Environmental concern, moral education and our place in nature

Abstract

Some strands of environmental concern invite a radical re-evaluation of many taken for granted assumptions of late modern ways of life—particularly those that structure how we relate to the natural world. This article explores some of the implications of such a re-evaluation for our understanding of moral education by examining the significance of ideas of our place in nature that focus not on our location in some grand abstract system, but on our felt sense of place in the course of our daily existence. It will be argued that exploration of the anticipatory and ecstatic nature of such concrete emplacement reveals an underlying normative character to our encounters with nature, now experienced as an autonomous and essentially mysterious non-human other that both sustains and is sustained by places—places in which find ourselves and live out our lives. It is argued that this view foregrounds a notion of transcendence that leads to both a questioning of the anthropocentrism (i.e. its metaphysical basis) that informs many Western moral views and an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in nature, such that some current mainstream understandings of the character of moral sensibility and of moral education can no longer be regarded as adequate.

Notes

1. Throughout this article ‘metaphysics’, ‘metaphysical setting’, ‘metaphysical climate’ are understood as referring to those deep motives holding sway within a culture at a particular time and that by shaping our perceptions of, and ways of relating to, the world install us in a particular version of reality. ‘Metaphysics of mastery’ refers to the growing ascendency in modern Western rationality of instrumental motives and the will to power that ultimately produces a reality in which everything is turned into a resource, their meaning and value becoming a function of how they show up in utilitarian calculations (see Bonnett, 2000).

2. It should be noted that on this view while a distinction is drawn between what is experienced as human and what is experienced as nature, this does not make the view dualistic in the sense of supposing that nature is authentically understood as an object for an independent subjectivity, denying that we exist in nature, or that consciousness is in an important sense part of nature. It simply asserts that human consciousness (or its equivalent) is of a special character: it is the place in which things show up—are encountered, are understood, become intelligible—as things (mysterious and inhering in a world). As will be clear from the arguments developed in this article, consciousness so conceived is regarded as being intimately bound in with a world of things and places (in which our relationship with nature is pivotal)—to the extent that it is nothing without them.

3. While some aspects of the account that follows are in part inspired by the seminal treatment of these ideas by Martin Heidegger (1962) in Being and time, it does not pretend to be an exegesis of Heidegger’s thinking and, indeed, in some respects it might be seen as nuancing matters rather differently.

4. The term ‘anticipation’ is preferred in this context to, say, ‘significance’ or ‘expectation’ because the latter can denote an experience that is too exclusively cerebral, abstract and explicitly stateable. ‘Anticipation’ is interpreted as a more fluid occurrence—one of, as it were, an ‘understanding in motion’ (see Bonnett, 2009a).

5. This is not, of course, to deny that sometimes it might occur on the back of a prolonged struggle to understand.

6. See, for example Wordsworth’s The tables turned (1798), Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798), Ode: intimations of mortality (1807) (Wordsworth, 1994 edn.).

7. I use the term ‘knowledge’ here in a sense that does not imply totalising comprehension, but rather an awareness of intimations of potentiality. Hence the epistemic stance that emerges in this article is precisely one that eschews any aspiration of possessive grasping in favour of one that seeks the knowing of open receptivity, and acknowledges, in the context of the current metaphysical climate, the preparation of heart and mind that is frequently necessary to achieve a way of acting in the world in which such receptivity can occur.

8. I refer here to that sense of empathy that presumes an ability to ‘put oneself in the shoes’ of another, to know ‘just how you are feeling’. Here the other is turned into an object of (totalising) knowledge and the expression of empathy can express a power relationship in which the empathiser (often despite their intentions) sets themselves up to legitimate the feelings of the other. All empathy and sympathy assume a level of commonality, and this assumption can be misplaced.