Resonance and reflexivity as pathways to eudaimonia in the Anthropocene?

Abstract

The Anthropocene challenges our ways of relating to the world and our ideas of how to lead a good and ethical life under the threat of climate catastrophe. In this article, two theoretical propositions around how we relate to the world are explored in search for synergies to help outline pathways to a good life: Hartmut Rosa's resonance theory and Margaret S. Archer's reflexivity theory. Both focus on our encounters with the world and suggest ways in which we may formulate private and political concerns and strategies to guide the search for a good life and a good society. Resonance and reflexivity both demand a fundamental openness to the world and suggest how to formulate life strategies that does not ignore the knowledge of climate change but foster and use capacities to engage in collective action towards social change. By integrating resonance and meta-reflexivity, we can form a theoretical basis for an integrated approach to promote such collective action on macro, meso and micro levels.

Is it possible to live a good life in the Anthropocene? Is it not unthinkable, once we accept the fact that we are living through a climate crisis, and at that a deeply unequal one seen to who suffers the consequences? Largely, these questions could refer to whether or not we link our mundane everyday activities to our civilization as a whole, as illustrated by Timothy Morton:

There you are, turning the ignition of your car. And it creeps up on you. You are a member of a massively distributed thing. This thing is called species. […] Every time I start my car or steam engine I don’t mean to harm Earth, let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event […] Furthermore, I’m not harming Earth! My key turning is statistically meaningless. […] But go up a level and something very strange happens. When I scale up these actions to include billions of key turnings and billions of coal shovelings, harm to Earth is precisely what is happening. I am responsible as a member of this species for the Anthropocene. Of course I am formally responsible to the extent that I understand global warming. That's all you actually need to be responsible for something. (Morton, 2016, p. 8)

Because yes, we do harm the Earth through our daily lives. We do it knowingly, we do it repeatedly, and most of the time, we do not feel terrible about it. In this article, my aim is to discuss whether it is possible to live lives which can be considered good, in an ethical sense, in light of climate change. For this, I will primarily discuss Rosa's (2019c) idea of resonance and Archer's (2000) notion of reflexivity. These are theories that actively engage with notions of the good life and how we may theorize the development of life strategies and identity formation. Both theories are also concerned with how individual reflexivity may be related to broader social change. The benefit of discussing and integrating these specific theories is that their integration offers a new theoretical injection to a well-paved debate on the good life. Another benefit is to explore how they may offer insight into this issue during the climate crisis. None of them are chiefly concerned with climate change, but both authors touch upon it. By explicitly contextualizing the integration of the two into a climate change framing, I hope to emphasize their societal relevance in their ability to outline pathways toward a good life even in challenging times.

Before delving into the main argument, however, it is necessary to establish some starting points both with regard to the idea of Anthropocene and the idea of a good life.

First, the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch in planetary history was suggested to the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a successor to the Holocene. It was rejected in 2024 due to its too recent onset, but the term has been established in Earth Sciences as a way of conceptualizing a significant shift in how the planet's ecosystem is developing due to human impacts (Hamilton, 2017). In social sciences it has spurred new ways of discussing humans and their surroundings (e.g. posthumanist theories aiming to counter human exceptionalism), and a semantic debate over the terminology, whether the impact on the climate should be attributed to humans as a species (as the term Anthropocene suggests) or to certain groups or systems, for which the term Capitalocene has been suggested (Moore, 2016). Hamilton argues that Anthropocene is the preferred concept from an Earth Sciences perspective, in which it is of little import that some people are more responsible than others. While other concepts may be better served to place responsibility where it is due, I will in this article proceed from the term Anthropocene because it has clearer implications for our ontological assumptions about the world. In the Anthropocene, Hamilton (2017) argues, we need to reconsider our theoretical assumptions and ontologies since our agency, through techno-industrialism, has increased, making us ‘super-agents’ with a massive impact on the Earth, which in turn awakens a response from nature. In this increasingly volatile relationship, Hamilton contends that we cannot, like the posthumanists, discount human exceptionalism but need to start from a ‘new anthropocentrism’ where we acknowledge our exceptional impact and take responsibility for it. This is directly related to how we may live ethically responsible lives.

Second, opinions on what a good life means differ. I will proceed from a well-established view based on Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia, commonly translated as ‘flourishing’. For Aristotle, a good eudaimonic life could be seen as at least three things:

The masses, the coarsest people, see it as pleasure, and so they like the life of enjoyment. There are three especially prominent types of life: that just mentioned, the life of politics, and thirdly the life of contemplation. (Aristotle, 2000, p. 6)

The good life as a hedonic hunt for pleasure is in Aristotle's view ‘fit only for cattle’; the political life is for sophisticated people concerned with honour and virtue, while the third group is the philosophers. In a neo-Aristotelian view, flourishing is ‘a state of being rather than a feeling or experience’ and consists of activities ‘that both express and produce in a human being an actualization of potentialities that are specific to its natural kind’ (Rasmussen, 1999, p. 3). This does not, however, make flourishing a purely individualistic or egocentric notion. Humans are social animals, and our flourishing is not isolated. It is, however, deeply personal and can imply different things for different people. It is something other than simply an absence of suffering; flourishing is related to using one's faculties and have positive consequences.

Eudaimonia can be criticized for being an anthropocentric concept focusing solely on the human good, discounting the harm done to non-human beings or to the Earth in this pursuit. Flourishing, it may be argued, can be a state of being also for other animals (including Aristotle's cattle), for plants or for entire eco-systems, which can be said to have capabilities and integrity, and therefore deserve moral consideration (Moyano-Fernández, 2023). This type of ecological well-being is a topic for environmental ethics, e.g. through ecological eudaimonism where caring for the environment is a virtue based on our ecological dependency (Hannis, 2015). Further, by adopting a ‘synergetic flourishing’, we can conceptualize ‘the positive feedback between human flourishing and non-human flourishing as a way of empowering different capabilities without creating tensions between them’ (Moyano-Fernández, 2023, p. 9).

Flourishing is a common goal in arguments for various utopias, which in modern social sciences have taken what might be called a ‘realist turn’. While there have always been ambitions to put utopian ideals into practice, more recent theories have actively tried to free utopian thinking from its history of producing blueprints for ideal societies which become totalitarian nightmares when implemented. In the Anthropocene, our ideas of the future are bleaker as utopian impulses have become exhausted (Delanty, 2024), and the acknowledgement of human finitude and vulnerability calls for ‘a tragic, humble, version of utopia founded upon humility, rather than hubris’ (Featherstone, 2024, p. 345). In this realistic turn, Wright (2010) has proposed the term ‘real utopias’, while Archer (2019) prefers the term ‘concrete utopias’. Regardless of terminology, flourishing remains a goal. Real or concrete utopias aim to build better societies within the current order rather than aiming for social revolution, either by eroding capitalism (Wright, 2010) or through promoting a socially and systemically integrated social change (Archer, 2019).

While climate change is the primary context for the article, this is entangled in social relationships. Writing from the privileged position of a white, male and well-paid academic in a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) society, it is only with considerable tunnel vision that I can choose not to see the inequality between myself and others. The lifestyle of people like me also have a considerable impact on both the climate and social inequalities; even if I try to buy organically and ethically produced products, I am in the end at the mercy of the market and its hunt for cheap labour. This implies that I will also need to consider issues of inequality and human suffering, and how climate change affects people differently.

In the next two sections, I will introduce the theoretical arguments from Rosa and Archer, respectively. In the subsequent section, I explore how they can be combined to form a theory of a good life and its relevance in the context of climate change and political action.

Resonance

In Rosa's Social Acceleration (2013), the escalatory logic of growth is described as perpetuating most parts of human life. Technical and social acceleration is driven by a structural, a cultural and an economic motor which combined creates an increased life tempo and an approach to life where we aim to maximize our experiences. Social acceleration results in an instrumental relation to the world, including to nature: the technical acceleration requires use of natural resources at a high pace to increase efficiency (Rosa, 2013). Society seeks stabilization but must do so dynamically by constantly incorporating new innovations: the result is a frenetic standstill where we need to keep moving to stay in place, and to avoid falling behind.

For people trying to live a good life in an accelerating society, one imperative is repeatedly actualized: to gather as much resources as possible to maximize our choices (Rosa, 2019a). Life in an accelerated modernity fosters a specific notion of the good life, which Rosa calls the ‘Triple-A’ approach, making the world available, accessible and attainable (Rosa, 2019a). The good life is equal to an extensive reach and control over the world, which is a fundamentally aggressive stance (Rosa, 2020). It leads, Rosa argues, to the destruction of nature and to alienation or burnout (Rosa, 2019a).

In Rosa's view, this is a bleak outlook on life. As a response, he developed the idea of resonance, which serves as an ‘other’ to alienation (Rosa, 2019c). Resonance, taking its metaphors from music, is about experiencing a vibrating string to the world, where this connection is mutually transformative. We listen to the world and answer with our own voice, and in the process, both we and the world change. We may find it in relation to art, music or nature; in social exchanges with people; or in the material world through our work. To qualify as a resonant experience it needs to fulfil four criteria: (1) that we are affectively open to receive the voice of the other; (2) that we are capable of answering, self-efficaciously; (3) that we are transformed in the process, and that we mutually transform the other; and (4) that this type of experience and process is uncontrollable, that is, not possible to predict or plan for (Rosa, 2019c).

Resonance can be found in various places but can never be guaranteed: what is resonant today may be bland and empty tomorrow. Resonance therefore contradicts the Triple-A approach since it cannot be stored or accumulated (Rosa, 2019a). But we try to establish stable axes of resonance (Rosa, 2019c), that is, organizing our lives to increase the possibility for a continuous supply of such experiences by engaging in certain activities or through social relationships. The construction of such axes is an indispensable element for a good life:

A subject will have a good life, I claim, if he or she finds and preserves social, material and existential axes of resonance which allow for iterative and periodic reassurance of ‘existential resonance’, i.e., of a resonant mode of being. The possibility of such a good life, then, is endangered if the conditions for these axes and for the dispositional mode of resonance on the side of the subjects are structurally or systematically undermined. (Rosa, 2019a, p. 50)

Resonance is both a descriptive and a normative concept (Rosa, 2019c). It is descriptive since it refers to resonance as a basic human capacity and need: we long for and desire it, while we try to avoid alienation. Thus, the dialectic relationship between resonance and alienation can be used to understand peoples’ identity formation: through our lives we will encounter various alienating situations which we will seek to avoid in the future, and resonant situations we will strive to repeat. Puberty, Rosa argues, is a period often characterized by intense alienation and a phase where we begin to come to terms with who we are, depending on where we find our resonance, as well as who we are not, depending on where we find ourselves alienated.

The normative dimension appears when we interpret resonance as a concept for the good life, as part of a social philosophy. This does not, Rosa (2019c) notes, imply that we should expect or try to make every experience into a resonant one, which is both impossible and conceptually misguided: the reification of certain elements of the world is necessary to ensure the basic conditions for a good life. We cannot always be open to resonance, since it also makes us vulnerable. A dispositional resonance may therefore prove quite harmful, and an ability to form a colder or analytic relationship to what we encounter may be a safeguard for us to manage certain types of tasks (Rosa, 2019a). We need to be able to be both open and closed. But modernity has forced us into a dispositional alienation, where the constant lack of time hinders resonance, and where the aggressive and alienated stance toward the world closes us from experiencing it at all. With the normative dimension, Rosa introduces a moral evaluation of experiences and activities, which excludes certain forms of action from what can be labelled resonance. He discusses racism and Nazism as examples: while they may involve close communities with a friendly in-group atmosphere, a racist community is built upon silencing other voices, and thereby the people of such communities are closed to the world, non-responsive and unwilling to be transformed (Rosa, 2019c).

Resonance has, I believe, the potential of being truly radical when used as a political concept. If we take its normative dimension seriously, it becomes ethically demanding. It fundamentally challenges a stance toward the world that is closed to other peoples’ suffering, or to environmental destruction. If we wish to be open to the world, we need to see it for what it is and acknowledge the suffering it contains. Rosa says in an interview:

Once you start to change and develop a culture of attentiveness, it doesn’t even matter if it's at the university or in the city, you also start to care about what's going on at Europe's border. But right now, people say, ‘I know it's bad, but I really have a lot of work to do’. I think they’re already dispositionally closed. But I think we could start at any point to redevelop and recreate our strength and resonant relationships. And that would have consequences, in the long run, on how we deal with nature, how we deal with people in Bangladesh producing our clothes, or with people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. I’m convinced about this. If you say, ‘I don’t care about them’, you can really see it in your eyes, in your hands, in your voice, how you close. (Rosa in Malmqvist et al., 2023, pp. 187–188)

With this perspective, how can we ever expect to experience true resonance? How could we defend to ourselves that we engage in resonant experiences while turning a blind eye to what goes on at Europe's borders, or in Gaza? Or that a climate catastrophe is under way? Would not this interpretation of resonance make most, if not all, such experiences into false resonance? In the same interview, Rosa argues that resonance in relation to nature is expressed through a non-paternalistic care ethics:

[I]f you want to solve the environmental crisis, which I do think is very important, we have to no longer think of nature as a resource, not even as an object to preserve, but as a sphere of resonance. And as soon as you are in resonance with something, like nature, it automatically implies an ethics of sustainability, or I would even say care ethics. If you’re in resonance with something or someone, you immediately want to protect it. Not in the paternalistic sense, because ecological action can be very paternalistic: ‘we have to preserve nature’. Resonance implies a form of care ethics which wants to preserve the other as an other, and in itself. (Rosa in Malmqvist et al., 2023, p. 186)

What comes across in these quotes, I believe, is not that resonance demands world peace to exist, but that it places demands on people to actively engage with the world, and precisely not close our eyes to suffering. By meeting such issues with openness and a willingness to listen and respond, there is both hope and a possibility for resonance. But most of our resonant experiences imply that we do isolate ourselves from the parts of the world not relevant to the particular experience. We enter into a limited resonance space where we are allowed to listen and respond and where we engage with one voice rather than the choir of cries for help around us. On the other hand, this is different from choosing not to listen at all, to embrace Marcuse's (1964) one-dimensionality, which would equal Aristotle's first example of a good life: mere pleasure-seeking.

Reflexivity

Archer's theory of reflexivity is different from Rosa's in its ambitions and scope, but similar in the sense of offering an idea of how people develop their identities and how they determine their notions of a good life. For Archer (2007, 2012), this is a reflexive pursuit and comes down to what matters most to people, their ultimate concerns. These concerns are developed in our interactions with the natural, the practical and the social orders of the world. We begin our identity formation by developing a basic self-identity, based on our biological existence and sense of self, through our practical interactions with the world (Archer, 2000). Our personal identity forms the next layer, which is something that develops over time as we mature. Our social identity, finally, develops through our interactions in the social world and the roles we act within. The natural sense of self we have is hence differentiated from our conceptions about ourselves, which are always social. Further, our identities are emergent and take shape through our internal conversations with ourselves, where we develop and engage with our concerns to determine our way of relating to the world.

Human reflexivity, defined as ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’ (Archer, 2007, p. 4), is a key mechanism for how people come to terms with themselves in relationship to the world and the vehicle for mediating between structure and agency in our identity formations. This is done through a deliberative process over our ultimate concerns, which are translated into life projects and practices (modus vivendi) which we believe will take us closer to our idea of a good life (Archer, 2003). Peoples’ reflexivity and internal conversations differ and how they differ is related to societal structures. A stable society fosters what she calls communicative reflexivity, where people generally reproduce existing structures and engage less in critical appraisals of their structural conditions. A society which values career-driven individualists will rather promote autonomous reflexivity, focusing on the practical order and on how to increase the possibilities of getting ahead. A fast-changing society will require meta-reflexive capacities, that is, to manage decreasing social stability and being able to reflect critically on structures and ideas, and how these relate to a person's ultimate concerns. Any society will also have its share of what Archer calls fractured reflexives, that is, people who either have failed to develop sufficient reflexive capacities, or who have become displaced through traumatizing experiences. The development of ultimate concerns is heterogeneous because of peoples’ different structural conditions: it is subjectively dynamic based on how we assess the realizability of our goals, and we are active subjects who constantly evaluate our situation and change based on those evaluations (Archer, 2003).

Archer's theoretical starting point is ‘analytical dualism’, that is, that structures and agency are analysed both separately and how they interact over time (Archer, 1995). It is used to analyse both reproduction of social structures and to understand how and why structures change (morphostasis vs morphogenesis). Structures have a direct and objective impact on the social interactions between people by conditioning certain types of actions or attitudes. This impact is however not determinative, but prone to change because of peoples’ reflexive capacity and collective actions. Social interactions thereby lead to structural developments, which also imply that the changed structure may condition another type of reflexivity than the structure at a previous time point. Archer (2012) argues that we are currently experiencing increasing morphogenesis, that is, that a larger variety of cultural ideas are co-existing and that structures change more rapidly than before. In a morphogenic society, morals become increasingly private and excluded from public discourse (Archer, 2017b). This implies both increased possibilities and a risk for disorientation and normative crises, affecting peoples’ identity formation and their reflexive management of societal transformation. In this type of society, Archer considers meta-reflexives as most attuned to the surrounding moral diversity; they strive to make a difference and engage in collectives that share their ideals with whom they can live and work (Archer, 2019).

One change that all societies need to grapple with is that of climate change. It involves a shift from viewing progress as related to mastering nature to managing the consequences of humanity's destructive impact. Climate change is, at its basis, a consequence of a ‘contradiction between the Practical and the Natural Order’ and ‘capitalist competition fuels the corporate practice of externalizing costs to the environment’, driven by consumerism and an imperative of growth (Archer, 2019, p. 248). Archer argues that our greatest liability as a civilization today is:

the extinction of humanity climatically through rendering the planet uninhabitable or through nuclear warfare. As the first time that we live with the possibility of our species-extinction, so for the first time the entire population must choose between succumbing to its ultimate liability or collaboratively co-operating, using its combined capacities, to avert this conclusion. Facing finitude is an unprecedented (morphogenetic) feature that now outweighs our other concerns. (Archer, 2019, pp. 246–247)

Climate change is therefore the ultimate concern for us as a species, above all other imaginable ones. In relation to this, a ‘good life’ is related to our idea of a good society, which in Archer's view is what promotes the ‘Common Good’, defined as something ‘that all contribute to generating (…) and without their cooperation it cannot exist’ (Archer, 2017a, p. 132). It demands a level of social integration since it cannot exclude people and remain ‘good’ according to such a definition. Further, it requires system integration to ensure that the ‘relational goods’ in one sphere does not translate into ‘relational evils’ in the next.

Archer's meta-reflexivity has been used as a variable to explain responsibility in relation to social and environmental issues (Golob & Makarovič, 2022), which was measured through attitudes, intentions and behaviours. Meta-reflexivity was closely related to age and education (younger and more well-educated were more meta-reflexive) and to attitudes, intentions and behaviours. Critical analytical thinking, creativity, originality and problem solving are important meta-reflexive skills needed to promote societal green transformation. Meta-reflexivity has also been argued to be crucial for peoples’ ability to comprehend the complexities of climate change and to engage in the type of behaviours that acknowledge the suffering of future generations (Davidson, 2012; Davidson & Stedman, 2018). On a societal level, Davidson (2012) argues, collective awareness is a structural condition for global societies to induce the necessary meta-reflexivity.

Given the extreme complexity of climate change and how to amend it, Archer's call for system integration is challenging; for instance, changes to mitigate climate change in one sector (e.g. transitioning to electric cars) may lead to environmental problems in another (e.g. when mining for minerals). This calls for an integrated meta-reflexivity on meso and macro levels that can offer a comprehensive view of how systems interact and to plan transition policies with regard to such complexities, to avoid that good intentions lead to bad consequences. In this vein, ‘just transition’ is a common ambition in green policies, for example, the European Green Deal where this is clearly stated (European Commission, 2019). This relates to the issue of system integration through the ambition to avoid policies making trade-offs between environmental and social goals. Rather, policies should integrate them based on an understanding that green policies will only be perceived as legitimate if they also account for their social implications. Otherwise, such policies may result in low uptake, making them less adequate and in the end not serving to improve peoples’ sense of a good life at all.

Towards a theory of the good life in the Anthropocene

Archer and Rosa have not interacted much in their scholarly work. I have not been able to find any references to Archer in Rosa's work, but a few exist in the other direction. Rosa's acceleration theory was used as a starting point for the contributions to a book edited by Archer on late modernity (Archer, 2014b). In the introduction, Archer dismisses both his theory and Bauman's (2000) notion of a ‘liquid modernity’ as mixing up epistemology with ontology: just because it feels like everything is speeding up, it does not have to be so (Archer, 2014a). She describes social acceleration as a metaphor or a rhetoric figure rather than as an empirical fact and argues that it needs to be substantiated. She also questions Rosa's idea that social acceleration leads to people wanting to cram in as much as possible into their lives. Rather, people are guided by their ultimate concerns, and much of the purported changes are largely irrelevant to people in their deliberations over the good life. Rosa's writings does not seem to have made any substantial impression on Archer, given how she in subsequent publications misnames him as ‘Helmut’ (Archer, 2019, 2021), and his later theory of resonance is not discussed in her work.

I will in this section argue that resonance and reflexivity may be fruitfully combined and that such a combination can be useful for how to approach a good life in the Anthropocene.

Critical Theory meets Critical Realism

First, it is necessary to address the ontological and epistemological foundations of the two theories and to which extent they may be considered compatible. Rosa is rooted in and indebted to three generations of Critical Theory (e.g. Theodore W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth), while his lesser materialist influences include Charles Taylor. Archer's background is Critical Realism, a tradition championed by Roy Bhaskar and grounded in a critique against positivism as well as postmodern and post-structuralist theory.

The heritage from Critical Theory is apparent in Rosa's emancipatory ambitions, and his inclusion of Marxist and Hegelian concepts such as alienation and dialectics. He explicitly links his analysis to the Frankfurt School's critique of social pathologies such as reification and alienation, as well as Habermas's colonization thesis. He dismisses both positivist objectivism and constructivism and argues for a sociology of relationships between the subject and the world as mutually constituting phenomena: subjects are formed within a world but will also influence this world (Rosa, 2019c). Such relationships, Rosa argues:

are first established existentially and corporeally, and (…) the world, as the always already present other side of said relationship, necessarily concerns us in some way as subjects, (…) the three-part division of world into the objective world of things, the social world of human beings, and the subjective inner world of feelings, wishes, and perceptions (…) appears as the result of a subsequent mental and linguistic (or prelinguistic) operation which itself implicates the human capacity for and necessity of a cognitive/representational conception of world. (Rosa, 2019c, p. 36)

It is through our encounters and interactions with the world we form relationships to it and consequently a sense of self. It could be argued that Rosa's resonance theory includes realist assumptions in its focus on how we relate to the world not just socially, but as biological beings. Critical Realism advocates for a realist approach to explaining social phenomena (Bhaskar, 2008), and Archer's inclusion of human biology into the development of our identities is one example of how this realist ontology is translated into an analytical approach, as is her analytical dualism to explain how structure and agency interacts. While the natural order has a causality which is less impacted by human actions, social causality is dependent on the interactions between structures and human actions over time. Archer consequently dismisses both structuralist ‘downward conflation’ and constructivist ‘upwards conflation’ (Archer, 1995) in favour of analysing structures and agents separately, focusing on their interplay. Common to both traditions is an emergent perspective both on society and on individual identity, which is shaped by interactions both with the natural and the social world, aptly summarized in Andrew Sayer's notion of ‘human becoming’ instead of ‘human being’ (Sayer, 2011, p. 110).

Critical Theory and Critical Realism have been combined before, for example, related to causality (Reeves, 2009; for a critique, see Nevasto, 2024) or in relation to conceptions of the good life (Vandenberghe, 2021). The two traditions have been described as ‘complementary parts of a single project: to develop a critical theory of society that is able to analyse, diagnose, criticize and transform society’ (Vandenberghe, 2019, p. 334). As to the question of what ‘critical’ means in the two traditions, Nevasto (2024) suggests that it for Critical Theory is primarily concerned with critique of reified social relationships and challenging the transhistorical and universal status of knowledge, while in Critical Realism, it chiefly refers to providing a philosophy of the social sciences that can explain social practices and underpin emancipatory politics.

While the emphasis may differ, I would argue that there is sufficient common ground to explore potential synergies. It also matters which ilk of theorists within each of the traditions one refers to. For Critical Theory, Frédéric Vandenberghe suggests that scholars such as Habermas were more concerned with justice, while Honneth and Rosa focuses on social pathologies and what constitutes a good life (Vandenberghe, 2019). He argues that Bhaskar's stance that the happiness of each cannot be built upon injustice or the suffering of others is similar to a Buddhist position (Vandenberghe, 2021). It is also closely related to Rosa's arguments about the limits to resonance, the impossibility of ‘negative’ resonance (Rosa, 2019c) and the demands for openness to others’ suffering that resonance implies (Malmqvist et al., 2023). Vandenberghe suggests that German Critical Theory, along with British Critical Realism, French pragmatism and American communitarianism, has taken an ‘ethical turn’ in its focus on human flourishing (Vandenberghe, 2021). These ideas of the good life are founded in Aristotelian ethics, where practical wisdom is essential and involves:

rational deliberation about the relation between ends and means that directs the practices towards its final end: (…) human flourishing in, through and as self-realization. (Vandenberghe, 2021, p. 822)

This could read as a summary of Archer's perspective on reflexivity and ultimate concerns and is not far off Rosa's notion of resonance as a driving force in our process of establishing a structure for our lives. A good life is, in Adorno's perspective, a conscious or authentic life (‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’, Adorno, 2005, p. 39). Hence, a good life, combining the theoretical impulses from Rosa and Archer, would imply a life where we acknowledge the problems in the world, and where we actively engage, reflexively, in working toward betterment, in bringing about change. It is a ‘minima moralia’, in Adorno's terminology, but with impacts also on our communal lives. We can no longer, Vandenberghe (2021) argues, expect a ‘magna moralia’, but we could and should aim to establish ‘ground rules’ to secure basic ethical and democratic principles (Vandenberghe, 2021, p. 826).

False resonance, oases of resonance and eudaimonic bubbles

Is it possible to live a resonant life which is non-reflexive? It could be argued that it is almost a prerequisite in today's world to discount reflexivity in favour of individual resonance. Would this equal a false resonance? Or is it in the end the most pragmatic way of leading a happy life? To choose one-dimensionality, or even adopting Marx's (1996) characterization of the capitalist mindset: Après moi, le déluge? Can we dance ourselves into the abyss?

Whether it is possible to lead a good life in a world filled with suffering, inequalities and environmental devastation is an especially difficult question for resonance theory because of its normative dimension. Reflexivity theory is less normative, but as Archer (2019) has pointed out, climate change at least ought to be a major concern for human civilization, and hence, also for most people.

Those who Archer labels autonomous reflexives are in their strategic and individualistic priorities reminiscent of what Rosa calls the Triple-A approach, while her communicative reflexives are almost conceived as a remnant of a past collectivistic society. Being less reflexive overall, this type of reflexivity could be interpreted as leading to happier (or at least contented) people, due to their limited life ambitions and limited brooding over their place in the world. Such an ‘ignorance is bliss’-approach would, in a society where knowledge about climate change is widespread, demand an active closing off from the world, equalling a false life. The communicative reflexives tend to avoid conflict in an ambition to preserve good social relations and to not rock the boat. This stance becomes problematic in a situation when the boat, all according to science, definitely needs rocking.

We may argue that the radical interpretation of resonance that acknowledges suffering rhymes best with Archer's description of meta-reflexivity, which empirical studies also has identified as related to concerns about climate change (Golob & Makarovič, 2022). A meta-reflexive approach would be more dispositionally open to the world and take in its various failures in living up to ethical ideals. On the one hand, meta-reflexivity may seem like a recipe for unhappiness, since a critical appraisal of the world in relation to ethical ideals seldom leads to feelings of happiness; on the other hand, it can potentially provide an individual with an ‘eudaimonic cultivation of powers’ making it ‘constitutive of true happiness’ (Al-Amoudi, 2017).

Clearly, Rosa thinks that resonance is possible in an unjust world and that people actively desire it and seek to construct their lives to make it possible. While maintaining his normative stance, he discusses what he calls ‘oases of resonance’ (Rosa, 2019c, p. 114), found in the ‘deserts’ of alienation. These oases form the basis for the axes we aim to establish, which are oriented towards nature, religion, art, music, work or social relations. Nature, Rosa claims, is experienced as an oasis of resonance in a hard and competitive world, and in this oasis, a romantic or aesthetic mode of perception dominates. However, nature is commonly enjoyed but is not seriously considered as a transformative source of resonance, or we would treat it differently in our daily lives. And this is a key issue: we use nature as a source for resonance, while simultaneously abusing it through our way of life, which in the end risks falsifying resonance. To truly relate to nature in a resonant way, we need to listen to it and respond, which would imply acting to change modern societies’ mute and alienated approach to it.

The strive to establish resonant oases can be seen as just another attempt at increasing our reach, and as such part of competitive capitalism. Providers of ‘resonant’ experiences (e.g. cinemas, tourist trails in nature) demarcate limited areas where the rest of the world is temporarily silenced, allowing for a commodification of such oases (Rosa, 2019c). It is a calculated resonance, a reified version aiming for stimulation rather than establishing a resonant relationship. Still, Rosa imagines that it is possible to build truer oases of resonance, for example, through city planning, sharing economy or various forms of collective ways of living, that could serve as starting points for an expansion, to make such oases socially transformative and develop into serious alternatives to the desert around them. They are therefore not pointless, Rosa concludes, since they uphold the idea that another way of relating to the world is possible.

Lawson (2017), a critical realist, suggests the possibility of forming ‘eudaimonic bubbles’ within an otherwise adverse society, a notion not unlike that of oases of resonance. Whether anyone can flourish in a system built on the suffering of others is a conundrum hard to resolve, but he argues that one path towards eudaimonia, in a more restricted sense, is through sub-communities in which certain needs are met without causing harm to others. He takes the creation of the British National Health Service (NHS) as a case in point, which was developed in the post-WWII society where a joint sense of community thrived, and systems could be created based on principles opposed to those of free-market capitalism. Lawson points to how different societal conditions make such eudaimonic bubbles more or less likely, but that their existence is a fact, and their number is probably large, if interpreted as anything from friendships or families to intentional communities. Maintaining such bubbles is however difficult in a social milieu which is oppressing such attempts, through capitalism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism or coloniality. It demands a sufficient level of awareness among participants to rise above society's background ideology and that sufficient material support exists to ensure a level of insulation from societal counterforces.

The notions of oases of resonance or eudaimonic bubbles are useful for pointing to arenas where conditions for leading a good life can be maintained. It is relevant for social security and for intentional communities where people aim to create communal or ecologically sustainable ways of living. Such communities can however be seen as attempts at insulating a group of people from mainstream consumerism and capitalism, and it may be questioned if Lawson's condition of non-harm applies. It may be true that they limit the ecological impact of its members, but, given the global scope of the climate crisis, they could perhaps not be considered a solution – harm is still done by neglecting sufficient political action to reform society on a larger scale. If these communities are not combined with such action, they become escapist rather than transformative in character.

The viability and urgency of political engagement

The arguments above leads to the question of political struggle. Populist and nationalistic politicians dream of the revival of traditional local communities with more homogeneous social relationships and seem to long for what Bauman (2017) has called ‘retrotopias’. In Archer's terminology, this could be considered a reaction to the decrease of communicative reflexivity. Populism comes across as a non-reflexive shortcut with simple responses to complex problems that declines to accept that the world is changing or that climate change is a threat (Golob & Makarovič, 2021). When this type of politics increases in popularity, political engagement can appear as a futile exercise which only deepens the despair; an alienated shouting against a world that does not respond. Is it viable to try to rectify the wrongs in the world?

Aristotle identified political life and contemplation as potential pathways to eudaimonia. It could be argued that Archer's meta-reflexives try to combine the two, through constant deliberations of their concerns in relation to ethical ideals, and through political engagement. In relation to the Anthropocene, Hamilton (2017) argues, we need to consider morality from a collective standpoint, where it is of little impact whether we as individuals try to live rightly unless our systems and institutions are reformed through politics. What, then, are the avenues for promoting social change in the traditions of Critical Theory and Critical Realism?

Rosa and Schulz (2023) argue that any theory of society needs to answer three questions: (1) what is society (synthesis), (2) what are the driving forces of social change (dynamis), and (3) how can people (re-)shape, influence or control social change (praxis). Social theory views society as something more than mere politics and government; rather, politics is the effect of social structures and the emergence of society through social action. For synthesis, Critical Theory is based upon a Marxist standpoint, and for its 20th-century developments, reification was a key concept for understanding how we are fostered into societal beings. In the second generation of Critical Theory, Habermas suggested a more dualistic view, consisting of material and symbolic reproduction, and with communication as the condition for societal development. Current Critical Theory scholars adopt a pluralistic view and choose different concepts to centre their analyses, for example, Honneth's idea of recognition or Rosa's resonance. The dynamis in society is for Critical Theory based in inherent contradictions in the societal structure, leading to conflicts, either expressed as contradictions between labour and capital, between instrumental reason and nature or between system and lifeworld. In Rosa's view, the inherent contradiction of modern society is one between the logic of control and domination versus the conditions for resonance. For praxis, pluralistic iterations of Critical Theory can envisage several pathways towards social change by criticizing problematic elements of social structures. Rosa and Schulz conclude that society is considered as a ‘historical changing totality and structural unity’ which has an ‘“in-built motor” of social transformation inherent in the core structures of society’ and that ‘it is in principle possible to intellectually perceive and analyse the governing laws, structures and developmental tendencies of society and to (try to) reshape or at least influence them politically’ (Rosa & Schulz, 2023, p. 211, emphasis removed) in a way that favours the oppressed and the alienated.

Those who engage in creating oases of resonance and acts to counter injustice or climate change reacts and responds to the world's cries. It is a way to avoid false resonance, which would be the consequence of choosing not to listen. Rosa (2019b) has argued that politics need to be conceived as a sphere of resonance and that an adequate democratic debate depends on an active listening and responding based on the assumption that all voices are worthy of being heard. Resonance hence becomes a concept to determine the quality of democratic debate. Politics should aim to foster conceptions of the good society, and political democracy depends on nurturing ideas of what the good life entails and discussing different ideas of this in a responsive way. Resonant politics is therefore concerned with relationships between politicians and citizens and the characteristics and resonant qualities of such relationships.

In Critical Realism, it is possible to differentiate between social and political reflexivity (Al-Amoudi, 2017). While social reflexivity is the individual activity of forming one's own life project to attain a good life as defined by the individual, political reflexivity is suggested to denote reflexivity on the societal level, answering the question ‘how can we steer society together’ (Al-Amoudi & Latsis, 2015). As such, it is collective in nature and related to the formulation of ideas of the good society. It involves certain capacities that individuals may be better or worse equipped with, depending on their level of meta-reflexivity. It also differentiates between the individual question of how an individual may contribute and how we collectively can steer society. Political reflexivity serves utopian ends by imagining a transformed societal structure through a democratic imaginary and a sense of the common good. In Archer's theory, agency is fundamentally collective and comes in two forms (Archer, 1995). People with similar life situations are primary agents by being representatives of certain interests, while generally lacking an organization to promote them. By organizing, they can become corporate agents, that is, collectives that are working to promote social change in a specific direction. Through such collective agency, political action takes place and is reasonably a form that anyone considering climate change as an ultimate concern should aim to engage in.

I argue that this is the point where Rosa's and Archer's theories can best be integrated and converge into a theoretical framework that is helpful for reasoning about how to work for a good life on both an individual and a societal level. Both theories relate to individual development and social change, and in my view, it is through collective action that these can merge into an actionable perspective on the good life and the good society. Rosa's and Archer's perspectives are fruitful to combine since their integration provides both a direction for the struggle and a method for moving toward such a goal. Resonance serves as a normative goal both for individuals and societies, building on a respectful and relational approach to how we relate to the world. Meta-reflexivity is a necessary skill that needs to be fostered in individuals, organizations and societies, to make such a goal possible. Change needs to happen on all societal levels and requires meta-reflexivity in every step. A bottom-up perspective is crucial to allow for various ways of acting, both depending on different ideas of what flourishing implies and on the different conditions that people live under. A top-down perspective is needed to enforce climate laws and policies that promote social transformation. At the meso level, organizations such as authorities and companies can become corporate actors by adopting greener goals and procedures. In Archer's view, it is through the development of corporate agency that we may influence society, and in order to do so, we need to relate to other subjects who are sharing our concerns and organize based on them. It is only by relating resonantly with others that we can work toward changing societal institutions. Here, Pierpaolo Donati's and Archer's (2015) idea of a relational subject may also be fruitful, by connecting the personal development with others to foster both social reflexivity and collective action on micro, meso and macro levels, to make institutions act like a ‘We’ (Donati, 2016). In this context, Rosa's theory is well-suited to consider also the fairness of social transformation, since it aims to side with the oppressed. Meta-reflexivity is, in my view, often related to a quite alienated stance toward the world, given its constant struggle in trying to align an imperfect world with ideals of the good society. When combined with resonance theory, it offers a path toward the future we aim for and the recognition of points of resonance in the present which corresponds to our idea of how a good relationship to the world ought to be.

Conclusion

If I go to work every day to a job that I like, even love at times, then go home to a loving family and spend the weekends playing music, I will lead a life with three strong resonance axes: practical, social and existential. If I live this kind of life, in my privileged social position, while not engaging politically, not caring for the climate, nor trying to help anyone outside my purview even though I know these problems exist, would this qualify as true resonance? If not, could I still be said to flourish? If neither, could I at least be said to thrive?

It is unreasonable to argue that resonance is impossible unless I live an ethically impeccable life, for example, by being vegan, dressing exclusively in ethical or second-hand clothing, refuse flying, donating a chunk of my income to charity and being active in political groups. It could however be argued that resonance is possible in many situations simply because they do not depend on the suffering of others, and that my resonant experience does not aggravate this suffering. On the other hand, in a globalized world it is difficult to argue that my everyday life is not at least related to those sufferings since I uphold capitalist and colonial relationships through my consumption or at least related to climate change given the environmental impact of the society I live in. In the introduction, I quoted Morton (2016, p. 8): ‘I am formally responsible to the extent that I understand global warming. That's all you actually need to be responsible for something’. With this realization, where should we draw the line?

One distinction to be made is between resonance as experience and resonance as a state. Resonance is uncontrollable and transient and therefore something that occurs from time to time to most people. Rosa claims that a good life is one where we as individuals find and preserve axes of resonance, allowing for ‘iterative and periodic reassurance of “existential resonance”, i.e., of a resonant mode of being’ (2019a, p. 50) – which in principle means that contingent resonance experiences is not enough but needs to be incorporated into a more lasting life structure. In Aristotelian ethics, eudaimonia is a state rather than an experience since it depends on our praxis. Consequently, it would be possible to experience resonance even in an alienated or false life, but to claim to live resonantly, that is, a good life, demands a disposition towards resonance and a willingness to be transformed in encounters with the world. We could potentially say that a person lives a resonant life if this is understood as nurturing resonant relationships that maintain this openness.

I would argue that eudaimonia places more demands on us than do resonance, because ultimately, flourishing involves using our capacities toward engaging in social change in relation to the sufferings of people and the planet. Resonance is thus not equal to eudaimonia, but a pathway towards it; relating to the world in a resonant manner is necessary, but not sufficient. At this point, reflexivity enters into the equation. By engaging with the world openly and meta-reflexively, formulating our ultimate concerns in ways that consider the concerns of other people and our common planetary destiny, we may collectively work toward change. While meta-reflexivity is not required for experiencing resonance, it seems crucial for establishing an ethical horizon from which we can come to terms with what qualifies as ‘good’. Doing this self-efficaciously, as Rosa considers critical for resonance, and through collective agency, which Archer identifies as central for promoting social change, we may develop a modus vivendi that takes us closer to this goal. Doing so could also foster the type of ‘synergetic flourishing’ (Moyano-Fernández, 2023) that considers also nature's right to flourish.

Hamilton (2017) suggests that what is good and evil in the Anthropocene boils down to a scale between care and neglect, which concerns our basic relationship to the world, and whether it is characterized by sympathy for or negation of the natural world. An ethics of care in response to climate change will be reflected not only through our individual lifestyle choices, but in fostering a good and caring society. While the good life is necessarily related to the good society, we cannot assume that a good or resonant life always equals happiness, or vice versa. A person living in luxury while others starve may very well be happy and thrive in their ignorance, if choosing not to care about the other. But it would neither qualify as resonance, nor as flourishing, simply because these terms have an ethical dimension. The happiness one may feel as a by-product of eudaimonia is of another quality than the happiness one may get from conspicuous consumption. Leading a good life in a society where everyone can be expected to know about climate change or injustice (which is at least the case in WEIRD countries) therefore requires meta-reflexive capacities and to act according to this reflexivity. Not doing so would qualify as what Kahn-Harris (2007) has called ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’, that is, knowing better but still choosing not to know. When developing our ultimate concerns, it is simply no longer possible to discount climate change; to do so would be to retreat to the purely personal life. In Aristotle's time, participation in civic life was considered virtuous, which is a stance that is valid also today.