Subject: Re: HAB: 'Nature broods'
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:00:55 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)



On 27 Jul 2000 10:03:00 -0500 Bill Hord <HORD_B-AT-hccs.cc.tx.us> wrote:

> In a review of the Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture
> the following quote is attributed to Habermas: '[W]hile outer nature
> broods in its way on revenge for the mutilations we have inflicted on
> it, nature within us also raises its voice'.  (This sentence is
> apparently quoted in Ch. 6 of the Cambridge Companion.)
> 
> Can anyone identify the printed source in Habermas's writings for this
> quote?  (The review seems to hint that "the nature within us" refers
> obliquely to psychoanalysis.)

In response to a question about the problem faced as a result of the 
progressive destruction of the environment, and the accompanying apocalyptic 
mood, Habermas comments:

It's true that the time bombs of a recklessly exploited natural world are 
ticking faintly and persistently. But it's also true that while [outer?, KM]
nature, in its own way, plots [broods?, KM] its revenge for the mutilations we 
have inflicted on it, nature also lifts its voice in us. Adorno spoke 
evocatively of the 'mindfulness of nature in us.' The paralyzing sadness that 
overcomes us when confronted with a landscape destroyed, poisoned, literally 
asphyxiated by human hands and by the trash of civilization, is unmistakable. 
But on the other hand, the voice of our feelings would lose its own warning 
force if we melancholically give ourselves over to this sadness, or if the 
warning is suppressed by the urgency of our most immediate needs. We won't 
escape from the double bind of ecology and the market economy by getting sucked 
into the pull of these intuitive end-of-the-world moods. Instead, we have to 
let ourselves learn from our own feelings. Only further enlightenment - docta 
spes - has grown from the devastation of enlightenment. Totalizing critiques of 
reason - which reason itself brings to confusion - are worthless. Nemo contra 
Deum nisi Deus ipse - which is not to appeal to some sort of deified reason, 
but on the contary to say that it is only through reason that we can determine 
the limits of our own rationality. This is the fundamental figure of Kantian 
thought that was definitive for modernity. And modernity can't just be peeled 
off like a dirty shirt. It's in our skin. We find ourselves in the condition of 
modern life: we didn't freely choose it; it is existentially unavoidable. But 
for the opened eyes of mdoernity, this condition also implies a challenge, and 
not just disaster.

>From "Europe's Second Chance" pg. 94 The Past as Future (Habermas interviewed 
by Michael Haller).

If there is a reference to psychoanalysis here, it is through the connection 
with Adorno...

ken



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