Abstract

This chapter first explains how the book reframes environmental ethics through the lens of recognition theory. Extending the question of recognition to nature, it advances a dynamic model in which the recognizer is not a sovereign subject applying fixed criteria of moral considerability, but is itself decentered and transformed in the act of judgment. Nonhuman beings, in turn, are not treated as passive objects awaiting acknowledgment but as active bearers of recognition claims. The account of nonhuman agency outlined here diverges from new materialist and posthumanist approaches, drawing instead on critical reconstructions of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Adorno, whose analyses of subjectivity, judgment, perception, and aesthetics provide fresh resources for extending agency beyond the human. The chapter then criticizes the Habermasian communicative turn in Critical Theory for its discursive bias, which excludes bodily, affective, and aesthetic forms of claim-making—precisely the dimensions essential for recognizing expressive agency. It concludes by previewing the alternative developed in the book: a critical reformulation of Steven Vogel’s communicative theory of nature that does not reverse but radicalizes the communicative paradigm by incorporating expressive agency into recognition theory.