https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2038-2435
Abstract
This essay outlines some of the key themes and ideas developed in in the above title. These include: the influence of scientism and a "metaphysics of mastery" in late modern times; a phenomenology of nature that focusses on the native "occurring" of things in nature; the development of a notion of environmental consciousness in which sustainability is integral; an exploration of what might be involved in ecologizing education.
I would like to begin by thanking the editor of Environmental Education Research for this opportunity to set out some of the main ideas and themes that shape the arguments that I develop in Environmental Consciousness, Nature, and the Philosophy of Education (Bonnett, Citation2021). The book itself represents a continuation of a project that I initiated in a previous work: Retrieving Nature. Education for a Post-Humanist Age published in 2004. In this earlier volume, the attempt was made to reaffirm a viable and important notion of nature that could rebut the many criticisms of the idea of nature as a foundational idea/experience that arose from a variety of sources such as postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-traditionalism. Basically, views of this kind reveal nature as a social construction that is vulnerable to criticisms concerning its integrity, including its vagueness, lack of cultural or historical stability, its capacity to incorporate implicit and questionable values and power relations, its lack of intelligibility and/or relevance in our late-modern historical period, and its potential for endorsing what some see to be a false dualism of nature and culture and for homogenizing the former. Undoubtedly such criticisms contain important elements of truth and raise complex issues that threaten to undermine any idea of nature that would have the solidity and impartiality necessary for guiding an understanding of human flourishing or for founding an environmental ethic. However, I argued that if we think of nature as a dimension of experience (rather than, say, some pristine realm) and that central to this dimension of experience are things that arise from out of themselves – that is, they befall us as essentially non-artefactual, independent of human authorship, intention – then we have an understanding that has a long provenance (dating back to the Greeks) and that can withstand the criticisms voiced above. Environmental Consciousness seeks to develop this idea further, to defend it against what are argued to be a prevalent scientism sired by an underlying ‘metaphysics of mastery’ in Western culture, and to indicate its significance for ideas of ‘ecologizing’ education. It develops a position that is realist but not materialist in conventional terms.
Because of what I take to be their power as enemies of nature so conceived, I begin by saying something on how I characterize ‘scientism’ and the ‘metaphysics of mastery’ in the book.
Scientism and the metaphysics of mastery
By scientism, I refer to the phenomenon of presuming that classical experimental science has a privileged access to the nature of reality; that somehow its methods, findings and constructions reveal what is ‘really’ real and that therefore it can assume the mantle of arbiter for thinking in general. Clearly, this is to be distinguished from science as a field of research; scientism is a set of presumptions about the significance and application of the assumptions, methodologies and findings of this field of research in our daily lives.
At one extreme, and with regard to the natural world, scientism occurs, for example, in claims that what in everyday experience we take to be solid objects are to be understood as, say, ‘really’ bits of space traversed by speeding particles; what we experience as their colour or sound is ‘really’ movement of a particular wavelength. Similarly, the behaviour of a beaver in selecting a site to build a lodge which it protects from river surges by felling nearby trees, gnawing them to manageable lengths and towing them to narrow parts of the river to form quiet pools shielded by dams, becomes construed as ‘really’ the working out of blind quasi-mechanical processes. Here, the everyday account of its activity that involves ideas of purpose and agency is viewed as a quaint piece of anthropomorphism. Indeed, today it seems relatively unremarkable to suppose that, along with the physical sciences, the basic workings of the universe can be captured and explained by mathematical equations and that phenomena receive their most fundamental articulations by being assimilated to the structures that result.
The position that I develop challenges this presumption that somehow such scientific accounts are in some universal sense ‘truer’, more objective in the sense of providing a more authentic depiction of the world – one that properly reflects how it ‘really’ is. I pose the question as to why we might be tempted to privilege blind mechanical depictions of the natural world over those that imply purpose and agency when human experience of the natural world is so much richer than these depictions allow and cannot be adequately articulated through their vocabulary. I argue that while, no doubt, quasi-mechanical conceptions of nature can serve a useful function within the discipline of science, the limitations as well as the strengths of its particular project towards the world must be recognized. And when, as often surreptitiously occurs with scientism, the richness of experience and the kinds of intelligibility that this project occludes becomes generalized, the result is a highly arbitrary reductionism.
As to why we can find ourselves condoning scientism, I argue that ultimately the answer lies in what I have termed the ‘metaphysics of mastery’. This refers to 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. Here, the underlying motive is that everything is to be understood not simply in terms of serving human flourishing – which it would be possible to conceive in receptive, non-manipulative terms – but in terms of the assertion and satisfaction of the human will. This involves a pervasive disdain for given reality and the authority of nature, and an accelerating preference for the artefactual – the products of our own ingenuity – in many areas of life, including with regard to our own anatomy. Hannah Arendt (Citation1998) observed that in late-modern times man (sic) seems
“possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking) which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” (2–3)
This emphasis on the will and its products as central to human flourishing is taken to raise an important set of issues. For example, while it is perfectly understandable that we value our own flourishing, it remains an open question as to whether elevating this above all other considerations is justifiable. This is particularly pertinent when anthropogenic impacts on the natural environment are causing mass extinctions of other species. Clearly any plausible notion of sustainability must include human flourishing in some sense, but maybe not one dominated by the exercise of the human will. Here there is encouragement to envisage our flourishing in other ways (after, all for some, flourishing has consisted precisely in subordinating the will to some greater good) and the fundamental question is raised of what, in our current environmental circumstances, should count as human flourishing.
Today, perhaps the most pervasive expression of an underlying attitude of mastery is exhibited both in the strength and character of the consumerist economic motives that dominate Western society, and also in its understandings of ‘development’ that have led to widespread exploitation and despoliation of the natural world. The commodification of all (for example as ‘natural capital’, ‘human capital’), is a clear expression of the motive of mastery – one that operates by habitually externalising collateral effects that lie outside the chain of ‘most efficient’ production. Indeed, the very attempt to ‘include’ nature in instrumental calculations as a form of ‘capital’ only does so by means of a highly reductive thinking that effaces its full reality. In this way of thinking, any fully holistic understanding of the world is undermined and nature is set up as a pure resource for human consumption. Furthermore, as it gathers pace, the unrestrained instrumentalism that this authorizes could hardly fail to cause harm both to the delicate natural equilibria in which human existence is embedded and to any fully humane frame of mind that could be properly sensible of this. I argue that it is in this sense that it is appropriate to speak of a prevailing metaphysics of mastery, for here we are thoroughly installed in an impoverished conception of reality: one that inherently seeks to efface anything that lies beyond its purview – especially any sources of intrinsic value that transcend the human will and that could impose moral restraints on its demands. I argue that the towering anthropocentrism present in Brundtland-type conceptions of sustainable development that are oriented exclusively around the satisfaction of human needs and whose underlying notion of development, insofar as it impacts the natural world, reflects norms that are external to the natural world, express this metaphysics.
To return, now, to a previously raised question: I argue that the reason why quasi-mechanical portrayals of the natural world have the ascendency that they do is that they render the world as something that in principle is susceptible to being controlled. In contrast, the recognition of spontaneity, fluidity and independent purpose pervading the world disturbs this. Persuaded that we live in a world conceived essentially as an exploitable resource, it becomes increasingly difficult for us truly to address the conservation concerns to which early advocates of sustainability wished to draw attention. Now modulated through the metaphysics of mastery and articulated in in terms of economic motives and the lexicon of ‘efficiency’ and ‘yield’, the idea of sustainability becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. It functions to legitimate behaviour that is ecologically destructive by diverting attention from full human responsibility for its ecological consequences. Within this frame of mind, any adverse consequences of exploiting nature appear simply as needing to be fixed by either current or future technologies. Essentially, any problems are taken to lie not within the human will but within those aspects of nature that prove to be recalcitrant to it.
A phenomenology of nature: the “occurring” of things in nature
It is generally accepted that things in nature exist always in reciprocal relationship. In contrast with scientific ecology that construes this relationship in terms of causal or probabilistic law-governed biophysical interdependencies between objectively definable entities, phenomenologically, things look somewhat different. Instead of existing in (ultimately mathematically specifiable) physical locations, things occur in places that are unique sites of intelligibility – neighbourhoods – that address us, each presenting its own countenances and ambiences. And the occurring of each individual thing within a particular neighbourhood both conditions, and is conditioned by, this neighbourhood. I offer a couple of vignettes that are intended to illustrate this kind of ontological interdependence in which the way of standing forth of things as the things that they are is a matter of mutual sustaining.
The first is that of our experience of a woodland dell in which we come to feel the presence of its inhabitants in a way that somehow transcends or undercuts what discursively we might know of them. On our arrival at the dell, should we encounter, say, a great beech tree we can feel ourselves to be in its living presence. It befalls us as standing there in and of itself. Perhaps we are struck by the inscrutable massiveness of its gleaming boughs, yet that dance in the breeze; the fall of its extending and diminishing shadow on the vegetation below; the rustle of birds flitting through its foliage, itself delicately intermingled with that of its neighbours at the periphery; the aggregations of moss and lichen on its limbs; the enveloping odours of growth and decay; the dance of midges beneath its canopy as evening closes. Here, the manner in which this particular tree occurs is imbued with the occurring of all that is around it, all that shares this particular place. In this way the tree participates in an ongoing process of place-making. By contributing a unique and diverse element to the precise ambience of its neighbourhood, it upholds this neighbourhood and is in turn upheld by it. In its being, the tree takes part in a reciprocal sustaining, and should it somehow be physically extracted from this special place, while in a sense perhaps remaining the same tree biophysically, there is also an important sense in which it is no longer the same tree. It cannot occur as once it did. Something of its native ‘selfhood’ is destroyed. I suggest that if, for example, it were to be somehow transplanted to a city mall, its evening being might be transformed from that of a vibrant sheltering presence to perhaps a cold silhouette on neon.
Considering our understanding of the world more broadly, I take examples of this kind to illustrate two metaphysical approaches that are relevant to the issue of how we (should) think about nature. In other work (Bonnett Citation2004, 65) I have dubbed these the ‘metaphysics of objects’ and ‘metaphysics of things’. Ultimately, the former frames everything as specifiable in terms of the characteristics of category membership. Here our tree would be subsumed under some species description that consists in a set of objective properties, such as the typical shape, colour and distribution of its branches, leaves, flowers and fruit, its mature height under normal conditions, and so forth. In this way its unique and mysterious being becomes intellectually processed and possessed – stabilized as a defined object that can be stored and organized in some database, set up to be on hand for inspection and use. Its native occurring has become transmuted into so much information. By contrast, the metaphysics of things does not conceive the tree as knowable and capable of summation in this way. It is alert to the tree’s individual native occurring, along the lines previously described. As the senses become attuned to the tree’s address, aspects of its ‘thisness’ shine through that defy totalization under some classificatory label, as does its sheer existence. Perceived in this way, the relationships of these aspects with each other and the relationships between the tree and its neighbours are experienced as being in accord not with some causal or utilitarian logic, but rather as organic in the sense of consisting in mutually sustaining fluid interplays. Under the aegis of the metaphysics of things, things in nature befall us in their spontaneity, ineluctable ‘otherness’ and mystery. They are known (always incompletely) by acquaintance rather than by calculation.
To take the second example: an upland stream. Here our attention might be caught by a number of things: the glistening flow of water eddying around tumbled polished rocks; the mysterious movement of a reed at the margin where the water is quiet; the momentary silver glint of a darting fish; the fresh breeze that blows at this place and that disturbs the pendant branches of a stunted willow that overhangs the stream, its fissured bark displaying and withholding strange shapes as sunlight and cloud shadow pass over it. Here, again, the living presence of each is sustained through its participation in a creative interplay with all, and a unique place is constituted. Removed from this place – maybe, the fish to an aquarium, the stone to a rock collection – their being is transformed, perhaps reduced to that of curio. Uprooted in this way, their ability to befall us as natural becomes attenuated. Their occurring for us now reflects their participation in a new imposed interplay that is partly parasitic on some knowledge of their former existence, but that also undermines important aspects of their original self-arising nature.
Hence, central to our experience of things in nature are qualities of deep alterity, interrelatedness and emplacement. Implicit in this account is another important quality. Although they are profoundly other, things in nature can impart something of their own integrity such that we can have intimations of what would count as their wellbeing, perhaps fulfilment. In this sense they are experienced as normative and as possessing intrinsic value. Negatively, our awareness of this can be evoked if perhaps, on revisiting the woodland dell we find it strewn with the remnants of fly-tipping, or the beech tree wantonly vandalized. Or, on returning to the upland stream, we were to find the bloated corpses of fish borne on foam topped waters smelling of industrial waste. More positively, in experiencing the myriad interplays, harmonies and contrasts, subtle adaptions and accommodations, we might be struck by a sense of rightness emanating from the dell or the stream during our first encounter. Somehow things occur in such a way that how they are conveys a sense of how they ought to be. This is not to argue that on occasion we might not be justified in disrupting what we take to be nature’s integrity in the service of human welfare. Rather it is to make the point that the presence of integrity and intrinsic value in nature are relevant to any such decision.
This recognition of intrinsic value in nature gives rise to the exploration of a notion of ecological justice that recognizes nature’s needs in the distribution and utilization of resources. This is taken to hold important implications both for the adequacy of conventional understandings of the principle of social justice as a pivotal moral/social principle and for how we conceive the relationship between sustainability and human population growth. It also leads to exploring the issue of how we receive intimations of nature’s normativity: the sense in which nature has a ‘voice’, the conditions under which it is heard, and the authority that it should be taken to possess. For example, the possibility that an errant romanticism might be in play in this particular regard and, indeed, throughout the account as a whole, is addressed.
Environmental consciousness
It is argued that, cumulatively, ideas of the kind outlined above are suggestive of a fundamental relationship between a deep sense of sustainability and human being: namely that there is an important sense in which sustainability is integral to human being and that we need to get back to this understanding of sustainability in order to elucidate a right relationship with nature and to properly address environmental issues – and to live more fully.
Drawing loosely on the development of the “intentionality thesis” by Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the argument takes its start from what is held to be the essentially ecstatic nature of consciousness – its constant reaching out beyond itself in a disclosure of things in the world. On this account, consciousness is nothing without its things, to which it is directed: these ‘intentional objects’ give structure and content to our conscious life. Hence, 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. I argue that a frame of mind that enables things to be present in the richness of their manifold being (which includes their inherent otherness and mystery) is, itself, enriched and achieves fulfilment.
Thinking back to the example of the woodland dell: it is important to acknowledge that here, in the encounter, we, too, are sustained by our participation in the place-making that occurs. Witnessing such a scene, our being can be enlivened and enlarged, our senses awakened and refreshed, our bodies resonating with what lies before us. There is an important sense in which the being of the dell becomes our being and we are held in the sway of the transcendent powers that permeate it, such as those of birth and death, growth and decay, lightening and darkening, sound and silence, motion and stillness, revealing and withholding. These illuminate consciousness and bind us to the cosmos in a way that abstract scientific formulations can only shadow.
In addition to a sensing of integrity and value radiating from the natural world, the latter reveals itself as vibrant with anticipation. This reverberates in the predator seeking out its prey, leaves unfurling for the light of day, while beneath our feet, pale roots draw towards moisture in dark places. After a hard winter the swelling buds standing out on dark stems anticipate warmer and longer days. Reaching for a ripe fruit, it can be experienced as awaiting our grasp; the nearby robin awaits alert for the disturbance that will expose hidden grubs as I take my fork to the soil. I argue that in important respects we exist through our participation in this interplay of anticipation. Indeed, without it, we would enter ontological freefall, our lives untouched and unsustained by a world that we pass through but do not inhabit. It is through an intermeshing of our anticipations with those experienced in the places that we inhabit that we inhere in the world, become emplaced and in so doing gain a sense of what we are doing and, indeed, who we are. In the case of ‘natural places’, this engagement can range from an unreflective picking of an inviting fruit, to a more general intuitive attunement to the myriad intimations of what is nascent on a spring day that can shape our own anticipations and thus locate us in the play of the seasons. Under the influence of scientism we can become persuaded that such experience that responds to the transcendent inviting otherness of natural places is merely to indulge a frothy fiction. It is argued that to accept this would be to dismiss an essential element both of the our own genius and that of the places in which we live.
These, then, are some important facets of our “being there” in a natural place. They represent aspects of what I term our ‘emplaced transcendence’: embodied consciousness as a constant and complex motion of attentive standing out towards the emplaced things that lie before it in an intelligible world. In this fundamental sense, human consciousness is inherently environmental and just as the space that it inhabits is far removed from uniform Euclidian space (as illustrated above), so, too, is the time that it inhabits far removed from that of linear ‘clock’ time. In the experience of such ecstatic consciousness, things in nature create the character of their space, so, too, they bring their time with them. From the perspective of ‘clock’ time, environmental consciousness lives in timeless moments, absorbed in its participation in the play of being in which time as a standardized measurable and measuring phenomenon is out of place. Such ways of being in nature are an important part of a notion of ecological selfhood developed in the book. Here, for example critical reference is made to Emmanuel Levinas (Citation1981) notion of the “face” as that which expresses the unique living presence of another person and that calls us into relationship. It is argued that there is an important sense in which ecological selfhood extends this experience to things in nature and in this way rebuts the colonization of nature that the metaphysics of mastery celebrates.
The foregoing account has sought to outline some key general themes developed in the book. I now turn the focus more directly on education.
Ecologizing education
The account developed so far suggests that one of the chief tasks of education for sustainability must be to break the hold of anthropocentrism and the metaphysics of mastery so as to allow and encourage the essentially receptive/responsive (i.e. poetic) modalities of perception and understanding required for a wholehearted engagement with emplaced nature. These involve a knowing that is dialogical and intuitive – a sensing of things in their particularity that embodies and expresses agency, integrity, intrinsic value, motion and mystery. They require modes of attentiveness that are open, multi-sensory, bodied and affective as well as cerebral – and that are capable of founding a systemic wisdom in relation to the natural world achieved through participation in the fluid reciprocal relationships that constitute it ontologically as distinct from, say, an essentially spectatorial engagement that reveals what constitutes it causally.
Hence, one of the considerations that the issue of knowing nature raises is the character of truth and the conceptions of it that inform/should inform education. Here we are invited to reappraise ideas of truth and knowledge that have long been central to conventional educational thinking. There are many facets to this and here I amplify one in order to illustrate the kinds of issue that arise. The invitation to focus on receptivity to the manifoldness of things themselves in their native occurring intimates an ontological notion of truth: the significance of the idea of ‘being in truth’. That is to say it can draw attention to the significance for education of the quality of our living relationship with the thing known: the way that we are towards it. I suggest that in the environmental context this focus on the quality of the relationship resonates with David Abram’s claim that:
Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false”, but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. (Abram 1997, 264)
In modern times, increasingly we have become accustomed to thinking of empirical truths as standing both independent of moral considerations and of how they might play into ideas of the wellbeing of things. This autonomy finds expression in the traditional distinction between facts and values where it is held that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ because when empirical facts are stated it is always possible to question whether they have the moral implications attributed to them, or whether the situation they describe is what it ought to be. On this argument, moral or other value is revealed as not internal to a fact about the world.
However if, as I have sought to demonstrate, phenomenological reflection shows that the world is inherently normative and that, for example, the neutral mechanical world of the physical sciences is an abstraction from a greater and more primordial grounding experience, this argument falls away. Discerning intimations of the earth’s wellbeing is no longer to be regarded as a (mere) human projection on some essentially neutral world, it arises as an integral aspect of the world in which we live. Truth and wellbeing are experienced as intimately interwoven and propositions and actions that ignore or contradict this experience are no longer true to the world. They go against the flow of the world and cannot properly represent it. Here, a wholehearted and intimate participation in the flow of things is broken and a space is created for purely human-authored, detached purposes and principles (rational or otherwise) to arise and to assume the countenance of exclusive sources of morality. I suggest that in this moment a fatal sleight of hand occurs: the knowledge of abstract generalisation severed from the knowledge of intimate engagement comes to hold sway and the products of alienation come to gain authority over, and to diminish the significance of, experiences of acquaintanceship.
In this moment, too, the possibility arises of this unrooted knowledge eddying off from the full lived reality of which environmental consciousness is capable and that is essential to properly interpreting reality. Such knowledge then becomes available for service to the metaphysics of mastery, the natural environment now being encountered as pure resource. Yet, as Max Scheler (Citation1980, 109) expressed in his notion of ‘value-ception’, it is receptivity to the flow of value ‘streaming off things’ that first places us in the world and that lies at the heart of a proper perception of it. Encountering intrinsic value in the other reveals that which lies beyond our self-given purposes and facilitates an openness to fullness of things themselves in the inherent mystery of their sheer ‘thisness’. I argue that an ecologized education would seek to affirm that this experience, rather than that of so-called ‘hard facts’ that are shorn of intuition and feeling, constitutes what is ‘really’ real.
A central theme of the book is that it is the self-assertive frame of mind that remains oblivious to such intimate felt connection with what is other that lies at the kernel of our current environmental crisis – is its hidden centre. Therefore it must be exposed and repudiated in all its myriad forms if substantive progress is to be made. I suggest that one key way in which it is expressed lies in the pre-specification that pervades modern life from modular window frames to modular curricula. Regarding the latter, I note that the kind of knowledge and learning that can be pre-specified and ‘delivered’ could hardly be more different in character compared to the kind of knowledge and learning that intimate acquaintanceship with nature evokes. Because of its intense particularity, the living presence of natural things previously described simply cannot be captured in pre-specified items of knowledge, and certainly cannot be reduced to mere information to be passed on ‘secondhand’. (Here, I draw a contrast with Gregory Bateson’s (Citation2000) characterization of nature as a cybernetic information processing system.) An element of serendipity is always present in gaining an understanding of nature. I argue that when this is taken into account the conventional idea of a curriculum that essentially consists in the transmission of pre-specified material and whose success is measured by standardized tests is revealed as inadequate as a vehicle for environmental education. Rather, what is needed is a curriculum of emergent engagements in which what is to be learnt arises through the fluid and emplaced interplay of pupil and teacher attention to what presents itself (in its mystery) in the course of a genuinely open receptive-responsive – that is to say, poetic – enquiry.
Here, unity and direction in learning are achieved not through the imposition of pre-formed disciplinary or interdisciplinary connections, or utilitarian projects – all determined by sources distant from particular sites and occasions of learning – but by participation in an evolving interplay of felt demands that arise in the course of receptivity to the draw of the known and the as yet unknown: the never to be fully known.
Finally, returning to the general thesis and its significance for education, a number of further issues are raised. Cumulatively, along with others previously flagged, they suggest a need for deep, but I argue not wholesale, cultural change. Space permits me to list only a sample of them here.
The value and limitations of immersive experiences in nature and implications for the ideas of being in nature and a truly educational environment require attention. Clearly, simply to be physically located in a more natural environment might be insufficient educationally, for one could be so located and yet have little interest in it for itself or respect for its intrinsic value – an attitude wholly consistent with the metaphysics of mastery. This observation leads to the issue of stimulating a suitably attuned frame of mind and invites a re-evaluation of the contributions of art and literature (perhaps, particularly poetry and myth) in this regard. It also alerts us to a need carefully to consider that oft (and rightly) espoused aim of environmental education of developing a sense of wonder in nature. Such wonder is always in danger of being metaphysically stereotyped, for example by being attached to the grand and sensational that serve to provide some emotional thrill, and that leads to the effacement of the relatively small scale and near at hand.
In relation to these issues, I consider the significance of outdoors education and ideas of ‘slow’ and ‘wild’ pedagogies that advocate pausing and taking time to dwell in places and landscapes ‘face to face’ so that their voices and those of their ‘more-than-human’ inhabitants can enter the educational enterprise. Here the educational significance of the agency of things in nature and natural places (for example, the ways in which they can be considered as ‘co-teachers’) is explored and exemplified.
Related to this, is the question of how are we to provide access to such authentic experiences of nature to a population increasingly situated in megalapolitan conurbations and heavily in the thrall of digitalized experience in which, for example, aspects of reality can be called up and manipulated at will, and are experienced through sight and sound of a peculiarly restricted kind emanating from a computerized device that leaves the rest of the immediate environment in near oblivion. In such circumstances some might regard a quest to bring these populations into a more intimate engagement with the natural world as simply risible.
Consideration needs to be given to some of the terminology in which we describe our current environmental situation. For example, with regard to the now popular idea of an ‘Anthropocene’ epoch, we need to remain alert to the possibilities of hubristic human self-aggrandisement implicit in this notion in the way that it foregrounds the power and significance of human agency over those of ‘natural’ agency. Indeed, it is argued that there are perhaps elements of this arrogance in the widespread and seemingly benign notion of human ‘stewardship’ of nature, if this is allowed to become definitive of our role. When we speak of, say, the need to manage wild fish stocks, we are talking of managing human behaviour towards a fish population; left alone this population is quite capable of ‘managing’ itself. It is argued that we must beware a spurious inversion that underwrites a continuing anthropocentric interference in nature ‘for its own good’.
However earnestly we might wish it otherwise, we are now confronted by a bleak possibility: It is entirely possible that anthropogenic impacts on nature have already set in train processes that will lead to the extinction of humanity in a not so distant future. Does this prospect have implications for education? Might there be benefits to be gained by giving some consideration to what should be the character of education so situated? For example, might such consideration foreground issues – perhaps, concerning the educational significance of human finitude, or an overly future orientation to much current education – that the philosophy of education should address, and that could enlighten our thinking about the underlying purposes of education in a way that remains relevant even if the threat of anthropogenic ecocide were to be lifted?
Throughout the work, it is emphasized that it is scientism rather than science that is to be repudiated. Yet, there are kinds of science that on occasion are extremely aggressive and that, for example, have disparaged the seeming passivity of natural history as mere ‘stamp collecting’. This observation, along with previous ongoing commentary on portrayals of reality, leads to some passing consideration of the desirability and possibilities of ‘poeticizing’ science. For example, how might its investigations look if its stance was more receptive to the integrity, normativity and intrinsic value of things in nature revealed phenomenologically, and that have been argued to be an inherent part of a more primordial reality from which its data and theories are abstracted? How might such a reorientation affect both its methods and agendas? What significance might attentiveness to the ineluctably emplaced character of the ‘being’ of natural things hold for the status of experimentation that disrupts this?
In the light of the qualities of spontaneity, space and time that participation in the native occurring of things in nature involves, some structural obstacles to a proper engagement with nature posed by current mainstream education are considered. In keeping with previous argument, a critique of conventional educational environments where typically nature is kept at a distance and affairs are regulated by measurement and pre-specification is developed – the latter, on the grounds that such pre-specification is the bane of proper environmental education because it undermines the possibilities for being properly “there” in nature.
To conclude
There is a fair of talk of impending environmental catastrophe, particularly now with the acknowledgement of what spiralling global heating might bring. There are some frightening prospects. But there is another catastrophe under way: it is that with the ascendance of modernist humanism in dominant strands of Western culture we do not – and seemingly cannot – think properly about the issues involved. While environmental degradations of increasing intensity rightly now command our attention, we need also to acknowledge that these are the symptoms of a deeper malaise: the holding sway of a metaphysics of mastery and a discursive scientism that too frequently has become the default mode of thinking when it comes to addressing environmental (and many other, including educational) matters.
Ultimately, the issue of sustainability raises the issue of thinking: the kind of thinking that needs to be affirmed in an age when sustainability might well turn out to be the most fundamental concern to be addressed. Environmental Consciousness argues that the key issue here is our understandings of nature and the ways in which they condition our relationship with it. It argues that in the time of a metaphysics of mastery there is an urgent need to (re-)establish a wholehearted contact with nature as the self-arising in our life-world through participation in its native occurring and the qualities of time and space that this brings. Here it becomes possible to retrieve a sense of nature’s transcendent integrity, agency, normativity and intrinsic value. This could be supported by a truly observational science that is rooted in and enriches our life-world by helping to reveal the transcendent in all its manifoldness and mystery. Where the transcendent shines through the metaphysics of mastery is stymied and falters. Yet, while science and technology have the potential to do this and have an important contribution to make in addressing immediate large-scale problems such as climate change in the shorter term, they do not address – and are capable of exacerbating – a deeper danger: the quality of our underlying relationship with nature. Essentially, seeking sustainability is not a matter of brute material to be manipulated and problems to be fixed technologically. Rather, it is a matter of making what one might term a spiritual change by taking opportunities for an open engagement with nature that celebrates the existence of something that is other than ourselves and our constructions, and allowing it to stand forth in the nobility of being itself. While, of course, how it reveals itself ineluctably will be conditioned in part by our human form of sensibility – and in this limited sense remains epistemologically anthropocentric, it need not – and must not – be exclusively conditioned by the instrumentalism of the metaphysics of mastery, i.e. be immoderately anthropocentric ethically. Without this change of heart – if the old motive of anthropocentric mastery continues unrestrained – it is argued that the catastrophe that failure to achieve sustainability harbours remains extant. Ultimately, what is required is a transcendence of humanism that allows us to be more human – through participating in the gift of the given.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
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