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.In their Dialectic of Enlightenment they argue that the more humankind gained control over nature, that is, substituted mythical and mimetic approaches with rational inquiry and technological domination over nature, the more humankind became alienated from it: “Nature must no longer be influenced by approximation, but mastered by labor….In thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves—but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated.”17The first federal platform of the Greens was reminiscent of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analysis of contemporary society in vehemently rejecting the domination society exercised over nature and the human being.Moreover, it lamented the total commercialization of nature as well as leisure time and the resulting alienation of the individual from nature.Finally, the platform protested the bondage of human beings to the dominant economic system.18 Although the Greens’ criticism of contemporar y society resembles that of Horkheimer and Adorno, even pointing out the necessity of safeguarding civil liberties and the democratic structure of the Federal Republic, the issue of the survival of the planet Earth was at the heart of their politics.Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s interest in the correlation between the domination of nature and of humankind, in contrast, is based on the question of freedom and autonomy for the individual and not on the conservation of nature.Quite in contrast to the Greens, Horkheimer and Adorno emphatically assert the freedom of the individual, even if this means disregarding nature.The difference between Horkheimer and Adorno and the Greens can be explained in historical terms.The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written at a time when environmental problems had not yet become as blatantly visible as since the 1970s and, most importantly, would have paled in the face of fascism and the Holocaust—the historical points of reference for this study.The Greens’ platform gives, however, a taste of the party’s problems in shaping a coherent social and aesthetic theory out of the multitude of often opposing traditions on which the Greens drew.The 1980 platform also illustrates the Greens’ difference from the student movement.Whereas the Greens showed an apocalyptic thinking that denied any possibility for progress, since it would only lead us further along the road to ecological catastrophe, the student movement did not condemn all technological advancement but still believed in social progress driven by the technological improvement of human life.Looking at it from a Marxian perspective of class society, the students attacked only technology’s undemocratic application in the service of capital as wrong.Hence the proletarian revolution represents the prerequisite for the peaceful and beneficial use of technology.The concept of revolution played no role in the ecological movement, which favored a model of social evolution that paralleled evolution in nature.Ecological thinking therefore represented a new step in the historical development of the concept of nature, which Konrad Paul Liessmann summarizes in his analysis of the relationship between ecology and aesthetic: “The more nature actually disappears in the process of the technological transformation of the earth, the more it is stylized as a value in itself within the discourse about its end.”19 In ecological thinking, nature, that which is organically grown and untouched by the human being, stands for all that humankind has lost.Nature represents the meaningful cycle of birth and death and rebirth, in contrast to the meaninglessness of destruction.Nature is a harmonic universal network in which each particularity has its specific and necessary place and function; thus it is unity in diversity.Nature represents the unity of body and intellect or matter and spirituality.Nature is movement and change as a dialectical process, peaceful evolution instead of violent revolution.Finally, nature equals sensuality or an aesthetic experience that is repressed in contemporary society [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]