The pervasiveness of the rational-conceptual: an educational-philosophical perspective on nature, world and ‘sustainable development’

ABSTRACT

At the heart of our current environmental predicament lies the issue of our relationship with nature. Michael Bonnett’s educational rehabilitation of nature, which might be called a ‘metaphysical’ turn in nature-related issues, brings us back to the core question of educational-philosophical thinking: how we are to understand ourselves and our relation to the world. In this paper, by confronting his environmental philosophy of education with what John McDowell, in his debate with Hubert Dreyfus, terms the ‘pervasiveness thesis’ – that conceptual rationality in a relevant sense pervades human lives – I try to offer an analytical supplement to the notion Bonnett entertains: that a phenomenological project to ‘retrieve’ nature and ‘ecologise’ education can have massive implications for the character of philosophy of education and the whole enterprise of education. I also argue a confluence of their nature-related ideas adds an educational nuance to the traditional picture of human beings as rational animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature
• world
• sustainability
• Michael Bonnett
• the McDowell-Dreyfus debate

Introduction

What, if anything, does philosophy of education have to say about environment-related issues in an ever-increasing body of environmental research? Much, in one recognisable sense. A widespread sense of urgency about the need for action to protect our planet and its people and ensure ‘sustainable development’ has led to a flourishing of environmental philosophy/ethics on the one hand and environmental education on the other; the former is now a distinct and thriving branch of philosophy, while the latter is widely held to be indispensable to today’s citizens and students. No doubt these endeavours should not be taken lightly. The felt urgency and worries, however, might at times serve as an obstacle, precisely because of the emergent need for action, to the further pursuit of deeper issues around the environment, issues deserving of closer educational-philosophical attention. One such issue, and perhaps the deepest, is how, beyond familiar denunciations of anthropocentrism or human-centredness, we are to understand ourselves and our relation to the world. A fuller understanding of ourselves and our relation to the world is, to say the least, a centrepiece of both philosophical and educational enquiry.

For the last quarter of a century or so, no philosopher of education has taken more pains than Michael Bonnett to bring educational-philosophical attention to bear on such deeper issues through his exploration of the idea of our relationship with nature. Making a compelling case for the importance of not casting nature-related issues solely as political-economic or scientific-technical in favour of metaphysico-ethical approaches, Bonnett has sought to ‘retrieve’ nature and ‘ecologise’ education (e.g. Bonnett 2004a, 2019a). He has attempted to work out the extent to which exploring what it is to be (in) a right relationship with nature, which requires us to rethink our being in nature and the nature of our own being, has radical and extensive implications not simply for environmental education (e.g. Bonnett 2010) and moral education (e.g. Bonnett 2012) but also for the character of philosophy of education (e.g. Bonnett 2017) and the enterprise of education as a whole (e.g. Bonnett 1997).

While remaining vigilant in the maintenance of philosophical rigour, Bonnett (2009a) sees ‘philosophy by proxy’ (368) as less than wholly credible if the philosophy has a whiff of over-rationalisation or over-intellectualisation. It is with this attentiveness that Bonnett celebrates phenomenology – especially of a Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontyesque type – , since he thinks it enables us to aptly capture ‘the experiences of those involved in education, their own, usually implicit, sense of their human condition and the environment in which they find themselves’ (ibid.). Interestingly, crossing the Analytic-Continental border, Bonnett (2007) acknowledges in his phenomenologically informed view of nature ‘some resonances’ with John McDowell’s argument for a ‘[partial] re-enchantment of nature’ (715), which is suggested in his major work, Mind and World (1996). This is interesting because Hubert Dreyfus, who draws heavily on the two existential phenomenologists Bonnett likewise exploits, throws McDowell’s line of thinking into doubt as, initially, ‘the Myth of the Mental’ (Dreyfus 2005, 2007a), and, subsequently, ‘the Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’ (Dreyfus 2013).

The so-called McDowell–Dreyfus debate concerns a number of profound philosophical questions (e.g. the nature of conceptual capacities, practical intellect and the idea of ‘being-in-the-world’, to name but a few).¹ The focus in this paper will be on what both discussants in the debate call ‘the pervasiveness thesis’: that is, McDowell’s claim that ‘rational mindedness pervades the lives of the rational animals we are, informing in particular our perceptual experience and our exercise of agency’ (McDowell 2013, 41). The reason for this is that I think the debate has revolved around whether and how it is possible to accept the pervasiveness claim, encouraging us to (re-)examine many philosophically important and educationally relevant questions (such as those just mentioned). By confronting Bonnett’s educational rehabilitation of nature with the pervasiveness thesis, this paper aims to tease out Bonnett’s rather elusive environmental philosophy of education, which centres on the thought that ‘human consciousness is ineluctably environmental and involved in sustainability’ (Bonnett 2017, 343), where sustainability is not conceived as a policy statement but as ‘a frame of mind’ (Bonnett 2004a, 128). In my view, Bonnett’s proposal that a series of philosophical rethinkings about what exactly our relationship with nature is and can be have enormous implications for the character of philosophy of education and the enterprise of education as a whole is not far-fetched grandiloquence. Nevertheless, there seems to exist some ambiguity in his phenomenology-inspired, environmental philosophy of education, whose main source, I think, is his inadequate treatment of the notion of world. While raising the imperative question ‘What do we mean by the natural world?’ (Bonnett 2010, 519), Bonnett’s argument focuses almost exclusively on conceptions of nature and the environment.² As is perhaps exemplified in his expression of ‘our being-in-nature’ (Bonnett 2019a, 44), Bonnett might use nature as a synonym for world when describing the conception of the meaningful space in which we human beings dwell.³ But it seems that his apparent failure to articulate the way he draws or erases conceptual distinctions between the two sometimes hinders completion of his environmental philosophy of education.⁴

So, Bonnett’s phenomenologically informed argument needs supplementation. To illustrate the sense in which Bonnett’s ambitious project is never a metaphysical parti pris, I will try to fill in the analytical details of his phenomenological picture.⁵ In what follows, after giving a sketch of Bonnett’s project, I draw attention to McDowell’s relevant argument, including the McDowell–Dreyfus debate, which contains some components that do not form a main focus of Bonnett’s discourse. The elements to which only scant attention is paid in Bonnett’s argument are, for instance, distinctions between the modern disenchanted conception of nature and the partially re-enchanted nature, between first nature and second nature, and between rational and non-rational animals, in all of which the question of the relation between the operation of rational-conceptual mindedness and having the world in view comes into the foreground. The point of bringing McDowell’s argument into contact with Bonnett’s is that a confluence of their nature-related ideas invites us to see ourselves and our relation to the world in a way that not just spells out but also adds an important nuance to the traditional idea that human beings are rational animals. If the pervasiveness thesis that our lives are permeated by mind-penetrated conceptual rationality is grasped properly, Bonnett’s suggestion that the whole enterprise of education can be radically reframed proves more convincing.

Bonnett on nature, sustainability and the environment

As opposed to seeking an option along the anthropocentric spectrum of views of nature with its ‘postmodern’ (Bonnett 2004a, 46) and ‘scientistic’ (Bonnett 2019a, 37) poles, Bonnett (2010) builds on Heidegger’s retrieval of the Greek experience of nature as physis to propose that we should think of nature as the ‘self-arising’ or ‘self-emergent’ (520). Recognisably, the self-arising character of nature, which Bonnett identifies as an ‘underlying unifying conception of nature’ (ibid.), delegitimises ‘postmodern’ – constructivist – accounts of nature; it is also argued, on the other hand, to be at odds with scientism, which privileges the laws of nature that are human-independent. Appreciating Bonnett’s (2018) conviction that nature should be conceived as ‘transcendent and normative’ (1090) is key to making sense of his overall project to retrieve nature and ecologise education. The rationale behind Bonnett’s conception of nature as transcendent-but-normative rests upon his phenomenological understanding of human sensibility-associated capacities, such as our consciousness, our experience of nature and sustainability.

It is certainly not easy to come to terms with Bonnett’s picture, which is not anthropocentric but accentuates ‘the possibility of developing a notion of human essence in which the way in which we are ineluctably environmental is linked to a primordial idea of sustainability’ (Bonnett 2017, 334, italics added). Bonnett (2000) refers to Charles Taylor in describing ‘our proper stance towards the world’ as ‘human-related but not human-centred’ (599, italics in original). Following Taylor’s (1995 [1992]) reading of Heidegger, Bonnett (2017) brings out the idea of human consciousness as ‘the place where things presence and the way in which they therefore necessarily show up against, and in the light of, human concerns and involvements’ (334, italics added). Human consciousness matters, in other words, because this is precisely where ‘things occur’ (Bonnett 2019a, 41, italics in original) in a way that necessitates ‘relatedness and interdependence between ourselves and the environment’ (Bonnett 2009b, 40). When depicting the idea of environment also as ‘“place”’, Bonnett (2010) obviously attaches a priority to his phenomenological interpretation of it as ‘“life-world”’ – environment understood as ‘an intentional structure’ rather than the interpretation in the natural sciences, that is, environment understood as ‘a causal system’ (519). Elaborating Bertrand Russell’s suggestion that ‘true knowledge is a union of the Self with the not-Self’, Bonnett (2017) maintains that ‘[i]n this fundamental sense of consciousness being attentive to what its intentional objects present, it is involved in a sustaining of things – a letting them be as the things that they are. This is the basis of world-formation’ (335–336, italics added). It is, as it were, only by way of what Bonnett elsewhere (2019b) calls a ‘mutual sustaining’ (3) that something’s natural character enters the scene. This is ‘a pregnant sense in which sustainability lies at the heart of human consciousness’ (Bonnett 2017, 335) and in which ‘sustainability is integral to human being’ (Bonnett 2019a, 40).

Bonnett’s ‘ecological’ consciousness thesis is essentially bound up with the notion of our experience of nature, which Bonnett (2004a) holds should be set apart from ‘concepts’ of nature (57). With that distinction in mind, he (2009b) claims that ‘[n]otwithstanding the senses in which concepts of nature are social products that may vary over time, there is a certain constancy [i.e. sustaining] in our elemental experience of nature. Nature befalls us’ (46, italics in original). The overwhelming emphasis Bonnett places here is on the primordial structuring of reality by humans’ original experience of nature that conditions all subsequent descriptions of it, including scientific definitions of ‘pristine entities’ (ibid.). That is, his emphasis is placed on ‘the primacy of an antepredicative life-world in our experience of nature over scientific abstraction’ (ibid., 48). Bonnett succinctly writes: ‘science takes the results of this pre-scientific experience for granted’ (ibid., 44).

Once the idea of sustainability is acknowledged as ‘a frame of mind’ in the way Bonnett recommends, we would, he urges, be bound to enliven our relationship with nature in ways that are ‘less aggressive’, ‘non-manipulative’ and ‘more celebratory’ (Bonnett 1999, 321). Bonnett (2004a) claims, to put it in Heideggerian terms, that ‘we must learn to develop the receptive/responsive – that is to say, poetic – attitude that itself is a key characteristic of authentic dwelling, a dwelling that is in touch with what ultimately sustains it’ (137, italics added). The general point to register here is that our relationship with nature, which lies at the core of our current environmental predicament, is to be seen ‘metaphysically’, not ‘simply bio-physically’ (Bonnett 2009b, 40). The metaphysical quality of environmental issues that has too often gone unrecognised in no way requires any commitment to wishy-washy speculations, but, instead, sustainability as a frame of mind, for example, ‘puts the focus on our everyday way of relating to things, including our everyday practices’ (Bonnett 1999, 320, italics in original). Almost every aspect of our daily lives is enmeshed in the metaphysical structure of the mutual sustaining of humans and the ‘natural’ environment.

Bonnett’s proposed metaphysical turn is a welcome antidote to the anthropocentric attitudes that, in a number of guises, are still often replicated in environment-related issues. But despite his touching upon ‘the basis of world-formation’ in his phenomenological account of the consciousness-mediated notion of sustainability and upon ‘the primacy of an antepredicative life-world in our experience of nature’, the notion of world is given short shrift in Bonnett’s environmental philosophy of education. As will be seen in the next section, Bonnett sympathises with McDowell’s rational-conceptualist view (of nature) and, ipso facto, would (have to) find the pervasiveness thesis congenial. Since the pervasiveness thesis pertains to the world-formation and an antepredicative level of human activity, it is instructive to look at McDowell’s line of argument.

McDowell on nature, experience and openness to the world

As Bonnett (2007) contends, both he and McDowell share some crucial and fundamental points of view with regard to the transcendent-but-normative character of nature. On McDowell’s view, a viable understanding of the partial re-enchantment of nature, in which Bonnets finds considerable affinity with his phenomenological view of nature, puts us in a position to reject the idea of the capital-G ‘Given’ in our experience – a bare presence that is waiting to be conceptualised – but to recognise the given (without the capital letter), that is, things are thus and so in the world. A parallel point is certainly made in Bonnett’s view of nature:

[Nature] can be rightly construed now as a ‘given’ in the sense that it is both not simply a product of our decision-making and choice … and that as an orientating idea, it is so deeply embedded in our form of sensibility that it is constitutive of our way of seeing and understanding the world both cognitively and affectively. (Bonnett 2007, 715)

What is by now clear is that appreciating the mutual sustaining between human consciousness and its environment in the way Bonnett advocates is tantamount to giving proper credit to a ‘given’ with its normative functioning (without becoming misled into accepting the Given). In glossing McDowell’s rational-conceptualist ‘re-enchantment of nature’ argument as insisting that ‘[c]oncepts are involved in our apprehension of nature from the bottom up, and nature is therefore no longer divested of everything normative’, Bonnett (2017) clearly regards it as akin to his own conception of nature as a given and avers that ‘nature occurs 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’ (715, italics added).⁶

McDowell follows Wilfrid Sellars in rejecting the Myth of the Given and frames the Myth that Sellars does not, in fact, explicitly formulate, as: ‘it is a form of the Myth to think sensibility by itself, without any involvement of capacities that belong to our rationality, can make things available for our cognition’ (McDowell 2009c [2008], 257, italics added). Sellars’s dictum, as McDowell notes, coincides with a fundamental tenet of Kant in that it refuses to admit ‘intuitions without concepts’, rejected by Kant on the grounds that any such intuitions would be ‘blind’ and so empty, not intuitions at all (cf. McDowell 2009d [2003], 157–158).

The way out of the Myth that McDowell in a Kantian-Sellarsian vein shows, and the reconciliation of the realm of sensibility with the realm of conceptual rationality, is his reconfigured empiricism, which he variously labelled ‘minimal empiricism’ (McDowell 1996, xii), ‘transcendental empiricism’ (McDowell 2000, 8) and ‘coherent empiricism’ (McDowell 2009e [1999], 129). The crucial point of this renewed empiricism is a complete rejection of the dualism of reason and nature,⁷ which has yielded a series of modern dualisms that has, in turn, lent credence to the unprofitable dualisms in educational research represented by that of the positivist-quantitative/constructivist-qualitative distinction (Misawa 2016).

McDowell often elucidates the rejection of the reason-nature dualism as a rejection of the identification of what stands opposed to the logical space of reasons (in Sellars’s famous contrast) with the logical space of nature. That the realm of disenchanted nature within natural-scientific intelligibility does not exhaust the realm of what is natural allows room for natural occurrences that are not foreign to the normative space of reasons. That is, ‘natural occurrences’ here (e.g. impressions) are not to be taken ‘purely’ as impingements of a surrounding environment on sensory nerve endings; they are never equivalent to the occurrences that can be explained wholly in (natural-scientifically) causal terms.

As an empiricist, McDowell entertains the idea that perceptual experience is basic in our cognitive lives, yet in such a way that denies the traditional empiricist claim that, on the basis of perception, we conceptually or linguistically represent what we perceive. This latter foundationalist argument obviously proceeds in two stages and there endures something like what philosophers (of mind and consciousness) call an ‘explanatory gap’ between the two – i.e. the lingering mystery remains of how the (lower) natural order of something that we share with non-human animals leads to higher-order cognitive functions, such as thinking and judging. According to McDowell’s version of empiricism, however, there is no mystery if we acknowledge that perceptual experience (already) has conceptual content, to wit, that the content of experience is always conceptual rather than the bare Given.

That many non-human animals have sense organs does not mean that they share the same perception or sensibility as humans completely. In McDowell’s (2011) picture of experience, human and non-human animals have perceptual knowledge in common in terms of ‘genus’ but not in terms of ‘species’ (54). It is by virtue of our acquiring and making various and distinct use of a second nature that perceptual knowledge as possessed by humans becomes a species of a genus. The exemplary capacity of second nature that McDowell, following Sellars, adduces is the command of a language, through a gradual acquisition of which human animals with no second nature are ‘initiated into conceptual capacities, whose interrelations belong in the logical space of reasons’ (McDowell 1996, xx). McDowell dispels the seeming spookiness of this second nature-driven ‘transformation’ by invoking the notion of Bildung, which he holds is ‘a central element in the normal maturation of human beings’ (ibid., 125). We need not be under special conditions to acquire certain skills and capacities relating to our first language; tautological as it may sound, learning a first – natural – language is a natural process (under normal circumstances). It is also worth mentioning here that McDowell fully embraces the ‘Gadamerian note’ that language serves as ‘a repository of tradition’ (ibid., 184), to the effect that ‘the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world’ (ibid., 125, italics added).

Taken altogether, in McDowell’s empiricism, experience can be conceived as direct openness to the world without the two steps that have long invited the traditional problems of knowledge about the ‘external’ world. McDowell urges:

Impressions can be cases of its perceptually appearing—being apparent—to a subject that things are thus and so. In receiving impressions, a subject can be open to the way things manifestly are. This yields a satisfying interpretation for the image of postures that are answerable to the world through being answerable to experience. (McDowell 1996, xx, italics in original)

In the picture of experience McDowell advocates, therefore, for the rational animals we are, perceptual experience is often prior to higher mental functions such as thinking and judging in terms of the sequence of happening; but it is not prior in terms of what is involved in their operations – i.e. in terms of the actualisations of conceptual capacities belonging to the rationality that makes it possible to inhabit the logical space of reasons – although, of course, not every activity (perceptually, cognitively or practically) is discursively explicable.

Turning to the McDowell–Dreyfus debate can help to further illuminate these issues, whose complex combinations underlie the pervasiveness thesis, and which do not come to the fore in Bonnett’s phenomenological expositions.

The McDowell–Dreyfus debate on the pervasiveness thesis

There is no dispute between McDowell and Dreyfus that the Myth of the Given is real and has long fuelled modern temptations towards foundationalism on which to base empirical certainties. However, in his American Philosophical Association Presidential Address under the title ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise’, Dreyfus (2005) charges McDowell with establishing a polar opposite to the Myth of the Given, namely ‘the Myth of the Mental’ – the idea that ‘pure perception is impossible so perception and coping must somehow always already be conceptual … ’ (59). His complaint is that McDowell overlooks a third option, which Dreyfus urges can halt the slide from the Myth of the Given to the Myth of the Mental, i.e. a ‘conceptually pure yet meaningful given’ (ibid., 55). Dreyfus protests: ‘A “bare Given” and the “thinkable” are not our only alternatives. We must accept the possibility that our ground-level coping opens up the world by opening us to a meaningful Given – a Given that is nonconceptual but not bare’ (ibid., italics in original). The character of this ground-floor level coping in our experience is precisely at the heart of the question of whether and how to accept the pervasiveness thesis.

Drawing existential phenomenologist insights from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus claims that there is a ‘ground-floor level’, at which ‘preconceptual, preobjective/presubjective, prelinguisitic, coping’ is operative (Dreyfus 2007a, 364). The thought expressed in the sentence that follows is clearly a denial of the pervasiveness thesis; we should not think ‘experience at the most basic level must somehow be pervaded by mindedness’ (ibid.). Dreyfus (2005, 2007a) adduces a chess master playing lightning chess as an example of such absorbed and embodied coping in flow. When and where the master is absorbed in lightning chess, no mindedness comes into play. The point is not confined to expert coping but also extends into general, everyday coping, such as an instance in which someone does not attend to – i.e. mindfully – a doorknob when she goes out the door (Dreyfus 2007a, 361).

So, Dreyfus’s (2005) main objection is that McDowell and analytical philosophers more generally do not seem to engage in the indispensable task of ‘showing 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’; in other words, the task of ‘pursing the question of how these nonconceptual capacities are converted into conceptual ones – how minds grow out of being-in-the-word – rather than denying the existence of the nonconceptual’ (61, italics added). On Dreyfus’s view, ‘the transcendental account’ McDowell puts forward is not so much wrong but ‘secondary’ (Dreyfus 2013, 21), since the perception and coping ‘necessary for world disclosing’ is essentially ‘nonconceptual’ (Dreyfus 2005, 59, italics added). The kernel of Dreyfus’s criticism of McDowell’s view is epitomised in the following passage:

McDowell begins his description of the relation of mind and world too late. That human beings are open to a world of facts presupposes a nonpropositional, nonintentional, ongoing background activity that discloses our familiar world without the mediation of conceptual content.⁸ Only on the basis of this pervasive activity can human beings relate to things and equipment. (Dreyfus 2013, 23, italics added)

While coming to admit the significance of the pervasiveness thesis through their exchanges, Dreyfus (2013) has never rid himself of the firm suspicion that McDowell is committed to ‘the Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’, i.e. the assumption that ‘there is an essential distance between mind and world that must be bridged by concepts, thoughts, and reasons’ (36). Yet, McDowell (2013) labels this assumption about the mind-world relation as ‘the Myth of Mind as Detached’, claiming that it distorts Dreyfus’s interpretation of the pervasiveness thesis as McDowell means it (41). For McDowell, it is Dreyfus who is committed to a myth concerning the mind, namely to the assumption that ‘rational mindedness is always detached, so that it must be absent from the absorbed coping that occupies the ground floor’ (ibid., 55). Fully appreciating the pervasiveness thesis requires abandoning the concomitant idea that ‘a subject of experience is always detached from the world’ (ibid., 44). In his first response to Dreyfus’s Presidential Address, McDowell (2009a [2007]) refutes the Merleau-Pontyesque view of this body’s ‘motor intention’ on which Dreyfus approvingly relies, arguing that ‘[o]nce I have separated me – the thinking thing I am – from this body, it is too late to try to fix things by talking about the former merging into the latter’ (322, italics in original).

In addition, more generally, the supposed ‘distance’ between subjectivity and the concept of objectivity in the world is already attacked in Mind and World. The reproach there is targeted on Donald Davidson’s (2001 [1983]) ‘triangulation’ thesis, that the objectivity that thought and language demand necessitates a ‘three-way relation among two speakers and a common world’ (xv). McDowell argues:

By my lights, if subjects are already in place, it is too late to set about catering for the constitution of the concept of objectivity. We must take subjectivity and the concept of objectivity to emerge together, out of initiation into the space of reasons. (McDowell 1996, 186, italics added)

Noteworthy here is that despite his acknowledgement that Heidegger’s indirect influence regarding Aristotelian phronēsis operates on him (through Gadamer), McDowell by no means employs Heidegger’s phrase of ‘being-in-the-world’. Rather, his point in the relevant context is that acquiring a mind and having the world in view are two sides of the same coin, and this coin can be obtained only by rational animals, namely, animals who are initiated into, and thereby learn to navigate, the logical space of reasons. Once initiated, such animals are surely ‘always already’ in the world. The notion of ‘being-in-the-world’, insofar as it describes what it is – once initiated into ‘the space of linguistically expressible thought’ (2009a [2007], 317) – to be a minded being, is what McDowell would find well-fitting with his pervasiveness thesis. It is important, however, that the ‘insofar as’ clause cannot be omitted in McDowell’s picture; otherwise, it looks as if the question of ‘how minds grow out of being-in-the-world’ is the question to be answered. For McDowell, Dreyfus is putting the cart before the horse, because if a being is already in the world, that being is in possession of a mind. Instead of committing himself to answering the misplaced question, McDowell (2009a [2007]) has repeatedly striven to convince us that even a perceptual experience is world-disclosing and, if so, its content has a distinctively human form (320). This is to mean that the ‘distinctively human perceptual experience is actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness’ (ibid., italics in original), consciousness that we share, in a (natural-scientific) sense, with animals that are not rational. Our conceptual rationality pervades the capacities for sensory awareness and thus for absorbed coping, which represents active intervention in the environment.

McDowell’s (2013) insistence that capacities belonging to conceptual rationality are in play, ‘not only at upper levels but also on the ground floor’ (54), allied with his claim that those capacities are acquired through initiation into the linguistic and discursive logical space of reasons, might give an inkling that every move in absorbed coping that occupies the ground floor is discursively expressible. But, of course, McDowell does not set such a high bar for it: his point in putting forth the pervasiveness thesis is that in the capacities actualised in absorbed coping there is already ‘a potential for discursive activity’ (McDowell 2009c [2008], 265, italics added), a potential to be achieved if the coper takes a step back to reflect or she equips herself with a discursive capacity. It is on this ground that McDowell makes the pervasiveness claim that mind is found everywhere in a distinctively human engagement with the world, including perceptual and coping engagement, in preference to Dreyfus’s (2007a) conception of absorbed coping as ‘[pervasively] mindless’ (353). McDowell (2013) emblematically notes that the dependence between these ground and upper levels ‘goes in the other direction also’: ‘Unreflectively absorbed experiencing and acting characterize the lives of rational animals only because they are engaged in by subjects that also reflect about what to think and what to do’ (55, italics added).⁹

The ancient idea that human beings are rational animals that McDowell has held on to, along with a proper appreciation of the pervasiveness thesis, certainly has massive implications for education in ways that Bonnett suggests in phenomenological terms.

Concluding remarks: we are developmentally rational animals

Bonnett’s educational rehabilitation of nature persuasively widens the realm in which nature and sustainability are at stake. It is not just of important relevance to contemporary environmental education by exposing some highly influential but anthropocentric understandings of nature (such as ‘post-modern’ and ‘scientistic’ accounts) but also of profound relevance to deeper educational-philosophical questions in throwing us back to the metaphysical questions of how we are to understand ourselves and our relation to the world. I have countenanced his long-held view that a proper appreciation of our relationship with nature has huge implications for the character of philosophy of education in general and the whole enterprise of education.

To demonstrate that his proposal is never an example of rhetorical exaggeration, I have linked Bonnett’s phenomenology-inspired environmental philosophy of education with McDowell’s rational-conceptualist ‘re-enchantment of nature’ argument that culminates in the pervasiveness thesis that preoccupies his debate with Dreyfus, according to which capacities that belong to conceptual rationality are in play even on the ground floor (of perception and coping) in human lives. What I have attempted to do, through this confrontation, is to fill the void that seems to remain in Bonnett’s discourse, especially regarding his notion of world.

Bonnett and McDowell share the view that the space in which one lives and acts – that is, nature for Bonnett and the world for McDowell – is never normatively inert. Despite the close resemblance Bonnett identifies with McDowell’s rational-conceptualist view of nature, Bonnett does not seem to go far enough. His account of nature, with its rather exclusive focus on a poetic-romantic, direct encounter between the human being and nature, falls short of explaining how human animals come to inhabit the meaningful space as human beings, that is, how we come to enjoy the ‘sustaining’ as a given.¹⁰ To follow it through, it is of much help to consider McDowell’s relevant argument that distinguishes first from second nature as well as the disenchanted conception of nature from the partially enchanted nature, exploring what it is to be and become a minded being in the meaningful space in which human beings dwell. I have tried to indicate that McDowell’s elaboration of mind and world opens up a richer kind of thinking about rationality and conceptuality, namely not as the things Bonnett (2004a) rightly criticises by annexing them to ‘Enlightenment humanism’ (98) – which is a typical version of modern anthropocentrism – , but as what characterises the distinctively human form of life. In this regard, it is possible to say that Bonnett is working with an overly restrictive conception of ‘rational experiences’; what Bonnett (2009a) counts as ‘non-rational experiences’, such as experiences of ‘love, faith, compassion, [and] repugnance’ (367), can be the content of an experience in the world as McDowell means it with the pervasiveness thesis.

McDowell’s rational-conceptualist argument is not a panacea, however. His attention to the formation of the rational-conceptual or mindedness, which is inextricably entangled with being capable of having a view of the world, is slight since his (2009a [2007]) philosophical – not educational – interest is in ‘the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom’ (308, italics added).¹¹ Bonnett’s (2019a) long-standing emphasis on ‘participating in the gift of the given’ (45) adds some nuance to the ancient idea, an importantly educational nuance that is an integral part of what it is to be the sorts of animals we are. Viewed in the way McDowell and Bonnett mutually inform, the traditional dictum can be reframed as this: we are developmentally rational animals. Following McDowell, we must understand the nature of the distinctively human form of life as being pervaded by rational mindedness without committing ourselves to any kind of untenable anthropocentrism, and following Bonnett, we need to acknowledge that the space in which we dwell is always, in some sense, on the way. Along these lines, the thought Bonnett (1997) expressed in one of his earliest writings on nature-related issues should be highly appreciated: ‘it is no mere bombast to observe that ultimately the issue of the environment is, in a very profound sense, the issue of the shape of human nature and its future development’ (263).

It may seem that I have set aside the questions of what kind of enterprise can education then be and what kind of discipline can philosophy of education then be once we turn to a Bonnettian-McDowellian reappraisal of nature-related issues. Bonnett has indeed sought to give these questions a concrete shape by emphasising the central importance of, for instance, ‘ontological education’ and ‘human mortality’ (e.g. Bonnett 2019a 44–45). Although I agree with many of the suggestions made by Bonnett, I want to draw this paper to a close by stressing the fact that such a reappraisal can take multiple forms and that, given that various types of educational-philosophical thinking are being advanced today in philosophy of education, it is indeed in progress in our discipline. One such example is Jan Derry’s (2013) penetrating criticism of a ‘representational paradigm’ (32) that has impoverished the concept and practice of education. Drawing insights mainly from Robert Brandom’s work, Derry denounces the representationalism that underwrites not just ‘a mirror view of nature’ often connected to the corresponding theory of truth (or ‘scientism’ in Bonnett’s preferred terminology) but also the ‘constructivism’ predicated on a ‘implicit dualism’ between mind and the disenchanted world, a dualism that has accelerated the flourishing of the idea of meaning-making in education (ibid., 32–48).¹² What Derry instead puts forward is Brandomian inferentialism, which she (2020) claims takes proper account of ‘the distinctively human life-form’ that is inundated with our capacity to be ‘responsive to reasons’ (15).

My reference to Derry’s Brandomian inferentialism is, of course, not to show that her approach best answers the questions of what kind of enterprise must education be and what kind of discipline must philosophy of education be. To be prescriptive beyond a certain point would be unwise and impossible. My only intention here is to demonstrate that the Bonnettian-McDowellian reappraisal of nature, world and ‘sustainable development’ can varyingly affect and go hand in hand with diverse lines of the possible development of philosophy of education. There exists no single path we need to take. What the reappraisal brings out is the existence and potential of educational-philosophical perspectives that find room for further exploring ourselves and our relation to the world in this ‘Anthropocene’ era, with due recognition of the fact that we are developmentally rational animals.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Michael Bonnett for his kindness in reading an earlier draft of this paper and in offering helpful comments and encouragement. I also wish to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which I have tried to incorporate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JP19K02421and JP20H01178].

Notes

1. What is now known as the McDowell–Dreyfus debate is mainly constitutive of Dreyfus 2005, 2007a, 2007b and 2013, as well as McDowell 2009a, 2009b and 2013. Dreyfus also takes up this debate and tries to add more clarity to his view in his co-authored book with Charles Taylor (2015, especially Chapter 4). Because of space limitations, I have had to leave aside the rich details of many issues raised by this debate.

2. At least in his monograph, Bonnett (2004a) makes a distinction between nature and the environment, saying that ‘it becomes clear that “nature” and “the environment” are not synonymous and that reference to the former can serve a normative function with regard to our understanding of the latter and how we treat it’ (40, italics added).

3. Bonnett told me that such an identification of ‘nature’ with ‘world’ does not do proper justice to his view, insisting that ‘concepts of nature and experiences of nature respectively are primordial elements of our idea of world and our experience of it (being in it)’ (personal correspondence, 30 July 2020). If ‘nature’ and ‘world’ are not synonymous in his picture, however, it appears all the more necessary to give a more extended account of their relationship for the reasons I suggest in the text that follows, especially in the last two sections.

4. The failure to clearly (dis)connect the conceptions of nature and the environment, let alone those of nature and world, is frequently witnessed in a good deal of environmental research, including in the realm of philosophy of education. The ‘call for papers’ of the 17th International Network of Philosophers of Education Conference (INPE), whose conference theme is ‘Education, the Environment and Sustainability’, is perhaps a case in point. In this call, the term nature is used non-normatively as equivalent to the environment (often in the form of ‘the natural environment’). Of course, one is free to use these expressions as one pleases; however, the problem is that whereas the call for papers makes no mention of the term ‘world’, at the beginning of the document, it rather inadvertently quotes the Kenyan proverb as instantiating the conference’s inclination: ‘The world was not given to you by your parents, it was lent to you by your children’ (INPE 2019).

5. I have also elsewhere (Misawa 2020) drawn an extensive comparison between Bonnett and McDowell, particularly in terms of human nature.

6. Note that the phrase ‘shot through’ has no negative connotation here. What Bonnett means by this passage is that nature as we have it from the start – to use his phenomenological terminology, primordially – is experienced from within our form of sensibility that is infused with human significances; that is, nature is not something to which we later attach values. This inherent normativity coheres, however, with the ‘otherness’ of nature. Bonnett has reiterated the point that human significances in nature are not solely human authored (e.g. Bonnett 2004b, 122).

7. Bonnett’s thorough repudiation of the traditional separation between fact and value is fully in the spirit of the McDowellian dislodging of the nature–reason dichotomy. Bonnett (2019a) protests that the traditional fact–value dichotomy has prompted the view that ‘moral or other value is not internal to a fact about the world’ (43, italics in original).

8. Throughout this debate, Dreyfus (2013) separates McDowell’s idea of ‘a world of facts’ from Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of the world ‘in proto-normative terms’ (22); for example, by introducing the distinction between ‘affordances’ and ‘solicitations’. Still, this is a mischaracterisation of the position McDowell takes towards the notion of world, which never casts it as normatively inert.

9. In contrast, Dreyfus holds on to a foundationalist mode of thinking: ‘That the phenomenological approach accepts the challenge of relating the preconceptual world to the conceptual world makes that approach, even though it is reminiscent of foundationalism, seem to me the more attractive’ (Dreyfus 2007a, 364). While broaching, at a place, the possibility that his Heideggerian-Merleau-Pontyesque account for absorbed coping could be called ‘horizonal’ (Dreyfus 2007b, 377, italics in original) in order to mitigate the foundationalist flavour, Dreyfus retains the thought that the ‘basis’ of conceptual mindedness is the ‘background’ of ‘our egoless, non-conceptual absorbed coping’ (ibid., 376). For a critique of Dreyfus’s interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking about skilled coping in philosophy of education, see Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (2010 [2007], 117–119) where Dreyfus’s ‘partially secularized updating of Heidegger’ is depicted as ‘Californian’ (118) to the effect that his reading fails to accommodate fully ‘the social world’ that is linguistic in nature. Paul Standish (2016) also gives Dreyfus’s Heidegger the same label, ‘a Californian Heidegger’, arguing that ‘[t]here is a loss of the sense of the human condition as unheimlich – as uncanny or not-at-home – and of its constitution as “ecstatic”, which is to say not purely present or self-contained’ (109).

10. My assertion that Bonnett does not really say much about children’s development should be qualified by the fact that, as one of the reviewers of this paper reminds me, his first book is Children’s Thinking (1994), which is obviously relevant to his sense of how children develop. For the purposes of this paper, however, I did not see this book as being located within Bonnett’s proposed ‘metaphysical’ turn in nature-related issues.

11. While potentially having many educational implications, McDowell’s reference to Bildung is only passing and certainly underdeveloped. In this regard, David Bakhurst's (e.g. 2015, 2016) highlighting of the philosophical-educational benefit of more closely analysing the Bildungsprozess of human beings, which he has recently liked to call a ‘transformational view’ of human development and learning, is worthy of note. Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011) has successfully brought McDowell’s philosophy to the attention of philosophers of education, and the symposium published on the book includes both sympathetic and critical responses to Bakhurst’s McDowellian argument, where critical analyses of the proposed notions of, for example, Bildung, second nature, autonomy and the re-enchantment of the world are presented (Rödl 2016; Standish 2016). For a discussion of this symposium, see also Misawa (2017). The McDowellian/Bakhurstian line of philosophical argument has been provoking and inspiring works in contemporary philosophy of education (e.g. Miller 2020; Webb 2020).

12. For Bonnett’s trenchant criticism of ‘representational thinking’, see Bonnett (1983, especially 25–26).