Between ecologising education and aesthetic knowing

Ecologising Education
We are well beyond the idea that there is a simple relationship between knowledge and action, and that environmental education involves something straightforward like disseminating the ‘right’ information to bring about a more sustainable world. There are too many cases where knowledge simply doesn’t lead to action for faith continued faith in that relationship. And so, in recognition of the partiality and contingency of knowledge, a range of other aspects of the human experience, including thoughts, beliefs, feelings, worldviews, attitudes, and social relations, have been targeted instead, alone or in some combination. However, is it any more the case that the ‘right’ attitude or belief (and so on) might fare any better?

One premise of the ‘ecologising education’ perspective I have been developing is that any and all such aspects are as context dependent and partial as knowledge is, and that practitioners and theorists alike fall into the trap of assume they have found the eco-silver bullet needed to approach the ecological crisis. There are a web of reasons why this might be the case, including the psychological need for simple stories amidst scary confusions, the egoistic need to feel one knows what one is doing or is contributing something unambiguously meaningful, not to mention the fact that the current socioeconomic structure encourages the promotion of confident solutions (like how academics need their ‘take’), and so on.

But the silver-bullet approach is problematic because linear causal relationships between things is highly unlikely in phenomena and is highly likely to be an epistemological simplification that distorts our perception of what is happening. Of course, in a sense the shift to how all these aspects (worldviews, attitudes, knowledge, feelings, etc) are themselves elements of a mental ecology, where what they do (in part or completely) depends on what they interact with, is my own silver bullet. However, where I differ is that I am agnostic about how much even this ‘overall view’ should itself be entertained. It might be ‘true’ as an overall view, but important (or essential) to consider only sometimes to reorient our attention or action in some way. It might be highly destructive if attempted as a continuous perspective. In other words, the ‘ecologising’ perspective applies to itself by considering the ecologising view as itself an aspect interacting within mental ecology.

Aesthetic knowing
What I want to develop here are some connections between this overall view and ‘what’s next’. Although I have written about ways forward (e.g. Affifi 2022, 2024), it is also true that I sometimes leave the reader with ‘it depends’ that might seem to scatter everything into indecisive relativism. I will be clear about some ways forward in what follows, but only after more precisely articulating the ecologising perspective through a concrete example.

If the question is ‘what does this thought or belief or feeling actually do?’, then what is needed is a greater capacity to pay attention to the ecology that it influences and is influenced by. For example, the belief that ‘we should protect nature because of the services it provides’ might do something very different in a room filled mining investors compared to being stated in a ‘deep ecology’ forum. In one case, it might serve to pull people towards more responsible choices for resource extraction, in the other in might ignite judgement and ire at the apparent superficiality and selfishness of the position (though see Contradictions). Of course, these two scenarios are quite contrived, but they are outlined to illustrate the point that in some degree, whatever aspect we choose to work on (beliefs, thoughts, attitudes etc), but also what ever particular kind of that aspect we might cherish (this or that belief or thought or attitude as a favoured way), have qualities and effects co-constituted with the field of interactions within which they occur. And of course, what effect a given element has also depends on the scale we are looking at. For instance, as time passes, the deep ecologist’s judgement may soften into something else, the investor may forget about ecological services and go on to seek some dilution of previously agreed standards.

This outline suggests several things. The first is that effects are ecological and therefore relational, and that how we observe, understand and interact with those effects must be of a kind suited to perceiving and participating in relationship. The second is that despite our best efforts to choose a tool up to that task, the actual relations are vastly complicated and spread across different space and time scales. The third is that as we scale in and out, expanding or framing our perception, we are at risk of introducing quite a lot of fiction into our perception. A frame may cut out a vital effect, whereas stretching out may produce a magnified story that exaggerates a causal effect just because the string of relations might seem feasible.

In the face of these considerations, one key strategy of ‘ecologising education’ is to work on aesthetic knowing (Affifi 2019; 2024). Aesthetic knowing is a word I use to describe the perception and participation in relationship, whether that be the perceived coherence, discoherence (or relationship between coherence and discoherence) between things. This can include anything from the relations between parts of a painting or piece of music, to the perceived quality of relations between myself and others, and the very relations between various mental aspects reciprocally influencing one another in my mental ecology. Aesthetic knowing catches ‘forms’, which means the way things connect together across space and time. But it is also evaluative. Certain gestalts feel beautiful or ugly, and so on, and these felt responses tell us something about the quality of the relations we perceive.

However, because the relationships themselves are more complicated than we can actually perceive, and also because they may themselves be changing in important ways (of their own accord perhaps, or maybe through our interacting with them) whether or not we have homed in on important relations is fallible and itself an ongoing question. Aesthetic knowing does not involve a continuously skeptical attitude towards any perceived pattern, as this would itself permanently disorient the person from their ability to participate in co-constituting healthful relations. Rather, it means that the quality of relations between when we do or do not put our prior perceptions into question is itself part of the process of doing aesthetic knowing. In practice, this also ushers in interplays between confidence and humility, action and reception, repetition and novelty, courage and cowardice, and many others. The ecologising principle of ‘it depends’ also applies to the means by which we evaluate whether ecologising is occurring towards healthy and healing ecologies, or towards some kind of dysecology.

The ecologising perspective can only do certain things as a perspective. As a way of understanding, it is primarily in what we might call the ‘cognitive’ register of thoughts and understanding. This is partly why the question of how much it should be used is a question, because such cognitions have a tendency to get generalised across contexts. And so, while ecologising’s concerns about ratios and relationships are intrinsic to aesthetic knowing, aesthetic knowing can do things that cognition itself cannot. Aesthetic knowing feels quality of relationship whereas conceptual relationships stand outside of the relationship to posit it, consider it, counterfactually engage with it, and so on.

The interplay between the cognitive and the aesthetic has itself an aesthetic aspect and can also be considered cognitively. For example, while aesthetic knowing evaluates the quality of relationships, the cognitive can pull away from immersion in them and ask whether those are the relationships we should be focusing on. Have we scaled too far in or out? Have we considered all who are relevant? This act of separation now introduces new relationships with their own qualities as the tensions, possibilities, connections and questions that can now be felt by virute of the very distance opened up. And so on.

It is also the case that other registers are at stake, which are not at base aesthetic or cognitive, but that interact necessarily with aesthetic and cognitive dimensions as well. For example, with ethical engagement, there might be an ongoing tension between whether I should care for some specific being or whether I should abide by what I think is a universal good. The relationship between my focus on the particular and the universal can be felt aesthetically, and understanding what is at stake when leaning into one or the other or some combination of both is itself cognitive. However, the aesthetic and cognitive registers feed back, affecting one another as well as the ethical aspects of the experience.

Aesthetic knowing and flexibility
Rather than presuming that we should teach aesthetic knowing with the aim of having people be able to effectively ‘home in’ on gestalts and act accordingly, a more flexible attitude is truer to the situation. Being ‘good’ at aesthetic knowing is half about perceiving relations and half about abandoning them. It is about the capacity to hold onto a frame for as long as is needed, but no longer. It is also about sustaining framelessness when the frames available seem misleading or superficial. Moreover, it is about sustaining the flexibility not only with what one is holding and backgrounding as ‘relationship’ in the world, but also towards one’s relationship with aspects of mental ecology. Does our flexibility allow us to sustain the aesthetics of a cognition when appropriate, but to flip to the aesthetics of the relationship between a cognition and its ethical dimension in another? Whenever the perception of relationship is at stake, whether this is within something one is engaging, or between things one is considering, or something else altogether, aesthetic knowing is at stake. And of course, as is always the case in mental ecology, where metalevels instantly arise our of streams of thought, there is also aesthetic knowing about aesthetic knowing: what is happening to the quality of relationships I am actually participating in when I pay attention to the quality of relations in X?

And in this way, whereas the ecologising perspective is the ‘what’, aesthetic knowing is the ‘how’. Both engage, like content and form or theory and practice, in ecological process, and they co-occur and affect one another.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Beauty in the darkness: Aesthetic education during the ecological crisis. Journal of Philosophy and Education.

Affifi, R. (2022). Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research

Affifi, R. (2024). Aesthetic knowing and ecology: Cultivating perception and participation in the ecological crisis. Environmental Education Research

Affifi, R. (2025). Contradictions from within: Beyond angels and villains in environmental education, Ecologising Education blogpost.