Rethinking the Social Through Eco-Social Philosophy: Education in the Midst of Wicked Problems

• In Event: New Events and Their Implications for Analyzing Social Contexts of Education: Facing Crises, Technology, and Difference

Abstract

Education has long offered a place to examine the politics of environment – cultural and natural – as effects upon being. In the spirit of the ecologically-minded work of Bill Ayers and Noel Gough, the aim of this presentation is the analysis and redefinition of the conditions for cultivating our relation to the environment in an age characterized by global ecological threats.

The basic assertion in this paper is that currently we have enough evidence (knowledges) about our destructive relation to Nature, but we seem unable to collectively translate that knowledge into permanent changes in our behaviour. Because education and curricular thinking concern the socialization process, they are engaged with basic ontological beliefs and commitments concerning human beings in the world. In our everyday lives, these basic beliefs are mostly hidden and unconscious for us. When knowledges are not enough to translate into change, we must go to the level of ontology for reconceptualizing the ecological and more-than-human basis of communities and consider the implications for education. This paper draws mainly upon Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) late ontology of ‘flesh’ and Timothy Morton’s (2013, 2011a, 2011b) ‘hyperobject’ to rethink what eco-crisis portends for teaching today’s youth.

This is particularly salient as we are living in an age of global wicked problems (e.g. climate change, over-population, waste) that determine our being in the world. These problems are not governed or controlled purely by human beings or by individualistic responses. Bruno Latour’s concept “hybrid object” and Timothy Morton’s ‘hyperobject’ both refer adequately to such uncontrolled being. In an age of global threats, education cannot ignore these hybrid objects as constituting “elements” of human life of Self. They are crucially intertwined with our contemporary conceptions of temporality and Being.

Morton posits that ‘hyperobjects’ were created as an unintended consequence of our technological culture. The border between human creatures, human culture, and nature are mixed in them, complicating claims to selfhood. Thus they are a kind of a combination of nature and culture. According to Morton’s definition they are ‘viscous’ objects. This means that we are not able to isolate them or abjure their existence. The more we try to abjure them the more they will be engaged in our ways of living. Pollution, such as nuclear waste, or floating plastic rafts in the Pacific Ocean typically cause a reaction of repression, rejection from consciousness in us. This collective refusal and reluctance from considering those phenomena as real, is very ambivalent in our technological civilization, a situation Merleau-Ponty’s approach to “flesh” helps to draw out.

Clearly, we need new ways of thinking. Our traditional anthropocentric concepts do not reach the ‘reality’ of ‘hyperobjects.’ Consequently, the idea of Morton’s hyperobject and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh open novel visions for theorizing in the ‘metaphysical’ sense our being in the world. Together, they open possibilities for reconceptualizing basic beliefs in educational thinking as beyond an individualistic Self. The paper takes up this theme in conclusion, challenging beliefs concerning our spatial-temporal commitments especially in the act of setting educational aims.

Author

• Veli-Matti Varri, University of Tampere