This paper argues that education itself, properly understood, is intimately concerned with an individual’s being in the world, and therefore is ineluctably environmental. This is guaranteed by the ecstatic nature of consciousness. Furthermore, it is argued that a central dimension of this environment with which ecstatic human consciousness is engaged, is that of nature understood as the ‘self-arising’. Nature, so conceived, is essentially other and is epistemologically mysterious, possessing its own normativity, agency, and intrinsic value. As such, engagement with nature (...) presents opportunities for consciousness quintessentially to go beyond itself, to be inspired and refreshed, and to receive non-anthropogenic standards in the form of intimations of what is fitting and what is not. It will be argued that these are fundamental to the orientation of human being, providing primordial intimations of the nature of reality and truth. Given their centrality to the idea of a person’s becoming educated, the elucidation of these and the issues to which they give rise must be central to the philosophy of education and in this sense it becomes deeply ecological. (shrink)

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

What are the parameters that define a posthuman knowing subject, her scientific credibility and ethical accountability? Taking the posthumanities as an emergent field of enquiry based on the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, I argue that posthuman knowledge claims go beyond the critiques of the universalist image of ‘Man’ and of human exceptionalism. The conceptual foundation I envisage for the critical posthumanities is a neo-Spinozist monistic ontology that assumes radical immanence, i.e. the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter. This implies (...) that the posthuman knowing subject has to be understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness. Two related notions emerge from this claim: firstly, the mind-body continuum – i.e. the embrainment of the body and embodiment of the mind – and secondly, the nature-culture continuum – i.e. ‘naturecultural’ and ‘humanimal’ transversal bonding. The article explores these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and discusses the implications of the critical posthumanities for practices in the contemporary ‘research’ university. (shrink)

To facilitate engagement across diverse philosophical cultures, this paper expands points of alliance between the ‘ecosophical’ perspectives shared by Deleuzo-Guattarian posthumanism and by Indigenous thought, here exemplified by the expressivist philosophy of Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi or ‘Speaking as Country’. Indigenous philosophies of existential interconnectivity resist simple incorporation into the Western ‘post’-humanism that they in fact precede by millennia; instead they contribute fresh material for a more cosmopolitan or globally ecosophical, nonhumanist conceptualisation of humanity. We begin by discussing the humanist political ontology (...) subtending the neoliberal-capitalist notion of ‘service benefit’, which informs much contemporary policy for environmental governance. We then consider how the ‘three ecologies’ described by Félix Guattari define a relational ontology of complex co-implication that is Spinozist in its inspiration and is characteristic of contemporary Continental posthumanism. Finally, we explain how the Indigenous Ngarrindjeri Nation in Southern Australia have begun a process of environmental policy reform by communicating a traditional philosophy of ecological well-being and prioritising this in contemporary political negotiations concerning the responsible management of their Country. An understanding of human responsibility for action realising interconnected benefit is manifest in the Ngarrindjeri Nation's striving for self-governance of their social, economic and environmental affairs, and is exercised transversally in the three interactive ecologies of self, society and nature. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Spinozism on the deep ecology movement and on new materialism. It questions the stance of supporters of the DEM because their ecosophies unwittingly anthropomorphise the more-than-human-world. It suggests that instead of humanising the ‘natural’ world, morality should be naturalised, that is, that the object of human expression of ethics should be the more-than-human world. Moreover, the article discusses Deleuze’s Spinozism that informs new materialism and argues that stripping the human of its ontological privilege does (...) not deprive the human animal from its ethico-normative distinctiveness. Implications of the discussion for an education aimed at cultivating human sensibilities are explored. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action. Yet the validation process for this term appears to be extremely conservative. According to geologists’ leading efforts to formalize the term, signals need to petrify in stratigraphic sequences in order to become candidates to mark the start of the Anthropocene. I argue that this emphasis results from a fossilized view of becoming, where time is seen as a punctuated accumulation of solid (...) surfaces that are accessible only in retrospect. I show that this petrified view of change relates to a tendency to divorce earth and sky, which currently divides the practices of humanities scholars and geologists, as well as those of earth system scientists and stratigraphers collaborating on the formalization of the Anthropocene. Challenging this tendency, I conclude, requires opening up earth’s history to the more-than-solid flows of environmental change. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, as theorized by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, attempts to name the fact that the human has become a geological actor. Much of the contemporary discourse around environmentalism and climate change calls for humans to act in particular ways to avoid a catastrophe in an imagined future. Even as a case can be made that the catastrophe has already happened, my point of departure in this chapter will be this simple claim: that thinking human action can avert climate-related (...) catastrophe is, in the most obvious way, a re-assertion of the human’s status as geological actant. The earth is not “ours,” even to save. (shrink)