremacist model of ethical and political relations between humans and other-than-humans, and insight into ways in which Indigenous activism could provide a model for ecologically motivated, effective thought and action within the cultures of capitalist modernity.

Difficult questions arise, too, from the apparent dependence of self-determining human agency, however understood, upon a level of material affluence that can be maintained only through the continued exploitation of natural resources. Vetlesen challenges the indifference of contemporary mainstream political philosophy, including the theories of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, toward questions about the ecological limits of material abundance that many conceptions of freedom and rights take for granted. But even the ecologically attuned conception of self-determining, self-transforming agency proposed by Cooke involves self-reflective, creative activity that has evident material and social prerequisites: it presupposes, for instance, a certain level of education and the satisfaction of basic needs for food, accommodation, and clothing. These prerequisites raise the question whether technology is indispensable in order to meet such needs. McGuire alerts us to dangers arising from reliance on technology. He unmasks the ideology of possessive ingenuity that underlies the tendency for government agendas to reflect the priorities of technology monopolists (Bill Gates, Elon Musk) over the needs of ordinary citizens. He also criticizes the uncritical pursuit of “novel” answers to all-too-familiar problems, particularly when the valorization of habitations beyond Earth comes at the expense of ensuring that the Earth itself remains habitable. In this regard, it is not easy to counter Horkheimer and Adorno's objection in Dialectic of Enlightenment that technology is inherently manipulative, essentially indifferent to the distinctive qualities of the matter it manipulates. An additional problem is the close connection between technology and unequal socioeconomic power relations. It is likely that advances in “sustainable” technology will benefit only the smallest portion at the top of the steep human pyramid created by global capitalism. To date, the promised transition to a “greener” economy has served to reinforce the hoarding of scientific and technical benefits in the global North, while the global South is left to serve as the site for industrial manufacturing and tourist-friendly nature reserves.

Yet another set of difficult questions have to do with the challenges to democracy posed by the urgency of the need to avert ecological disaster. Some political theorists argue that any viable response to the ecological crisis must be part of a democratic process. But other theorists contend that the time has passed for a democratic response to the crisis. Rather, the urgency of the task, coupled with its global nature, calls for strong leadership, “top-down” government and extensive use of the resources of state bureaucracy. This antidemocratic position finds support in the “Sixth Assessment Report” of the 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which effectively states that climate change is now inevitable and that it falls to governments and other “strong actors” to meliorate the consequences without further delay—regardless of potential political or ideological opposition.

Does the Anthropocene have specific implications for contemporary critical social theories? Vetlesen and Allard-Tremblay discern troubling forms of anthropocentrism and eurocentrism within the Frankfurt School tradition. While such implicit biases are always a matter of grave concern, remedying them is complicated; important work is already underway in this respect. But the Anthropocene raises questions, too, about the normative underpinnings of critical social theorizing. The early Frankfurt School theorists relied on a broadly Marxist position as the normative foundation for their critical diagnoses and emancipatory projections. JürgenHabermas appeals to the normative presuppositions of everyday language use. His successors in the tradition tend either to seek alternative strong normative foundations (Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst) or to embrace a variant of Rorty's radical contextualism (Amy Allen). Cooke sidesteps these competing justificatory strategies by presenting her critical discussion of human freedom as an open invitation to imagine new ways of thinking about human agency and to seek new vocabularies for articulating those new imaginings. Drawing attention to the critically disclosive powers of Adorno's writings, she invites us not only to reimagine and rearticulate the idea of freedom, she also invites us to reimagine and rearticulate pathways for social critique.

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