- 著者
-
岩熊 典乃
- 出版者
- 経済社会学会
- 雑誌
- 経済社会学会年報 (ISSN:09183116)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.38, pp.171-184, 2016 (Released:2021-04-01)
The subject of “nature” played a significant role in the critical theory of early Frankfurt School. “Nature” was a conceptual tool for them for revealing barbarism and violence of the Enlightenment, which were regarded as the Program of human liberation. Although such an insight into “nature” has disappeared from the framework of the critical theory since its “communicative turn,” the early Frankfurt vision is recently being reexamined from another context, namely that how we should understand contemporary ecological crisis. This paper surveys this new trend and analyzes points of discussions and results. Outlining the early Frankfurt vision on “nature,” I argue that M. Horkheimer, W. Benjamin, Th. W. Adorno and H. Marcuse shared the critical viewpoint that is, the correlation between the social domination (domination of man) and the domination of nature. This, in a sense, ambiguous viewpoint about the domination is the subject at issue for recent studies which compare the early Frankfurt vision with the ecological thoughts, and also for Interpreters about the alienation on the early Frankfurt school. The theory of “societal relationships with nature” (gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse) which is on going in Germany reworks on the early Frankfurt vision and focuses on how “nature” is constructed in society, but, at the same time, how society is materially mediated through its biophysical conditions. According to it, the so-called ecological crisis should be reduced neither to the crisis of “nature in itself,” nor to the crisis of our social-economic structures, but understood as the crisis in societal relationships with nature.