Rationality environmentalised (with and beyond Michael Bonnett)

Abstract

Michael Bonnett’s highly regarded Environmental Consciousness (2021) is an admirable extension of the phenomenology of nature inaugurated in his previous work Retrieving Nature (2004). To fully capture the essentials of his environmental thinking, I locate the set of ideas he has developed in his phenomenology of nature (such as ‘environmental consciousness’ itself) within a wider context, by situating Environmental Consciousness as a sequel not just to Retrieving Nature but also to Children’s Thinking (1994). While broadly sympathetic with how his thinking has evolved into the environmental philosophy of education articulated in his new book, I argue that the notion of rationality has been alienated from his environmentalising project. Given the alliance Bonnett acknowledges with John McDowell’s re-conceptualisation of nature, I contend that the latter’s view that human experience is pervaded by conceptual rationality in a relevant sense can make room to integrate rationality with Bonnett’s on-going project; put differently, I wager that rationality should be ‘environmentalised’.

Keywords:

• Environmental Consciousness
• Children’s Thinking
• rationality
• experience
• the subject–object relation
• the pervasiveness thesis

Preliminaries

Environmental Consciousness, Nature and the Philosophy of Education: Ecologizing Education (2021a) is Michael Bonnett’s third monograph, preceded by Children’s Thinking: Promoting Understanding in the Primary School (1994) and Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist Age (2004). In the summary paper of the new book (2021b), he explicitly claims that his third book represents a continuing development of his phenomenology of nature, the project he embarked upon in his second book (1). It is wrong, however, to suppose that there was some cut-off point in his academic career when Bonnett shifted his attention and interest from thinking to nature and the environment. Rather, the spirit with which he has engaged in the philosophical study of education since the late 1970s is strikingly consistent: Bonnett has devoted his academic career to bringing out the ways and the extent to which his (alternative) approach can be an essential corrective to many of the dominant intellectual, cultural and educational modes of the present order that are, in various guises, anchored in European Enlightenment thinking. Of course, the main targets of attack in the three books vary, being ‘rationalism’ in Children’s Thinking, ‘constructivism/post-modernism’ in Retrieving Nature and ‘scientism’ in Environmental Consciousness, but it is hardly difficult – even though it may not always seem like it – to notice an obvious continuity not merely between the second and third books, but also between the first and the latter two in terms of his enduring endeavour to work out the details of his alternative approach to the (then) dominant mode of thinking that still threatens to close off the possibilities of another kind of thinking and so another way of being in the world.

This continuity matters because it reminds us of two related points. First, the environmental project he initiates in the second book – in fact, in the earlier papers that would eventually comprise the main part of the book – was not necessarily directly rooted in environmental studies in an ordinary sense so much as in a philosophical-educational investigation: Bonnett’s long-lasting scholarly interest has been in making better sense of ourselves and our relation to the world. Second, therefore, the notion of the environmental is what Bonnett, in the course of developing his philosophical-educational enquiry, encountered and has since refined; in this regard, the environmental in his use is often metaphorical, just as it is in his master thesis that human consciousness is inherently environmental and so too are many other phenomenologically inspired illustrations and conceptions that are key to his environmental thinking (e.g. ‘environmental/emplaced/ecstatic consciousness’, ‘human being as sustainability’, ‘the idea of poetic receptiveness’ and ‘participating in the gift of the given’ (Bonnett 2021a, passim)).

These points might strike those who desperately need practical tips to reduce humanity’s impact on the Earth for sustainable development as unhelpfully indirect, if not fraudulent. Yet, Bonnett is concerned with addressing our current environmental predicament; he regards it as ‘a crisis of not only of our physical survival, but of our spiritual being – that is, our felt intuitive understanding of the kind of beings that we are and how we should relate to everything around us’ (Bonnett 2021a, 130, italics added). For Bonnett, the second crisis is more fundamental and important. He says: ‘The real issue is the underlying character of our thinking, and the real catastrophe is that currently we are insufficiently aware of this’ (ibid., 131). Even so, nonetheless, Bonnett’s remarks on these lines might still be taken to be almost platitudinous or a familiar façon de parler, or, worse, a rhetorical metaphysics filled with philosophical gobbledygook. But none of these potential reactions is right. I think one of the surest ways to ensure that Bonnett’s sustained attempt, under the general head of ‘retrieving nature’ and ‘ecologizing education’, to explore ‘our underlying relationship with nature’ (2021b, 10) and create a philosophical-educational space in which to ameliorate the conditions that potentially allow us to appreciate and experience more authentic (underlying) relationships with nature, is distinctive and genuine, is by reflecting on his environmental considerations in light of how his thinking has evolved since his early academic work – that is, by casting Environmental Consciousness as a sequel not only to Retrieving Nature but also to Children’s Thinking.

In what follows, therefore, after briefly sketching Bonnett’s negative and positive proposals in his phenomenology of nature, I devote two sections to providing an account of how Bonnett’s existential considerations in Children’s Thinking have evolved into his current environmental philosophy of education, such that we can fully recognise and wield many phenomenological metaphors and conceptions that characterise his environmental thinking. In the section that follows, I turn, as I did in my previous work (Misawa 2020; Misawa 2021), to analytical philosopher John McDowell’s argument that seeks to reconcile nature and reason, with which Bonnett sympathises. In particular, I focus on McDowell’s ‘pervasiveness thesis’ (McDowell 2013, 41) that conceptual rationality in a relevant sense is everywhere in human lives, the thesis over which McDowell debates with existential phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus. In the last section, then, I offer some suggestions that might benefit Bonnett’s on-going environmental project. My aim here is to corroborate, rather than correct, his environmental philosophy of education, and I hope my attempt will be an appropriate token of respect and admiration for his work.

Bonnett’s phenomenology of nature

At the core of Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education lie the projects to ‘retrieve nature’ and ‘ecologize education’ (e.g. Bonnett 2004; 2021a).

I think the negative part of Bonnett’s point is profoundly right: we need not oscillate between social constructivist and scientistic views of nature. At least since Retrieving Nature (2004), Bonnett has urged that social constructivist views of various kinds (including post-modernism and post-structuralism) and scientism, while being polar opposites from one another in terms of their orientations, are equally anthropocentric in terms of their understandings of nature; constructivist accounts cast nature as human-authored, and according to the scientistic outlook, we are not the authors of nature but its managers, manipulators and exploiters (on occasion, with the seemingly benign idea of ‘human stewardship’). The latter view has got along with what Bonnett terms the ‘metaphysics of mastery’, namely ‘the way in which dominant strands of Western culture increasingly frame all issues in terms that are deeply anthropocentric and manipulative, and that achieved a particular potency in the modernist humanism that arose in Enlightenment thinking’ (2021b, 2).

I also see little difficulty in the positive part of Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education, which attempts to afford a genuine escape from the oscillation between these two problematically anthropocentric views of nature and convince us that a proper acknowledgement of the phenomenological means of escape he recommends has massive implications for how we think about not just environmental education (in a narrow sense) but human flourishing and education in general. It is not easy, however, to come to terms with his phenomenological means of escape from the anthropocentric spectrum, at least partly because of his often-metaphorical characteristic idioms, such as ‘environmental consciousness’ and ‘human being as sustainability’. Many readers less excellent at metaphor-wielding than Bonnett may get startled by his phenomenology-inspired diction.

One good way to capture the positive part of his picture without drowning in the sea of phenomenological illustrations and conceptions Bonnett has introduced is to situate his environmental project in the wider context from which the issue of our relationship with nature has arisen as a paradigmatic case of something more general: the issue of how we relate to the world. This grander issue is precisely the central agenda of modern philosophy, and it has traditionally been approached in the form of the question of how the Cartesian subject knows the ‘external’ world circumscribed from the former. Bonnett’s academic endeavour can be glossed as an attempt to find and offer ways to resist this formulation, that is, the modern formulation that is consonant with Enlightenment thinking. The broad upshot of his environmental philosophy of education is that if we reformulate the subject–world relation as he suggests, we can rethink, or possibly transform, our thinking per se, that is, ‘our attitudes towards the world in which we are embedded’ (Bonnett 2021a, 130). And Bonnett’s pursuit of a reformulation had already began in Children’s Thinking.

Children’s Thinking: rational thinking, poetic thinking and authentic–rational thinking

The reproach in Children’s Thinking (1994)¹ is targeted to ‘rational thinking’ as advocated by R. S. Peters and Paul Hirst – the founding figures of the British philosophy of education – whose rationalist pedigree Bonnett traces further back to the work of Michael Oakeshott and Ludwig Wittgenstein where ‘the public, the shared, and the rule-governed’ (84) come to the fore as the features that underlie human thinking and understanding.² In Bonnett’s view, the main trouble with the rationalist view of thinking is that it falls far short of pervading the whole range and, more importantly, depth of human thinking and understanding, because ‘rationality ultimately sees things from a perspective which subordinates them to something other than what they are in themselves’ (32). The basic characteristic of rational thinking, Bonnett claims, is marked by its enterprise of ‘seeking to master reality by interpreting it through an imposed system of defining categories which standardize things and thus make them manageable’ (166, italics added), whose rigour is acquired by ‘the application of public rule-governed procedures to experience in terms of which it is thus organized and validated’ (190, italics added). Hence, for Bonnett, what is lacking in the rationalist perspective is an ‘appreciation of the importance of “subjective weight” in a person’s understanding and general mode of relating to things’ (97).

It is in this context that Bonnett appeals to what Martin Heidegger dubs ‘poetic’ thinking³ as a vital and robust alternative to rational thinking, that is ‘a form of thinking which springs from things as they are in themselves’ (129, italics in original). Put in the terms Bonnett works with, while rational thinking prompts us to ‘live predominantly with objects’, poetic thinking disallows any kind of application of the imposed and impersonal categories external to the thinker or the experiencing subject and entitles us to live with ‘things’ that are not converted into objects of thought (191, italics in original).

It is worth pausing here, however, because the two contrasting modes of thinking do not exhaust the full picture of the 1994 Bonnett. He seeks to lay out ‘a third dimension of thinking’, which is concerned with both rational thinking and poetic thinking: ‘authentic–rational thinking’ (166). Now rational thinking is divided into ‘rational–calculative thinking’ (ibid.) – Bonnett borrows the term ‘calculative’ from Heidegger – and authentic–rational thinking, which is characterised not by ‘self-centredness’ but by ‘self-referencing’⁴ (118–119). It is in fact this conception of authentic–rational thinking that Emma Williams considers in ‘Oakeshott, Bonnett, Derrida and the Possibilities of Thought’. In this piece, she criticises Bonnett’s critique of Oakeshott in Children’s Thinking on the grounds that Bonnett remains committed to the conventional (Cartesian) conception of subjectivity, to which according to her Derridean perspective, we should not cast Oakeshott as vulnerable. Williams says: ‘Bonnett works firmly within the subject–object model of experience, where the subject is a being with its own inner world, of which it is in full possession and which is there prior to any engagement with the world that stands apart from it’ (Williams 2016a, 100, italics in original). Despite its aspirations to get beyond the traditional picture of the thinking subject, Williams expounds, Sartrean existentialism, from which Bonnett draws much inspiration in making his case for the importance of personal significance, ‘continues to work within the traditional idea of the subject as always already disengaged’ (ibid., 101, italics in original), and therefore so does Bonnett.

I think Williams’s accusation misses the target. Her real target must be the notion of poetic thinking, which is, in the end, given a higher priority even in Children’s Thinking than the notion of authentic–rational thinking, which has, with the idea of self-referencing, been dropped out of the picture after the book. (I shall come back to this.) Yet if the target was set to the notion of poetic thinking, Williams might also uncover a vestige of the traditional subject–object relation in Bonnett’s account of poetic thinking.⁵ Perhaps we can say that there are elements in Children’s Thinking that lend credence to the view that Bonnett remained trapped in the traditional subject–object framework, but a more charitable reading may suggest that Williams’s diagnosis (merely) reflects Bonnett’s failure to give organised expression to the thought he would have wanted to articulate with existentialist insights, not the spirit in which he has attempted to present a different picture of the subject–object relation, or, to use a more Bonnettian phrase, the subject–thing relation, from the traditional one in which the subject is seen as disengaged. It may well be that Bonnett himself did not find Sartrean existentialism entirely satisfactory and that this kind of dissatisfaction led him to come to think that a better way to bring out what he really wants to say is to express things by more specifically referencing the insights of (existential) phenomenology. In this way, Bonnett has since honed and expanded the conception of poetic thinking in the direction of an environmental philosophy of education, whose root conviction is that we cannot fully understand the nature of our being without properly appreciating our relationship with nature, namely, in Bonnett’s conspicuously Heideggerian terminology, ‘the idea of our own ‘being-in-nature’ (Bonnett 2021a, 132).

Bonnett’s environmental turn

It is no accident that after Children’s Thinking, Bonnett widened his focus from existentialism to (existential) phenomenology, the philosophical tradition that has chiefly concerned itself with acts of experiencing and the structure of experiences through ‘intuition’ or what Bonnett preferably calls ‘sensing’ (e.g. 2021b, 6). Such a phenomenologically informed environmental philosophy of education has advanced in a way that is at odds with the Cartesian subject–object model of experience. For instance, Bonnett spends most of the new book working to countenance and spell out the importance of nature’s agency (with its collateral qualities, such as transcendent integrity, normativity, mystery and intrinsic value), which is not to be viewed as subordinate to human agency. The ‘occurring’ of things (not of objects), which Bonnett advocates, is not a phenomenon figuring on the object side of the modern dualistic picture. What Bonnett approvingly terms ‘things themselves’ must not be confused with the idea of ‘things in themselves’ that has long haunted many philosophers and which perhaps afflicts those involved in contemporary environmental concerns. Bonnett claims:

… the transcendent that I intend by the designation ‘things themselves’, while certainly referring to an aspect of things that lie beyond human construction and authorship (they are ‘themselves’), does not refer to things that are so ‘in themselves’ as to be beyond all knowledge and sensory perception (as with Kant), or indeed have an existence that is completely independent of human participation (as with Plato). (Bonnett 2021a, 57, italics in original)⁶

In the alternative picture Bonnett recommends, things themselves show up as particular – individual – things only against the backdrop of our participation. Bonnett tersely writes: ‘there is an important sense in which we participate in their occurring’ (57). The subject is an engaged and embodied agent; at the same time, however, this should not be taken to imply that Bonnett flirts with a version of constructivism.

The participation that enables the occurring of things is not one-sided, but is ‘reciprocal participation’ (69), because just as ‘phenomenologically, we are never unplaced’ (71),⁷ so ‘nothing that we encounter is unplaced’ (69). It might be wrong to say that Bonnett obliterates the traditional subject–object relation altogether, since he gives pride of place to the authenticity that the purported constituents of the relation each have. But no doubt his participatory picture offers a different connection between them – one that is neither anthropocentric nor reductive, but environmental. That is to say: neither the subject nor the thing herself or itself is one side of the traditional dualism, but they come fully on the scene by virtue of their emplacement – namely, environmentally. And what matters is that such an environmental relation is usually not a one-to-one relation, but a ‘mutual sustaining’ relation between ‘all the inhabitants of a place’ (134), including, of course, the (human) subject involved.

Where the participation is taking place, Bonnett argues, is in human consciousness; hence the first part of the title of his new book – environmental consciousness. Taking his cues from the intentionality thesis developed in the phenomenological tradition, he defines ‘the essentially ecstatic nature of consciousness’ as ‘its constant reaching out beyond itself in a disclosure of things in the world’ (2021b, 5); authentic selfhood needs ‘a radical de-centring of self’ (68) because it should be receptive to the authenticity of things. Bonnett glosses his consciousness thesis and his idea of human being as sustainability on these lines: ‘consciousness is understood as the place where things occur – show up, are beheld. And they show up most fully – are most themselves – when the receptivity of such consciousness is as open as possible. This is to say that it is the essence of reflexive consciousness to allow things to be, and in this sense to sustain them’ (2021b, 5, italics in original). In a parallel passage in Environmental Consciousness, Bonnett describes how he conceives the traditional subject–object model of experience differently: ‘Here, as it were, subject and object appear as poles of the relationship that is consciousness. The poles can be distinguished, but arise only as aspects of this original intentional relationship that constitutes consciousness …’ (68). Seen this way, it would be no surprise that consciousness is also where education enters the picture. The broad thrust of Bonnett’s project of ecologising education is this: ‘ultimately it is with the quality of consciousness that education is chiefly concerned’ (60).

I have tremendous sympathy for the environmental philosophy of education so conceived. One omission on the part of the environmental project might, however, force a qualification. I noted earlier that Bonnett has, after Children’s Thinking, left out what he used to term ‘authentic–rational thinking’. Indeed, in the course of developing a fuller phenomenological exploration that has amounted from Retrieving Nature through to Environmental Consciousness, Bonnett seems to relegate issues of rationality to the edges of his picture of an environmental philosophy of education in such a way that is oblivious of the distinction he set out in his earlier work between rational–calculative thinking and authentic–rational thinking. Rationality is now almost exclusively identified with the former Enlightenment – instrumental – conception that has served to set the scene for and accelerate the prevailing metaphysics of mastery; in effect, the latter authentic–rational thinking as well as the self-referencing that characterise it find little to no expression in Bonnett’s later two books.⁸ Of course we should not miss the fact that the authentic dimension of thinking has been brought into clearer focus in the subsequent writings; the explicitly Heideggerian idea of ‘authentic dwelling’ (Bonnett 2004, 137) that Bonnett has worked towards delineating instantiates this. I do not think, however, it is far-fetched to say that the notion of rationality has been left out of the development of his environmental argument, as if authenticity has been singled out from authentic–rational thinking, perhaps with a justification according to which a minimal sense of rationality is accompanied by authenticity. I find this justification wanting because one remarkable attraction of Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education is, as I understand it, that it throws us back to the most fundamental issue of the philosophical-educational enquiry (i.e. the issue of the nature of our being and our relation to the world) by environmentalising our ways of thinking and speaking of, say, nature, things, consciousness, experience and the subject–object relation, on pain of dismissing them out of hand as totally irrelevant to a rethinking of the fundamental issue. It seems that Bonnett is not yet committed to environmentalising the notion of rationality; it is as yet insufficiently environmentalised.

The main reason why Bonnett is reluctant to engage with the environmentalising project with regard to rationality is, as I see it, his lingering assumption that rationality conflicts, in essence, with the receptive-responsive dimension of thinking and experience that he cherishes. Yet I think we need not accept this assumption. To explore whether and how rationality can find better expression in Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education, it is helpful to attend to a series of debates carried out between McDowell and Dreyfus.

The pervasiveness of conceptual rationality

Turning our attention to what has become known as the McDowell–Dreyfus debate in the context under consideration is no surprise, since at the centre of this debate lies the issue of how we relate to the world, and this general issue takes the shape, in this debate, of whether human experience is pervaded by conceptual rationality in a relevant sense. McDowell, in a (Wilfrid) Sellarsian and (Immanuel) Kantian vein, vindicates what both discussants term ‘the pervasiveness thesis’ that ‘rational mindedness pervades the lives of the rational animals we are, informing in particular our perceptual experience and our exercises of agency’ (McDowell 2013, 41); in contrast, Dreyfus, drawing on the work of existential phenomenologists (e.g. Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) to which Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education is likewise indebted, points to the limitation of rationality by trying to demonstrate ‘a ground-floor level of preconceptual, preobjective/presubjective, prelinguistic, coping’ (Dreyfus 2007, 364), thus rendering the pervasiveness claim unintelligible.

Bonnett does not directly engage with this debate. Interestingly, however, there is good textual reason to think he is on McDowell’s side rather than Dreyfus’s which finds an academic home in the tradition of existential phenomenology. In Environmental Consciousness, Bonnett registers an affinity between his view of nature and McDowell’s proposal of ‘a partial re-enchantment of nature’ (McDowell 1996 [1994], 97), which McDowell links with the Aristotelian – namely pre-modern – notion of second nature and which resists the modern temptation to equate the realm of nature with the reach of the modern conception of nature – that is, the realm of natural-scientific understanding. In a passage that follows, Bonnett makes approving reference to McDowell’s argument and claims:

reason in the sense of the operation of concepts goes all the way down to the level of our most primordial experience of things. There is no prior apprehension of a pre-conceptual ‘given’, upon which concepts then operate. How could they obtain a purchase or participate in an alien logical space? Concepts are involved in our apprehension of nature from the bottom-up and nature is therefore no longer necessarily divested of everything normative. (Bonnett 2021a, 36, italics added)

It is evident that Bonnett would, as McDowell does, reject the question that Dreyfus invites McDowell to address, the question by which their debate made a start: ‘how our conceptual capacities grow out of our nonconceptual ones—how the ground floor of pure perception and receptive coping supports the conceptual upper stories of the edifice of knowledge’ (Dreyfus 2005, 61). For McDowell, Dreyfus’s concern is misplaced: such a question turns on the assumption that conceptual capacities are not operative in skilled action, expert or everyday, in which we are (unreflectively) absorbed; in other words, ‘rational mindedness always involves detachment’ (McDowell 2013, 53) – the assumption McDowell calls ‘the Myth of the Mind as Detached’ (ibid.). As conceptual capacities are ‘capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality’, McDowell urges, ‘another way of putting my claim [corresponding to the first sentence of the above indented quote from Bonnett] is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality’ (McDowell 2009a [2007], 308). I think Bonnett would not object to this formulation either, because he avers that ‘the central point that experiences of nature occur within, as I would put it, a form of sensibility that is shot through and through with human significances and is in that limited sense rational and a cultural product has to be granted’ (Bonnett 2021a, 37, italics added). But as he puts it in his second response to Dreyfus, McDowell employs the term rationality ‘in a strong sense’, that is, ‘responsiveness to reasons as such’ (McDowell 2009b [2007], 324, italics added).

In the sense he attaches, McDowell draws a sharp line between rationality – responsiveness to reasons as such – and ‘the kind of responding to reasons that is exemplified by, say, fleeing from danger, which is something non-rational animals can do’ (McDowell 2009b [2007], 324). In the eyes of those familiar with Darwinian evolution, the Aristotelian idea that we are rational animals can seem like nothing but a hallmark of human hubris that is untenable and should be jettisoned, but what McDowell tries to champion is precisely that ancient idea that we, ‘mature human beings’, are unique and special in the animal kingdom (McDowell 2009a [2007] 308). Still, this uniqueness and specialness attributable to human beings has nothing to do with the human arrogance that has committed us to the terrible treatment and exploitation of other animals; McDowell’s point is simply that we need to appreciate what kind of beings we are, and we are unique and special in being responsive to reasons as such; in other words, in being free – that is, in having ‘the freedom of exercises of rationality’ (McDowell 2006, 238). We can defend the classical idea, McDowell takes it, without diminishing the Darwinian theory that ensures the continuity and resemblances between human and non-human animals, but now with a legitimate recognition of the Sellarsian-Kantian insight that ‘the logical space of reasons’ (Sellars 1997 [1956], 76) is sui generis (to human beings) and conceptual capacities that belong to the higher cognitive faculties – such as thinking and judging, which are exercises of spontaneity in which human freedom manifests – are also and already in play in experience.

As revealed in the second sentence of the above indented quote from Bonnett, McDowell follows Sellars in rejecting the so-called ‘Myth of the Given’ since the idea that the Given, ‘a brute effect of the world’ (McDowell, 1996 [1994], 42), can ground empirical knowledge from outside the conceptual realm is mythical. This is a staunch denial of the foundationalist programme of traditional empiricism, but McDowell does not abandon the notion that we confront the world by way of experience or ‘sensible intuition’ (to use a Kantian term) (ibid., xii), thus calling his alternative picture a ‘minimal empiricism’ (ibid., xi). In this alternative empiricism the passivity of experience comes into the foreground in a way that separates the operation of our sensibility – receptivity in the sense of the world’s impacts on our senses – from non-human modes of sensibility, however similar our sensory arrays and systems are to theirs; with this conception of experience, McDowell elaborates the point that we are animals of a unique and special kind: rational animals. He claims that ‘distinctively human perceptual experience is actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness’ (McDowell 2009a [2007], 320). The impressions on a possessor of sensibility (i.e. cases of receptivity in operation) are surely natural phenomena, but they need not be considered to be the subject matter of (exclusively) natural-scientific investigations; on the contrary, on the account McDowell gives, they ‘can fit in the logical space of reasons because impressions can be actualizations of conceptual capacities’ (McDowell 2000, 7).

We should not, however, go so far as to delete the distinction McDowell keeps between actualisations of conceptual capacities and exercises of them. We ‘actively’ exercise conceptual capacities, paradigmatically in, say, judging and thinking (McDowell 2000, 9–12) – typically with the ability to ‘step back’, the ability McDowell marks out as one that differentiates responsiveness to reasons as they are from responding to features of the environment on the part of non-human animals; there is no requirement, McDowell contends, that for there to be actualisations of conceptual capacities the capacities be exercised, but, rather, conceptual capacities are actualised in sensory receptivity – hence the thesis that ‘conceptual capacities are passively operative in experience’ (McDowell 1996 [1994], 29).

What McDowell has contrived to do in Mind and World and many other writings is to illustrate ‘how the conceptual capacities that are drawn into operation in experience are integrated into spontaneity at large’ (McDowell 1996 [1994], 36), and this is the argument on which the notion of ‘perception as openness to the world’ (McDowell 2009a [2007], 314) is premised, according to which, even human activities at the ground-floor level, such as absorbed coping and acting in flow, should be understood to be distinctively human (perceptual) engagements with the world, in the sense of the pervasiveness of conceptual rationality, which, contrary to Dreyfus’s assumption, does not always involve detachment (cf. McDowell 2013, 54). And conceptual rationality so conceived clearly does not sit easily with the notion of (Enlightenment) rationality that Bonnett castigates for its externality to the subject of experience; rather it is perfectly compatible with the receptive-responsive dimension of thinking and experience that he espouses.

Coda: towards environmentalising rationality

If Bonnett joins McDowell in claiming that rationality in the relevant sense is ‘everywhere in our lives’ (McDowell 2009a [2007], 321), his environmental philosophy of education in fact accommodates the demanding sense of rationality, the sense that McDowell is claiming Dreyfus’s phenomenology does not accommodate. This is to indicate that rationality is, unwittingly, environmentalised in Bonnett’s environmental thinking, at least to some extent, without being so expressed. In spite of his acknowledgement of ‘some resonances’ between McDowell’s views of nature and his own (Bonnett 2021a, 35), Bonnett might reject the invitation to afford explicit expression to the conception of environmental rationality. But I think undertaking the project of giving finer-grained expression to that conception will contribute to both furthering the continued evolution of his environmental philosophy of education and making it more accessible to wider audiences, especially those who have no prior knowledge of philosophy. In my view, the pernicious influences of the modern conception of rationality that Bonnett (rightly) claims has generated and validated the culture of metaphysics of mastery can be better attenuated not by stopping discussions about rationality, but by properly ‘environmentalising’ it in tandem with other fitting key components of his environmental project, such as consciousness and experience.

I want to end by considering two of many aspects of the pervasiveness thesis around which the McDowell–Dreyfus debate swirls, which I wish would encourage Bonnett and his readers to take a step towards environmentalising rationality.

First, it is important to note that McDowell’s enigmatic idea that the content of experience is conceptual is not the same as the absurd idea that everything we do, including perceiving and acting in which the ability to step back is not exercised, is always linguistically explicit. But if so, in what sense, one might ask, does McDowell’s view differ from Dreyfus’s insistence that what is going on at the ground-floor level is pre-conceptual? McDowell warns us against interpreting his view as meaning that those goings-on are ‘only implicitly conceptual’ as long as that interpretation implies that ‘conceptuality would be properly on the scene only after something had been made explicit in discourse or discursive thought—that is, only after the subject had exercised the ability to step back’ (McDowell 2009b [2007], 324–325, italics in original). McDowell’s point here is that while intuiting is, unlike judging (which is analogous to asserting), not discursive in character (McDowell 2009c [2008], 262) and thus intuitional content is not discursive, let alone propositional, intuitional content is nonetheless conceptual. McDowell claims: ‘[an intuition’s content] is in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very content, figure in discursive activity. That would be to exploit a potential for discursive activity that is already there in the capacities actualized in having an intuition with that content’ (ibid., 265, italics in original). This ‘already there’ thesis concerning rational-conceptual capacities obviously coheres, not with Dreyfus’s foundationalist thinking based on the ground/upper-floor structure, but with Bonnett’s environmental thinking that builds on his own consciousness-emplacement thesis that he offers by appropriating the intentionality thesis in phenomenology. But one crucial lesson from the pervasiveness thesis that (re-)casts human beings as rational animals is that it never commits us to a separation of mind from body, or ‘me from my body’ (McDowell 2009b [2008], 328), a separation on which even Bonnett (along with other phenomenologists like Dreyfus and Merleau-Ponty) sometimes seems to throw excessive emphasis when talking about ecologising education and highlighting ‘the primitiveness of the body’ (Bonnett 2021a, 137). Bonnett claims: ‘the body has a primordial knowledge of the environment that can form a foundation for interpretation and concrete sense-making in cognition by assimilating more abstract perceptions. An ecologized education would see it as important that this pre-predicative understanding is not occluded by too exclusive a preoccupation with celebrating the cerebral’ (ibid., 136, italics added). The subject in the subject–thing relation that Bonnett’s environmental thinking elegantly enables us to appreciate need not be divided into the bodily and the cerebral/the cognitive (as if our brain were not part of our body).

The second aspect relating to the pervasiveness thesis that motivates my suggestion that rationality be environmentalised is that the analytical discussions of rationality incorporate considerations of how we come into the world at all. This is, as far as I can see, a topic that has not come into view in Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education, perhaps similar to the fact that the theme of how we get to be-in-the-world was not set as a serious agenda in Heidegger’s work. While Heidegger did not write about childhood,⁹ Bonnett of course does write about it. But his eloquent and fascinating argument seems to focus on elucidating how we, who are already environmental beings – engaged subjects, whether children or adults – are always already interwoven, deeply and intrinsically, with other inhabitants of a place. Undoubtedly, his environmental philosophy of education deserves to be honoured and celebrated, but to paint a fuller picture of the environmental project, I think it would be a fine thing to pay more attention to how we get to be-in-nature. McDowell accounts for how we become inhabitants of the logical space of reasons by invoking Aristotelian moral education (in which the notion of second nature is almost explicit) through which relevant rational-conceptual capacities that differentiate inhabitants of the space of reasons from non-rational animals inhabiting merely their surrounding environment are acquired (McDowell 1996 [1994], 84). While also invoking the German idea of Bildung to express that initiation into conceptual capacities that are rational in the strong sense, McDowell does not delve into this issue mainly because the ‘we’ in the ancient idea that we are rational animals, which he tries to defend, are adult human beings. In this respect, the work of David Bakhurst, who has successfully brought McDowell’s philosophy to the attention of philosophers of education, merits mention (e.g. Bakhurst 2011), since he puts the issue of the Bildungsprozess of human beings on the table. Avenues have thereby been opened up to us to develop a philosophical-educational space to bring within the scope of our enquiry the second-personal dimension in our being in the world, especially in our coming into the world in the first place (cf. Bakhurst 2020) – a dimension that seems to be under-explored in both McDowell’s and Bonnett’s discussions. Attempts to encompass that dimension will be useful antidotes to a privileging of the human–nature relationship over the human–human one that might be found in Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education in ways that perhaps give the impression that the former relationship always predates the latter (e.g. Bonnett 2021a, 146).

Michael Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education brings us back to the most fundamental question throughout the history of humankind: how we understand ourselves and our relation to the world. And I think it is no exaggeration to say that his environmental project is unprecedented in that it is concerned to engage, under the head of ecologising education, with education at the ground-floor level, as it were, namely with developing the quality of environmental consciousness, which does not fall into the scope of either Dreyfus’s or McDowell’s philosophical investigations. Detailing and substantiating environmental rationality in Bonnet’s picture will, I believe, contribute to advancing his venerable philosophy of education further in a way that makes the force of the symbolic phrase of ‘participating in the gift of the given’ with which Bonnett closes his summary paper of Environmental Consciousness (2021b, 10) more vivid and comprehensible, and whose spirit certainly already appeared in the Preface of Children’s Thinking: ‘What is required is not yet more "evidence", but to perceive the significance of what we often already know’ (Bonnett 1994, xiv).

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Kakenhi [grant number JP19K02421] and [grant number JP20H01178].

Notes

1 All page references in this section are to Children’s Thinking unless otherwise stated.

2 One of the most influential views in education that exemplifies the rationalist position, Bonnett argues, is Hirst’s classic conception of liberal education, which was submitted to liberate a mind from ignorance and free it ‘to explore reality in a rational manner’ (64) and which certainly made a tremendous impact on ideas that structured the curriculum at national and local levels, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

3 As early as the early 1980s, Bonnett already contrasted two opposing ways of thinking: ‘the rational self-assertive or “calculative” and the receptive-responsive or “mediative”’ (Bonnett 1983, 27). He even referred to Heidegger’s notion of ‘poetic building’ (ibid., italics in original), the notion that has occupied a central place in later stages of Bonnett’s thought.

4 Self-referencing ‘refers to a determination to understand what one learns in terms of one’s own experiences, and to act in accordance with one’s own beliefs and commitments’ (119).

5 In fact, Williams does engage in a critical discussion of Bonnett’s account of poetic thinking as well as of authentic–rational thinking in Chapter 2 of The Ways We Think (Williams 2016b). Casting doubt on Bonnett’s reading of Heidegger’s philosophy, Williams sums up what Bonnett suggests about his own alternative to the rationalist view of thinking by claiming: ‘Fundamentally, his account either retains the metaphysics of the subject at work in the rationalistic mode (as is the case in his account of authentic-rational thinking) or flies off too far into the romantic realm (despite his somewhat fudged attempts to introduce rigour to poetic thinking)’ (ibid., 55). Yet Williams’s diagnosis of Bonnett’s apprehension of poetic thinking strikes me as rather uncharitable, given the subsequent development of his views (as environmental thinking). As I suggest in the text below, it appears to me that Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education does quite a good job in achieving what Williams herself seeks to do: to move ‘robustly’ beyond the ­rationalism in question (ibid., 56). Whilst not going into detail about Bonnett’s subsequent writings, Williams seems to admit, touching upon one of his later papers, the possibility that what she finds in Children’s Thinking with regard to poetic thinking is approached differently in Bonnett’s later works (ibid., 55). As far as I can see, however, Bonnet does not give proper consideration to what Williams – rightly in my view – strives to do: to defend and articulate ‘a broader conception of rationality’ (ibid., 43, italics in original). The most important task remaining in Bonnett’s environmental thinking is, therefore, to ‘environmentalise’ rationality, as I detail later in this paper.

6 Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent page references in this section refer to Environmental Consciousness.

7 Bonnett writes: ‘no human action is possible in the absence of place, nor indeed, any thought, including that of sense of self’ (71).

8 I think Bonnett’s treatment of rationality is overly restrictive, or at least it leaves open the possibility of different treatments of it. For instance, even Hirst, one of the main targets of Children’s Thinking, altered his views, around 1990, on rationality, inspired (primarily through the work of Alasdair MacIntyre) by Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason. Many of Hirst’s later writings proceed with critical discussions of his own earlier position and of its underlying philosophical doctrines, to which he, with hindsight, affixes the label ‘the “rationalist” approach’ (Hirst 1993, 190). Indeed, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the philosophical world witnessed a new wave of interest in reclaiming and refashioning the Aristotelian conception of practical reason and the educational world also witnessed significant breakthroughs in our understanding of practical reasoning in pedagogic practice. For a good review of accounts of practical reason in the 1980s and 1990s, see Shirley Pendlebury (Dunne and Pendlebury 2003, 204–211).

9 Thanks to Paul Standish for pointing to Heidegger’s indifference to childhood.