Thinking beyond the ecological present: Critical theory on the self-problematization of society and its transformation

Abstract

This article assesses the contribution of a long tradition of critical inquiry to understanding how ‘felt contact’ with the world, in this instance a heating planet and its detrimental impacts, provokes ‘thinking beyond’ its limits to take account of the cosmopolitan potentials created by new planetary conditions. In particular, it examines the contributions of Hegel, Marx, Adorno and more recently Rosa to a critical theory of subjective resonance and reflective learning from encounters with damaged life. It notes the significance of these experiences to new initiatives aimed at forcing constructs of justice to turn more imaginatively towards the implications of embodied contact with climate adversity, and to addressing deepening contradictions between ideals of justices and lived struggles to protect nature and thought’s freedom from domination.

Introduction

Over the years, critical theory has offered much in the way of a devastating critique of the common structural roots of humanity’s various ills (economic, psycho-social, cultural, political and ecological) in capitalism’s historical mission of expansion and accumulation, as well as peculiar mode of relating to the world in ways ‘hostile’ to resonant experiences (Rosa, 2019, p. 41). Few, perhaps, have been more prolific in this regard as first generation critical theorists (e.g. Adorno, 1973; Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002; Marcuse, 1991 and affiliates such as Fromm, 1994). Inspired by the writings of Hegel (1975, 2011 [1978]), Marx (1975 [1844], 1976a [1867], 1976b [1846]), Simmel (1964), Lukács (1971) and Freud (1991), these theorists sought to explain distinct pathologies of the social in terms of capitalism’s invasion of all spheres of life.

Along with this diagnosis, however, has been another thread of thinking in critical theory noting how the inhumanities of this order could not fill the subject with despair if it did not also ‘harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the whole’ (Adorno 1973 [1966], pp. 377–378). Capitalism may give rise to serious perversions in human relations (Marcuse, 1974) yet we still encounter these effects with the expectation that its better potentials will somehow speak meaningfully to us and, in doing so, enable us to transform society (Rosa, 2019 [2016], p. 189). The search for meaningful connections with a world heavily ‘mutilated’ by centuries of capitalist destruction may seem like an illusory project to many. For critical theory, however, it is one governed by a basic species need to connect meaningfully with one’s world and to close ‘the unavoidable gap between ourselves and others’ (Rosa, 2020, p. 399). Establishing resonance with a wider world remains an essential aim, even if one that is prone to relapse and malfunctioning (Susen, 2020). Rather than emanating only from positive worldly encounters, resonant relationships also frequently emerge from a ‘felt contact’ (Adorno, 1974) within situations of crisis. Addressing ecological problems, for instance, can elicit a sense of meaningful purpose in the subject and a stronger sense of their capacity to change a problematic reality.

Rosa’s insights on resonance, especially resonant relationships emerging from scenarios of suffering or alienation, are an important elaboration of a long tradition of thinking in critical theory emphasizing how present social conditions are felt and understood by the perceiving subject. Through a ‘felt contact’ with ‘actually existing’ worldly conditions (Adorno, 1974), the thinking subject may choose to actively disengage from a world of ecological destruction or, alternatively, conceptualize a critical path towards its transformation. Both options are explored by Rosa through his work on resonance and alienation but also by a long tradition of critical thinking on ‘feeling subjectivity’ (Hegel, 2011 [1978]) and reflective learning as a project of philosophical inquiry and a methodological approach to the study of social change.

Together, thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Adorno and, more recently, Rosa, continue to offer important insights on how domination persists but, equally, how resistance to domination might be dialectically construed from inside domains of oppression and destruction. That is, it could be explored in a manner that does not deny the ‘calamity’ of the domination of capitalism (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 1) but notes how what is just, good and true about this world might be discerned through experiencing, feeling and thinking about the conditions of its deformation. Negations of this world, therefore, might emerge out of engagements with specific or existing conditions of societal destruction. From Kant through to Hegel, to Marx, and four generations of critical theory (see Rosa & Schulz, this issue), there has always been an advocacy of the critical abilities of the thinking and feeling subject to reflect imaginatively on societal sources of harm, first from ‘within’ and then ‘beyond’ their ‘given’ forms (Adorno, 2001).

To emphasize this dialectic of emancipation is not to deny the enduring capacities of capitalism to mute the voice of suffering, including that related to the loss of nature. Rather, the aim is to point to ways in which its sway over popular thinking is sometimes challenged by critical reflexive mediation of lived experiences of adversity. Reflections from damaged ecological life do not inspire qualities of feeling that go nowhere, so to speak, but occasionally provoke imaginative reconstructions of dangerous environmental conditions as evidence of contradiction in the truth content of established ideas of justice and responsibility. They may also inspire new ‘thought communities’ directed at transforming relations with nature in a world experiencing potentially fatal climate change. The discussion below will focus on ways in which such thought communities have found expression in the sphere of law. Here, several recent legal challenges reveal how ‘felt contact’ with ever more threatening environmental conditions compels a normatively structured communication to address how agents of transnational climate harm might be more effectively held to account.

The analysis will begin with a brief overview of key contributions of critical theory that address the capacities of thinking and feeling subjects to explore possibilities gleaned from damaged life. It will then assess ways in which lived experiences of climate change, as a pivotal example, may enrich the socio-cognitive capacities of contemporary subjects to conceptualize troubled relations with nature in a manner that may lead to thinking beyond their limits (Adorno, 2001, p. 19). It notes the learning opportunities created by this reflection process, both on the individual and collective institutional level, in terms of how freedoms are formulated through creative thought processes (Adorno, 1973) and subsequently realized through reflection-led action sequences. It ends by addressing how the growing trend towards communicatively synthesizing climate-related experiential content with ideas of cosmopolitan justice further extends potentials for institutional change.

A critical theory of feeling subjectivity and socially conditioned thought

Belief in the critical capacities of the thinking and feeling subject has been examined by many theorists over the years, from Kant’s (1998 [1781]) insights on the power of imaginative thought to Hegel’s account of the relationship between reason and reality (Adorno, 1993, p. 138), Marx’s argument on the political possibilities of self-feeling (Adorno, 1973, p. 56; Marx, 1976a [1867]), Peirce (1960) on sense perception and cognitive awakening, Dewey (1984) on the learning potential of disturbance experiences, as well as the more recent contributions of Rosa’s (2019 [2016]) on the resonance building capacities of contemporary relationships with the world. In spite of many differences between these thinkers, there are some points of convergence. One theme explored by all is the conditioning effects of lived experience on the cognitive capacities of society’s subjects. Second, how the immediacy of this experience always contains something more than just itself – subjectivity (Adorno, 1993, p. 59). In his reading of Hegel, Adorno (1993, p. 54) explains how lived experience always entails a ‘dialectical movement’ between the objects in our environment and consciousness, leading to the formation of a third entity – reflection. For Hegel (1975, p. 12), the importance of experience to the reflection process cannot be overstated: ‘in order to accept and believe any fact, we must be in contact with it; or, in more exact terms, that we must find the fact united and combined with the certainty of our own selves’.

Similarly, for Marx (1975 [1844], p. 337), reflections on the alienating force of capitalism and its detrimental impacts on humanity’s ‘species being’ arise first from a dialectical engagement with its everyday character. Only via the self-reflexivity of the feeling subject, Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, can humanity develop the creative and emancipatory power necessary to drive an imagination of social justice and societal change. ‘How else should the cognitive faculty be awakened into exercise’, Kant (1998 [1781], p. 136) asks, ‘if not through objects that stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the activity of our understanding into motion to compare these, to connect and separate them’?

The discussion below assesses the value of this tradition of critical inquiry into the relationship between experience and reflection in terms of its relevance to more contemporary encounters with climate change. In particular, how the subject’s capacity to sense, feel, know and understand the type of immanent ecological dangers facing the world today are conditioned by felt contacts with the same. Comprehension of this reality depends not only on a cognitive registering of the facts of ecological destruction but, equally, a sensing and experiencing of its peculiar, lived qualities in social contexts of reception. When knowledge of the form of this destruction (hard facts) is brought together with knowledge of its experiential content (lived reality) through reflection, neither is left standing as an ultimate truth (Hegel, 1975). Instead, both are brought together as components of an ontological process of knowing a climate-changing world. For Zerubavel (1997, p. 51), this process of mediation is never an innocent exercise but one deeply shaped by the worlds we inhabit. There are no natural filters, Zerubavel adds, which allow the subject to automatically single out, mentally speaking, certain problematic components of a changing environment from a larger whole. What changes we chose to pay attention to or ignore is determined in part by the senses (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 18) but chiefly by the specific ‘thought communities’ (Zerubavel, 1997) into which we buy. The latter help to shape the boundaries of everyday awareness (Norgaard, 2006, p. 362) in the form of socially shared conventions of attention and cultural translation of what aspects of climate change ought to be observed or ignored, as the case may be. There are, as Zerubavel notes, important ‘social underpinnings’ to what elements of our world are recognized, depending on the social and cultural norms of the community in question. Social and cultural context invariably have a conditioning effect on how the value of what we see, hear or feel is measured, depending on what ‘thought communities’ are most influential in any given social setting.

One thought community that penetrates all social contexts is that associated with our socialization into the value orientations and institutional norms of modern capitalist living. Of key concern to Weber (2011), Simmel (1964, p. 411) and Fromm (2001, p. 118) was the capacity of this socialization process to gradually habituate the individual to practices of desensitization (see also Rosa, 2019, p. 333) and an unproblematic acquiescence to the terms on which the ethical irrationalities of a capitalist order are sustained – through limited consciousness of the ‘unimagined heights’ of nature’s destruction (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. xvii). For Honneth (2012, p. 57), a key component of this socialization process is learning to forget how to engage empathetically with a wider world or ‘see’ the extent of capitalism’s devastating impacts. An antecedent recognition of the qualitative richness of the social is thereby neutralized in the interests of accommodating the ‘malignant normality’ of capitalism’s violence against nature (Weber Nicholson, 2019). While the impacts of this socialization process on current (im)perceptions of climate change are undeniable, one wonders if a disinterested disposition on nature’s destruction is all but inevitable? Can cycles of destruction (and their wholesale denial) be broken?

The discussion below will first consider how a collective disengagement from contemporary climate realities is ‘socially compelled’ by the demands of capitalist living before exploring how this estrangement, in spite of its strongly prescriptive element, might, potentially, be undone. Of critical importance here is the mediation of lived experiences of ecological adversity with critical reflection (Adorno, 1974). That is, the need to make sense of ever more direct and dangerous encounters with climate change as experiences of disturbance, contradiction and rift with established patterns of thinking about the good life. It asks if current reflections from damaged ecological life have the potential to provoke more responsive relations with nature and new thinking on the possibilities of another way of living? Before considering these issues, the analysis will first examine what climate change denial entails and assess the various social purposes it serves.

On the current priority of forgetting the true nature of climate destruction

Scenarios where the subject is motivated on the basis of professional or ideological affiliation ‘not to know’ changes occurring in environmental conditions have been well documented by research. The work of Houser et al. (2019; see also Houser et al., 2017), for instance, offers considerable empirical evidence of a selective perceiving and strategic lack of knowledge of the various effects of climate change. Houser et al. (2019) document how farmers in the Midwestern corn belt region of the United States, for example, make sense of the regional biophysical impacts of climate change on their daily lives and note the structuring influence of the political-economic context of farmers’ perceptions of climate-related changes as chiefly ‘barriers to achieving capitalist goals’ (Houser et al., 2017). The peculiar interpretative patterns that Houser et al. observe would indeed suggest that political economic and socio-cultural context exert considerable influence over how subjects make sense of experiences of climate change and relationships with the natural environment more generally. Similarly, Norgaard’s (2006) study of how the peoples of a rural Norwegian community who benefit directly from the wealth generated by fossil fuel production develop certain skills of non-responsiveness to climate change facts by maintaining a distance between what is known about the risks posed by high fossil fuel energy production and consumption on the one hand, and personal lifestyle choices on the other. In this context, ideological and social forces are said to play a significant role in restricting the boundaries of everyday awareness and limiting what biophysical changes subjects pay attention to (Norgaard, 2006).

In many ways, the findings of Norgaard or Houser et al.’s research would seem to support Honneth’s (2001) thesis on social pathologies of recognition, where a limited perception and evaluation of climate change problems might be read as a ‘second order disorder’ (Zurn, 2011) stemming from a disconnect between first order, experientially grounded climate change impacts and a second order reflexive comprehension of the same. Further, we may note certain similarities in the tendency of all to explain this disconnect, or pathology of recognition, in terms of reoccurring ‘mental habits’ (Honneth, 2012) acquired through the socialization process, where a forgetting of nature’s intrinsic value is encouraged. While in the case of Honneth, it would seem these habits are largely passively acquired, in the research of Norgaard, habits of forgetting require a more conscious, active effort to preserve their relevance. Even so, a ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ (ibid., p. 64) is not understood in either case as arising from a condition of sensory deficiency but rather from a disposition that does not allow the true nature of climate change to be seen or heard. Climate change is thereby made to intentionally ‘disappear’ in ways that evidently involve not a physical non-presence of signs of ecological destruction but rather their ‘non-existence in a social sense’ (Honneth, 2001, p. 111). To this extent, climate change’s socially orchestrated invisibility (‘figurative invisibility’) presupposes the visibility of its effects in the literal sense. Such pathologies of recognition are clearly evident today in a lack of attentiveness to a growing range of climate-related problems, from mass displacement, soil erosion, crop failure and sea level rises. All and more are observed in the immediacy of their occurrence with reifying accuracy, without critical depth or memory of their social origins.

In her readings of Honneth’s account of a forgetfulness of recognition, Butler (2012, pp. 100–101) points out that forgetfulness presupposes the possibility of recognition re-emerging if conditions so allow it. Indeed, it is this persisting ‘trace’ of the possibility of recognition, or what Rosa (2019 [2016]) prefers to call resonance, that constitutes the primary reason why the current priority of forgetfulness must be explained. Climate change denial or recognition failure, as learned mental habits, can never fully succeed in eradicating the subject’s originally involved and ‘caring engagement with the world’ (Butler, ibid., p. 101). The possibility of a more involved perspective or resonant relationships with a climate changing world, therefore, remains. The recent research of Brulle and Norgaard (2019, p. 887) highlights the various ways in which strategies of perspectival selectivity on climate change are coming under increasing pressure, especially as climate-related events grow more severe and disruptive to the ‘individual routines, institutional behaviours, ideological beliefs and overall regimes of practice’ of everyday life. The authors observe how various routine behaviours and modes of thinking (including habits of denial or forgetting) are increasingly subject to scrutiny, leading, on occasion, to a change in taken for granted assumptions about the permanence of current social and ecological worlds (see also Alexander, 2012).

As experiences of flash flooding, storms and wildfires intensify, their traumatizing effects not only disrupt the routine practices of daily life but also shared narratives of social order. In spite of these challenges, it is not uncommon for climate-related events to still be met with a ‘business as usual’ response on account of ‘the legacy effects of prior socialization’ (Brulle & Norgaard, 2019, p. 897) and engrained patterns of selective interpretation and avoidance. Even so, climate change effects can still be shown to invoke cultural trauma (Alexander, 2004; Eyerman, 2015) in ways that not only destabilize the practical utility and ongoing normative validity of strategies of denial (Brulle & Norgaard, 2019, p. 894; Sztompka, 2004, p. 164) but also disrupt traditional identity narratives (e.g. contemporary society as progressive) and create a need for ‘emotional, institutional and symbolic reparation’ (Alexander, 2012, p. 16) for environmental losses. Even if dominant cultural beliefs and practices (e.g. ‘business as usual’) survive, there is still growing evidence to suggest a struggle is taking place on the individual psychological and collective level where issues of security, wellbeing, responsibility, justice and rights are subject to more intense debate (Brulle & Norgaard, 2019, p. 898). Greater levels of interpretive variety today suggest structure-undermining forces are gaining ground and in ways likely to induce significant changes in how climate change effects are registered ‘socio-mentally’ over time.

From this perspective, the more problematic lived experiences of climate change become, the more likely they are to become ‘socially visible’ (Honneth, 2001, p. 119) and recognizable to greater numbers. Already, there is evidence to suggest that youth register, feel and socially envisage the effects of climate change differently to older generations (see Ballew et al., 2019; Schiffman, 2022), a finding which may be explained by the way children have yet to learn what is socially supposed in terms of cultural standards of ‘relevance/irrelevance’ and other key components of the perceptual socialization process. While socialization clearly plays a role in shaping responses to climate change (including socialization into the value orientations and behavioural norms of capitalism), arguably, it does not account for the reflective capacities of contemporary youth and the speculative dimensions of their thinking on the injustice of unmitigated climate change (which Zerubavel’s theory of perceptive socialization might underestimate). Equally in relation to older generations, the weight of traditional habits of seeing the world clearly have not overpowered all capacities to envisage it as otherwise (e.g. Elders Climate Action). Disassociation from the real conditions of the climate present may be experienced by some as a painful maladjustment to damaged life (e.g. states of fear, denial or a forgetfulness of empathetic engagement with the world). The traumatic impacts of climate change may provoke paralyzing forms of fear that do not necessarily lead to action. However, as climate impacts induce higher levels of suffering and loss, they are also likely to provoke an ‘abductive moment’ (O’Mahony, this volume) in states of consciousness, or a ‘modal shift’ away from received ways of thinking that no longer speak meaningfully to the conditions of the present.

Grasped in its synthesis, the ‘experiential content’ of this changing world may inspire in the subject a desire for comprehensive change, including a change in ways of seeing and interpreting humanity’s constitutive connectedness to nature or potential for transformation (Delanty, 2009, p. 3). From the experience of disturbance comes the possibility of insight and further, the potential for new solidarities to emerge among those keen for society to gesture towards a new model of the good society. For Delanty (2009), this imagination is a distinctly ‘critical cosmopolitan’ one on account of its concern with the self-problematization of carbon intense societies and with re-establishing the normative foundations upon which their immanent transformation might be conceived. However, the conditions that make this imagination possible must be explained in more detail. This is where critical theory’s insights on the feeling, perceiving and engaged subject make a particularly valuable contribution to understanding what connects this subject with a wider project of reflective learning.

While consciousness of our intricate connectedness to nature is not consistently displayed, what presence it does have seems to be heavily influenced by the deepening impacts of rising temperatures, wildfire or episodes of flooding, for instance, on our lives. Disturbance provokes a need to investigate both primary (immediate ecological) and secondary conditions (social, cultural, political and legal) contributing to escalating problem scenarios. The disclosing and transformative functions of this reflection process are explored below in terms of their intimate connection with the act of feeling, perceiving and interacting with the material moments of climate change. In that, it takes issue with the arguments of Ollinaho (2016, p. 53) who observes the ‘objective uneventfulness’ and ‘intrinsic irrelevance’ of climate-related changes to most lay people in ‘the sensorily perceivable, physical world’ (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973, p. 5) of everyday life. Climate-related challenges, Ollinaho (2016, p. 61) adds, remain ‘predominantly an issue at the intellectual level’ for most in ways ‘incommensurate with the pragmatic sphere’. On the contrary, I would argue, it is precisely in this domain where climate-related disturbances are experienced most perceptibly by the subject and in ways that have the potential to break learned habits of detached observation and a forgetfulness of recognition of relations of dependency on nature.

When faced with the prospect of more severe episodes of ecological destruction in the future, the perceiving subject may feel compelled to turn these experiences ‘inwards’ (Adorno, 1993, p. 90) in the hope of establishing a clearer understanding of barriers in the way addressing these challenges (including strategies of avoidance, denial, selective knowing) and grounding interpretation more in the profundity of emergent climate scenarios. To understand how this type of reflection may fire ‘the imagination’ (Marx & Engels, 1976b [1846], p. 31) and provoke ‘passion’ (Hegel, 2011 [1978]) in the subject, it is necessary to look at how changing environmental conditions might be felt in the ‘sensorily, perceivable’ domain of everyday life, where ‘feeling subjectivity’ may shift the subject’s register of consciousness of familiar worlds to newer ways of thinking.

As felt contact with climate change conditions grows, knowledge of its social identity evolves, leading to a shift in the nature of its interpretation over time. In more recent years, a distinctly ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ (Delanty, 2009, p. 6) has shaped the development of thought on this front, leading to a re-interpretation of the social relevance of cosmopolitan principles of co-responsibility, cooperation, civic solidarity, universal rights and so on to everyday experiences of climate change. ¹ Before assessing how this imagination informs contemporary perspectives on climate change, it is first necessary to consider how it comes to be endogenized in the interpretive reasoning of the social actor and made to speak to everyday encounters with its effects. With this in mind, the discussion below will draw on insights offered by Peirce (1960) and Dewey (1984) on how interaction with everyday worlds can provoke feeling subjectivity in ways that energize thought’s freedom to think beyond the taken for granted or given. ²

Three stages in the cognition of contemporary ecological worlds

An essential forerunner to reflective thought on deteriorating environmental conditions today is the immersion of the sensing subject in the everyday contexts of ecological change. It is here where sense impressions of more intense heat or poor air quality, for instance, first begin to draw the subject’s attention to the ‘felt qualities’ of climate-change (what Peirce refers to as ‘firstness’). Bodily grounded sensory reactions to changes occurring in one’s everyday living environment are the most elementary components of all ideas generated by the subject (Peirce, 1960). Such reactions reflect the capacities of the senses to generate the raw elements that potentially go into the formation of new insights about the state of a nature that surrounds us. Firstness entails a sensing of some unusual quality in the observed environment (e.g. heat levels as a ‘qualisign’ of change) and establishing an impression of its nature (a ‘sinsign’ of change) on the basis of a testing of existing knowledge, one that may be expressed subsequently in communication (a ‘legisign’). For Zerubavel (2006, p. 17), even sense perceptions are socially patterned. That is, the product of ‘socio-mental acts’ performed by members of particular communities who have been socialized to pay attention to certain aspects of their environment and simultaneously ignore others (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 25). Depending on how the subject has been socialized, only certain sense stimuli may capture their attention. Zerubavel draws an important distinction here between the act of seeing or sensing some change in one’s environment and actually paying attention to its features. Assuming that some changes in a subject’s otherwise ‘unproblematic’ everyday environment (Schutz, 1970) have the potential to draw their attention, these changes may evoke surprise. As Peirce highlights, the capacity to evoke a reaction of surprise in the subject is one of the key elements of feeling subjectivity and the initial basis of the subject’s awareness of changes occurring in their environment.

While firstness can generate a significant potential for perceiving some environmental change, it does not in itself give rise to a fully formed, grounded position on the ‘interpretive relevance’ of this change (Schutz, 1970). At this first stage, change may be experienced as little more than ‘the jar of dissonance’ (Dewey, 1984) or a sense that something different is present in one’s environment. Only when this sense is taken up by an additional range of interpretive procedures can it potentially become an object of more conscious awareness (‘secondness’). When change, or what Dewey (1984) refers to as ‘disturbance’, is encountered more regularly, additional interpretive categories (‘thirdness’) may be used to understand its general relevance as a ‘warranted’ truth (Dewey, 1984; Garrison, 1996). At this stage, noted changes may begin to impose a qualifying effect on the subject’s interpretive reasoning. Although not guaranteed, this qualifying effect can cause the thinking subject to question the validity of prevailing cultural beliefs, especially when confronted by a growing body of counterfactual evidence. Noted changes in nature’s welfare are disclosed from a perspective of engaged involvement, where insight is drawn from the universe of experience to assess the ‘relevance’ of available societal truths on nature’s wellbeing (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973; Zerubavel, 2006). The disclosure of difference may bring into play a series of new cognitive operations that encourage the subject now to ‘think beyond’ what has been presented to date as familiar or predictable, and into deeper spaces of reflection ( Adorno, 2001).

At this stage, insights generated by newer encounters with polluted worlds may be drawn upon to incursively recondition established interpretive positions and reassess the ongoing appropriateness of historically embedded environmental practices and cultural belief systems. The power to make connections and draw new conclusions is driven, above all, by the power of inferential reasoning. These powers relate to the socio-cognitive capacities of the subject to form a distinct interpretive position on what become the increasingly felt qualities of an ecologically challenged world. As these qualities become more pronounced, their capacity to reverse a ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ (Honneth, 2012, pp. 52–53) of nature’s value may also grow. What were once generally imperceptible and largely socially invisible features of the natural order (e.g. gradual increases in air, soil and ocean temperatures, or falls in levels of rainfall) now gain greater thematic relevance due to a change in the regularity of their occurrence and the propensity to perceive them as socially relevant. Such changes, in turn, coincide with shifts occurring in ways of relating to the natural world and the search for more resonant relationships with the same (Rosa, 2019 [2016], p. 53). The loss of stable environmental conditions induces widespread fear but also causes axes of resonance to gain momentum, leading concern for nature’s wellbeing to move more to the fore of social consciousness and public communication. The following section examines the process of resonance-building in more detail, noting the contribution of feeling subjectivity to these efforts.

Reversing a forgetfulness of nature’s value: The productive functions of grief, anger and surprise for resonance-building and cognitive transformation

There is growing evidence today to suggest that cumulative damage to the familiar properties of shared ecological worlds is inducing a significant wounding of the mind as much as the body of the Anthropocene subject. That is, a wounding marked by grief, anger, surprise, guilt and longing for the restoration of nature’s ‘resonance-engendering’ qualities (Albrecht et al., 2007, 2019). Much of the literature on the anxiety-inducing potential of climate change focuses on its debilitating effects on health and wellbeing (e.g. see Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018; Woodbury, 2019), particularly among younger age cohorts (e.g. Twenge, 2000). More recently, Craps (2020, p. 5) has challenged a purely negative reading of these findings by suggesting strong emotional reactions to deteriorating natural surroundings may also serve a productive function. Once understood as a dynamic response to lived experiences of climate change, expressions of surprise, grief or anger on the part of the ‘feeling subject’ (Marx, 1975 [1844]) may be channelled as ‘a resource’ and leveraged in the call for corrective action to address climate change (i.e. be interpreted in ways that may induce ‘motivational relevance’, see Schutz, 1967, p. 130). Kant (2015 [1788]) notes the affective and cognitive role emotions can play in compelling the agent to pay closer attention to the circumstances of action. Reflection, he adds, is always enriched by the emotions. As a generative force, emotions provide pro tanto motives for action (Bagnoli, 2020, p. 145). Subjectively felt grief or anger at nature’s decline, for instance, can draw the subject’s attention to parties responsible for acts of climate destruction (Hobbs, 2019). In this sense, anger tracks the pathways (Nussbaum, 2004, p. 345) of climate-related harms, from their source to their impact, as ‘the coarsely sensuous objectivity’ (Marx, 1976a [1867]) of a heating planet asserts itself with ever greater precision today.

The importance of the immersive context of thought in this instance cannot be overstated (Jaeggi, 2018). Steady changes occurring in the background conditions of everyday living, including more regular encounters with heat stress, rising pollution levels, storm surges and so on, provoke a change in levels of receptivity to and patterns of evaluating ecological dangers. Such changes may challenge established perspectival positions and prompt a move away from viewing certain environmental practices and features of a polluted world as an inevitable part of the modern development process, to one proclaiming these same features as unacceptable. As Piaget (1999) observes, the most important mechanism for progressing from old to newer conditions of understanding any given reality (including the state of nature’s wellbeing) are changes occurring in background conditions. As environmental conditions continue to decline, greater reflective attention may be paid to the way these changes/losses make us feel, leading human relations with nature to be conceptualized as relations of wrongdoing (Kumar, 2003). Higher levels of exposure to the dangers of extreme heat, wildfire or flash flooding, for example, have been shown to increase motivational support for more ‘open thinking’ (Adorno, 2001) on the social origins of these problems and the desire to find imaginative solutions to the same (Beck, 2015).

Recent backlash against conventional understandings of wildfires as ‘non structured’ fires ‘that start by themselves’ is a case in hand. Critics query what it means to define wildfires as ‘spontaneous’ events in the context of deepening anthropocentric climate change. ³ Fire may have always been a component of the natural order but as more of the Earth’s hydrocarbons are brought to the surface and set alight, they contribute to a level of destruction that many believe could have been avoided. More direct encounters with wildfires provoke a change in socio-cognitive reasoning, with the tendency increasingly to view these disaster events as ‘climate-related’ and further, the product of intense industrial histories, poor resource management, deforestation and a lack of investment in fossil fuel alternatives. The social underpinnings of shared understandings of climate change as a distant reality are rigorously tested by new experiential content encouraging a moral reading of wildfires and other climate-related effects as the product of human-led destruction and governance failure (i.e. a lack of commitment to policies aimed at reducing emissions levels). A notable degree of ‘interpretive novelty’ (O’Mahony, 2019, p. 347) is thereby generated in cultural translations of the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of contemporary wildfire devastation in ways heavily informed by lived experience. Similarly, in relation to the problem of ocean acidification, it’s common construction as a problem created by non-specific sources of harm to marine life and food chains in distant or remote regions (e.g. the oceans of the Arctic) is subject to revision of late (Cassotta, 2021). Newer translations of this problem highlight the role played by specific polluters and the way their actions threaten global ocean food webs, fisheries and marine life in general (Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring & Assessment Programme, 2021). In relation to both examples above, it is the immersive contexts of lived experiences of climate change that provoke a shift in perspective on the social origins of these problems.

Addressing contradictions between the real and ideal conditions of everyday life

The more experiences of eco-disturbance are encountered directly, the more likely they are to open up a critical distance between formal institutional efforts to contain the societal relevance of their dangers and everyday contact with their effects. In defence of this argument, I draw on the argument of Adorno (1974) who notes how far from being of ‘inferior status’, encounters with the ‘particularities’ of everyday experience are ‘a driving moment’ in the process of understanding how a social totality is marked by contradiction. The crucial issue here is how the thinking subject responds to the discovery of contradiction between the real and ideal conditions of contemporary social and ecological life. Pandemics, rising temperatures, falling crop yields, the rapid loss of biodiversity and more draw reactions that waver between despair (at the destruction that is), hope (for what could be) and a desire to explore capacities to change endangered futures. As disturbance experiences, these events potentially provoke ‘feeling subjectivity’, expressed as passion and sometimes also a drive (Hegel, 2011 [1978], p. 325) to think beyond imposed limitations and critically confront climate change ‘as it actually exists’ (Adorno, 2006). Adorno (1974) understood the paradox of this situation only too well. Coming to terms with a situation of ecological freefall elicits widespread fear, anger and a deep sense of loss but, equally, a desire to explore how some form of ‘green recovery’ might be initiated beyond the present. In this way, climate-related disturbance experiences offer the thinking and feeling subject an empirical basis from which to reassess the validity of accepted truths and engage imaginatively with the possibility of transforming current situations of crisis.

For Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, p. 246), the key element here is ‘the liberating influence of thought’. Once explored inter-subjectively, critical thinking may energize new interpretive positions on the relevance or, indeed, limitations of present societal models of development. The freedom to think imaginatively about a world beyond catastrophe is stimulated by reflection on ‘the very content of the real’ (Marcuse, 1999, p. 150) elements of current environmental destruction (e.g. increasing temperatures, severe flooding, wildfires, etc.). Reflection encourages a ‘synthesis of the manifold in imagination’ (Kant, 1998 [1781], p. 239) to facilitate a ‘thinking with’ but also ‘beyond’ current ecological realities into ‘openness’ (Adorno, 2001, p. 68) in ways aided by shared grammars of justice.

Once these evaluations become the subject of wider debate, they may inspire new thinking on those actions needed to rectify current wrongdoing, especially when the ‘kinetic dimensions’ (Chakravarti, 2014) of reactions to devastating wildfires, intense flooding or the collapse of mountain glaciers, for instance, spark the type of energies needed to provoke a more societally focused response. In this situation, lived signs of environmental destruction move from being elements of ‘ineffably vague qualitative situations’ (Dewey, 1984 [1930], p. 248) to being formulated as more definitive signs of larger, observable societal problems. Accumulating insights on the state of woodlands, coral reefs, lakes, animal welfare or depleted natural habitats, for instance, gradually become objects of opprobrium, the focal point of newly apparent contradictions in the application and understanding of rights, duties and responsibilities. The ‘qualitative unity’ emerging between local and global scenes of environmental destruction is now assessed in terms of evidence of normative failure. The ‘conceptuality’ (Adorno, 1973, p. 12) of rights, cosmopolitan responsibilities and other duties of care is turned more acutely towards embodied contacts with a climate-changing world. The analysis below looks at how these processes are played out in the sphere of law at present where struggles between societal actors sees legal cosmopolitan norms being re-assessed in terms of their relevance to contemporary encounters with ecological adversity across state borders.

Advancing a cosmopolitan imagination of climate justice in the legal sphere

Increasingly of late, the realization is that many of law’s age-old regulatory instruments (e.g. principles of liability that are temporally and territorially bound) no longer adequately address the inescapably transnational nature of climate change. The challenges created by rising temperatures, for instance, prove too far-reaching and unpredictable to be contained within the boundaries of any one state’s jurisdiction. Law is compelled to adapt its regulatory instruments to a growing range of practical challenges, including the ever-increasing threat of wildfires and other heat-related risks. As it does so, it finds reason to reassess the societal relevance of cosmopolitan principles of shared responsibility, cooperation, universal legality and equality when it comes to addressing such trans-boundary threats.

With the ecological circumstances of local and global communities increasingly affected by interpenetrating harms, the realization is that more rigourous transnational regulatory procedures are needed to ensure a greater cross-border coordination of response efforts, disaster preparedness and ‘co-responsibility’ for collectively produced harms (Apel, 1993; Delanty, 2009, p. 7). In particular, harms to a nature that does not lend itself easily to being ‘carved up’ or divided between the competing territorial interests of states (e.g. the atmosphere, ecosystems, sea microbes, etc.).

Ownership and state territorial jurisdiction clearly do not exhaust entitlements to clean air, pH balanced oceans or stable average temperatures, for example. Equally, occupancy rights cannot be assigned exclusively to such resources as carbonate ions or rainfall. Instead, all earthly inhabitants share these resources as ‘unclaimable’ components of a global commons. Yet as these resources decline, law comes under pressure to prove its commitments to a cosmopolitan ‘common earth’ model of justice and explain why property rights claims to nature (as object) should remain the dominant justice perspective? In this context, the assumption is that climate change creates bad circumstances for those who fail to take advantage of the opportunities their own resource rich territories create for them to adapt to deepening climate adversities. In reality, however, such opportunities and the capacity to avail of them are already limited by cumulative harms. That is, harms generated inside, between and across state borders over time. How might responsibility be allocated then in a truly fair manner?

An object centred view of natural heritage (i.e. nature as property) is not naturally relational (i.e. considerate of the needs of others). Thus, while the notion of ‘shared responsibility’ for the protection of natural resources or the communities dependent on them may be well established in international legal discourse (e.g. preamble to the UNFCCC, 1992), at a deeper level, it runs contrary to many of the norms and reasoning of traditional state liberal thinking (emphasizing a separation of powers among state communities). As long as justice is defined in these terms, what is right for all states to do in terms of ongoing acquisitions of limited seabed, atmospheric or land resources, will not be considered in terms of what are owed to the peoples of climate vulnerable regions. ⁴ Instead, private gain will continue to take precedence over communal loss and insufficient attention accorded to the way agents, in their interactions with land, air and oceanic environments, affect multiple communities. Increasingly, publics challenge law to resolve these contradictions and actualize commitments to a cosmopolitan order of climate justice. Drawing on their communicative powers and political legal rights as citizens, publics demand that law responds more appropriately to contradictions arising between real and prescribed standards of climate justice. ⁵

Law is compelled to consider how a relational model of responsibility for climate change might be extended to incorporate not only what ‘socially connects’ states and regions in their belonging together in one planetary system (Young, 2011) to what also connects them in civic terms. That is, in terms of what binds communities to shared expectations of cosmopolitan justice and legally grounded principles, especially in contexts where the threat of major disaster is very real (Skillington, 2017, pp. 246–247). The impetus for change here comes mainly from a widening gap between institutional cosmopolitan commitments to action and a stable ‘inconsistency in acting’ (O’Neill, 1989) to fulfil these commitments (a dominant theme of discussion at COP27 in November 2022). Contradiction marks the problem-ridden situation of growing numbers forced to consider the various ways in which universal rights to health, a safe environment, or security, for instance, are not reflective of their own lived conditions. As encounters with the effects of climate change intensify, their impact begins to be felt in ways that are more than just physical but also socially, psychologically and culturally relevant. When consciously construed as problematic, these impacts may prompt ‘a confrontation’ with understandings of climate change as relevant only to ‘the world of natural facts’ (Honneth, 2021) and a gradual move towards ‘thinking beyond’ (Adorno, 1974, p. 247) this construction to better possibilities, including those that more imaginatively address ways of democratically regulating the spaces between us.

Shared duties of care and responsibility are brought into dialogue with lived experiences of climate change in the hope of finding their redemptive qualities. One essential mechanism enabling this type of speculative thought is the cosmopolitan imagination (Delanty, 2009). The latter encourages an critical examination of the reasons why existing practices have failed to protect the larger freedoms of interdependent communities (i.e. development, security and the human rights of all, UN General Assembly, 2005), as well as an imaginative reconstruction of the capacities of existing cosmopolitan legal norms to address these issues.

Feeling subjectivity, youth legal activism and the cosmopolitan imagination

In September 2019, 16 youths from 12 countries filed a petition with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey in which they claimed these five states had failed to take the necessary climate mitigation measures to ensure that the rights of children to life, health and culture are protected. The common point of reference for all 16 youths in this instance was personal encounters with climate-related harms affecting health, wellbeing, life and liberty. In October 2021, the Committee on the Rights of the Child responded to the children’s petition in a formal letter in which it accepted the claims of these children that the carbon emissions of the five states in question were affecting the lives, health and culture of children in various world regions and in ways that were also negatively affecting their rights. The Committee concluded that the children had sufficiently justified their claims that the harms they have endured personally (both materially and psycho-emotionally) were indeed legitimate (e.g. the devastating effects of more intense heat waves, deadly forest fires, storms or flooding on personal wellbeing, life plans, community life, etc.). Not only did the CRC Committee accept the children’s claims in this regard but made the decision to consider similar cases in the future where emissions happening in one state pose a significant threat to the health and wellbeing of children in another. The response of the CRC Committee to the children’s complaint in this instance has since provided impetus to other citizen coalitions seeking redress for similarly transnationally sourced climate harms affecting multiple lives and liberties. ⁶ In the process, greater consideration is given to the question of how principles of justice might be situated more effectively within a relational framework accounting for multiple agents, causes and effects and acknowledging geographical, generational and socio-cultural differences between peoples in ways that align a growing range of challenges with the concerns of a cosmopolitan project of justice (Skillington, 2019).

In the case brought by six Portuguese Youths to the European Court of Human Rights against the EU 27 plus UK, Norway, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland and the Ukraine in September 2020, the pollution activities of these states were thought to have ‘sufficiently proximate repercussions’ on the abilities of youth, locally and globally, to achieve security, health and self-determination (as rights guaranteed by various international conventions). That is, repercussions occurring outside, as much as inside each of these states’ own jurisdiction. Other violations noted included breaches of the right to a life free of the fear of climate catastrophe (four of the six are survivors of wildfires in the Leiria region of Portugal in 2017), drawing on personal experiences of the psycho-emotional impacts of disaster events on the wellbeing of these youths and their communities.

Again, in this instance, campaigners demanded that states acknowledge the legal authority of cosmopolitan principles of responsibility, cooperation and duties of care when addressing climate change. At the same time, an imaginative reconstruction of the relevance of the legal principle of ‘presumptive responsibility’ was proposed in an effort to address those problems identified. ⁷ Legal campaigners noted the contribution of multiple agents to increasing flows of embodied carbon, leading to rising sea levels, more frequent and intense heat waves, wildfires, storm surges, ocean acidification and so on. In situations where the numbers contributing to the generation of climate harms is expanding and there is uncertainty as to who is disproportionately responsible, each polluting party may be deemed ‘presumptively responsible’. In this case, the onus is on each accused party to show how they, in fact, did not cause the relevant harms, rather than the more usual scenario where it is the injured party who carries the burden of proving harms are traceable to the actions of specific actors. In the process, states are reminded of obligations to account for the effects of their pollution activities on multiple communities within and across borders and facilitate a more coordinated adaptation to emerging realities (Skillington, 2019, pp. 123–130). Already, ideas of responsibility are being creatively extended along these lines in the hope of addressing the increasingly diffuse, trans-territorial nature of climate harms.

As debate on these issues intensifies, greater interpretive variety is generated around the question of what constitutes a harm agent (e.g. a state, a group of states or corporate entities) or even what may be considered a climate harm (ecological, social, cultural or psychological harms). Feeding this debate is the compelling force of more direct experiences of ecological disturbance, now brought into closer contact with existing knowledge categories and the contradictions that plague their truth content (Adorno, 1993, p. 54). A more creative use of legal rules and structures of argumentation is sought to address current gaps in institutional commitments to a cosmopolitan order of climate justice. In particular, the need to determine how a ‘fair share’ of responsibility for newly identified varieties of transboundary harms might be established?

In attempting to further understanding of the universal scope of rights, duties of care and a planetary model of distributive justice, youth seek to establish a legal conceptualization of climate justice that not only imaginatively extends the institutional relevance of cosmopolitan principles but does so in ways that also increases the resonance of perspectives emerging from the ‘perceivable’ domain of everyday life. It is here that ‘feeling subjectivity’ (Hegel, 2011 [1978]) allows thought to reach back to the material dimensions of daily encounters with ecological destruction in ways that sharpen understandings of the practical need for change. Through legal argumentation and exchange, the experiential content of practical encounters with climate change is drawn into a more focused communication with normative grammars of justice (Forst, 2011, p. 13). As it does, law’s energies are directed towards finding more effective solutions to increasingly complex, yet commonly shared problems.

Conclusion

This article explores the contemporary feeling subject’s engagements with what have become increasingly unstable social and environmental conditions, noting how felt contact with ecological adversity drives a change in perspective on a nature ‘to which we react with fear and desire, as well as with an interpretive, active and cognitive’ mind (Rosa, 2019 [2016], p. 38). What may have once been largely imperceptible and ‘socially invisible’ (Honneth, 2001) features of a climate changing world (the effects of gradual increases in global temperatures) now move more to the fore of social consciousness not only on account of the growing intensity of their impact but also because of their increasing ‘social visibility’, or presence in collective social consciousness.

Of key importance here is how these changes come to be perceived and understood in terms of their potential to undermine socially acquired habits of ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ of nature’s intrinsic value. Reflections on rising temperatures, the greater risk of wildfire, drought or storm surges today provoke further thinking about modernity’s historical relationship with nature as one of monumental failure. In the process, climate change becomes more than the concepts under which it is subsumed (e.g. scientific accounts of a heating planet). It’s increasing social presence encourages thought to ‘think itself through’ felt contact with very real and present dangers into ‘openness’ (Adorno, 2005), or an imaginative reconstruction of the source of our imperilment as a ‘resource’ or a tool that can be used to conceptualize what could or, indeed, needs be different. Reflection may prompt the subject, for instance, to question whether an ‘axis of resonance’ (Rosa, 2019 [2016], p. 41) can still be established between universal concepts of responsibility, human rights or cosmopolitan solidarity and everyday life? The discussion here considers how speculation on these issues is currently played out in the sphere of law where the severity of transboundary climate harms is seen to necessitate a more imaginative application of principles of responsibility, rights and distributive justice.

Coalitions of actors across territories seek to advance a civic connections approach to these issues, where the actions of multiple harm agents are assessed in terms of their combined impact on the rights and circumstances of peoples in various world regions. Responsibility is thereby defined within a larger web of action consisting of many contexts of subjection to climate harms. Arguably, this shift in attention towards varieties of negative relationalism generated by the pollution practices of multiple, transnationally dispersed agents renews the institutional relevance of a cosmopolitan, multi-layered model of justice and creates additional grounds for contesting the ways in which the terms of internationally agreed treaties, including the Paris Agreement (2015), are implemented (Skillington, 2020; 2023). ⁸ Cosmopolitan ideals are opened up to fresh interpretation on the heels of dissonant encounters with world negativity and the changing ecological, socio-cultural and political circumstances of our time (O'Mahony & Skillington, 2012). A newer perspective on the societal value of modernity’s cosmopolitan normative heritage is gained from felt contacts with ecological destruction and their critical mediation.

The strategic importance of these types of perspectival gains, particularly to thought’s freedom, has been highlighted consistently by critical theory over the years (e.g. Adorno, 1973, 1993, 2005; Hegel, 2011 [1978]). In particular, the role of feeling subjectivity in helping the subject to move more consciously ‘toward the world’ (Rosa, 2019 [2016], p. 121) and thematize the sources of its endangerment. This article explores these tendencies in terms of their potential to animate more imaginative thinking on the transnational relevance of cosmopolitan ideas of justice, rights and responsibility for climate change (Beck, 2015; Delanty, 2009). Its central aim is to draw attention to the importance of these developments to practices of societal learning and simultaneously, to a tradition of critical thinking on feeling subjectivity, noting its relevance to understanding of how felt contact with a changing world today is interpreted by the actor and collectively by institutions, such as law and politics, in ways that allow modernity’s cosmopolitan imagination to continue to gain in perspectival richness, differentiation and possibility.