Abstract

This article investigates the possibility and potential of a critical theory of nature and technology. A blind acceptance of the uninhibited development of the forces of production led traditional critical theory to neglect these areas, which it assigned to the domain of the natural sciences. The recognition that nature is socially constituted compels a reformulation of the interest in reasonable conditions that guided the older critical theory. The article asks what criteria offer themselves for determining what would be reasonable in our relations both to the nature that we ourselves are, the body, as well as to the nature that we ourselves are not. Such questions might revitalize critical theory in the very moment it threatens to become historically obsolete