Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education

Anja Heikkinen, Jenni Pätäri & Gabriele Molzberger (eds), Disciplinary Struggles in Education Tampere University Press 2019, 195–214 http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-359-002-1 Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education Kari Väyrynen Abstract Environmental questions call for a radical revision and re-evaluation of our ways of thinking, valuing and acting. Ecological wisdom as a holistic view to these questions is therefore an increasingly important challenge for education and its basic philosophical presuppositions. My article asks, what are the options of pedagogy in this situation? To my mind, classical theories of Bildung, of the cultivation and formation of man, have an important theoretical potentiality for environmentally wise education. I take as an example G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of Bildung as an antagonistic, dialectical process. Dialectical environmental wisdom sees humans both identical to and different from nature. We must control nature to a certain degree, but all the time learn from its feedback. Possible harmony with nature would therefore develop in an open, dialogical and dialectical learning process. Keywords: environmental education, dialectical pedagogy, Bildung, ecological wisdom, G.W.F. Hegel Kari Väyrynen 196 Introduction Environmental problems are not always small, technically or institutionally solvable practical questions. First, they are serious, ‘wicked’ problems: often extremely complex issues with contingent factors and therefore difficult to control both technically and socially. Secondly, they are theoretically and philosophically deep problems, which puts many paradigmatic assumptions of our traditional scientific and philosophical thinking and basic cultural ideals and values into question. Environmental questions therefore call for a radical revision and reevaluation of our ways of thinking, valuing and acting. In this situation, what are the implications for general pedagogy? Pedagogy must always reflect the probable future challenges our children will face and try to develop such practices, mentalities and value standpoints that could anticipate future challenges and their possible solutions. In our time, environmental questions must therefore have a more important role in forming pedagogical practices than they currently have. There are many uncertain factors involved, so we must keep different options open in order to manage our relationship with the environment. In this case, pedagogy does not have one solid fundament to build on and must therefore take many possibilities into account. A dialogical approach and cross-disciplinary questioning must therefore be an integral part of environmental education. An environmentally conscious philosophy of education is an extremely important field in this new situation. It can inform practical pedagogy with the new problems about environmental thinking. New environmental consciousness is still developing, and there is no philosophical, value-theoretical and ethical or scientific-technological and political consensus about the seriousness of and solutions for the situation. Alternatively, it is necessary to strive for a rational consensus. The danger of relativism is serious because it supports environmental denialism: in philosophy, we must also take critical realistic alternatives seriously and seek for a metaphysical and ontological fundament for environmental ethics and politics which could guarantee the wellbeing of both man and nature. The subjective constructivism and narrativism of the late 20th century are not fruitful theoretical options here. They only support anthropocentric, narrow culturalist Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 197 thinking and do not help to bridge the traditional methodological dualism between the humanities and the natural sciences. What are the options for traditional pedagogy in this situation? To my mind, classical theories of Bildung, of the cultivation and formation1 of man, have an important theoretical potentiality for our search for a theoretical basis to environmentally wise education. Bildung referred originally – until Kant – to the natural growth of organisms. Alternatively, its cultural aspect, the Bildung of culture, has cultura in its Latin origins, which also has a meaning related to the cultivation of the natural environment.2 Of course, this aspect can be interpreted in an anthropocentric way only. But especially in German Romanticism the pantheistic conception of nature saw human culture in a positive interaction with nature, and especially with wild nature, through which we can learn about higher spiritual and aesthetic values. For example, the sublimity of nature (Kant) can deepen not only our aesthetical views of nature but also affect our basic ethical and philosophical views concerning nature. The young Kant formulated a view of man who basically cannot control mighty nature and is explicitly denied the physicotheological view of man and nature, which was still typical during the early Enlightenment. (Väyrynen, 2006, pp. 225–228; 2008). In my mind, the concept of Bildung found its most interesting formulation in G.W.F. Hegel’s thinking. He stressed the antagonistic character of Bildung. Human development is not a process of harmonic growth but has necessary moments of reification and alienation.3 These moments are not negative aspects of external power but rather positive challenges for the learning process (Väyrynen, 2012). This fits very well with our relationship with the environment: we are both identical to and different from nature. We must control it to a certain degree but all the time learn from its feedback. We must seek harmony with it, but this is possible only in a dialectical relationship with reified/alienated moments of 1 Because there is no generally accepted direct translation in English, I use the German term. 2 And, in principle today, conditions for a sustainable man-nature relationship. 3 Reification means our necessary connections to thing-like (lat. re = thing) connections. This is necessary for the human condition: already the use of language and tools is reification. Alienation refers to such outer conditions (ideologies, politics, institutions), that prevent humans from fully realizing their human potentialities. Alienation is not so necessary as reifications: it can – at least in principle – being avoided in as much that human freedom and autonomy is increasing in a better functioning society. Kari Väyrynen 198 the process. Our identity with nature is dialectical: partly harmonious, partly disharmonious. An equally important aspect of the Hegelian concept of Bildung is the political. Education is bound to basic institutional structures of society. Family, civil society and state have their own educational goals. Hegel stresses the independence of education against inherited family traditions (such as different religions), which tend to be too conservative and traditionalistic. Alternatively, education must be independent of the short-term economic interests of a capitalistic economy in civil society. Educational institutions are therefore rather parts of the state insofar as the latter represents a reasonable general will of society towards a better future, towards ‘freedom of all’ as the ultimate goal of history, as Hegel understands it (Väyrynen, 2016). Whilst bearing our topic in mind, I would add that this means of course only positive freedom, through which we must become both socially and environmentally responsible citizens. Promoting the general interest, which is the fundament of pedagogy, today includes our interests in a good environment – and not only for us but also in itself. (An und für sich, as Hegel would say: that means in an environmental context that we should learn to promote our own interests [für uns] in such a way that it does not harm the interests of nature [an sich], that is, the interests of all living species in a good life of their own.) Traditions of wisdom: Limits and possibilities Environmental philosophy has challenged many anthropocentric traces of traditional philosophy, especially in metaphysics and ethics. But the original ideal of philosophical knowledge as wisdom (Gr. sophia) has also been positively accepted as a background interest and synthesising activity in environmental philosophy and environmental knowledge in general. For example, the Norwegian founder of deep ecology, Arne Naess (1912–2009), spoke as early as in 1973 about ecosophy (Naess, 1973/1976). Another example is the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003), who saw in the ancient idea of the avoidance of hybris a wise environmental principle in the 1980s (Väyrynen, 2017). The roots of Western thinking were actually not so anthropocentric, as many historians of environmental thinking have asserted. Even for Plato, whose dualism has been Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 199 almost unanimously been criticised as an anthropocentric position, the idea of cosmic harmony was normative for human action, which should not step outside its proper limits (Väyrynen, 2006). Not only classical Greek philosophy but also original Chinese wisdom, which was expressed in the early yin/yang cosmology and ethics,4 tried to harmonise our relationship with nature. Especially in Taoism, yin and yang should be in a harmonic relationship (he), and this harmony was also considered a normative principle for man’s actions. Harmony (he) refers to the bringing of all different elements into proper proportion. If, for example, ‘there is yang without yin, there will be no life and peace will vanish’ (Wang, 2016, pp. 3–5). Wise human action, such as successful charioteering, is therefore based in adaptivity to the natural environment and forces, functional efficiency in coping with environmental disturbances and the reorganisation of inherited behaviour patterns to fit existing environmental situations. Yin/yang is a configuration of forces, ‘the rhythm of human life, earth’s changes, and heaven’s powers’, leading to Dao, to wise knowledge, or how to use power (Wang, 2016, p. 11). At this fundamental level, the traditions of the West and East share common ground. For environmental research, von Wright’s basic distinctions concerning traditional scientific rationality and environmentally sensitive wisdom are important. In his essays from the 1950s he saw the ancient concept of wisdom (sophia), and especially practical wisdom (fronesis), as the main focus of his philosophical thinking. Later on, it was important to von Wright to distinguish between scientific-technological rationality and traditional wisdom, or the rational and the reasonable. In his article Images of science and forms of rationality (1985), he writes that rationality, when contrasted with reasonableness, has to do primarily with formal correctness of reasoning, efficiency of means to an end, the confirmation and testing of beliefs. It is goal-oriented … Judgments of reasonableness, again, are value-oriented. They are concerned with the right way of living, with what is thought good or bad for man. The reasonable is, of course, also rational – but the ‘merely rational’ is not always reasonable. 4 Yin is a cosmic, active masculine principle of heaven, yang a passive feminine principle of the life-producing earth. In Confucianism, the masculine principle is dominant, in Thaoism, the feminine (Väyrynen, 2006, 49–65). Kari Väyrynen 200 The search for the reasonable was especially typical of the ancient Greeks. They were searching for the right natural order, ‘a eunomia, i.e. lawful and just order’. To understand the world order was ‘to attain wisdom rather than knowledge; it was, as has been said, to attune one’s life to its “natural” conditions’ (von Wright, 1993, pp. 172–174). For von Wright, the environmental implications of this distinction are already clear in his article (1985). He stresses the importance of human-ecological research. He sympathises with a new holistic worldview, which would represent ‘a new form of scientific rationality’. According to him, this would ‘encourage a shift in the view of the man-nature relationship from an idea of domination to one of co-evolution’. This could help ‘the adaptation of industrial society to the biological conditions of its survival’ (von Wright, 1993, p. 187). Later on, he developed these ideas further in many books and articles before his death in 2003.5 All scientific research is based on human interests and values, such as Jürgen Habermas has shown in his famous theory of knowledge interests (Habermas, 1968). In environmental research, the core values and interests are often explicitly recognised in order to protect nature (for example, biodiversity, ecosystem health). The environmental sciences actually follow the ‘emancipatory interest’ of Habermas, which he saw as a leading interest in radical social sciences (Marx, Freud). The traditional concept of wisdom in Greek and Chinese philosophy was basically a knowledge of fundamental cosmic values and how they directed human knowledge and actions. It is now again time to make explicit in the philosophy of science the core values leading scientific enterprise. Environmental sciences should therefore consult environmental philosophy in order to make their ontological and value-theoretical standpoint clear. Environmental sciences still often lean simply on traditional anthropocentric values, and this is very problematic, not only for science but also for environmental ethics and politics. For the philosophy of education, von Wright’s distinction between the rational and the reasonable is very important. Pure rationality in education can lead to the social-technological conception of education as a pure means for economic and administrative goals, nowadays especially for international economic competition. Education is not seen as important per se for full human 5 I have analysed von Wright as an environmental thinker more broadly in Väyrynen (2017). Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 201 development relatively independent from practical economic and real political goals. An extreme consequence of this social-technological rationality would be a kind of a la carte education (as Lyotard, 1984 has expressed it), supporting the contingent needs of the economy. In this view, humans are only flexible material for economic purposes without any intrinsic value. A wise education, on the contrary, would be critical of immediate economic or political trends because they can lead to negative developments, such as the emergence of the Nazi regime in the 1930s, or support the currently deepening environmental crisis. A wise education should have a long enough historical perspective to recognise dangerous political trends. This has been stressed both in conservative and radical political thinking (in Burke and Marx, to give a classical example): a longer historical perspective can show how complex a set of entities a wise politics – and as a part of it, education – must take into account. Utopian alternatives – such as escaping from environmental problems to other planets – are always too simple and have therefore many unforeseen side effects. Also simple pedagogical solutions, such as the hype of information technology, share the same problem. Children, as part of the changing society and environment, are an extremely complex phenomenon: how do we keep the rich possibilities of their bio-psychological and intellectual-emotional development on solid ground through the antithetic pressures of the coming decades? A wise pedagogy does not necessarily have any better answers to these future challenges, but it attempts at least to recognise the central problems involved in this without overly simple or utopian answers. Dialectical thinking: Basic structures The Hegelian theory of education and Bildung is based on his dialectics. Like all processes of reality, education and Bildung are antagonistic. They must find a balance between antagonistic tendencies relevant to education, such as individuality–collectivity, autonomy–heteronomy, egoism–altruism, formal– material, etc. In addition, our relationship with nature is antithetic in the sense of dialectical thinking: we try to understand and control an entity that is radically different from our immediate human world. Alternatively, we are ‘cultural Kari Väyrynen 202 animals’ – animals as a part of nature. We can experience nature directly through our body, emotions and living experiences (elämys, Erlebnis), and through concepts and categories, which express natural properties, structures and processes. We also have important valuative connections to nature. We are both identical to and different from it. Dialectical logic has developed a system of categories that express complex and dynamic interconnections between our thinking and ontological realities. Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) in particular exemplifies the extremely complex structures involved. It is very difficult to comprehend as a whole.6 However, luckily the organising principle is quite simple and fundamental to all critical thinking and its problems. This famous structure is the Hegelian triad, or thesis–antithesis–synthesis. It is useful to briefly describe its fundamental idea. The first step, thesis, leans on our immediate thinking: some concept as such is the dominant perspective on reality. This can be a position in our ordinary thinking, a common sense view of something, as a scientific, paradigmatic position in some field of research. This position is typical for every reductionistic position in science. However, in connection to the objective world, this thesis turns out to be problematic; it leaves residues (see Lefebvre, 2016, pp. 11–12, 299–303, passim.), which cannot be properly explained by the original thesis. We must therefore try to formulate an antithesis, which could better explain these residues. Through this, we must take a different or even a contradictory perspective. This is often logically implicit in the original thesis: for example, the simple idea that something ‘is’, is originally connected to its contradictory thought that something ‘is not’.7 It is important to note that not all antitheses develop in this formal way. The material aspects of reality often also demand a dialectical analysis. For example, concrete social antagonisms must be expressed in thinking through contradictory concepts. Master–slave dialectics, which is analysed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is the most famous example. For our topic, the 6 It is therefore understandable that the recently extensive analytical metaphysics and ontology has not taken the challenge of this work seriously. Theoretically, this new trend of analytical philosophy has returned to pre-Kantian metaphysics. 7 Plato explained the birth of dialectics in this way. See my article concerning the interconnections between Plato’s and Hegel’s dialectics, Väyrynen 2017(a). In Hegel’s Science of logic, the famous first triad (being – nothingness – becoming) analyses these elementary concepts more deeply. Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 203 great, basic antagonism of spirit–nature (Geist – Natur) is especially important. This antagonism is fundamental to Hegel’s whole philosophical system, expressed in his Encyclopaedias of Philosophical Sciences (1817). The relation of thesis and antithesis is typical for all critical thinking: it is therefore pedagogically important. However, there is also a danger of relativism and scepticism, or ‘negative dialectics’, to use Hegel’s expression. The third aspect of the dialectical triad, synthesis, should lead to a higher, positive result in this respect – ‘positive dialectics’, or speculation. But what is synthesis? This may be the most difficult aspect to comprehend in Hegel’s dialectics. I briefly present here my own view of this crucial concept. First, synthesis is not a formal combination of thesis and antithesis; it is not simply a more general concept in which thesis and antithesis are included as parts. It rather opens up a wider ontological perspective for antithetic concepts. For example ‘becoming’ (Werden) is an ontological perspective through which ‘being’ (something is; Sein) and non-being (something is not; Nichts) can be understood as more limited positions to the reality as a whole, as relative aspects of a higher truth explicated in ‘becoming’. ‘Becoming’ as a synthesis makes it possible to understand on one hand the limits and on the other hand the relative merits of ‘being’ and ‘not-being’. This is the idea of ‘sublating’ (Aufhebung) the contradictory concepts: through this ‘sublating’ act, they partly remain relevant aspects or moments in the higher concept.8 Becoming, for its part, needs something that ‘is’ and becomes something else – not-being. The parts of the triad are necessarily connected. In terms of ontology, one could say that Hegel’s triads express central modal structures of a stratified reality. In the modal theory of Hegel, a central modal concept is actual reality (Wirklichkeit). Its essence is activity, Wirken, and it is therefore understandable that Hegel criticises formal possibilities and contrafactual thinking about emptiness. According to him, it is more important to stress strata-specific real possibilities in modal thinking. For pedagogy, this means that, instead of utopic solutions, we must think about what the central historical possibilities to act in the near future are. This does not support deterministic talk 8 We could generally say, that through the process of Aufhebung the perspectives opened up by thesis and antithesis remain as relevant parts in a more holistic concept expressed by synthesis. On the level of synthesis, we know better their limits and relative truths. They no longer produce ‘residues’ as reductionistic concepts do (as Lefebvre 2016 – see above – noted). Kari Väyrynen 210 and clean drinking water to nourish the entire human population. Such basic ramifications are historically very stable. In addition, as we now know, they are vulnerable and scarce resources already in many parts of the Earth. Environmental history teaches us this simple lesson; it is a kind of metanarrative17 of human history that cannot be eliminated. For environmental education and Bildung it is also important to stress that it is not only the past – as environmental history shows – that is the problem here but also the possible future. The future is not a totally open field of possibilities, but in many ways, it is determined by the past and present. That is especially accentuated today because the effects of our actions reach not only in space but also in time far longer than before: every piece of plastic that we throw in ocean can have serious effects on ecosystems after hundreds of years. As Hans Jonas has shown, our technological society challenges traditional ethics in this respect: ‘the sheer magnitude and often also the irreversibility of the long-term effects of our actions make the questions of responsibility central for ethics in corresponding horizons of time and space’ (Jonas, 1984, pp. 8–9). It is increasingly difficult to foresee the effects of our actions in time and space as well in social and ecological contexts: we need therefore to take the ‘precautionary principle’ as a starting point for new ethics. What does this mean for environmental education? First, it stresses the meaning of a long historical perspective, including environmental history, social and economic history and the history of ideas. The pedagogical tradition of Bildung has this long-term perspective: the whole process of human cultivation and its dialectical structure is a background condition for all historically conscious education. It is sad that not even professional historians do not always understand this. Most historians are increasingly concentrating on current history because it is easy to research: for example, Antiquity and the Middle Ages are not such popular topics because they demand extensive language skills. On the other hand, 17 With my term ‘metanarrative’ I slightly ironise narrativistic talk here – avoiding the extinction of human species has not yet been any narrative, but can become in future a great narrative of our time … if we do success to stay alive. Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 211 environmental history is still a marginal area in traditional historiography – and it is also difficult because of its methodological and cross-disciplinary problems.18 Environmental history has also been a peripheral topic in environmental education. Environmental education stresses the meaning of empirical knowledge, especially living experiences in nature (Matthies, 2004). However, the longue duree of natural processes and our interactions with them are difficult to grasp in the immediate experience: they rather demand combined theoretical and historical knowledge about climate change, demographical processes and ecological dynamics – and very often about their complex interactions. A historical perspective should become part of teaching in the natural sciences – the old field of natural history has indeed been revived in environmental sciences, from geology to ecology. Natural history and environmental history19 actually cooperate today because the co-evolution of human society/culture and nature/environment is presently fundamental for human ontology and an environmentally aware philosophical anthropology. This many-sided, stratified, deeply historical view is pedagogically fundamental in changing the current hectic, short-term visions that are so popular in neoliberal economics and politics. The key issue is that historical consciousness opens up a deeper understanding of our current situation. We must learn to see how our present time is structured through overlapping histories: we still partly behave like hunter-gatherers; we use the products of agriculture extensively, and we use land extensively through that. We still act in the way Christianity has taught us: we think we are higher than animals and nature, with a basic right to control and use them as we see fit, and that we should ‘propagate and fill the earth’. These deep structures of our 18 I have conducted with the Finnish environmental historian Esa Ruuskanen a basic mapping of the short history of this discipline from the 1970s until the present day, and I have also analysed some of its theoretical problems as a multidisciplinary field of research (Ruuskanen & Väyrynen 2017). 19 The currently fashionable concept of the Anthropocene is too general for this purpose: as a geological period, it is not historically sensitive enough. In environmental history, periodisation must be based on multiple factors, from ideological (Christianity, liberalism, etc.) and economic transitions (birth of agriculture, industrialisation, use of fossil fuels, etc.) to climate periods (Medieval Warm Period, etc.) and ecological transformations (periods of mass extinction, extensive erosion and desertification, etc.). Just one way of periodicalising history (like the concept of the Anthropocene does) is not sufficient, because of many overlapping changes at different levels of reality. Kari Väyrynen 212 present-day lives can only be effectively criticised after having gained an extensive understanding of human history and its interaction with the natural environment. Leaning on this ontological fundament, we should re-evaluate the traditional idea of slow and many-sided human development (as Rousseau stressed) through the current perspective of co-evolution and formulate pedagogical practices which can, in this respect, produce sustainable results. Humans who take better care of their bio-psychological wealth tend to have sympathy for the wellbeing of other people and responsibility for the slow processes of nature. We must learn to listen to our bodily interaction with the environment, our emotions – especially moral ones, such as sympathy for other species (not only animals but also plants), and our aesthetical admiration of beautiful and sublime nature. Through historical consciousness, we can deepen these ontological fundaments to a concrete critique of our present-day limitations to realise these potentialities. Ecological wisdom as a challenge for the philosophy of education 213 References Habermas, J. 1968. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hegel, G.W. F. 1974. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion I. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jonas, H. 1984. Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Kant, I. 1966. Kritik der Urteiskraft. Stuttgart: Reclam. Korteniemi, K. 2009. 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