Strange loops, oedipal logic, and an apophatic ecology: Reimagining critique in environmental education

Abstract

There are currently two broad forms of critique undergirding environmental education theories: the first is one of subtraction from perceived reality as it seeks to reveal and remove illusions and ideologies, while the other takes the inverse form of adding to reality in the form of investigating how matter comes to matter. We suggest a third form that explores the paradoxical and uncanny aspects of ecological awareness and assumes an apophatic, self-negating form, which short-circuits and relinquishes all attempts at epistemological closure. In this third form, we are drawing on themes from dark ecology, which maintains that ecological awareness is decidedly ‘weird’ as it assumes the guise of an ‘Oedipal’ logic, a narrative trope in which the protagonist seeking to avoid a tragic fate finds out that avoidance itself is the realization of the tragedy. Using Timothy Morton’s work as a springboard, we unpack the import of such looping temporality onto the onto-epistemological frameworks of environmental education.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• philosophy of education
• dark ecology
• critique
• apophasis

Introduction: a third form of critique

Bruno Latour (2004) claims that modernist critique, the kind that removes the false veils of ideology, ‘has run out of steam’. Despite its theoretical variety, it often consists in pointing out how ‘matters of fact’, our vaunted, scientifically vindicated truths about the world, society and ourselves, are ‘socially constructed’ or ‘historically contingent’ and as such, either cover up some more fundamental reality, or reveal that there is no fundamental reality behind such constructs at all: “Once deprived of this naive belief in transcendence, critique is no longer able to produce this difference of potential that had literally given it steam” (Latour, 2010, p. 475). With contemporary ‘wicked problems’ like global warming and mass extinction, this critique is now defunct, claims Latour, as it is unable to account for the ways in which societies, along with more-than-human actors, are contributing to such crises and their solutions. Modernist critique of debunking is unarmed against the armies of conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers and other skeptics of scientific facts that currently dot the political landscape, claiming that the scientific facts of global warming are mere ideology, ironically upending the narrative arc, and effectively “debunking the debunkers” (p. 475). Instead Latour argues for critique as addition to reality: from debunking and removing veils of illusion to adding, protecting and caring qua ‘matters of concern’: gatherings of political, existential and scientific interests as well as concepts, spaces and objects. Such a critique is decidedly empirical and “all about immanence” (p. 474) as it investigates the heterogeneous material, social, natural and political trajectories involved when addressing wicked problems like global warming and mass extinction.

Although not always drawing on Latour, there are currently notable approaches in theories of environmental education (henceforth EE)¹ often tagged with labels ‘posthuman’, ‘new materialist’ or ‘ecofeminist’ that, despite differences in their theoretical allegiances, follow a loosely similar strategy of critique as addition: pointing to the multiple ontological and political registers of pressing matters of concern in EE as a field of study (Van Poeck et al., 2016). With concepts and metaphors of hybrids, assemblages and paths, they also think anew “what really matters” by destabilizing common binaries between the human and the more-than-human, the cultural and the natural, constituting an onto-epistemological paradigm shift that takes its focus beyond the anthropocentric limitations on language, consciousness and western notions of reason to the material ‘outside’ or ‘unthought’ in reality (Gough & Whitehouse, 2018).

While we recognize the value of this form of critique as addition and its many ways of investigating how ‘matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2003) in EE theories, we would like to propose a third form that is especially primed for responding to events like global warming and mass extinction: a mode of ecological critique that comes to terms with the weirdness of reality. This critique takes the form of a strange loop, indicating a movement of thought from grappling with reality to its weirding with every positive affirmation of reality being paired with its negation. Such a critique, instead of revealing or adding to reality, assumes the form of apophasis, a constant negation of all attempts at epistemological closure. Apophasis indicates that the short-circuiting and epistemic failure of critique is paradoxically the precondition of opening up radically different forms of thought. As a performative example, we are examining the weird loops in their temporal aspects in the onto-epistemological undergirdings of EE that we read as a propaedeutic (i.e. preparatory) failure directing us towards apophasis.

Accordingly, this paper will consist of three scaffolding parts. In the first part, we will sketch some of the salient features of weirding and its strange looping structure in the ecological aesthetics known as dark ecology by flushing out some of the narrative tropes of EE and describing the attunement structures that ecological awareness in a modality of dark ecology calls for. In the second part, we will draw out the Oedipal narrative logic of the Anthropocene given the weird, looping structures of reality described in the first part; and in the third part, we will bring these discussions together with a critical approach to EE we are calling an apophatic ecology.

Dark ecology: weird reality and strange loops in ecological awareness

In our proposal of a third form of critique, we are developing themes from Timothy Morton’s ecological aesthetics and his corresponding modes of environmental awareness. While his theoretically eclectic and labyrinthine style has drawn criticism (see e.g. Bennett, 2012; Clark, 2013), we interpret it as an attempt to articulate the weird, looping structure of reality, beckoning us to approach it indirectly or obliquely with allusion or innuendo. These are fundamental principles of object-oriented ontology, which Morton subscribes, where reality withdraws or withholds our direct access to it (see also Harman, 2017, p. 7). Buried within this philosophical approach, we find his concept of ‘dark ecology’ a useful springboard for exploring the possibilities of alternative forms of critique. With this neologism, Morton highlights aspects of coexistence, a term he ascribes as foundational to ecology, that have often been passed over and disavowed in environmental rhetoric. These aspects are decidedly ‘dark’ as they express negativity, ambiguity, irony, horror and difference (Morton, 2010b, pp. 16–17).

A significant aspect of disavowal under dark ecology is the ‘always already’ in environmental thought: when environmental catastrophe is no longer an event looming in the future horizon, but a massive process beginning centuries ago in which we find ourselves caught amidst. Dark ecology unpacks what is at stake in our ever-evolving realization that ecological “catastrophe, far from being imminent, has already taken place,” thereby subverting the consistency and stability of our coordinates of reality (Morton, 2007, p. 28; 2010b, p. 17) and eliciting “a wounding that manifests in jarring, rupturing, disjunctive encounters” in our future’s past (Richardson, 2018, p. 1).

Dark ecology also refers to the study of the ‘weird’, more precisely, the paradoxical and conflicting aspects of ecological awareness. As such, it goes against the grain of Romantic readings of ‘Nature’ as a pristine and distinct domain from which (western) humans are alienated and to which they must be rekindled (Morton, 2007). Instead of a neat culture-nature divide, we are constantly engaged with unholy mixtures between humans and non-humans that sustain the functioning of society.

As such, dark ecology comes close to a Latourian critique of the ‘modern constitution’: an onto-epistemological scaffolding that seeks to keep separate ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, which must be continually purified and mediated. For Latour, the modern constitution also undergirds the aforementioned modernist critique revealing that which is ideologically constructed as ‘natural’ is actually ‘cultural’ or vice versa (Latour, 1993). Latour’s well-known antidote is to forgo such ontological distinctions and to observe how ‘actors’ themselves forge connections into a network (Latour, 2005). Yet dark ecology does not proceed to the critique as addition qua empirical investigation as this would risk taming the weird and disavowed elements inherent in our collective ecological awareness. Rather it introduces a hesitation or caution of sorts to take into consideration these withdrawn or submerged aspects.

Morton claims that ecological awareness in the dark mode is decidedly ‘weird’ because it assumes the guise of ‘a strange loop’ “in which two levels that appear utterly separate flip into one another” (Morton, 2016, p. 16). It is like a Moebius strip, a topological plane which has only one surface and yet appears to have two: it can be easily constructed by taking a strip of paper, twisting one end 180 degrees and then fixing the two ends together. By tracing a line along the surface of the strip, you will begin to notice that despite the appearance of two sides, the line transverses but one plane. This illustration is useful for showing the slippage of seeming opposites that ecological disasters and upheavals have forced into our awareness requiring further examination in our theoretical frameworks and practices of EE.

While Morton’s texts have no extensive definition of the concept of weird loops as such, they appear in both epistemological and ontological registers. Morton connects weird loops to epistemology in the sense of a flipping of the subjective ‘inside’ of the knower and the ‘outside’ object of knowledge undergirding many empiricist environmental discourse. Scientific knowledge of ‘life’, ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ are undoubtedly conditioned by subjects as rational beings capable of forming cognitive representations of reality and ordering them methodically. And yet, it has become evident that these sensory and rational capabilities are possible only by virtue of ‘environment’ and ‘life’—our existence as material and biological beings. In a circular way, the two sides of the subject and the object of knowledge operate as each other’s conditions of possibility. Thinking and non-thinking, presence and absence are mutually encroached: “this knowing might be weirdly like a serpent in a loop, swallowing its own tail. It is a profound paradox,” Morton continues, “that what appears to be the nearest—my existence qua this actual entity, the shorthand for which is human—is phenomenologically the most distant thing in the universe” (Morton, 2016, p. 19). It is a straightforward, yet at the same time, a paradoxical task to think in these terms, to draw a line in the strip of paper without raising your pencil from the paper, “to follow and witness the being owing to which thinking is happening. Thinking,” concludes Morton, “goes into a loop” (p. 24). Exposing such paradoxes and loops is not used to debunk or demystify science, however; instead, such an exposition points to the ways that science has enabled us to acknowledge the deep uncanniness of reality.

The epistemic form of looping is tied to the register of ontology and identity, the fact that being itself is conditioned by non-being, and vice versa. For instance, we know now that humans are made up of nonhuman parts, which bear the traces, through evolutionary history of different lifeforms: “A human is made up of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. Lungs are evolved swim bladders. Yet a human is not a fish” (p. 18). Humanity is, in logical terms, a set that does not include itself. The same goes for all other entities: being itself is fundamentally contradictory (p. 18).

Yet there is also a temporal register in which the import of weird loops bears significant weight for EE discourses. This is a form of critique that is non-representational: it does not seek to reveal a more substantial reality behind a veil of illusion, nor does it trace a network or an assemblage. Rather, it signifies a growing awareness of the profound weirdness and paradoxical nature of environmental awareness without an attempt to solve or dispel them, or the hope thereof. Following this, we will focus our attention on describing precisely the temporal aspects of ecological awareness as well as flushing out its theoretical import for critique in theories of EE.

Narrative tropes in environmental education discourses

Recent critical philosophies of EE have picked up on Morton’s (2007) insights in deconstructing ‘Nature’ as an organizing concept, especially how EE often employs a romantic imagery of cultivating a relation to Nature (Lysgaard et al., 2019; Lysgaard & Bengtsson, 2020; Wallin, 2017). Nature imagery is etched in what we would like to call a “narrative of the fall”: telling a story of cultural alienation, separation or a falling away from a harmonious relationship with the more-than-human. Its future-oriented obverse is the “narrative of a return,” a rekindling with Nature as intuitive, affective and embodied belonging.

The aforementioned criticisms identify such narratives as founded on the culture-nature distinction that obfuscates the cultural specificity of such a divide as well as those experiences and phenomena—ominous or repulsive aspects of the more-than-human environments—that do not neatly fit in either side of the dichotomy (Clarke, 2017; Duhn et al., 2017; Lysgaard et al., 2019). Moreover, insights from dark ecology have been used to point out the paradoxical character of incitements to ‘connect with nature’ in EE discourses, which are deeply paradoxical as they constantly reiterate the nature-culture distinction they seek to abolish (Fletcher, 2017).

This is how dark ecological perspectives have aided in flushing out the repeating narratives of distancing nature in order to connect with it and of renouncing the human while sustaining it by the same sleight of hand (see also Morton, 2010b, p. 255). In other words, these criticisms have unearthed an unacknowledged loop, a Moebius strip that ties together the seemingly opposite poles of presence and absence, enchantment and disenchantment, distinction and non-distinction.

Another traditional narrative in EE follows the so-called “improvement agenda:” once we find the right kind of education, we can find the means to prevent or at least rein in environmental catastrophes (Jickling, 1994). This is a variant of the ‘educational reflex’ (Tröhler, 2017) of considering education systems as a primary means of tackling any societal challenge and believing in the possibilities of providing simple pedagogical solutions to complex problems. Yet education systems are themselves deeply entrenched in global systems of production and consumption undergirding our ongoing ecological disasters. And as it focuses on practical solutions, the improvement narrative in EE often closes off serious philosophical questioning of its own tenets and beliefs (Jickling, 1994). Education may be unwittingly sustaining patterns that prevent students from considering any radical changes to their lifestyle or the broader societal power structures behind the problems EE is meant to address (Hellberg & Knutsson, 2018).

Still, even the theories that seek to go ‘beyond’ such narrative tropes in EE are not always immune to looping structures. For instance, Wallin uses Morton to point out that in critiques of anthropocentrism, the repeated efforts to make EE research post-human, the ‘human’ is not only constantly repeated as a problem to be overcome in the imminent future, but the very means of problematizing anthropocentrism (language, reasoning, writing) are still centrally human (Wallin, 2017, p. 1107). In the narratives of leaving the problems of anthropocentrism in the past and moving towards a post-human future, the investigating, critiquing subject is obfuscated and so the loop remains submerged and unacknowledged.

Together, these problematic narratives in EE close off certain forms of knowing and experiencing the environment. In response, dark ecology has been used to highlight experiences of abjection and trauma—the pollution and the rubble (both literal and metaphorical) indelibly etched in our environment that sit uneasily with the narrative tropes discussed (see e.g. Saari, 2017; Saari & Mullen, 2018). Theories inspired by dark ecology have also destabilized many temporal imageries of EE and praxis by taking a point of view from non-human timescapes either from the future or the past. This is to cultivate an imagination that is much needed in responding to the enormous scales and complexities inherent in the ecological disasters of the Anthropocene (Bazzul, 2019). In recent EE theories employing dark ecology, such vantage points are found especially in dystopian novels and films or horror fiction (Lysgaard et al., 2019; Wallin, 2017). By using examples of H.P Lovecraft, Wallin (2017) stresses the import of an outlook of a future Earth continuing to exist without humans. A world that has always been and will be alien and unknowable to us figures as a non-place of thought that presses into the present by fundamentally destabilizing the notion of a world always already given to human thought. It also problematizes a teleology ingrained in education and educational research of a knowable and therefore controllable future (Lysgaard et al., 2019).

Oedipal logic

While we wholeheartedly agree with the ‘dark’ approaches of destabilizing EE narratives, we are not so much interested in seeking a vantage point from an in- or more-than-human future, nor accentuating the horrific in ecological awareness. Instead, we want to pursue further the critical potential of a decidedly looping narrative trope, where our distinctions between subject and object, human and more-than-human, surreptitiously slip into one another, thereby evoking the topological figure of the Moebius strip.

This becomes relevant in relation to the current discussions about the Anthropocene. The nascent era marked by significant human influence on the climate and ecosystems also signals, in various theoretical registers, growing awareness of the onto-epistemological aporias of ecological thought. As Morton formulates it, “the Anthropocene binds together human history and geological time in a strange loop, weirdly weird” (2016, p. 8). From Morton’s texts it is possible to tease out an epochal narrative where the following historical trajectories from the 19th century to the present become imbued. First is the intertwining of historical and geological time in the early 19th century as humans begin extracting carbon in the Earth’s crust and inserting it into the climate, inaugurating a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002). Yet the entanglement of human and geological time is initially obfuscated through epistemic discourses among the humanities, dictating that human subjectivity cannot access reality itself and that history only takes place only among human cultures (Morton, 2012).

Human insularity behind discourses of Nature as harmonious or subject to mastery is constantly haunted and made unstable by two other trajectories. On the one hand, there are ominous phenomena, such as dust-bowls and mass extinctions, which make it difficult to deny human influence on the more-than-human environment; and, on the other hand, there is the aforementioned growing awareness, brought about by several natural sciences, especially evolutionary history, geology and cosmology, that to be human is to be deeply imbued with non-human life and matter along with their enormous temporal dimensions. Our existence as humans is entangled with the vast histories of evolution that have created conditions for life on earth (Morton, 2012).

The development and braiding of these trajectories assumes a temporal form reminiscent of noir fiction, where a detective looking for a criminal finds out that he or she is the culprit. Morton (2012) used the film Blade Runner as a paradigmatic example, in which detective Deckard, hunting for non-human ‘replicants,’ comes to discover that he himself is one of them. In a similar fashion, humanity seeking to research and master ‘nature’ as an external domain ‘out there’ has found itself to be deeply imbued with the object of investigation. Yet this temporal, looping form is made more complex when Morton (2012) describes the ‘Oedipal’ logic behind our growing environmental awareness: a narrative trope in which the protagonist seeking to avoid a tragic fate finds out that their avoidance is itself the condition for the realization of the tragedy.

The paradigmatic case example is of course Sophocles’ Greek play of King Oedipus. In the tragedy, Oedipus receives a prophecy from the oracle that he will mate with his mother and kill his father. Trying to avoid such tragic fate, Oedipus murders his father without knowing his identity. Upon becoming a King of Thebes, he ends up, unbeknownst to himself, marrying his mother, queen Jocasta. When he finally finds out what has really happened, Oedipus blinds and exiles himself. Here, Oedipus finds that he is an unwitting instrument in a curse that has been cast before his birth, an intergenerational fate for which he is not responsible. And yet, in a noir-like turn, he is still the culprit.

There are obvious parallels following this Oedipal narrative structure in the looping trajectories of the Anthropocene. Not only is there a failed hope to keep humans and non-humans distinct and separate, but in a tragic loop, it is the sustaining of such an illusion that makes it sured failure that humans will become an enormous and destructive climatic force. There is also an obvious Oedipal logic in the growing uncanniness of reality introduced by the sciences: the more we try to intellectually tame reality through the sensorium and scientific reasoning, the more we find that reality itself defies and exceeds the limits of reason and the senses (Morton, 2012, p. 201).

Yet it would be a mistake to focus only on the tragic aspects of such a logic; instead, it points towards opening a form of reflexivity where the looping aspects of ecological thought are no longer elided and dismissed as useless forms of false consciousness. It is, rather, through such historical series of initial failures and misrecognitions, we argue, that ecological thought in the Anthropocene can assume a critical awareness in the third mode: a movement where inside-and-outside, past-and-future are allowed to flow into one another in a strangely weird looping form like the Moebius strip described above. This highlights critique, not only as a movement in time, but as a process where misrecognition and error are seen as indispensable to attaining truth.

Slavoj Žižek (1989), albeit from a different theoretical viewpoint, sees critical awareness as a process where “misrecognition arrives paradoxically before the truth in relation to which we are designating it as ‘error’, because this ‘truth’ itself becomes true only through… the error” (p. 61). Truth here, of course, is not seen as an adequate representation of external reality, but an awareness of the looping nature of thought. This can be compared with the narrative tropes in EE discourses: we argue that those environmental discourses that treat global warming as an external ‘thing’ and an impending catastrophe-to-come already and always have been inside and surreptitiously conditioned by the event global warming: “We start by thinking that we can ‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there,’ but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated” (Morton, 2007, p. 187), a realization that begets an approach to ecological awareness in this third form that we are calling an apophatic ecology.

An apophatic ecology

The weird, looping narrative of ecological awareness that we have pursued above can be summarized as a third form of critique that bears similarities with apophatic discourses. Apophasis, a term often connected to mystical theology, is succinctly defined as a negation of a positive (cataphatic) claim about God, for instance. Yet it can also be seen as a negation of the very ability to denote some ‘thing’ either in positive or negative terms (e.g. the attributes of God), thereby paving the way for a novel theological truth irreducible to propositional knowledge (Caputo, 1987, p. 269). Apophatic discourses cannot be captured in a method or a formula, however; instead, they signal a style that remains sensitive to the constitutive negativity of all thought. It is an extreme form of critical thought, a ‘limitless criticism’ (Franke, 2007, p. 64) that is first and foremost critical of itself. An apophatic style is not reducible to theological discourse: it is braided in modern philosophy (Franke, 2007; Thacker, 2015) including environmental philosophies (Keller, 2015; McGrath, 2019; Rigby, 2004).

With this loose characterization in mind, we can sketch an apophatic movement of thought in the sequence of EE discourses described above: starting from positive narratives of what Nature is and how we have been alienated from it, and how we can either ‘restore’ a harmony and belonging with Nature or gain mastery over it; followed by a corrective critique in the negative register that draws attention to what is left out of or disavowed from this narrative and its nature-culture dichotomies; to opening a further apophatic turn towards ‘unknowing’ (Thacker, 2015) or ‘non-knowing’ (Keller, 2015, 2), short-circuiting the very foundational narratives as to what Nature ‘is’ and what it ‘is not’ and how it can be known at all (Morton, 2007, p. 175). Such an apophatic critique has respect for paradox, irony, ambiguity and aporiae, and it is primed for the weird, strange looping forms that ecological reality is proving itself to be.

From the point of view of the dominant traditions of critique described in the opening sections of this article, an apophatic form of thought may seem decidedly weak, as it fails to say anything positive and conclusive, because any affirming proposition is followed by a backward gyration of the forward drill bit, as Morton puts it (2016, p. 7). Therefore, it cannot provide a firm grounding for thought and action in the sense of revealing a foundation behind a veil of illusions or ideology, nor can it simply ‘add’ other ontological registers to our conception of the real (see also Baker, 2008). From this it also follows that apophatic discourses cannot provide hope for easy pedagogical solutions to pressing concerns in the future. So it is no wonder that apophatic forms of ‘speaking away’ (Baker, 2008) are often labeled as irrational, mystical or useless.

Despite these obvious (and intentional) weaknesses, apophatic thought has undeniable value as it enables a clearing of the ground for radically other forms of environmental thinking. As Franke (2007) claims, apophasis

is necessary in order to prevent philosophical discourse from absolutizing itself or some one of its conceptions, including such concepts as experience and openness, just as much as those of matter or substance or structure. The ways of experiencing and of being open and responsive to (the limits of thought) are exactly what apophatic tradition is concerned to explore and so must not presuppose as having any known or definable shape or content (p. 65).

Apophatic discourses may sensitize EE to studying how those disavowed, abject aspects of its discourses may sometimes be a condition of their sustenance. It may open up possibilities of thought and action that come from facing the impossible, paradoxical forms of existence. It is precisely in this negative space, we argue, that something new can emerge (Keller, 2015, p. 269).

This also points towards some general principles of EE practices, as well as apophatic ecology, as being not only a form of critical thought in the third form as we are conceiving it here, but also as a way of learning to live darkly. In our previous work, we put forward juxtaposition and working-through as pedagogical strategies useful for tuning our awareness to the keys of dark ecology. On the one hand, juxtaposition entails our bringing into proximity objects and or events that are often conceptualized as distant, incompatible, or abject in order to de-sediment or destabilize our taken for granted assumptions. On the other hand, working-through entails naming the experience, whether it be anxiety or depression or apathy that tend to follow the realization of being a geological force driving our sixth mass extinction, and being with it in order to learn from it, as opposed to the commonplace strategies of avoidance, suppression and or remediation (Saari, 2017; Saari & Mullen, 2018).

Christie captures the way of apophasis in a way that dovetails our strategies of juxtaposition and working-through when he writes concerning our willingness “to embark into the unknown, risk coming undone in the bottomless depths, engage the soul-wracking power of the elemental” (2017, p. 219). “The loss of all bearings and orientation that we feel inside this immensity,” he continues, “can feel like a kind of death. But does it not also signal the potential for a new way of seeing, living, being, freed from the old constraints: humbler, more open and receptive to the life unfolding before and within us?” (p. 220).

All of this is not meant to undermine existing climate facts and the attempts in EE to mitigate the suffering and injustices related to ecological disasters, but to acknowledge and learn to live with the complexities and uncertainties involved in our planetary entanglement (Keller, 2015, pp. 275–276). It encourages us to allow for complexity and uncertainty in the way we make sense of our predicament, instead of smoothing out the inconsistencies that have resulted in an Oedipal-like tragedy. As Morton writes: “Dark ecology undermines the naturalness of the stories we tell about how we are involved in nature. It preserves the dark, depressive quality of life in the shadow of ecological catastrophe. Instead of whistling in the dark, insisting that we’re part of Gaia,” or waiting with hope in the eschaton for the end or beginning of the world, “why not stay with the darkness?” (Morton, 2007, p. 187). The darkness, in other words, might have something critically important to teach us.

Conclusion

Circling back to our opening discussion, Latour (2004) writes: “The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather…. What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction,” turning our critical gaze “not away but toward the gathering” (p. 246, 248)? Our position in this paper has been to begin describing this movement but with a hesitation, a moment to consider our situation by introducing a caveat and an interpretive modification, for those employing similar critique-as-addition strategies in EE. Such a caveat is introduced not as a way of disagreeing, but of clarifying the conditions for addition using the insights of dark ecology as our hermeneutic. In short, the story we have told is one of implication: we are the detective and the criminal in a narrative that is bearing down upon us from the future’s past. This narrative has obfuscated the distinctions between nature and culture, human and non-human, inside and outside, past and future we have literally held onto for dear life, rendering the need for a way of short-circuiting the cataphatic claims for an apophatic approach that opens up space for the darkness to shine, the withdrawn to reveal, showing us more clearly the irreducible gaps in our knowing and our being together in the world. Introducing this third form of critique as a meddling middle between subtraction and multiplication in philosophies of EE will prepare us for the uncanny gathering of unholy mixtures that dark ecology anticipates and global warming and mass extinction exemplify.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antti Saari

Antti Saari is an assistant professor in Tampere University Faculty of Education and Culture. His main research interests include history and philosophy of education and curriculum studies.

John Mullen

John Mullen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) at the University of Michigan. His research intersects educational theory and the environmental humanities with particular interests in the conditions of an ecological philosophy of education.

Notes

1 In this article we are using the term environmental education as a broad umbrella term to capture a host of discourses sometimes also tagged as education for sustainable development. While there are obvious differences (and even tensions) between these terms, we are focusing on the commonalities of their onto-epistemological registers and forms of engaging in critique (see Somerville, 2016).