1 Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn Societal Relations to Nature Outline of a Critical Theory in the ecological crisis “A stone is a coagulated pattern of dynamic relationships.” Hans-Peter Duerr (2001) 1. Preliminary Remarks Almost a hundred years ago – in 1905, to be exact – the young physicist Albert Einstein published an essay entitled “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper 1 ” in the Annalen der Physik, thereby founding the theory of relativity – and a new conception of space and time. In the very same year he proposed the hypothesis of the wave-particle, the dualistic nature of light, which led, 20 years later, to quantum theory. With these two moves Einstein opened the way for a scientific revolution, one that led to a radical change in the classical understanding of scientific objectivity and causal explanation within physics. A year earlier, Max Weber had formulated two postulates in a programmatic article, which, according to his views at the time, would insure the “objectivity of social scientific knowledge”. First, empirical knowledge and value judgments were to be strictly separated; and, second, precise concepts were to be employed. These concepts, however, were to be constructed specifically for the social sciences. With the first postulate Weber aimed at achieving the ideal of objectivity found in the classical natural sciences of his time; while with the second he aimed at achieving a sharp division between the natural and social sciences entirely in keeping with the neo-Kantian tradition. With respect to the second point, concepts were specifically social scientific concepts for Weber if they, on the one hand, were oriented towards a general cultural value (for example, that of purposive-instrumental rationality) and, on the other, if they enabled an interpretive understanding of the meaning of (as he put it) “cultural problems that affected people.” The goal of sociology, in other words, was to not to explain causal relations in the manner of the natural sciences but rather to understand the meaning of human action within, and for, given cultural worlds and processes of societal life. One can see a line of demarcation running between Albert Einstein and Max Weber, one which Kant viewed as an epistemological gap: on one side of this line stands the realm of nature with its ‘order of effective causes;’ on the other, the realm of human action with its “order of determined purposes.’ Within this tradition of thought, it is a part of the epistemic structure of modern science to separate the epistemic cultures of the natural and social sciences from one another, and to keep them separate with the help of a whole series of dichotomizing concepts: nature vs. culture; natural causality vs. rules of action; causes vs. reasons; effect vs. meaning; explanation vs. understanding; material vs. symbolic; … and so on. 1 In English: “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”.