Nature as a concrete other an alternative voice in Kant's conception of beauty and dignity

Abstract

How “universalist” are anthropocentric universalisms that exclude the nonhuman nature? The early Frankfurt School critique of the “domination of nature” largely fell out of favor in the later critical theory tradition, especially after Habermas’s communicative turn. 1 However, both Habermas and the later generations of critical theorists kept revisiting the question of nature. 2 As part of these efforts to bring nature back into the critical theory’s focus of attention, this essay takes its lead from Seyla Benhabib’s notion of “concrete other” and seeks to further extend that concept toward the nonhuman nature. The Kantian distinction between the dignity of persons and the price of things reduces nature to a mere means for human purposes. I will start by briefly mentioning how this distinction reemerges in Habermas’s discourse ethics and how Benhabib employs the notion of concrete other for a critical reconsideration of some of the dichotomies underlying Habermasian discourse ethics. I continue her move by extending this discussion to the “human vs. nonhuman” dichotomy. With that objective in mind, I turn to Kant’s Third Critique and uncover a line of argument in his discussion of sensus communis where he undermines his own distinction between the dignity of persons and the price of things by claiming that aesthetic judgments of nature are combined with a moral interest in nature for its own sake. The implication of this argument should have been the ascription of a distinctive kind of dignity to nature, but Kant leaves his line of thinking undeveloped.