Challenges of environmental problems to the philosophy of education

The environmental problem as a lifestyle-related disease

We live in an age in which the pollution and destruction of the environment have become a major concern. ¹ Without exaggeration, we may call the 21st century the century of the environment.

What makes the environmental problem so difficult to manage is that there is no quick fix or magical remedy. As Hans Jonas has shown, this issue extends over a very long period of time, going beyond a single generation. It is trans-generational (Jonas, 1984). At the same time, it also extends beyond political territories. It is transnational and global.

One of the major difficulties related to the environmental problem is that its solution requires a change in lifestyle for us all (McKibben, 2011). We cannot delegate this solution to certain specialists such as politicians or scientists, even though they may play an important role. There may still be some optimistic believers in science who would contend that scientific progress might one day solve the environmental issues confronting us. However, we should refrain from relegating the solution and responsibility to scientists alone. There are three reasons for this cautious approach.

First, as history shows, progress in science has not kept pace with the destruction of the environment. Much of the remedy it offers often comes too late.

Second, we should also take into consideration that scientists require enormous amount of money for research, and money comes mostly from the government and industries. The nuclear power plant catastrophe in Fukushima has brought to light that the fields of government, industry, journalism, and science in the past joined hands to promote nuclear power plants under the name of “clean energy”. Some scientists who warned against the danger of these plants were pushed to the side. It is therefore necessary to create a public sphere, in which the issue of the environment can be discussed openly and the citizens’ voice can be heard.

Third, an exaggerated worship of science can fix and harden our relationship with nature in such a way that our peaceful coexistence with it becomes difficult to achieve. This is the problem often discussed by environmental philosophers under “anthropocentrism” (Fox, 1995), an attitude and way of thinking that places man at the center of the universe and makes other beings (animate and non-animate) into man’s subjects. Criticism of anthropocentrism is often linked with criticism of Western thought, as in the case of the celebrated paper by Lynn White Jr. published in 1967 (White, 1967). Sometimes, it is also linked with criticism of male centeredness as in the case of the provocative article, “Death of Nature” by Catherine Merchant (Merchant, 1998). In this paper, we will propose a more balanced picture of the modern age, in which anthropocentrism is another aspect of human isolation.

It is therefore prudent to regard the environmental problem as a kind of lifestyle-related disease that cannot be cured by a single operation or a powerful medicine. Here the metaphor of a lifestyle-related disease seems to be quite adequate. For just as a lifestyle-related disease is caused by a certain way of life, such as a bad diet, an environmental problem is also caused by a certain way of life that is disastrous to nature. As a patient with a lifestyle-related disease is expected to change their lifestyle to a healthier one, so must humankind be willing to change its ways of life to address the environmental problem. This change concerns not only the present but also future generations. As parents and teachers, we must be able to model for future generations a way of life that is not anti-environmental. Philosophy of education must play an important role in this.

The impact of the environmental problem upon philosophy of education

Until recently, the environmental problem has not been a major concern for philosophy of education.

Fifty years ago, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, the environmental problem became a major public issue. A Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, introduced the notion of deep ecology in 1973. This concept was well received by George Sessions and Michael Devall in America in the late 1970s. As a consequence, the 1980s saw the emergence of a variety of deep ecologists (Fox, 1995). Despite the somewhat self-congratulatory use of the adjective “deep” (Fox, 1995), and despite the one-sidedness that sometimes adheres to their interpretation, deep ecologists have contributed greatly to making ecology a philosophical issue.

Also, in educational studies and educational sciences in general, there have been numerous studies concerning environmental education, especially since the United Nations General Assembly in 2002 (20 December) declared 2005–2014 the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

However, when we limit our view to philosophy of education, the landscape changes. It was only in the 21st century that ecological issues became a focus of philosophy of education. In 2003, the Journal of Philosophy of Education published Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist Age by Michael Bonnett as a special edition (Bonnett, 2003), which was subsequently published in the following year by Wiley-Blackwell. In 2010, a Taiwanese philosopher of education, Ruyu Hung, published a comprehensive book titled Learning Nature: How the Understanding of Nature Enriches Education and Life (Hung, 2010). In Japan, Mitsuaki Imamura had long been a lone fighter in this field (Imamura, 2009), but recently some younger philosophers of education have begun to follow his path (Inoue and Imamura, 2012). Yet despite such pioneers, the number of articles written on this subject is surprisingly few compared with the number of articles dedicated to other themes.

The reason for this neglect is that for a long time philosophy of education was intimately related to the concept of nature, which had its origin in Greek philosophy and which remained influential until recently. According to this concept, nature was considered to be a firm foundation upon which human activities are based. As such, it presented itself as an exemplary model that should be imitated by man. This thought was expressed aptly by a famous medieval saying, “ars imitatur naturam”, or “art (which includes a variety of activities) imitates nature” (Moritz, 2009). Of course, human activities often deviate from nature. But this deviation was considered to be a crisis of man, not of nature.

This concept of nature remained influential deep into the modern age. Comenius’ pedagogy was built upon it. Its influence is easily retraceable in thinkers such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Froebel. We might even say that the theory of evolution is an offspring of this concept.

If we consider this background, then we may understand the special challenge that the environmental problem poses to the philosophy of education. Nature in the age of the environmental crisis cannot function as a foundation, as a kind of firm rock upon which an edifice of education can be built. Instead, nature has exposed itself as vulnerable to human intervention. It has become manageable by sciences such as gene technology. At one time, nature was a divine being, seen as having been created by God as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or it was itself a kind of God, as in the cases of Greek physis or Chinese Heaven (tien). Human activities were then subject to nature. But now the main trend seems to run in the opposite direction. It is nature that is subject to human activities. Humankind’s dominion over nature can take many subtle forms. Nature can be used not only as a resource for industry but also for tourism. Nature can be incorporated into teaching materials through “the experience of nature”.

This dethronement of nature was not caused by the environmental problem. Rather, this problem is the latest phenomenon that is a result of this dethronement. The actual dethronement itself has a much older ancestry. It began earlier than Froebel, earlier than Rousseau, and even earlier than Comenius. But philosophy of education has not taken this problem seriously until recently.

The environmental problem is certainly a challenge, but it is also a chance for the philosophy of education, in so far as it compels us to see the fragility of nature and it invalidates the idea of nature as a model and a norm. Has the philosophy of education responded to this challenge sincerely? The answer is no. Rather, it has responded by silently taking the concept of nature off the table. This may take the postmodernist form that is anti-foundational and anti-traditional, such as we see in Richard Rorty (Rorty, 1980). ² This would imply “the death of nature”. ³ Or, more often, this omission occurs by way of shifting the discussion on education exclusively to social and political issues.

My intention here is not to propose a return to the past. Today, it would indeed be ridiculous to begin a discussion on pedagogy by observing the various activities of a bird, as Comenius did in his Didactica Magna, originally published in 1657 (Comenius, 2012). Even the appeal to nature in the writings of Rousseau may seem absurd and repulsive to some of us. Foucault was right to show the negative side of the concept of nature as a norm: the exclusion and condemnation of all that is considered to be “against nature” or abnormal (Foucault, 1999). In every attempt to see nature as the foundation, there lies the danger of exclusiveness and intolerance. Foundationalism can easily become fundamentalism.

However, I find the contemporary trends toward excluding or ignoring the metaphysical or the ontological considerations of nature too narrow. This narrowness has two aspects. On one hand, it separates us from tradition, in which a consideration of nature played an important role. On the other hand, it separates us from experience of the whole, which the Greeks called the cosmos and the Chinese the Heaven (tien).

It is therefore advisable to look for a third way, which shows due respect to tradition without falling into the fundamentalism of nature. For this third approach, it is helpful to consider the historical origins of the environmental problem.

Two origins of the environmental problem

The environmental problem has two stages, which correspond to two origins. The stage that is familiar to us is the stage of environmental destruction and pollution, which followed the Industrial Revolution. It has its origin in the advancement of technology and the spread of industry. This is the stage that is usually meant when we talk about the environmental problem. But before this stage there was yet another stage that played a decisive role in the formation of modern technology, a stage in which nature lost its ontological priority and its status as a model. By “ontological priority” I mean that nature was considered to be prior to human activities and artifacts not only in time but also in worth and dignity. This is the reason why nature was considered to be a model and a teacher for humankind. As long as nature retained this ontological priority, it was difficult to consider it as a simple means to an end, as an object of exploitation. But when nature lost the ontological priority, the gate opened for the subjugation and exploitation of nature, which in its final phase has brought about the environmental problem.

The rise of modern epistemology and the dethronement of nature

The question that arises here is: “how did nature lose its ontological priority?”

First, to avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to mention that the ontological priority of nature has been an object of dispute since antiquity. On one side stood the Greek tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism that bestowed priority to nature. Conversely, there was the Judeo-Christian tradition that seems to have emphasized the priority of man over nature, as the creation story of the Genesis seems to suggest. However, we should not forget that even here nature was created by God and was never supposed to be a mere object of human exploitation. With the introduction of Greek philosophy into Christianity in the first few centuries after Christ, the matter became more complex. However, we would not be off the mark if we said that nature as a divine creation retained its own dignity. Nature functioned as a model for artisans and artists. For a theologian like Bonaventure, the contemplation of nature was considered to be the first stage of the soul’s journey toward God (Bonaventura, 1953). Sometimes, nature was understood as a book written by the hand of God, a kind of second Bible. As Pierre Hadot has shown, the study of nature in antiquity and the Middle Ages was not a science in the modern sense. It had ethical relevance, in so far as it prompted man to realize his position in the universe and live accordingly (Hadot, 1995: 97).

A completely new challenge to the ontological priority of nature came from modern epistemological thinking. Before such thought began, the ontological priority of nature was challenged only within the framework of ontology and theology, as was the case with medieval nominalism that stressed the contingent character of nature before almighty God. But with the rise of modern epistemology ontology itself became outdated and dethroned.

This shift can be seen in the change in the status that mathematics underwent in the 17th century. It is true that mathematics enjoyed a high status among the sciences from antiquity to the modern age. However, the nature of this status changed fundamentally in the 17th century. From the time of Pythagoras until the Renaissance, mathematics retained a high status from the point of view of ontology: numbers and geometrical figures were considered to be a higher kind of entity, nearer to the Platonic ideas. This was the reason why Plato in the Republic recommended the study of mathematics to the future ruler of his ideal city (Plato, 2003). Descartes, on the other hand, in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad directionem ingenii) (Descartes, 2011) published in 1628, esteemed mathematics not because it was ontologically higher but because it was epistemologically certain. Mathematics was the model par excellence for clear and distinct knowledge. It also provided Descartes with a model for his method, the epistemological procedure, which played a fundamental role in modern science and education.

Mathematics underwent this change but retained its high status nevertheless. The case was completely different with nature. Nature, which was ontologically prior, became epistemologically secondary.

Cartesian understanding of nature in the Meditations

We can observe this change in the Meditations by Descartes (Descartes, 1999). Nature, in this book, does not function as a model or a guide. On the contrary, its existence itself is at first doubted. This concerns not only external things but also our own physical body. The reason for this radical doubt is that Descartes begins with the examination of the inner ideas within the mind and constructs his philosophy out of those ideas which are clear and distinct and immune to any doubt. The first of these ideas is the idea of ego cogitans, the thinking “I”. The second is the idea of God who is infinite, almighty, and good. The things outside of us, including living things (also our body), however, become an extended thing, res extensa, devoid of life. As such they become very problematic. It is only toward the end of the book, namely in the sixth chapter, that the existence of our body and physical things is finally ascertained.

Here we can clearly see the shift in the understanding of nature that came about through the rise of epistemology. Epistemology methodically creates a wall between the mind and things outside and gives priority to the examination of inner ideas. Once, contemplation of nature had been the first step toward God, as we can see in Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God. For epistemology, nature itself became an object of proof, an object that must be constructed out of the examination of inner ideas.

Oscillation and modernity

However, to do justice to such a complex matter, we would like to also remark that in the sixth chapter of Meditations, when the existence of physical things was established, Descartes restored the role of a teacher to nature and used expressions such as “nature teaches” and so forth. Such expressions may be dismissed as simply rhetorical. ⁴ But there is probably more reason to them. Meditations as a book is a watershed. Despite its epistemological tendency it still contains much of traditional ontology. The concept of God, for example, is a revival of the Platonic idea of Good. This may be the reason why at the end of Meditations nature suddenly regains part of its traditional role as a teacher.

This oscillation concerning the status of nature offers us an important insight: even though nature lost much of its dignity through the epistemological turn, it retained some of its ontological priority. This oscillation became even greater, more complex and dynamic in the following centuries. Let us consider Kant. In his first critique, nature lost its former dignity. It became a product of human intellect, constructed according to categories. Furthermore, it also became the thing in itself (Ding an sich), which lay completely outside of our understanding. However, in the third critique, nature regained some of its former ontological status. Or let us consider German Idealism. On one hand, there was a strong epistemological tendency, notable in early Fichte, of starting from I (Ich) and deducing or constructing not-I (nicht-Ich) out of it. On the other hand, there was a strong tendency toward the ontological rehabilitation of nature, as was notable in Schelling and Romanticism.

This oscillation was also discernible in modern philosophy of education. While there was a strong appeal to method, which was grounded on epistemology, there was at the same time a passionate appeal to nature as the teacher. Interestingly, these two tendencies were often found in the same thinker, such as Comenius or Pestalozzi.

This oscillation is also dominant in our attitude toward nature and the environmental problem. On one hand, there is a cool-headed approach to dealing with nature and controlling the environmental problem technologically. This is represented by what is called by its opponents as “shallow ecology” or “anthropocentrism”. Even though this approach received harsh criticism by thinkers of deep ecology such as Naess (Naess, 1989) and transpersonal ecology such as Warwick Fox (Fox, 1995), it is still the dominant mode of thinking among politicians and business people. This has been true even since the nuclear disaster of 11 March 2012.

On the other hand, there is intense enthusiasm toward nature, which takes a variety of forms, such as some trends of deep ecology and ecocentrism. Michael Cronon showed that the concept of wilderness, which originally had a negative connotation, underwent a radical change and developed a positive connotation. This was symbolized by the famous declaration of Thoreau: “In Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Thoreau, 2011). Cronon detected behind this change the influence of Romanticism as well as of the concept of frontier. It is due to this history that wilderness became “the ultimate landscape of authenticity” (Cronon, 1995, 1996). Even though this romantic worship of wilderness helped to create national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, it hindered us to cherish the nature near and around us.

How should we understand this intriguing issue? Clearly, epistemology cannot get rid of ontology completely. In fact, epistemology itself is a kind of ontology, in so far as it interprets being as inner ideas or representation. ⁵ But this version of ontology as epistemology is too narrow to give a proper account of our experience of such things as nature or our social self. This may be a reason for the persistent revival of traditional ontology in the modern age. However, so long as epistemological and technological thinking have the upper hand in our society, the ontological remnant remains secondary or reactionary.

This oscillation is not the worst option. It is better than a narrow-minded epistemology or a blind worship of nature. However, the deep gap that separates the two extreme poles must be mitigated. Otherwise, not only society but also our own self may be split into two conflicting elements. We might end up living the life of a technocrat during weekdays and a nature lover over the weekend.

To avoid this, epistemology must acknowledge the relevance of ontology. Ontology must also learn to be humble and stop dictating. Instead of being a “strong thought”, both must learn to be a “weak thought”, to use an expression of Gianni Vattimo. ⁶

Features of an alternative ontology

What kind of features should this ontology take? There are four features I would like to emphasize.

First, an alternative ontology must break down, or at least weaken, what Hannah Arendt once called the “prison of mind” (Arendt, 1989: 288). Epistemology, in its obsession with certainty, constructed the wall that separated the mind from things outside. As Charles Taylor has expressed in his recent book, The Secular Age, with the rise of modernity, the self, which was once “porous”, became “buffered”. This change, according to Taylor, can be observed in different spheres, such as religion, festivals, and manners (Taylor, 2007). We can learn from Taylor’s analysis that what we have shown in the history of philosophy as a shift from ontology to epistemology has its counterpart in the history of culture. The rise of a “buffered self” certainly contributed to the establishment of an autonomous self, which is relatively well guarded against the fear of the demons threatening us from outside. However, as the wall that separates the mind from the outside becomes thicker, the world loses its meaning and man begins to suffer in isolation. It is therefore advisable to try to think of an ontology that moderates the separation between the self and the other. This would lead us to the rehabilitation of the cosmos and nature.

Gregory Bateson’s criticism of the Western understanding of the self as an autonomous “I” can also be understood in this context (Bateson, 2000). This concept of the self establishes the self as an observer of an external world. And this way of thinking is still very common. According to C.A. Bowers, expressions that take the autonomous subject for granted can be found not only in the academic world, but also in public schools and university classrooms (Bowers, 1993: 159).

The breaking down of the wall of the narrow self places the self in a web of relationships with other beings, both human and non-human. This relationship is not an accidental property that adheres to an autonomous subject but rather the essence of the subject. In this respect, our position is in harmony with the deep ecology of Naess, who rejects “the man-in-environment image” and favors “the relational, total-field image” (Naess, 1989: 28).

Second, an alternative ontology should resist foundationalism, not to mention fundamentalism. In other words, it should be critically aware of its own limitations, which correspond to human finitude. Whereas traditional ontology, which Vattimo calls a “strong thought” (Vattimo, 1999), could not free itself from the Platonic dream of a philosopher king and used concepts, such as God or Nature, as an authority or a teacher, an alternative ontology as a “weak thought” should resist such temptation. This ontology would listen carefully to the voice of nature, but would neither obey it blindly nor exploit it without scruple. This criticism of foundationalism is to a certain degree a legacy of postmodernism, even though history provides examples of people who resisted the temptation of foundationalism. Without this caution, our relationship with nature would be left with a sterile alternative of “anthropocentrism” and “ecocentrism”.

Nature and culture

Third, the proposed ontology should also be aware of the cultural aspect of nature. Nature is no abstract Ding an sich, nor mere material for use, as modern epistemology has thought. Nor is it a romantic wilderness, a virgin land without any trace of human life. Rather, nature is inseparable from what we call culture and history. Our experience of nature has been formed by songs, paintings, buildings and so on, which we have inherited from tradition. We can name many examples of harmony between nature and culture in the East Asian tradition, ranging from poetry, painting, and architecture to the tea ceremony and culinary art. Matsuo Basho’s journey to northern Japan is one example (Basho, 1967). In 1789, Basho, a famous haiku poet of Japan, undertook a long journey to northern Japan, in which he visited many places and left many haiku poems about nature. However, he had hardly any interest in mere nature or the wilderness. Rather, he was motivated to visit famous places that had already been sung about by Saigyo, a waka poet of the 12th century. For Basho the experience of nature was predominantly a poetic experience.

Such experience is not limited to East Asia. In fact, each culture, if it is worthy of its name, ⁷ has developed its own manner of living in and with nature such that the destruction of nature is at the same time the destruction of the culture. Only by recognizing the cultural aspect of nature and the natural aspect of culture can we escape from the futile opposition between nature and culture and enter into a fruitful conversation with nature.

We should therefore be cautious of the extreme form of nature worship that appears in the writings of the nature lovers such as Rousseau and Thoreau. Also we should remind ourselves that Rousseau’s admiration of the state of nature expressed in his books such as Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (Rousseau, 1996) and Emile (Rousseau, 1999) was motivated by his criticism of his contemporary culture and was largely rhetorical. We should instead look for Rousseau’s more personal relationship with nature as a walker and a botanist, as seen in his Confessions (Rousseau, 2009) and Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau, 1978). As for Thoreau, he tried to plant a bean field, but, not wanting to defend his crop against weeds and birds, eventually abandoned it with the declaration: “if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” ⁸ Yet we should also not forget that Walden Pond was close to Concord and was by no means wilderness. Despite Thoreau’s romantic admiration of wilderness, Walden is, rather, a sober book about an experiment. He experimented with a way of life that was economically feasible and friendly toward nature. ⁹ It is this aspect and not the romantic infatuation with wilderness that gives Walden actuality today.

The range of culture is quite wide. It includes not only activities of fine arts but also a variety of forms of collaboration between nature and mankind such as farming, hunting and fishing. Farming is especially important. The word culture itself was born from the experience of cultivation (colere in Latin). Properly cared for farms (not factory farms) with little insecticide not only contribute to the preservation of nature but also of culture. This would require a kind of farming that is the opposite of the modern factory farming. Wendell Berry calls this alternative farming “farming by the measure of nature”:

Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love. (Berry, 2012)

Now, this kind of farming is not a novel idea. This is a type of farming that was widely practiced throughout the world before modern technology and capitalism (and now also globalization) made out of agriculture yet another kind of industry or business.

The narrow connection between nature and culture also warns us that the rapid disappearance of living natural languages has a serious negative effect on our relationship with nature. According to David Crystal, half of the living natural languages, which numbered between about 6000 and 7000 at the beginning of this century, will disappear by the end of this century (Crystal, 2002). There are many reasons to lament this loss. One of the reasons is that through the disappearance of a language, the knowledge and experience of nature, which the speakers of the language have acquired through a long history, will be lost forever. In this regard, the disappearance of languages (on average, a natural language disappears every two weeks) is also an ecological problem (Crystal, 2002).

Ecology and self-transformation

Finally, an alternative ontology should not be a matter of abstract philosophy. Rather, it concerns our way of life and has an educational impact. It must promote and encourage us to transform ourselves.

In this context, the concept of transpersonal ecology proposed by Warwick Fox deserves special attention. As a friend of Naess and a learned scholar of environmental philosophy himself, Fox belonged to the circle of deep ecologists. But he was not satisfied with this somewhat ambiguous and self-congratulatory label of “deep” ecology and offered the new label of transpersonal ecology (Fox, 1995). By “transpersonal” he did not mean “between persons”. Instead, the term meant transcending the individual and identifying oneself with the larger and higher entity such as nature or the universe. Fox borrowed the term “transpersonal” from transpersonal psychology of Abraham H. Maslow and Anthony J. Suich. But for the explication of transpersonal ecology, he referred to various writings of deep ecologists, as well as to a variety of thinkers such as Spinoza, Gandhi (the two favorite thinkers of Naess), Heidegger and Dogen, a Japanese Zen Buddhist.

The idea of transpersonal ecology has a strong educational dimension. This can be shown through the remarkable affinity it has with the traditional understanding of education as self-transformation. This affinity escaped the notice of Fox, whose treatment of philosophers was somewhat sporadic. We hope to fill the gap here.

Before the rise of modern education, traditional education was mainly concerned with self-transformation. This applies to both the East and the West. In the East, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism shared an understanding of education as self-transformation, in which spiritual exercises of different forms were occasionally used. In the West, there was also a strong tradition of spiritual exercise. It is the contribution of a French historian of philosophy, Hadot, that brought this clearly to light. In his book Les exercises spirituelles (which was translated into English under the title Philosophy as a Way of Life) Hadot showed that most ancient and medieval philosophy of the West aimed at self-transformation and not at objective knowledge per se. For example, the Stoics notably divided philosophy into three categories: logic, natural philosophy and ethics. But even then, logic and natural philosophy were not pursued for their own sake. They were supposed to supply knowledge conducive to ethics. Ethics, on the other hand, was not simply a system of rules of conduct, which one may or may not obey, but rather was solely concerned with an individual living a good life by becoming a good man or woman. One of the important insights of Hadot is that the contemplation of nature (which belonged to natural philosophy) played an important role in self-transformation. By contemplating nature one could free oneself from the obsessive preoccupation with the narrow self and identify oneself with the greater self such as mankind and the universe (Hadot, 1995). This is what Buddhism called the transformation of the small self into the great self, and what Confucianism called the unity of Heaven and Man.

This is an important message for us. In an artificial world of man-made things, mankind will forever be enclosed within “the prison of mind”. An alternative ontology, which is suggested here, may show us the way out of this impasse. However, without the actual effort of self-transformation supported by the wonderful presence of nature, this alternative ontology will become yet one more theory destined to be consumed by academia. ¹⁰