The liberation of nature?

Walter Benjamin introduced the notion of a “liberation of nature” in his eleventh thesis on the philosophy of history. The contrast he formulates between exploitative and liberating labor is familiar except that Benjamin refers not to the exploitation and liberation of human beings but of nature. He does not hesitate to give this unexpected application of Marxist categories its full utopian force. He writes that the Social Democratic

conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naïve complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials.¹⁷

Nature is a kind of reverse or negative image of society in the early Frankfurt School. It appears as a necessarily lost utopia. This pessimistic view is not contradicted by the implicit irony of Benjamin’s purified sea water and extra moons. But environmentalism has given a more substantial content to the notions of exploitation and liberation of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer do not relate the utopian promise of nature to concrete environmental issues, which only enter public discussion in the 1970s. However, Marcuse does address ecology explicitly on terms that appear to follow directly from Adorno’s elliptical remarks on nature discussed in the previous chapter. As usual, Marcuse enthusiastically breaches Adorno’s self-imposed limits, and this makes for a more explicit and decisive presentation.

In a 1972 speech, he wrote that nature “has a dimension beyond labor, a symbol of beauty, of tranquility, of a non-repressive order.”¹⁸ Yet this nature is being destroyed by capitalism. Marcuse’s essay on “Nature and Revolution” represents the furthest advance of the Frankfurt School toward environmentalism. He argues that

Value-free matter, material [there only] for the sake of domination is a historical a priori, pertaining to a specific form of society. A free society may well have a very different a priori and a very different object; the development of the scientific concepts may be grounded in an experience of nature as a totality of life to be protected and “cultivated,” and technology would apply this science to the reconstruction of the environment of life.¹⁹

He goes on to suggest the possibility of a “liberation of nature” that would be “the recovery of the life-enhancing forces in nature, the sensuous aesthetic qualities which are foreign to a life wasted in unending competitive performance.”²⁰

These potentialities of nature hark back to Aristotelian essentialism but refracted through Hegel’s historicism. Potentiality is a dynamic future-oriented principle rather than an “essence” in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., that which the thing always already was. It is not constructed speculatively as a fact independent of humanity but comes into view in the course of actual struggles and reflects the essential involvement of human beings with lived nature. Those struggles are based on the imaginative capacity to project a better future. A technology transformed by those struggles would be respectful of its objects, both human and natural. In this context, “science and technology would be the great vehicles of liberation.”²¹

Marcuse foresees a reconciliation with nature through a new technical practice based on an aesthetic form of objectivity. But he adds an important proviso to his theory of the liberation of nature. “Marx’s notion of a human appropriation of nature retains something of the hubris of domination. ‘Appropriation,’ no matter how human, remains appropriation of a (living) object by a subject. It offends that which is essentially other than the appropriating subject, and which exists precisely as object in its own right—that is as subject!”²² Marcuse here reaffirms the Frankfurt School’s fundamental thesis of the non-identity of man and nature, subject and object. But there is also a sense in which his theory is an affirmation of harmony through participation in a “non-exploitative relation: surrender, ‘letting-be,’ acceptance.”²³ The Frankfurt School’s insistence on non-identity is superseded by a different kind of identity, the identity of nature in subject and object, which is recognized in reflection and aesthetic appreciation.

Marcuse knows that the utopian conception of nature he shares with Adorno appears unscientific, even regressive. But these are resolutely modern thinkers who resist theoretical backsliding. They are not looking to re-enchant nature or to merge with it in a romantic unity. Yet Marcuse links his argument directly to several surprising comments in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory that appear decidedly premodern. There Adorno claims that human beings are called “to help nature ‘to open its eyes,’ to help it ‘on the poor earth to become what perhaps it would like to be.’”²⁴ Marcuse seeks a non-metaphysical interpretation of such notions, a third term beyond premodern essentialism and the idealistic kitsch of a “new age.”

He finds his answer in Kant’s aesthetics, which defines natural beauty as “purposiveness without purpose.” Nature exhibits characteristics of an object constructed for a purpose without actually having been so constructed. Marcuse interpreted purposiveness in this sense as a purely formal property of self-organizing objects. It arises from freedom, the self-production of the object according to its own intrinsic nature, its growth potential. We can distinguish the freely developed living thing from the mutilated product of a constricted growth process. The distinction manifests itself in formal properties we associate with health and beauty. This conception supports a normative understanding of nature and its tendencies.

Exactly how is this supposed to work? Adorno considers this idea and draws utopian conclusions from it but stops short of accepting its literal truth. He writes that natural beauty “recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed.”²⁵ Natural beauty hints at the idea of freedom that corresponds to such a world. But, Adorno concludes, nature is in reality a realm of unfreedom and so the aesthetic appreciation of nature is deceptive, a suggestive misapprehension.

Marcuse takes a different tack. Natural beauty and its purposeless purposiveness express the flourishing of life. A concrete “libidinal” attachment to the world underlies the aesthetic dimension. This attachment is historically variable, restricted by scarcity in the past, and suffering a peculiar reduction to sexuality in the present.

But Marcuse also argues that advanced technology tends to generalize aesthetic perception albeit in the specific context of the market. Here Marcuse’s comments are prescient. He notes the emergence of a new relation of worker to machine, a more distanced and informed relation due to advancing automation. This is “the emergence of a free subject within the realm of necessity” that Marx had predicted for socialist society. It leads to an aesthetic relation to the products of the new technology.

Already today, the achievements of science and technology permit the play of the productive imagination: experimentation with the possibilities of form and matter hitherto enclosed in the density of unmastered nature; the technical transformation of nature tends to make things lighter, easier, prettier … loosening up of reification. The material becomes increasingly susceptible and subject to aesthetic forms, which enhance its exchange value (the artistic, modernistic banks, office buildings, kitchens, salesrooms, and salespeople, etc.).²⁶

This aestheticization of the built world primarily serves capitalism, but it is ambivalent, contributing to the emergence of a new form of oppositional consciousness that appears in the New Left as an erotic mode of presence. Its full development awaits a liberated society.²⁷ Pleasure in beauty would then express a life-affirming sensibility. Beauty would relate the given to its potentialities in sensation, rather than selling a product or serving as a temporary escape from competitive strife.

Concepts such as beauty, health, potentialities have an intuitive appeal. It is obvious that strip mining “wounds” nature in Adorno’s sense; by contrast the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright is far more compatible with the unfolding of the potentialities of its living setting. In one of his last speeches, in 1979, Marcuse developed this contrast in its implications for environmental struggle. He argued that ecological devastation is an effect of capitalist productivity against which the “life instincts” rebel. That rebellion inspires the New Left.

What we have is a politicization of erotic energy. This, I suggest, is the distinguishing mark of the most radical movements today. These movements do not … constitute a struggle to replace one power structure by another. Rather, these radical movements are existential revolts against an obsolete reality principle. They are a revolt carried by the mind and body of individuals themselves … A revolt in which the whole organism, the very soul of the human being, becomes political. A revolt of the life instincts against organized and socialized destruction.²⁸

Disgust and rage at the abuse of human beings is an “aesthetic” expression of our sensitivity to suppressed potentialities. It articulates their value at the existential level. At that level the subject does more than observe the given state of affairs; she participates in it vicariously. This is the other side of the coin of mutual participation in which Adorno found the meaning of peace with nature. On Marcuse’s account participation is experienced as solidarity. Disgust and rage at harm to the environment would inspire its less destructive appropriation within the human world.

But, after all, is Marcuse’s parti pris for “life” more than a sentimental preference? Apart from killing, what is not life-affirming in some sense? And indeed, even killing in self-defense might qualify. Nature goes on in one form or another regardless of what human beings feel and do. Why single out its flourishing around a renaissance palace neatly tucked into the landscape, or Wright’s Falling Water? Nature “flourishes” in a garbage can too, especially one uncollected for a week, but this is not the affirmation of life we recognize as normatively valid. Does this mean our intuitive understanding of life affirmation is an arbitrary and subjective opinion without normative force? Not necessarily.

There is a difference between our intuitions and the counter-example insofar as the former seem to be rooted in our nature and are generally shared while the latter is a mere intellectual construction set up for the sake of argument. To call the multiplication of bacteria in a garbage can an example of flourishing is to ignore the emphatic meaning we normally give the term. What “flourishes” is not simply a mass of cells but the realization of such values as vitality and grace through the free development of living things in which we recognize a certain family resemblance or affinity. The concept is necessarily anthropocentric if it is to have any force at all. A garden or a child “flourish” bugs merely multiply. Furthermore, the introduction of life as a value in public discourse is not arbitrary. It makes sense in a context of permanent aggressive warfare, racial conflict, mass imprisonment, and extensive poverty. This was the context in which Marcuse wrote and it is still our context.