Horkheimer held that predatory violence toward nature was excluded from the concept of untruth

Evidence

There is a phenomenon called nature, and the principle ascribed to the young Marx' that it must be possible to confront every object critically within the framework of the revolutionary theory of Historical Materialismincluding nature’ is either meaningless or simply the converse of the extravagant concept of freedom which ultimately excludes nature from reconciliation, as a mere object of domination, as an aspect of metabolism, or, as H. describes it in connection with productive labour, as an aspect of the exchange of humanity with nature'. According to H., only domination among human beings, and not the predatory violence towards all creation that is reproduced in individuals, is to count as untruth’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2450

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux dividing Adorno/Horkheimer’s nature-pessimism from Habermas’s communication-focused theory. Links to the Dialectic of Enlightenment chapters and to general Critical Theory literature on the domination of nature.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that for Horkheimer, ‘untruth’ names only inter-human domination, not humanity’s domination of nature — a precise scope-definition of the early Frankfurt critique.