Empathetic epistemology: challenging the contemporary paradigm of educational knowledge

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The preliminary concern of this thesis is to show that the world of nature, upon which we as a species rely for our continuing survival, is being rapidly diminished. Given the incontestability of this deplorable state of current environmental degradation, the central objective of this thesis is to tease out the aetiology of the present environmental crisis by articulating the philosophical foundations upon which the purpose and pattern of our technological interactions with nature have been built. One of the fundamental causes of environmental destruction, I contend, is due to a philosophy of nature based upon our insatiable drive for power over nature. One facet of this drive for power is seen to emerge from both a contemporary western epistemology which sees knowledge as a form of power over nature, and a scientific methodology of reductio-mechanism which operates on the assumption that nature is a machine that can be pulled apart and then reassembled to suit human needs. Moreover, because the methodology of reductio-mechanistic science is one which has presupposed the separation of the ‘observer’ from the ‘observed’ (i.e. man from nature), we have further promulgated a sense of value neutrality in our technological interaction with the environment by affirming detachment, as opposed to participation, as the measure of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’. In contrast to this conventional position I submit that knowledge and its application is a value-laden process. The technologies of power which arise from the epistemology and methodology of power, have reconstructed and fabricated the world of nature in ways which make it more amenable to predictability. Laura has called this process ‘transformative subjugation’, and I shall argue that its implications for environmental education are momentous. One problem to be elaborated is that by virtue of reducing nature’s wholes into parts and then transforming or reconstituting those parts into inert, chemicalized, and even deadened things, we undermine the sense of conscience which attributes value to the integrity of functional wholes within nature and indeed to the whole of nature. We gain enormous control over the world by technologizing it. The problem is, however, that the control which we gain over nature comes at too high an ecological price. I shall argue in this thesis that the ostensible goal for environmental education is to serve the interests of ecological interconnectivity rather than the economic way of life dependent on the continual technologization of nature. It shall be made explicit that unless the form of educational knowledge we select is motivated by empathetic connectivity with nature rather than by a lust for power over nature, there is no place to go. Environmental education will simply reproduce, albeit in alluringly cosmetic ways, the same contexts of technological invasiveness and intrusion that have in the first place led to the desacrilization of nature