Intersubjectivity and ecology: Habermas on natural history

In philosophy, the field of natural history generally explores the transition from natural prehistory to genuine human history. It asks whether, and if so how, the human species rose above the realm of nature. Regarding the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, this type of inquiry is predominantly associated with the essay "The Idea of Natural History" by Theodor W. Adorno (1984; Pensky, 2004). There, Adorno assumes a constant interlocking of nature and history such that we cannot (yet) speak of a truly human history. But there is another version of natural history in Critical Theory, namely, that of Jürgen Habermas. Often overlooked, there exists no systematic discussion of it until now. One of the two central aims of this article is to close this gap and highlight key features of Habermas's version of natural history. What sets it apart is that it is thoroughly intersubjective: The natural history of Habermas brings out the role of linguistically based cooperation in the transition to human history. As we will see, this theme runs through his oeuvre since a 1958 article on philosophical anthropology at least, though it emerges most elaborately only in his Also a History of Philosophy (originally published in 2019). In this book, Habermas looks for signs of reason in history. This search is triggered by the diagnosis that autonomous collective action lacks traction to counter the aberrations of modernity. To solve this problem, he puts forward a history of learning processes. Although it is essential for this overarching purpose, the discussion around the book has thus far entirely ignored natural history. This deficit can be compensated for by exploring Habermas's take on the works of two anthropological thinkers, Johann G. Herder and Michael Tomasello. The engagement with their writings establishes a natural-historical point of departure for his quest to detect reason in history. The second aim of this article is to show that, in his occupation with them, Habermas marginalizes a crucial insight of Tomasello and especially of Herder—the dependence of the course of history on ecological circumstances—and accordingly underestimates the significance of environmental conditions for propelling collective self-determination. Whereas the first aim is more interpretive, this second aim has a critical intent, foregrounding the influence of the natural environment on developments in the intersubjective dimension. The overall argument of this article proceeds as follows. The first section provides an overview of the hitherto overlooked role of natural history in Habermas's thinking. It proves to be a constant throughout his work. The second section continues this overview by analyzing his engagement with Herder in Also a History of Philosophy. Drawing on Herder's natural history, Habermas conceptualizes his own history of learning processes. The third section subsequently concludes the interpretive part of the article with Habermas's take on Tomasello's work. He refers to Tomasello in order to reveal how the emergence of linguistic intersubjectivity came about. The fourth section argues that, compared with both Tomasello and Herder, Habermas virtually views human history as if it were decoupled from ecological circumstances, hence necessitating a recoupling. Finally, the fifth section advocates an ecological decentering of human self-determination. A history advancing in an autonomous mode is not independent of environmental influences but one aware of its ecological dependencies. In a certain way, it may be considered a branch of zoology: Its subject is man as a species, which it compares morphologically and physiologically with other animal species and which is also genetically related to them. It deals with the natural history of man, his 'descent' from the so-called anthropoids, the great apes. According to this description, philosophical anthropology understands man as a relative and descendant of animal species, with which he sometimes has more and sometimes has less in common.1 At the same time, it solely belongs to zoology "in a certain way." Although it uses comparable methods, the clause clarifies that its object of investigation is categorically different from those of zoological disciplines. Implicit here is a reference to the Aristotelean differentiation between the reasonless animal and the human species with rational speech or "logos" at its disposal. Despite his work's many twists and turns, this anthropological difference remains a continuously refined constant, along with the underlying idea of our natural-historical descent from the great apes. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Natural history, Habermas argues, has overcome itself by producing language, the medium that lifts our species out of the realm of nature. In a letter written to Helmuth Plessner some years later, he accordingly defends the hypothesis "that the acquisition of language is the most important factor for the humanization of our chimpanzee" (Habermas, 1974, p. 139; my translation). The processes of natural evolution were primarily responsible for the development of the human species prior to the development of language. Once these natural processes led to the acquisition and expansion of capacities of symbolically mediated interaction and role-taking capacities, the processes of sociocultural evolution became dominant in the further development of the species. In The Theory of Communicative Action, his magnum opus from 1981, Habermas incorporates this evolutionary differentiation into his full-fledged paradigm of intersubjectivity. In the course of the discussion of George H. Mead's idea of socialization, Habermas (1987, pp. 10−11) indicates that he wants to shed light on the natural-historical "question of the emergence of a higher-level form of life characterized by a linguistically constituted form of intersubjectivity that makes communicative action possible." With "emergence," he deliberately chooses a term that expresses the immanent development of a new form of integration from precursory forms. As explained by him, the great apes had to cross this "threshold of anthropogenesis" (Habermas, 1987, p. 22) at a certain point during prehistory because, otherwise, the initial sociocultural state would not have been reached, from which point the human species has been moving in markedly different directions ever since.2 By linking up with Mead, Habermas's magnum opus undertakes a natural-historical underpinning of language-based, intersubjective socialization. Against this background, the preoccupation with Herder's and Tomasello's natural history in Also a History of Philosophy appears as a resumption of earlier thoughts. However, before we come to this book and look more closely at the emergence of intersubjectivity, let me conclude the overview of natural history as a constant in Habermas's thinking with his discussion of eugenics. After natural-historical questions receded into the background with the turn to discourse ethics and democratic theory before and after the publication of Between Facts and Norms in 1992, they resurfaced in The Future of Human Nature from 2001. Although Habermas (2003a, p. 106) acknowledges the far-reaching impact of "the biological disillusionment about the position of man in natural history" in the wake of the Darwinian revolution,3 he holds on to his position that there is a differentia specifica between humans and all other beings. Only humans, he asserts, raise validity claims. Animals, on the contrary, "do not belong to the universe of members who address intersubjectively accepted rules and orders to one another" (Habermas, 2003a, p. 33). The language-based capacity to address intersubjectively accepted norms represents for him an essential component of a species-ethical self-understanding, a self-understanding that he thinks is disturbed when we manipulate the genetic makeup of unborn human beings beyond purely preventive measures. Once again, language, as a product of natural history, and the skills it brings are what set humans apart. Therefore, we can state that the natural-historical motif of origin of the human ability for language forms a constant that binds together different phases of Habermas's oeuvre. What is more, this motif not only appears in his earlier writings. It also plays a fundamental role in Also a History of Philosophy, bringing us to Habermas's more recent work and his discussion of the natural history of, first, Herder and, second, Tomasello. The impetus for Also a History of Philosophy is that collective action currently lacks a motivational pull for self-determination, with all recourses to ideas of divine justice blocked in our post-metaphysical age.4 Reason has done well, Habermas says, in abandoning the reliance on metaphysical worldviews, but now it struggles with its weak motivational force. Because of this, he searches for a rationally available substitute, which he finds in learning processes. Progress already achieved in the past, even if only partially and temporarily, is supposed to motivate us for the complex challenges ahead. Habermas does not presuppose general historical laws and certainly not a telos toward which history as a whole runs. He only wants to explain that intermittent learning processes left a mark in history—that is his answer to Kant's third fundamental question about what we may hope (Kant, 1992, p. 538). He contends that the assertiveness of rational objectives in the past proves that progress through collective efforts is possible in principle. Thus, a spark of hope can be fanned in the past, to borrow a phrase from Benjamin (2003, p. 391), instilling in our contemporaries the courage to strive for joint solutions to problems even under challenging circumstances. Habermas believes and, more importantly, wants others to believe that they can intentionally reshape today's globally intertwined societies. One might call this the cosmopolitan purpose of Also a History of Philosophy. Having provided this brief overview of Habermas's project, the function of natural history in this context requires some explanation. For this purpose, I refer to Habermas's two mainstays for natural history, beginning with Herder. Herder represents the pivotal forerunner of the concept of learning processes. Due to historiographical similarities, Habermas even borrows his book's title from Herder's Also a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, where he outlines his view of history.5 This conjuncture allows us to illuminate the fundamental features of their approaches by comparison. For my argument, it is of particular interest where Habermas deviates from Herder. However, we first need clarity about their central commonality to comprehend this difference. For Herder (2002, p. 77) as well as Habermas, humans are "the only linguistic creatures." They both believe that the human species can, like no other species, tackle problems cooperatively by using language and pass on knowledge about solutions intergenerationally. For them, this ability opens the opportunity for long-term learning processes. Without symbolically mediated interactions, such processes would be inconceivable. Due to language, humans are the "creatures capable of learning" who can aspire toward their "advancement" (Herder, 1989, p. 104)6—that is the bridge from Herder to Habermas. One could elaborate on this conjuncture in various ways. I will restrict my analysis to the natural-historical bedrock of their theories because this is where the decisive deviation of the Frankfurt School theorist and the thinker of Weimar Classicism occurs. The latter lays the cornerstone for his view of history in the Treatise on the Origin of Language. There, Herder defines the uniqueness of humans based on the connection that humans, as opposed to animals, have with their surroundings. Whereas animals are bound up in specific environments, humans, he thinks, are exempt. "Each animal has its circle," Herder (2002, p. 78) states, illustrating this statement by referring to the honeybee. Honeybees may build their hives with an astonishing "wisdom," "but beyond these cells and beyond its destined occupation in these cells," he claims, "the bee is also nothing." To his mind, the habitat is so confined because of an instinctual fixation. The "strength and sureness of instinct" (Herder, 2002, p. 77) may enable honeybees and animals in general to flourish in their species-specific environment while, at the same time, limiting their activity to this sphere. As Herder (1989, p. 103) underscores again in the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, honeybees are "intimately interwoven" with their environment and even "enclosed" by it. The existence of animals, such as bees, is constrained to a "very narrow and confined circle" in which they are entirely hard-wired. Diametrically opposed stands man, whom Herder (2002, p. 128) distinguishes as the "freely active, rational creature." He takes the view that humans are not locked up in a particular environment but have the privilege of finding dwelling places in many different surroundings. Note that this unrestraint does not imply that the habitat in which humans live is insignificant to their forms of life. It merely means that the ties between innate modes of reaction and outer stimuli do not universally determine their actions. Herder (2002, p. 84) notes that humans possess a "free circle of taking-awareness." For him, this room for maneuver or freier Besinnungskreis is the advantage of not being tied like animals. So, what might seem like a lack at first opens a crack for a sphere of negative freedom at a second glance. Stimuli from their surroundings, so the reasoning goes, do not toss humans impulsively back and forth. By taking awareness, humans can instead gain a prudent look at separate phenomena and thereby loosen the natural order of things. Figuratively speaking, they can steer their perception of the "whole ocean of sensations" to "a single wave" (Herder, 2002, p. 722). Therefore, Habermas (2019, p. 451; my translation) is correct in his analysis of Herder that awareness constitutes the capacity "with which the human mind emerges from natural prehistory." Being a human subject means standing in a circumspect relation to the natural environment.7 What we find in Herder is thus a kind of relational designation of the "human." This will be returned to in due course, but first, it is important to tie the argument back to Habermas and his paradigm of intersubjectivity. Herder ultimately needs to clarify how awareness comes about, i.e., the cutting of the cord of the human subject from the realm of nature. Even though Herder's approach to societal developments is intersubjective, as Habermas illustrates, his underlying natural history is not. It rests on what Habermas calls the "philosophy of the subject"; that is to say, it examines the bilateral relationship between an individual being and its surroundings. From this angle, however, it must remain unresolved how any being could "pull itself out of the swamp by its own hair." Conscious of this bootstrapping problem, Habermas deviates from the subject-philosophical paradigm, assuming that cooperation with others is indispensable for escaping from the natural order of things. That is why Tomasello's natural history is productive for him. According to Tomasello, humans are creatures whose being originates from association. In a nutshell, humans become human through interactions with their conspecifics. Habermas (2010, p. 167) praises this point as the crucial insight of Tomasello's natural history: "He," unlike Herder, "no longer concentrates on the solitary cognizing subject." Both agree that dissociation from nature results from association with others or, in Habermas's (2023, p. 157) words, from "the interlocking of one's own perspective with the perspective taken over from the others on the same object." Another example, that of the ape, sheds light on this natural-historical thesis and serves as a key to the intersubjective explanation of the transition to human history that Habermas adopts. Tomasello, too, attempts to determine what distinguishes humans from animals. To do so, he addresses the animals most similar to Homo sapiens, the other species of the family of the great apes. If one can draw a line between them and humans, the distinction is expected to apply to all other animals, a fortiori, since these are more alien to us than our closest relatives. As opposed to Herder, however, who explored the anthropological difference before the breakthrough of On the Origin of Species, the distinctiveness of humans requires a different explanation after the Darwinian paradigm shift. Homo sapiens is, as Habermas (2023, p. 111) underlines, similar to orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas in that he also is a "product of the natural evolution of the mammals and great apes." We share a pedigree with the other species of our family. Hence, asking how we differ from, for example, chimpanzees implies the question of when natural evolution took two different directions. The temporal vantage point is why Tomasello's natural history is called "evolutionary anthropology." There is also another related difference to Herder, which is of even more significance regarding the relationship between intersubjectivity and ecology. This difference concerns the transition with which Homo sapiens has risen above the realm of nature and embarked on a truly historical trajectory. Tomasello depicts this transition in terms of sociogenesis. Seen sociogenetically, the history of our species unfolds as a history of social order. The underlying thesis is that the moment when social orders came into existence coincided with the moment when human subjects entered the stage. So, Homo sapiens has neither emerged from preexisting social orders nor vice versa. Instead, they are co-original. Statements about what came first, human individuals or collectives, do not make sense on these grounds. Tomasello's perspective recognizes individuals and collectives as formed through a reciprocally constitutive relation. Both sides have forged each other through a series of adaptations over a long period of time. This standpoint, however pioneering it may be, does not free him from the question of how humans—seen now as social beings all along—initially appeared on stage. The simultaneous occurrence of human subjectivity and encompassing social orders does not exempt him from revealing the turning point between natural and sociocultural evolution. The striking cognitive difference between how chimpanzees and humans communicate and interact with their respective conspecifics is that primates make an egocentric use of their astounding ability to act intentionally, understand the intentions of others and make practical inferences …. Chimpanzees do not cooperate with each other in the sense of several conspecifics coordinating their actions to achieve a common goal. It is crucial to see that coordination between two or more agents toward a joint goal is not only at the bottom of shared intentionality, as Tomasello defines it. Moreover, it supplies the basic pattern of how language works, according to Habermas. At the core, this trilateral pattern comprises the "interlocking of a horizontal relationship between persons with a vertical relationship to states of affairs proceeding from this shared basis" (Habermas, 2023, p. 155). The version of natural history introduced in Also a History of Philosophy culminates in the idea of linguistically generated intersubjectivity. Tomasello's evolutionary anthropology is a stepping stone for Habermas to bring out this intersubjective heart of humanity. Intersubjectivity marks the endpoint of natural prehistory, and it simultaneously constitutes the starting point for genuine human history, which, as laid out earlier, contains learning processes through communicative interaction. As for the overall argument of this article, the preceding analysis serves as a scaffold to frame my query about Habermas's historiography. To its detriment, his view of history skates over the relationship between intersubjectivity and the world of natural entities. Despite the advantages the paradigm of intersubjectivity offers, we should be careful not to ignore these ecological relations. Sociogenesis, i.e., the reciprocal development of encompassing social orders and embedded socialized beings, remains attached to the natural environment, even if we assume a prehistoric transition that lifts the human species out of nature. We must take into account the influences of the natural environment on historical developments to understand the past, present, and future. In the next section, I advance in this direction by consulting the writings of Tomasello and Herder again, but this time from an explicitly ecological angle. As natural history turned out to be of major relevance in Also a History of Philosophy, I would go a step further than Eduardo Mendieta (2018, p. 297), who comments that Habermas engages with the so-called Axial Age "to retrieve a truly common past, in order to begin to fashion a truly common future." Habermas's narration takes us even further back than Mendieta presumes, namely, to the genesis of humankind. By this, he intends to promote an image of the human species that fits the aim of corporative learning and self-determined collective action of, ultimately, global reach (cf. Habermas, 2023, p. 38). If communicative cooperation is part and parcel of being human, then it appears logical to hold on to that skill even in the face of daunting prospects. After all, why should humankind give up its evolutionary advantage in times of global challenges and backslide into a primitive egocentric mode of reasoning when working together through linguistic interaction has already proven to be the most promising tool to cope with problems since the dawn of history? One can see from this how natural history functions not only as a point of departure but also as a sort of safeguard for Habermas's cosmopolitan purpose. The natural history of Habermas looks to language as the motor that lends human history its unique dynamic. The problem is that this leverage effect leads him to study history mostly as a decoupled developmental path. For him, the formation of language is a caesura in the wake of which the history of humans took on a life of its own. I do not disagree on drawing a line between natural prehistory and human history. I solely want to make the case that, based on any such distinction, we must not forget the enduring influences of and dependencies between social orders and their natural environment. Such a disregard is problematic because we should not fall prey to the belief that autonomy vis-à-vis nature has something to do with independence from it. Without due regard for the relationship with nature, we can neither discern what distinguishes self-determination nor what might endanger it. In favor of Habermas's guiding value, we should move beyond him in this respect. This criticism can be made more tangible by referring to his own sources, Tomasello and Herder. Regarding the discussion of Tomasello's thought in Also a History of Philosophy, one of his vital insights actually opposes any isolation of history from natural developments. When tying in with Tomasello, one should also consider the proposition that the ancestors of Homo sapiens were "forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways" (Tomasello, 2014, pp. 4−5).10 More precisely, Tomasello (2014, p. 36) states that our animal ancestors had to find "a new foraging niche" because of a collapse of their food supply due to a spread of ground-dwelling apes. He asserts that a stark "disappearance of individually obtainable foods" eventually occurred (Tomasello, 2014, p. 124), and he infers that this change led to the shift toward cooperative foraging, which, in turn, gave rise to shared intentional language as a breakthrough medium of collective coordination. According to this line of argument, linguistically constituted intersubjectivity has its roots in an advantageous adaptation to biotic factors. That these factors have so decisively contributed to the emergence of humankind suggests that we pay attention to them when reconstructing further historical events and trends. Tomasello, in any case, defends a similar position. He believes that "differences in cultural practices" are related to "highly variable local ecologies" (Tomasello, 2014, p. 141). Even though I do not refute Habermas's claim that the history of humankind has parted from natural evolution, I find it essential to reconstruct this history without abstraction from environmental effects. Habermas, unilaterally focusing on intersubjectivity, loses sight of its interdependence with the natural world. In what follows, I bring this imbalance into sharper focus by turning to Herder's philosophy anew. As explained above, Herder thinks of human forms of life as reproducing themselves through communication. That, however, expresses only half the truth. He also locates them in a natural environment with manifold influences. In his view, societies (a term that he does not use) perform acculturation and acclimatization; that is, the inward integration into a linguistically textured social order and the outward integration into a physical environment. Although Habermas incorporates the first side into his paradigm of intersubjectivity, he passes over the second side, an asset of Herder's theory. Put a little differently, Herder indeed frames the history of Homo sapiens "anthropologically as the result of an organic empowerment of linguistically socialized human beings into collectively learning authors of their diverse ways of life" (Habermas, 2019, pp. 428−429; my translation). However, leaving it at that discounts the effect of the ecology on historical developments. From Herder's thesis that humans are not fixed to a specific habitat, it does not follow that they are independent of environmental impacts. To illustrate this point, I will elaborate on an example he invokes. In the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, Herder refers to variables such as wind, precipitation, temperature, seasons, and the overall atmosphere as causes for divergences in the history of humanity.11 The "picture of the much-changing climate," he claims, influences the human body, psyche, and the social orders in which we live (Herder, 1989, p. 266). As a matter of fact, Herder (1989, p. 265) speaks of a "climatic spirit of laws" with allusion to Montesquieu (1989, pp. 231−307). It is worth mentioning that he takes pains to avoid deterministic inferences from the natural environment to the respective human forms of life. He explicitly states that the prevailing climate influences developments in the social realm but does not dictate them; "the climate does not force, but it inclines" (Herder, 1989, p. 270). Now, there is no question that—just as the climate is an epitome of forces and influences to which both the plant and the animal contribute and which serves everything living in a reciprocal relationship—man is also instated master of the Earth in that he changes it by art. Since he stole the fire from the sky and his fist forged iron, since he forced animals and his confreres together and educated them along with the plant to his service, he has in many ways contributed to the change of it. Herder says that, because the climate is "in a reciprocal relationship" with societies, the use of fire, metal extraction and processing, the domestication of animals, the cultivation of plants, and the foundation of settlements cause climatic change. In order to extract my Herderian objection to Habermas, it is helpful to update this assessment. Current climate change, which is gaining momentum all over the planet, confirms Herder's observations and surpasses them at once. On the one hand, it has become irrefutable that humans impinge on the climate not only on a local but on a global scale. On the other hand, more and more feedback loops arise, i.e., the environmental outputs of modern societies return as inputs. Anthropogenic climate change results in increasing repercussions. Societies everywhere find themselves in a situation of adaptation to global warming and its knock-on effects. As a result of this backlash, some seem to get closer to the tipping point at which the climate no longer "inclines," as Herder argued it would, but where it does ultimately "force" societies into specific reactions. So-called climate migration, which continues to increase due to, for example, more extreme weather, rising sea levels, and desert formation, is one case of this turnaround. Today's societies are on the verge of squandering what can be called the atmosphere of negative freedom. Herder presents proto-sociological and proto-ecological explanations for the course of human history because he is convinced that societies and their environments mutually influence each other.12 At the same time, he tries to avoid a strong naturalism. The "dwelling place," he highlights, "does not yet account for everything" (Herder, 1989, p. 339). Compared to that, the natural environment plays an insignificant role in the historiography of Habermas. While his forerunner conceptualizes an interdependence between societal developments and the environment, Habermas virtually proceeds as if the two were disconnected. Admittedly, Habermas (2023, p. 75) emphasizes at one point that there currently is a need for autonomous collective action a