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Environmental educators do not merely criticise explanations, knowledge and understanding for being reductionistic and mechanistic, but also for being linear. In this third blogpost, I would like to challenge the idea that linear explanations and thinking are necessarily dangerous. I will do this not by presenting a methodological argument (for example, asserting that linear explanations are needed or important to generate stable or usable knowledge), but instead through arguing for how it appears in ecologies. This sets me up in contrast to the common trope that ecologies are circular and therefore ecological thinking is inherently circular as well. This is based on a very simplistic notion of what ecologies are.

Relative to a linear view that only sees things in terms of x -> y type interactions, circular conceptions (such as we find in feedback loops, cycles, and so on) is a dramatic improvement. The world is not a series of causal chains disconnected from one another, and treating it as such is highly destructive. But the opposite conclusion, that circularity is what ‘actually’ exists and linearity is an abstract illusion, is itself still an abstraction. Ecological processes involve both circular and linear processes, and the distinction between them is as important as their interplay.

Let’s address ‘cyclical’ processes first. A cycle is a kind of circularity that tends to repeat the same pattern again and again. It is important to consider how pervasive feedback loops actually are. Some might conceive that feedback loops only occur in the relationship between living things, while they are absent in processes like ‘gravity’ and therefore irrelevant when considering the constitution of (say) the cycle of the moon. (Of course, for those holding this view, the cycle of the moon may in turn participate in many other feedback loops generating cycles, so long as living organisms are part of the processes – e.g. menstruation?). However, holding this view is part of the long shadow of the Newtonian picture, which essentially saw gravity as an instantaneous (action-at-a-distance) tug of war between two objects. From the Einsteinian perspective, the gravitational field interacts with itself, and the energy lost to gravity changes the orbit, which in turn changes the gravitational attraction. In relativity theory, gravitational attraction between objects occurs as a feedback loop in time.

Cycles can be considered as feedback loops that generate recurring temporal patterns. When we stop and ask why there aren’t ‘just’ recurring patterns, we take the first step to understanding the importance of linear interactions in ecologies. But before getting there, we need to first address what might seem like two possible answers: 1) change is possible because positive feedback loops destabilise negative feedback loops, and 2) change is possible because different feedback loops (even different negative ones) at different space and time scales disrupt each other. I suggest that while obviously both these cases are true, neither is necessary, and moreover, even if they were necessary, they still do not discount the presence of linearity.

First, let’s consider positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops exacerbate certain relationships, driving things exponentially towards infinity or zero. They are intrinsically unstable and crash. While it is clear that positive feedback loops generate change and disrupt the balancing processes of negative feedback, if they crash, we are forced to ask why positive feedback loops don’t themselves go extinct? After they all crash, why do they keep coming back?

The reason is because positive feedback loops alone do not explain what gives rise to their possibility from out of a balanced relationship. What is needed is an account of contingency: events that disrupt order and are the conditions for both new patterns of order and of disorder. Such events are widespread, both because systems are never sealed from what is outside of them, and because randomness also occurs from within.

Second, let’s consider circularities interacting between space and/or time scales. Circular conceptions perceive connections missed out when parsing the world into linear interactions. Some might argue that the problem is that a circular interaction is itself an abstraction, insofar as the world is more interconnected, and therefore involved in more kinds of recursive networking than any possible model can capture. From this point of view, what I view as the linear rupture of a given circular process should itself be attributed to how different circularities (in different space and time scales) interact. Surely such interactions happen. However, this does not cast doubt on the existence of linearity in the world. In response to the claim that ‘everything is interconnected’, one reply is ‘well, yes, but not everything is equally interconnected’. Another way of putting this, is that there are different ways in which things are interconnected, depending on the state of the system at a time. For example, some connections reinforce stability, others produce change.

Let’s consider how the integrity of a cell requires it maintains a series of internal and external relations. As it does this, there are events that arise that are not necessary or normal, and possibly deleterious for the cell, such as a temperature shift, a new chemical in the environment, etc. In many cases, these events are utterly new, arising from geological or exoplanetary factors for example. But for the sake of the its-all-cycles argument, let’s assume this shift or chemical has occurred before, say in some long ‘season’ in which they return every several million years. In this case, either the cell type existed back then or its ancestor did. If the latter, it is obvious that however the cell responds will itself be ‘new’ and therefore a real case of linear causality. However, what if the cell type did exist back then? We can imagine that the temperature or chemical cycle might be something it would ‘expect’, and have a repertoire to respond as certain gene regulation patterns kick in that are normally dormant. However, even here, unless every condition remained the same, it is difficult to imagine the cell would behave exactly as it did previously. For starters, other organisms in its environment will likely have evolved, to some extent are approaching this change as ‘new’ by doing new things in response, and altering the cell’s environment. But even if (miraculously) they were not, it is a fact that cells do new things spontaneously even in highly controlled environments. Of course, all of this grants too much: the cell would have changed in many ways in between each cycle.

The case for linearity is clearer when we consider how dramatic contingent events such as Theia smashing into the earth, the development of photosynthesising bacteria, or the evolution of human consciousness, have upheaved the existing order. In these instances, many things go extinct and previously well-operating negative feedback loops either fail to persist or reorganise into less functional relations. But what is also unleashed is the possibility for new relations, and so negative feedback loops between aerobic organisms and photosynthetic ones eventually evolved, while Theia stabilised the Earth’s axial tilt, giving way to more consistent seasons and climate, essential for further life. What will happen in the aftermath of human destruction, and how we are part of the subsequent flourishing is an open question. Single events rupture the order of circularity with opportunities but also many dangers, and nothing is assured.

Single contingent events are linear (they follow a very obvious x -> y causality) and not circular or cyclical. For that reason, it is perhaps wise that environmental educators are suspicious of linearity. Such events are dangerous and full of risk. One of the might wipe us out entirely. But they are also essential and not necessarily dramatic as the examples above suggest. Every gene mutation is a case in point. And it is important to acknowledge that circularity without linearity is just a well functioning machine – which is another concept that environmental educators resist. In fact, what we usually refer to as a ‘machine’ is precisely that which is unable to exapt or adapt to contingent events. Linear events deteriorate or destroy machines. So linearity is the true enemy of mechanism (and mechanism is an attempt at closed loop circularity). By contrast, linearity is intrinsically connected to creativity when it interacts with circular systems.

Part of the confusion, I think, is that there are two common opposites to linearity. It is sometimes contrasted with circularity, but other times with nonlinearity. The meaning of nonlinear is itself vague. In some cases, it means that the maths required to model the systems are not linear equations (in other words, the function has some exponential making it curved, and so on). In other cases, it means something like being intrinsically unpredictable (like the equations from chaos theory). think it is clear from the discussion above circular systems can be nonlinear in the first sense but not necessarily in the second. It is, however, the second sense that is the interesting one: those cases where one event causes another one, and history changes as a result.

Linear and circular concepts of time

There is a common trope that Western time is ‘linear’ while some Indigenous cultures see time as ‘circular’. I think this probably both bad philosophy and bad anthropology. While I admit to ignorance here, I do not see how an Indigenous culture, steeped in close attention to the land and inherited knowledge, would not clearly see how new events come into the scene, even if they emphasise the return of cycles such as seasons and the like. Conversley, ‘the west’, however allegedly linear, has identified thousands of cycles through scientific investigation, circularities within circularities all the way up and down. It is hard to imagine a culture that does not conceive of some interplay between linear and circular time, between what is new and what returns, though they may emphasise these differently in important ways.

Finally, radically ‘circular’ conceptions of time, such as Nietzsche’s (western) eternal return (1882), don’t seem to really help out in ecologising thinking – precisely because linearity is gone. After all, it is because linearity exists that humans can mess up ecological circularity, and it is also because linearity exists that we might turn things around -or not.

References

Affifi, R. (2025). My baby and his beeping box. Ecologising Education blogpost. https://ramseyaffifi.org/blog/my-baby-and-his-beeping-box/

Affifi, R. (2025). Misunderstanding ‘reductionism’ in environmental education research. https://ramseyaffifi.org/blog/misunderstanding-reductionism-in-environmental-education/

Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science (Kauffman, trans.). Vintage Books.

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.

Today my baby (who is nearly six months old) was absorbed with a plastic box that makes different sounds when its buttons are pressed. He would stretch his hand out, press down on a button, stop, and listen to the sound produced. He would wait until the sound ended, and then he would reach his hand back out again. I was fascinated watching him so fascinated. It led me to thoughts about buttons.

A button is a perfectly designed cause-and-effect device. The box has been designed so that various physical and chemical interactions are channelled towards establishing clear, consistent and visible causal interactions. The cause-effect relationship is clear in the sense that it is not ambiguous or multifactorial, it is consistent in the sense that it is reliably reproduced every time, and visible in the sense that the entire set up is designed for a prominent experienced effect.

Four most of the universe’s 4.5 billion year history, and in most places in the universe today, such boxes do not exist even though their underlying components may be present in substantial numbers. This indicates that most combinations of the physical and chemical subcomponents does not lead to a clear, consistent and visible cause-effect pathway. In most cases, causes are interconnected and effects are variable, which is why scientific experiments need to be carefully designed and controlled to extract a predominant relation from its context. For example, some combinations of plastic and metal (say if they were dust) might instead leads to many little nonrepeatable causes, like forming a pile or getting pushed by the hand into some shape, or swept away by wind. In other cases, the causality might be invisible, such as would happen if there were slow chemical reactions happening at a microscope level. Even if the shape was retained by the device was broken, we can imagine the same parts participating in different kinds of causal interactions such as being used as a projectile or a bat. If the plastic were still oil it would obviously have a range of other causal possibilities.

Through interacting with a device with well-defined causal dynamics, my baby is learning to see the world mechanistically. As I define it here, a mechanism is a structure that has reduced the degrees of freedom of its components to ensure the reproducibility of certain (unlikely from a thermodynamic perspective) causal paths. We can see how this operates in the plastic box: all its components are organised to reproduce the relation ‘button pressed -> sound effect.’ This relation is maintained at the expense of other causal interactions through redundancy. For example, I could scrape away bits of plastic or wire, and the device would still function. This means that ‘extra’ matter is engaged is harnessed to buttress a specific causal relation rather than doing something else. This is another way of saying they have been highly constrained and put together in an unlikely way, i.e. that the system has reduced degrees of freedom.

As an environmental educator, I have both learned and instinctive suspicions of mechanistic thinking. It is a common critique of unecological thinking that it is ‘mechanistic and reductionistic’ (though I hope it is obvious that these are not the same thing, and in some tension. On reductionism in environmental education, here). One reason environmental educators are often suspicious of ‘mechanistic’ thinking is that one of the key insights, from ecology to relational pedagogies, is that things are ‘interconnected’. Another is that mechanistic thinking seems to suggest that everything is determined (by its structure or organisation), which goes against the freedom and variability we sense in the living world and that we may also see as crucial for ecological ethics or politics.

I will consider the first aspect of mechanistic thinking first. A mechanism actually does not teach that things are not interconnected. Instead it foregrounds and reinforces a small subset of interconnections. Consider how the button pressed and the sound produced are clearly interconnected. When my baby becomes a child, finds a screwdriver and opens the box, he will see that there are a number of components that are in very specific reciprocally dependent interactions that underlying the translation of button pressing into sound. But what mechanisms teach by virtue of foregrounding certain interconnections is that others do not exist or are not important. This happens because the mechanisms has redundant features, as discussed above, that ensure robustness against perturbation from other things, and a buffer against diverse causal interactions. So, precisely because a mechanism is able to show a causal pathway so consistently and clearly, it also obfuscates or diminishes other causal interactions. This is part of the meaning of reducing degrees of freedom.

Before turning to the second aspect of mechanistic thinking mentioned above, I want to point out that even freedom or indeterminacy, even the most robust mechanism teaches my baby something about ’emergent properties’. Emergent properties can be defined in many ways, and are a complicated philosophical topic with many facets (just like mechanism), but for the sake of this discussion I define it as features that unexpectedly arise when material components are configured in specific ways, and that are not aspects of of those components in isolation. In the case of the plastic box, my son is witnessing that the organisation of matter leads to things happening that are unlikely otherwise. This will become clear when he eventually breaks the toy and realises there are vastly *many* possible broken states compared to states that function.

The second feature of mechanisms mentioned is the sense that if something is mechanistic it is therefore deterministic. The case of the plastic box may be quite deterministic and therefore re-enforcing some particular notions about how things work in the world. But many mechanisms that he will encounter are not so fixed in what they do. While all mechanisms reduce causal pathways when compared to the disorganised bustle of underlying atoms, some mechanisms produce emergent properties that do still have indefinite possibilities. For example, a guitar is a mechanism constrained to produce sound but this is clearly an ‘enabling constraint’ that can generate countless kinds of sound in concert with a person’s skill development in drawing them out. Living organisms can be considered mechanisms insofar as the constraints of their anatomy and physiology create entities that behave unpredictably and learn. From this, one might then think a mechanism is something where the underlying components are ‘deterministic’ even if the macroproperties appear not to be, and that those properties are therefore an illusion. But mechanisms don’t even need to have fixed components to be mechanisms. Sometimes stochastic probabilities are sufficient (like how intrinsically disordered proteins provide an indefinite ‘range’ of possible structures that feed into what kinds of broader organismic structure and behaviour are possible).

One might think a kind of appraisal of good vs bad mechanisms is possible, and be wary of having a child exposed to too many of the bad kind for fear of what they may be tacitly learning from them. But it is tricky to define what those might be. For example, from the discussion you might be attracted to the idea that indeterministic mechanisms are to be favoured educationally because they reveal contingency and interconnectedness more clearly. A caution against this is that many indeterministic mechanisms are likely problematic too (for example scrolling Youtube channels is novely generating), while on the other hand it may be that acquaintance with clear and consistent mechanisms is actually helpful for emphasising how life is different from such typical machines. What seems crucial is the kinds of questions and discussions that surround different kinds of mechanisms so that the presumption that the world is ‘just’ or ‘ultimately’ a machine is challenged: either through realising cases where it is not, or by challenging presumptions about what it means to be a machine, or both.

In environmental education, there are many attempts to posit theoretical and practical villains and angels. By this, I mean that it is often asserted that if only we did or did not think a certain way, or did or did not practice a certain kind of pedagogy, that a solution to the ecological crisis could be reached. Many of those who question the ‘efficacy’ of education will tacitly agree with such positing, because for them there are practical measures that can be taken (say at a policy level, etc.) and it is simply the case that the angels and villains lie outside the domain of curriculum or pedagogy.

One strategy I employ to refuse such dualistic thinking is to show how an exploration of either the angel side or the villain side of the binary shows contradictions within itself. It is my belief that attending to these contradictions is important, not to try and achieve some larger noncontradictory position, which I consider impossible, but rather to look for opportunities, transformations, and invite cautious humility. While my position may be seen as dangerous from a dualistic point of view, insofar as it seems to take the fuel out of the engines of the activist, I argue this ambiguity is necessary to avoid reproducing the very issues we are concerned with under a different guise. Most obviously, many environmental educators call out ‘dualism’ itself as the major theoretical ’cause’ of the ecological crisis, but seem unconcerned about the way the very same logic frames their diagnoses and prescriptions.

For example, let’s consider the argument that nature reveals itself through direct encounters in lived experience, but is obscured through other modes of interaction such the sciences. One version of this idea holds that pure science focuses on abstract generalities that occlude the ongoing and unique arising of nature, while applied sciences assume a predictable world that can be manipulated in predictable ways and therefore occlude the ways in which people and nature both change and are changed by reciprocal interaction. The idea is that the more we treat the world in these ways, the more we will continue to see only generalities and generic applications, whereas if we spent more time engaging with nature through encounters in lived experience, the more tutorage we would have on its ways which would be a corrective to this trend.

However, both pure and applied science implode from within, just as the solution of lived experience is revealed as unstable when itself interrogated. When considering science, we see that the harder its advocates attempt to concoct general claims about phenomena and their applications, the more nature shows itself as defying them. This shows up in outliers, exceptions, probability, side effects, mutations, wobbly planets, phenotypic plasticity, and many other violations of presumedly determinate understanding. However, on the side of lived experience, we see the very tendencies called out as problematic to be tacitly at work. Consider how even the artist and improviser of the most subtle relations with the more-than-human must nevertheless inductively generate pattern recognition, deduce possible implications, and use these to guide actions, as part of they interact. They are baked into perception, thinking, and action itself, not as the opposite of responsiveness but as risky yet potent conditions for its possibility. We also see inklings of such ‘scientific’ thinking in the desire to pin down certain scientific practices or beliefs as ‘the’ cause, and to ‘apply’ a solution to it (see Affifi 2023 ). And so, while I certainly believe we should spend more time perceiving and participating in nature in the rich multisensory space called ‘lived experience’, I argue this is only one of several domains in which environmental educators should orient their work.

When we interrogate an angel vs villain narrative, we often find that (despite itself) there is a hidden angel in the cracks of the villain’s power, just as there is (again despite itself) furtive villains surrounding the angel’s motivations. From an ecological point of view, these internal contradictions are not permanently and comprehensibly resolvable because internal tensions are constitutive of all ecological processes. Stability is itself a feature of internal tensions, such as arises in ‘dynamic equilibrium’, but is never assured nor permanent (Levins and Lewontin, 1987). Recognising the contradictions within each side of the alleged dualism might change the way in which we attend to our opponents, work on ourselves, dialogue with others, and look out for new angels and villains (as ever it seems we must) as our conditions change or our understanding of the situation develops. This dialectical lesson is expressed elegantly by McGowan (2019), who states that “[t]hose we imagine as enemies most often turn out to be versions of ourselves (which doesn’t eliminate the need for fighting them but just changes the conditions of the fight)” (p. 13).

One shift it entails is to realise that if we choose to adopt a dualism, that it is strategic rather than ontological. Realising this also confronts us with the fact that such strategies require sustaining an awareness of how the dualism may be leading us astray in our politics and ethics. It means not taking it so seriously when one rallies behind it, but instead seeing it as a limited and potentially dangerous tool – one that blinds us to shortcomings on one side and opportunities on the other. But it also means asking whether this strategic deployment is even appropriate and what circumstances instead call us to sit in the space of contradiction and open to what it can teach.

I suppose when different people consider these matters, they may make different judgements about the relative appropriateness of different positions. Although the ecologising perspective I advocate would insist (at a meta-level) that any position may play a role, which is to be determined by how it interacts with other roles and concrete contexts, this does not mean that I don’t think there is a place to hedge a bet in a specific way. And so my own non-metalevel approach (as the meta-level can only take us so far until its truths also obfuscate us) is that the awareness that positions are intrinsically contradictory leads to erring on the side of nonviolent approaches to relationships with others. I think this follows from the realisation that those we villainise may have aspects of value we can learn from, while those we identify with as good have hidden harms. This attitude aligns with the approach advocated in the Sermon on the Mount, by Tolstoy, by Gandhi, by Buddhists, and MLK, amongst countless others, that we focus on loving others and working on ourselves insofar as we have obstacles preventing such love. (for more on [[dialectics and nonviolence]])

One obvious objection is that while it might be beneficial to love other humans, it makes sense to separate them from their acts. We can villainise an act and it is dangerous not to. The view taken here, however, maintains that as long as those acts have occurred, they are part of the world, and we need to retroactively learn from them. This includes not only recognising their harm, which we are after all fighting against, but also what unintended or unanticipated side effects those acts may have that can be recognised and rendered a positive ground for our next steps. Note that this retroactive reconciliation does not make any claims about the future and does not justify sustaining past harm. Because the past is given and the future is indeterminate, we must have different attitudes towards how we make sense of them [[making sense of the future vs the past]]. When we treat the past as something we would like to change, and the future as inevitable, we mix things up. The result can be very deactivating. But this too, for reasons that are obvious by now, is not a blanket proclamation because making it so is to treat out future interactions with the future and the past in a determinate way, and there may be times when regret towards the past occurs and needs to be contended with to orient towards the future.

It is also my view that getting beyond angels and villains is what restores the ‘educational’ to education. If there are stable and specifiable good and bad approaches, the solution ends up focusing on ‘how to’ achieve the good and avoid the bad. But this is not just ecologically naive, in the sense that it does not recognise the dialectics within entities just discussed. It is also educationally problematic because it forecloses the freedom of the teacher and the student in their relation. More specifically, it risks reducing education to indoctrination by instrumentalising the educational relationship for ends extrinsic to the encounter itself. Luckily, such instrumentalisation is bound to show its own contradictions, which teachers can be on the lookout for, expose, play with and build upon (see Affifi and Hensley 2024).

References.
Affifi, R. (2025). Dialectics and nonviolence. Ecologising Education blog. [forthcoming]
Affifi, R. (2025). Confusing how we treat the future and the past. Ecologising Education blog. [forthcoming]
Affifi, R. & Hensley, N. (2024) Trickster teaching and the Anthropocene: Disrupting the explicitification of pedagogy, people and planet’, Environmental Education Research, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2024.2434608
Affifi, R. (2023) Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2022.2108768
Levins, R. & Lewontin, R. (1987). The dialectical biologist. Harvard University Press https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674202832.
McGowan, T. (2019). Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a contradictory revolution. MIT Press.

The word ‘reductionist’ is used pejoratively in environmental education research, and often. It is often paired, or used synonymously with ‘mechanistic’, and taken to refer to approaches that treat life as sufficiently or relevantly explained or accounted for by physical sciences. In practice, this usually involve a spatial ‘reduction’ in the account of the causal interaction. Small molecules causing big effects, intricate neural pathways causing global organismic consciousness, and so on.

Even from this rather limited view of it means to be reductionistic, there are already a number of different philosophical possibilities not usually accounted for in environmental education. For example, one might be an epistemological reductionist, believing that knowledge must avert to these lower causal levels, while stlll an ontological nonreductionist (the world itself is always more than such accounts). One might even be an ontological reductionist but an epistemological nonreductionist, say if one believes ultimately physicochemistry causes everything but that knowing is the process of forming simplified heuristics at many different levels and scales that ‘work’,

It is also worth mentioning in passing that one can be a reductionist but not a mechanist, or the other way around: for example, one can believe that quantum physics ultimately causes everything but that it is itself nonmechanistic in any ordinary sense of the world. And one can also believe that mechanical explanations are adequate but not reductionistic, insofar as a key part of mechanistic reasoning is in understanding how the parts work together to form the ‘machine’, which is to that extent relational and rejects the idea that it can be reduced to its components.

I want, however to draw environmental education researchers to the fact that reductionism is much more pervasive that what has been suggested, and comes in many different flavours. I will define reductionism as a stance that treats life as sufficiently or relevantly explained or accounted for by appeal to any one theory, view, level, process, or phenomenon. Relatedly, reductionistic ethics and politics would seek to find sufficient or relevant accounts on what to do by an appeal to one ultimate thing or another. From this perspective, most uses of the term ‘reductionistic’ are themselves reductionistic about reductionism.

I will give a few examples:

1) Ecocentrism is reductionistic because it places priority on the level of the ecosystem. This reduces individual organisms to being replaceable components of a larger process and risks leaning towards kinds of holism associated with totalitarian politics. Unlike common conceptions of reductionism in environmental education, this is an example of reducing to a higher level rather than a lower one (such as genes or molecules)

2) Phenomenological approaches are reductionistic because of the foundational (and often narrow) position they give to immediate lived experience over other modalities. It leads some scholars to think for example that our encounter with Nature only really shows up through direct sensory encounters and that science by contrast silences something fundamental to Nature through overmediating and abstraction. This is an example of reducing to the ‘mesolevel’.

3) The ‘flat ontology’ common in ‘New Materialism’ is reductionistic in how it de-emphasises differences in agency across living and nonliving things in an attempt to overcome Anthropocentrism. But the act of doing this shades out the different and important ways in which living organisms interact with their environments differently than the kinds of causal relations that chairs engage in. This is an example of how metaphysical approaches are reductionistic (“It is all one” and “It is all plural” are other examples of metaphysical reductionism).

4) ‘Nature connection’ is reductionistic because it does not account for how being alienated from nature is necessary as well. In specific, does not acknowledge how a separation from the environment is the condition for the possibility of encountering it (and therefore ‘connecting’ with it), and something all living organisms partake in to varying extents. It also does not acknowledge that a feeling of being disconnected can be ethically and politically essential through injecting doubt and uncertainty, and therefore subjectivity into the relation (see Nature connection and alienation). This is an example of how noncognitive, affective solutions can be reductionistic.

5) Finally, engaging with art is reductionist, because while one is creating or contemplating (say) a painting, all else is backgrounded. The frame introduces spatial and/or temporal contours to attention, and emphasises something crucial about perception as well (going back to example 1, above). Even if we ignore other ways we might encounter things and only focus on ‘lived experience’, there is already something reductionistic about the structure of perception itself. It already and always shows up as a field with some thing foreground against a context that is backgrounded.

Even nonreductionistic approaches that seek to embrace radical pluralism are reductionist. This is because pluralism discounts approaches that place emphasis on one level or causal locus over another (‘its all interconnected’ blinds us to how things are not all interconnected equally, and how that matters).

It would seem, then that we are left with nothing but different kinds of reductionism, and the choice is to distinguish what kinds are good from those which are dangerous. But this too would be reductionist, and probably in the bad kind of way. For example, one might suppose a bad kind is one that reduces by demoting highly relevant things, whereas a good kind instead keeps what is most relevant. But this is itself a very reductionistic way of treating relevance.

An ‘ecologising’ perspective acknowledges that every perspective, level, position may have its place, but does not settle on a simple ‘birds eye view’. Instead, it poses the concrete question of how the different perspectives actually interact (see Affifi 2023, 2024). There are times we hold onto one kind of reduction too long, other times we don’t dwell in one for long enough. There are key shifts between types of reduction, rhythms established between them, and so on, and these lead, arise from and interact with concrete conditions in the actual world. What is sustained and what is changed through the field of interactions across time? That is the issue, rather than arguing about what one or the other is the ‘best’ in general, or for some specifically delineated conditions. Part of the ecologising perspective entails that even this view, where one takes a step back and looks at how different partial views interact with each other and the world across time, is itself reductionistic. We would miss an awful lot of life if we were able to constantly engage at that level. Luckily we can’t and we find ourselves submerged back into this or that view all the time.

One reason this approach is ‘ecologising’ is because this is, in a way, how actual ecologies ‘work’. In living systems, each individual organism repeats a very narrow range of what its molecules are capable of doing, as they are trapped in the metabolic constraints. And each organism’s behaviour is in turn constrained by those it interacts with. So the behaviour of the physicochemical world is severely reduced in its degrees of possibility. But changes do occur, and what those transformations in material conditions actually are across time and relationships is what actually matters. Again the question is what is sustained and what is not. In the forest just as in the mind, the question is: what is the quality of relations enabled and sustained?

Of course, you will reply that I have just been reductionistic in my account of ‘actual’ ecologies. So be it. Let’s see what that account does, and wish it well when it needs to go.

References

Affifi, R. (2023) Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2024). Aesthetic knowing and ecology: Cultivating perception and participation during the ecological crisis. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2025). Nature connection and ‘alienation‘. Ecologising Education blog.

One idea I try to explore with Initial Teacher Educators is the importance of love in education. I believe love is important in relation to both the topics we teach, and the people we teach them to. In this blogpost, I want to articulate how one feeds into the other, and consider the role of the teacher in this mediation.

I sometimes have my students watch ‘My Octopus Teacher’ as a homework activity exploring the role of love in science. The protagonist of the film famously develops love, and a kind of relationship with an octopus, who he keeps visiting every day in a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa for an entire year. The film is educationally interesting for many reasons, as it opens up a lot of questions, such as: should he be interfering in that ecosystem? how was this actually being filmed, and what was the tension between trying to capture the relationship and the actual relationship? but also perhaps about what seems like his neglectful relationship with his own son. If such and other questions come up, I will surely make space for the discussion. But my intention is more straightforward. I want people to think about how emotions propelled his quest to know the octopus and wed into his decisions on how to attend to his ongoing understanding of octopus ecology. The protagonist is not a scientist but he quickly finds himself poring into the minutiae of scientific journal articles and wrestling with practical questions about what to do, especially when there is some conflict between such knowledge and what his heart might be telling him.

It is a particular story where a particular kind of love (eros, as the desire to know and connect with an other) wins over another kind of love (the agapic care that might lead him to save his friend from the bite of the pyjama shark). But it clearly opens the door for considering how love can guide the acquisition and application of knowledge. It is a different kind of emotion than those often associated with scientific research in capitalistic contexts, where one might prefer and feel more comfortable with emotions such as the desire for certainty, the joy of creating new things, or the exhilaration of risk, competition, and the prospects of wealth. The film works to open the door for a broader conversation, in part because no one doubts the authenticity of the protagonist. He wears his emotions on his sleeve and one sees clearly how they compel his inquiry and participation in his subject.

Doing so raises questions about what role emotions, and specifically different kinds of love, might play in the curriculum. Do children care about things in the world? Can they be invited to explore their love of things, new and old? What are the challenges and opportunities for teachers, and how to proceed? Because I primarily work with biology educators, it leads to questions about how the biological curriculum could be refashioned to support, invite and deepen love for other beings and processes in the living world.

However, because I teach teacher educators, pedagogy is always close on the heels of any discussion of curriculum. And so I invite the pivot to considering whether love also can motivate classroom practice, considering people don’t just encounter more-than-humans such as octopuses, but also each other? Do we learn more about our students and support them more effectively simply by caring about who they are, and how they will flourish, and what role we play in that? After all, there is an ecology in the classroom as there is in the kelp forest.

One way of thinking about the interplay between classroom relations and topic is to think of pedagogy and curriculum as a mode of form/content dynamic. If the topic is loving another but the manner of exploring that topic is at odds with it, then the students are likely to learn a very disjointed message (consciously or otherwise). There is the possibility of one symbiotically supporting the other, such that how we learn to love in one context can be tutorage for how we do so in another. But the gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ in teaching needs to be exposed, pointed to and played with, for these important questions to come up.

The distinction between pedagogy and curriculum melts into that of background and foreground, but with a twist. While we may think that the ‘what’ is our biology topic, and the ‘how’ is the pedagogy (which includes the classroom relations), this is only so when attention is directed at the topic. When attention shifts to the classroom relations, those relations become the ‘what’ and the curricular topic becomes the ‘how’. Sometimes we explore how to live with other species through how we live together as humans. Other times we explore how to live with other humans through interrogating living with other species.

I think it is important to be able to gestalt switch between foreground and background, or foci and context in teaching, rather than reifying certain labels such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’. This is not just because the latter inevitably leads to demoting one or the other according to priorities. It is also because once we realise teaching is a series of moments of foregrounding one thing and backgrounding another, both for and by the teacher and the students, how one experiences the sequence of the series of experiences comes to matter. They are no longer seen as partitioned unique dimensions (like form separated by an infinite gulf from content) or parcels of encounter closed off from one another in time (we did this and then that, and then this other thing). Rather, the (aesthetic) relationship within and between the experiences comes to matter, like how different motifs and movements follow one another in a piece of music. The teacher can then attend to the relationship between what is foregrounded and backgrounded, and the various shifts of focus, and what that teaches through its congruences, disjuncts, rhythms, and oscillations. This is partly how I use the term ‘artistry of teaching’, as featured in my chapters in the upcoming book (Biesta and Affifi 2026).

Does our love for each other in the classroom inform how we approach loving the creatures we study? Or vice versa? And how does paying attention to the interaction between our attitudes towards classroom relations and those towards other species alter our ability to develop connections between them?

It is not difficult to come across a paper in environmental education that assumes ‘connectedness to nature’ is a good thing, and there are some influential ‘tools’ to assess it used in environmental research, such as the Nature Relatedness (NR) scale and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS). (There are also many critiques of the adequacy and purpose of these scales). But what does it mean to ‘relate’ or ‘connect’ to nature?

On the face of it, some might think that ‘connectedness to nature’ would refer to one’s familiarity and understanding of nature, either through direct experience, but perhaps also theoretically through ecological science. These influential scales are for the most part, however, assessing instead a person’s feeling of having an emotional connection to nature and the extent to which they ‘self-identify’ with nature. They are after something embodied and ontological rather than merely epistemic. The idea is that if we see or feel ourselves to be ‘part of’ rather than ‘apart from’ nature, we are addressing a destructive dualism and are more likely to act in sustainable ways. The intuition stems from common philosophical positions in environmental thought, such as Deep Ecology’s Self realisation (Naess 2005) and biocentrism, but also the deanthropocentrism at the root of new materialism’s ‘flat ontology’ (e.g. Bennett 2007), albeit with ‘matter’ substituting (vapidly) for nature.

I will not argue that a feeling of connectedness to nature is a bad thing. Feelings arise and I do not think judging them is the way forward. Besides, I very much value the experience when it occurs. However, while I find the opposite feeling – an alienation from nature – less enjoyable, I want to argue that there is a clear and necessary place for it in environmental education. From my perspective, the more important questions lie in what we do with the feelings we have, how we make sense of them, and how they interplay with one another in how we concretely participate in the world. In other words, I am not aiming to replace advocating for one feeling over another, and I caution against reductionist approaches to finding ‘solutions’ to the ecological crisis. Even holistic ontologies can be reductionistic when they simplify nature, humans or their relationship and create a hierarchy between them. My concerns in this blogpost will centre around the feasibility and desirability of ‘connecting to nature’ as an ultimate end for environmental education, and I will point out that it is problematic ecologically, politically, existentially, and educationally.

My first observation is that it is not possible to feel connected to nature all the time – and perhaps it is not really possible to sustain the feeling at all. If I pay attention to my direct experience, I find that the feeling of connectedness is variable and shifting. Most obviously, because of the self-reflective nature of consciousness, I enter into loops where one moment I am experiencing something and the next moment I am experiencing *that* I am/was experiencing that thing. So I feel some interconnectedness and then feel that feeling, but as soon as I do so, some distance is brought between myself and what I felt connected to. Years of meditation can only add evidence to the phenomenological observation that this jump to the metalevel is an ongoing feature of human consciousness.

More generally, however, the feeling of connectedness also, it seems to me, is one of variable intensity. My feelings of connection and of separation are always co-existing in different tensions, ratios and qualities that shift between background and foreground for one another and give rise to many different experiences. Perhaps it is possible to develop a practice that concentrates and holds some of these dialectical interplays under the presumption that they are ‘more’ connected, but even if I can do so, it seems evident that I cannot go long holding that view. I soon need to ‘use’ something in nature and return to a habitual technological relationship (which has its own kind of connection, as technologies only ‘work’ with coordination (Heidegger 1929). It is because we slip away from the feeling of certain experiences that practices, rituals and developed in cultures to reorient. There is probably an important educational difference between aiming for feelings of ‘connectedness to nature’ as though it were actually possible (and feeling inadequate when we haven’t reached it), and aiming for it as an ideal, or orientation, or regulative principle of some kind. However, even if the latter holds a place in environmental education (and I think it does), it is insufficient and other aims also need to be held, some that are in contradiction with connection. More on this below.

A second reason to be suspicious of valuing the experience of ‘connectedness to nature’ is that nature is actually not even connected to itself. The reason we feel disconnection is because we are alive, and alive as highly centralised beings (animals). We have evolved a necessary separation. However, as much as it appears as though we are distinctly out of joint with the rest of the well-orchestrated universe, in fact no species is in perfect correspondence with its context. This is because all living things are new – that particular entity of that species has never existed before and what it is doing is in some form unprecedented. But it is also because the context in which it is living is also unprecedented (in part because it too is being constituted by other beings that are themselves unique). Of course, ecosystems have a range of reliable patterns and my aim is not to diminish the importance of them. It is simply to say that ecosystems are not merely such patterns and that tensions and ruptures are perennial too, and they constitute an essential aspect of how nature changes.

A third reason is that even if it was possible to sustain the feeling of connectedness to nature, it would not be desirable. One reason for this is well known and pointed out by ecofeminists in their observation that self-identifying with another, or feeling a oneness with them collapses their difference and can promote hierarchies that silence already marginalised beings. But the main reason I want to focus on here is an acknowledgement that the capacity to feel alienated from nature has many important benefits.

One is rather obvious: alienation confers on us an appreciation of the feeling of connectedness, which we otherwise would not have. Another is that alienation is an experience of uncertainty about who and what one should be, and how one should act. It is what splits us from our habit and automaticity and is the condition for the possibility of ‘subjectivity’. It is only because we can be alienated that we can ask: what am i to do? It is difficult to see this because alienation has been blamed for many of the contemporary ills, and a range of ‘warm’ environmental education options, like place-based education, are seen to put us back into ‘right relation’ and away from being awkward and displaced. But the question of what to do disappears when one knows one’s place. The moment of subjectivity, the question of asking what should I be or do, is the moment of slipping out of the assumed coordinations. It is a rupture of the existing order.

But who says the existing order was really so ordered, or that it was ordering things in the right way anyway? We might ‘feel’ connected, but were we actually? What aspect of nature were we feeling connected to and what was being obfuscated in that feeling? What species were being silenced by our holism? What aspects of those species were we reifying at the expense of others? It is the same in matters of ecology as it is in matters of love: we seek connection, unity, oneness, but to achieve it would collapse the difference between ourself and the other. It is in the dangerous, impossible and inevitable tension that can never resolve itself that the possibility of deeper intimacy, responsibility and relationship can also arise. Not to erase the alienation, but rather as an experience that coexists with it.

Alienation is a source of suffering and it is normal to want to flee it. But it is necessary for subjectivity and freedom, and also what kind of participant a human will be in ecologies. ‘Ecologising’ our thinking about the relationship between humans and the rest of the biotic world does not involve getting ‘beyond’ this alienation, but instead involves seeing how alienation is itself also part of the ecologising process. After all, ecologies and all evolutionary processes proceed through the fact that the organisms that arrive into the world are slightly ‘out of joint’ with the existing conditions, and that they change them further through their activity. This is the insight of the role of novelty/variation and niche construction respectively. Evolution by natural alienation. And like in any ecology, alienation offers possibilities and dangers, but it is the condition for change, which is necessary for change and what distinguishes ecosystems from machines.

Alienation is not something to solve with therapy either. Because we don’t assume a ‘place’ and ‘identity’ when we feel alienated, it is also the condition for our being political (McGowan 2024), and in this case, ecopolitical. Just as ‘symbolic identity’ (identifying oneself with a category and reducing one’s singularity though doing so) is seen by McGowan as a flight from one’s subjectivity, ecological identity (in the sense of knowing or feeling ‘who’ you are or what you should be in an ecosystem) is a flight from questions of what one should do in the presence of a developing community or relations one has only vague and indeterminate knowledge of. Finally, it is not an educational pursuit to absolutise ‘connection to nature’ over alienation from nature as a goal for the same reason: a concern with subjectivity is part of the existential core of the educational project (or ‘subjectification’ in Biesta’s sense, 2020; Affifi 2024).

I’ll end with where we all end: death. The deepest ‘connection’ with nature cannot be felt because it only arises once we die. It is here where our being surrenders the separation it maintains in its metabolism, in the structure of its consciousness, in the persistence of its stable being in the face of the vagaries of the world (Maturana and Varela 1992). It is here where the ontology flattens. Fetishising the desire for connection to nature may on some level necrophilic as it asks for a denial of what sustains life: the establishing and maintaining of difference.

References

Affifi, R. (2024). The ecology of sublimity. Environmental Education Research.
Affifi, R. (2019). Anthropocentrism’s fluid binary. Environmental Education Research.
Bennett, J. (2007). Vibrant Matter. MIT Press.
Biesta, G. (2020). Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, socialisation and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory.
Heidegger, M. (1929). Being and Time.
Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1992). The tree of knowledge. Shambala.
McGowan, T. (2024). Embracing alienation: Why we shouldn’t try to be ourselves. London: Repeater.
Naess, A. (2005). The selected works of Arne Naess (Drengson ed.), Dordrecht: Springer.

(This is the third instalment in a series reconsidering the relationship between physics and “higher level” or emergent sciences. The others are here and here.)

A physics teacher recently told me that physics studies the very small and the very large. It’s a flattering folk definition, but if both ends, why not the centre? Why bind the grandest and most intricate scales into one discipline while leaving the middle to others? The real dividing line isn’t scale but scope. Physics generates the most generalisable descriptions and explanations.

By “generality” I mean a family of traits—breadth across materials and taxa, invariance under interventions and background changes, range across scales, and applicability beyond special set-ups. In these ways, electromagnetism scores extraordinarily high; homeostasis scores lower. Of course, it remains powerful within organised systems that satisfy its boundary conditions (Polanyi 1968). In this view, disciplines are profiles of generality, not boxes of subject matter.

This is about explanatory scope, not causal priority. Electromagnetism is certainly necessary for what cells do, but it is not sufficient to explain where and when mitochondria arose. That requires organisational closures, ecological niches, and histories—enabling constraints that actualise particular forms from the many physically possible ones. For more on this, visit my earlier post.

A mitochondrion or a homeostatic system arose through a combination of underlying causes and contingent contexts. Sometimes contexts create and ramify differences. For example, in an embryo, a cell at the centre encounters different signals than one at the edge; those differences cascade into differentiation, leading to cell specialisation, which diversifies context for the cells still further. In other cases, contexts buffer underlying differences, such as how morphogen gradients, membranes, and feedbacks stabilise some micro-trajectories over others. But in either case, the point is clear. The ‘middle’ of the universe, the place physics is seen to hand over to other disciplines, is where bottom-up causes and constraining contexts interplay. This is almost an inevitable consequences of being in the middle, of being made up of small constituent parts and participating in the co-constitution of larger entities.

One might assert physics is “special” because it is more general. But the idea that scientific knowledge is more important if it can be applied across more situations comes from a specific understanding of the purpose of knowledge. The more generalisable sciences are by definition less context dependent (or not context dependent at all) so they are also most amenable to prediction and manipulation. If we see the sciences as a spectrum between the nomothetic and the idiographic (Affifi 2019), we can also see that knowledge has different roles across the spectrum. Physics studies what is highly similar across contexts. On the other end of the spectrum, we have phenomena that is nearly absolutely unique and/or in a rapid process of unanticipated change. Across the spectrum, similarity and difference coexist in patterned ways. Between uniqueness and uniformity lie themes with variations: members of a species differ, yet share form. Where cross-context similarity is high, patterns tend to be stable and mathematisable. Where organisation and feedback dominate, sometimes richer mathematics or mixed-method modelling can capture what is happening. The world of precision medicine lies somewhere in this murky middle.

However, as we move towards the increasingly idiographic, manipulation becomes more risky and indeed stops making sense. For example, applying highly general knowledge inside idiographic settings brings side-effects when contextual relations are overlooked. This is one of the cardinal sins of our age of ecological disaster. But going further, as knowing increasingly becomes a kind of encounter with what is singular and unique, the desire to manipulate (wise of side-effects or not) becomes increasingly unthinkable. Along the spectrum, science can foster curiosity, admiration, care, gratitude, humility — and informed ignorance, as when new knowledge reveals uncertainties that were previously invisible. But it also help us recognise the limits of “knowing” as a way of engaging the world when conceived in its usual way of seeking stable explanations and expectations. We begin to think about knowing at this farther end as a mode of encounter, intimacy and participation.

Of course physics also contains diversity—phase transitions, chaos—just as biology contains recurring motifs—homeostasis, modularity, canalisation. We need to be careful about what we are claiming. However, even here the difference is clear. In biology, knowing the metapattern is not sufficient for predicting the phenomenon. We can understand homeostasis in abstract but be continuously surprised at the different ways in which organisms have evolved it across the kingdoms of life. Modelling faces trade-offs among generality, precision, and realism (Levins 1966): push one corner and you typically give on another. Physics often optimises generality (and precision) via abstraction; biological models often trade some generality for organisational realism or case-level precision.

Perhaps all I am doing is asserting that there is indeed something “special” about the special sciences. I think there is. But I am not saying that utilitarian exploitation is the only value of physics, even if it is perhaps the dominating one nowadays. I don’t want to be reductionistic about reductionism. But even within physics, a fixation on manipulation can occlude other human possibilities that general physics can offer us from the sense of its sublime universality (Affifi 2024) to the very mysteries it confronts us with when contemplating the relation between our living, feeling world and the necessity of natural law. The point isn’t to enthrone a level, but to recognise different profiles of generality and the different virtues and limits that come with them.

References

Affifi, R. (2024). The ecology of sublimity: Education between existence and the ungraspable. Environmental Education Research.

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research.

Levins, R. (1966). The strategy of model building in population biology. American Scientist.

Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160(3834), 1308-1312.

Some Christians I know have a yearning for evidence or proof of God. And yet, they acknowledge that faith is core to their religion. There is an obvious tension between these two modalities. To want evidence demonstrates precisely a lack of faith, so Christians may view such a yearning as a kind of weakness. It is something with which they may struggle and seek to overcome. Perhaps. But alternatively considered, faith that comes easy may have little meaning. In fact, faith that requires no ‘leap’ may be faith only in name. It almost becomes rather an unverified knowledge claim, where ‘I believe in God’ and ‘I know God exists’ become essentially interchangeable statements. Faith here seems to require residing in a space of uncertainty, an uncertainty that can be uncomfortable, lonely, alienating or confusing. It drives the desire to make contact with what is good and enduring. It may well be that the yearning for evidence is simply part of the soil out of which faith can grow, the inorganic substrate out of which life can manifest, necessary in its time and place.

Shifting gears, I know people (and include myself in this list) who are trying to recover from the spell of reductionism. These are people who have been brought up in a scientific worldview that sees physics creating chemistry, and chemistry creating biology, and biology creating consciousness and so on, such that all ‘real’ causes seem to be located only at the lowest and simplest level (i.e. physics) and everything above it ‘just a bi-product’ of underlying forces and laws. This worldview sees experiences of emotion, beauty, love, the sacred, but also indeed, pain, violence and destruction, and so on, as derivative. Life and death and all in between is merely, as they say, ‘epiphenomenal’ patterns generated by interacting pixels and waves deep below the surface. Such a view obviously conceives of consciousness as not doing anything because there is no space for additional causes to intervene in the lockstep march of the physical world. This means that the feeling of freedom, both as a direct experience of self and as something we intuit other creatures to have when observing them, is also seen as illusory.

When I say I am trying to ‘recover’ from the spell of this worldview, this is what I mean: I live in a world where the living world matters, and where experiencing this world as meaningful is part of how I live and create a world with others. I have spent decades thinking about the relationship between different kinds of causality to build up an understanding of an alternative metaphysics, one that accepts what science comes across but that also recognises that these ’emergent’ entities are also ontologically and causally real. In that vein, I have also written papers and teach critically about reductionism, which I see as not only as a metaphysically problematic position but also as highly destructive. I believe it is a kind of fatal ‘nocebo effect’ that leads to bad relations with self, other people and nonhumans. And yet, I have moments where I am shook with the returning thought: But how is it possible? Can we really get out of the notion that physics determines everything? Time and again, I have to reconstruct all my arguments (and develop new ones too), say about the place of feedback loops, enabling constraints, formal causes, ‘experience’, and so on, in the co-constituting and co-arising of the world. I am continually recovering the alternative ontology that seems necessary for all I cherish and yet also seems to slip through my fingers.

Like the Christian’s desire for evidence of God, being born into a reductionistic metaphysics may also seem like a deficient position. But the back-and-forths between doubting and restoring the world ‘above’ physics has taught me a different lesson. I learn there is something essential about falling back into the possibility of reductionism. Reductionism sets me up to experience the wondrousness of the restored lived world in a way that would not occur if I took it granted. Just as how beauty is all the more a miracle when it arises from out of ugliness (see Affifi and Bertoldo, forthcoming), the meaningfulness I experience is astonishing and accentuated by how it develops in relation to the experience of meaninglessness — and indeed in that way makes meaninglessness itself meaningful.

Perhaps all spiritual positions involve dialectical tensions between some kind of doubt and a different kind of certainty, a difference that works like a charged battery to enliven the encounter. A dialectical spirituality does not seek to come up with a final worldview, position or belief system that, if only believed, would lead us to salvation. Instead, it recognises that what is already implicit and indeed offered in each of our individual and developing contexts, holds already a spiritual potency actuated in the tensions we struggle with.

I’ve been wrestling with what word to choose to describe it, and have settled on ‘spirituality’ not because I really like the word, but because I was recently led back into this dialectical labyrinth in a discussion with a colleague, Alice Cimenti, who herself raised it as an appropriate term. I’ve decided to stick with it, at least for this blogpost. Why, and what does it mean to me right now? I invite you to think about some of the non-supernatural ways we use the word ‘spirit’ in the English language. The spirit of the age, he is in good spirits, and so on. I will consider the ‘spirit’ of a piece of music. Note that it only appears when one can perceive its melody and rhythm. The form or Gestalt of music only exists when we can perceive relations between things. It is invisible when the individual notes are looked at one at a time and in isolation. But it is clearly real because it is the melody and rhythm that I perceive and that affects me. The spiritual evaporates when we look for the blocks that built it up. Lego is probably a terrible toy for ushering in an ecological age, not least because of the plastic.

My response to the music I hear also has its own spirit, a relational dynamic between different swoons and pops of feeling where each gives sense to the others. In doing so, the melody of sound and the melody of my being mutually affirm one another as real non-decomposable events. So too, the spirit in the things around me, such as my friend’s personality, the atmosphere of a rocky Scottish hill in the afternoon light, and so on. Each are Gestalts across time (and space), invisible upon analysis but carrying on just the same. Of course, to think of the long causal journey from subatomic particles to feelings of wonder at passing clouds imbues the latter with an obvious, and indeed literal kind of ‘depth’. And spiritual encounters need depth. But they also involve levity and ascents to great heights, vistas from which nothing could be seen otherwise. Spiritual practice is, as people keep rediscovering in different ways, a climb.

 

References

Affifi, R. & Bertoldo, J. (2026). The return of beauty on a dying planet. In “Artful education and the downward journey: Facing finitude and death” (MacAllister, Pirrie and Affifi, Eds).

If we take any physical entity in the world, we find it is made up of things and also is a part of something bigger than it. (Of course, whether this is true at the quantum level is an open question, so I leave it alone here). In this blogpost, I want to reflect on the nature of causality between these spatial levels and offer some considerations for science educators. My presumption leading into this is that most science teachers have a confused conception of causality and probably do not realise it (as few studied philosophy and current science education deals with its crucial concepts only tacitly).

If pressed, many science teachers will say that the only ‘real’ causes are happening at the level of physics, and all other causes are merely apparent. But then they go on to treat these other ‘apparent’ causes as real causes in their teaching. Indeed, were it just a matter of physics, science educator might be forced to say that subatomic particles cause everything and that the *entire curriculum* from chemical reactions to ecosystems is the study of how we are deceived into falsely identifying different apparent causes. I think some science educators would resist that view, and if so, it is worth asking them how additional causes then come into the story. Others may concede that most of the curriculum is therefore a mirage but insist that ‘pragmatically’ these false causes can still be helpful. For example, we can build bridges using Newtonian mechanics. But then the problem comes back at them: how can causes, deceptive or otherwise, be *used at all* if only physics can do anything? How is engineering even possible?

Many contemporary scientists and philosophers have been reconsidering Aristotle’s famous ‘four causes’ for insights into the contradictory traps we get into when committing to the physics-is-the-first-and-only-mover worldview. One involves resurrecting what Aristotle called ‘formal causes’, which people now associate with concepts like ‘enabling constraints’, ‘downward causality’, ‘boundary conditions’ and so on. For example, according to Polanyi (1968), the organisation of a thing (how its parts are related) provides boundary conditions that harness physical processes. For example, a mechanism (say a clock) does not interfere with the physics underlying the metal cogs, but channels it in specific directions by delineating where physical processes occur. According to this view, the atoms within the clock’s cogs are capable of organising into many different configurations – probably infinite – and so physics underdetermines what particular relations arise from it. The underdetermined nature of physics is particularly clear in how biological process (and machines) can break down without any change to the underlying physical processes. Because physics is always happening within contexts, these contexts constrain where and how this physics occurs, and enable events (like the clock hands turning) that would be vastly improbable were they to arise spontaneously from the interaction of the underlying particles alone. This leads to the term ‘enabling constraint’ which many authors discuss but which I will attribute to Juarrero (e.g. 2023).

What interests me today is not simply the nature of the relationship between physics and context in a particular entity. I am in specifically interested in how their relationship is dialectical and gives rise to progressively bigger forms in space and time. To do so, I’d like to disrupt some of the framing that I have used so far. In particular, I want to challenge the idea that there is only one physics and one context enabling/constraining its possibilities. Rather, I want to suggest that whatever the entity at whatever scale of the world, there is a sense in which it causes in a manner similar to the physics we were just imagining, and another sense in which it causes in a manner more like enabling constraints or boundary conditions. I will call these, following Aristotle, efficient and formal causes.

To get a concrete sense of what I mean, consider a flag blowing in the wind. In one sense, the flag’s shape is the product of underlying physics. But now that the flag exists, it participates in new efficient causes. When the wind blows it, a pattern appears over the fluttering sheet. It denotes the direction of the wind, which leads to a person looking at it from indoors to get a jacket because it is coming from the north. It also modifies the wind current (to a small extent). The flag constrained its underlying molecules, which otherwise would not likely be changing wind currents or getting people to put on extra layers of clothing.

We can say that new forces arise with causal power at different moments in the history of the world. For example, temperature does not exist at the level of an atom. But once it exists at a higher level it can certainly participate in efficient causal interactions with sweaty people, and so on. With the evolution of new forms in the universe there is a corresponding evolution of new formal and efficient causalities that co-arise and provides the conditions for the possibility of new forms in turn.

But just as formal causation limits the possibilities of its underlying components, so too do the new kinds of efficient causality that arise. The effects of the blowing flag further specify specific directions for the molecular substrate of the various entities interacting with it. It is because of this dialectical process that real development and real novelty are possible. While taken in problematic and dogmatic directions, this was the original sense of Engel’s (1934) vision of dialectical materialism. Constraints do not just generate new form, they also generate new kinds of interaction, and both always occur together.

I will close with some reflections on science education. First, we should explore causality directly in science education, and efficient and formal Aristotlean causes in particular. When new phenomena are encountered in the curriculum, teachers can reinforce the distinction by asking: ‘what does the pushing? What does the shaping?’ internally in the phenomena, and also externally in how it interacts with its environment. Teachers can reinforce this by asking for bidirectional explanations from the micro to the macro. Moreover, doing so we learn to see how form and capacity to cause change link between levels in the world. The flag is a bridge, channeling underlying physics into a form that can in turn influence and be influenced by a broader array of phenomena, like the wind and so on. Each new form opens into a world that could not be accessed without it.

Second, teachers should foster campaigns against words like ‘just’, ‘mere’ and ‘only’ when describing the world. ‘Just physics’ doesn’t make sense for many reasons, one of which is the fact that physical forces themselves evolve as new forms arise in the world. There is a ‘mesophysics’ to the flags movement that is not the physics of quarks. Further, teachers need to do disentangle physics and efficient causation. When people say it is ‘just physics’ they may be wanting to assert that it is just efficient causality, which may not be physics alone (at least without a very generous stretching of what falls under our concept of ‘mesophysics’).

Third, studying biological or engineered mechanisms shows that the relation between interchangeable components matters, but the significance of mechanism as an antidote to the ‘just physics’ mentality is not generally recognised. In fact, science is commonly critiqued as ‘reductionistic and mechanistic’ in the new paradigms (that I subscribe to), almost as though the two words were synonymous.

Fourth, studying phase transitions and emergent properties also acquaints students with the notion that efficient causes underwrite possibilities, but that form and context select and stabilise actualities. But again, students are well acquainted with the fact that water changes state at a specific temperature and so on, without being mystified about how this is possible with a reductionistic mentality. This again enforces the fact that we already have enough evidence against the metaphysics that only sees physical impact as causal, and that the solution involves pointing out the contradictions that are invisible so that a more coherent view can develop.

And finally, mirages aren’t just mirages anyway. They kill people.

References

Aristotle (350BC). The metaphysics.

Engels, F (1934). The dialectics of nature. Progress Publishers.

Juarrero, A. (2023). Context changes everything. MIT Press.

Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160(3834), 1308-1312.