This chapter marks a hinge in the book’s trajectory, shifting from classical German philosophy to the later development of Critical Theory. It argues that the resources uncovered in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Adorno cannot be redeployed in abstraction from the decisive communicative turn inaugurated by Habermas. Reconstructing this trajectory reveals both the obstacles it entrenched and the openings it left for renewal. The chapter begins with the first generation’s critique of the domination of nature, then turns to Habermas’s language-centered model of normativity. This turn secured a lasting gain—the insight that justification rests on reciprocal processes of communication—but also imposed a loss by excluding bodily, affective, and aesthetic forms of claim-making, indispensable for recognizing nonhuman agency. The analysis then follows how Benhabib, Honneth, and Vogel sought to loosen these inherited dichotomies. Vogel’s work offers the most thorough extension of discourse ethics to nonhumans, yet it remains bound to the separation of discursive and nondiscursive life. This defines the task of pushing beyond that final dichotomy and sets the stage for the next chapter’s critical reformulation of Vogel’s communicative theory of nature.