Abstract
Cross-cultural dialogue between the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy and the classical pragmatist tradition in American philosophy can help educators to clarify aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. This dialogue can contribute to meeting an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the way in which ecological perception becomes relevant to moral deliberation. The first section of this chapter explores relational thinking in the Kyoto School and American pragmatism to help develop, in the second section, a concept of ecological imagination. A fine-tuned ecological imagination is a capacity we already count on in our best environmental writers, educators, scientists, and policy analysts. Moral deliberation enlists imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” The final section draws from the foregoing to clarify some appropriate aims for contemporary moral education. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue about the relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded, a finely aware ecological imagination can make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy.
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- 1.
- 2.
Personal communication (2007). This chapter follows Japanese naming conventions for all Japanese authors, with family name followed by given name. However, all Japanese names and words are given in Romanized characters.
- 3.
Personal communication (2007).
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Nishitani, far more than Nishida, explicitly understood his project in relation to Buddhist religion.
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On the Kyoto School and wartime nationalism, see Heisig and Maraldo (1994). In ‘The Development of American Pragmatism’, Dewey insightfully writes: ‘In considering a system of philosophy in its relation to national factors it is necessary to keep in mind not only the aspects of life which are incorporated in the system, but also the aspects against which the system is a protest. There never was a philosopher who has merited the name for the simple reason that he glorified the tendencies and characteristics of his social environment; just as it is also true that there never has been a philosopher who has not seized upon certain aspects of the life of his time and idealized them’ (LW 2:6).
- 6.
I am grateful to Thomas Alexander for an unpublished essay titled ‘Form, Emptiness, and Nature’ that uses Basho’s poem as a way to explain Eastern and Western conceptions of form.
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A central thesis of William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism is that we also directly experience discontinuities, equally real, and we must be equally open to disjunctions as to conjunctions.
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Cf. James, ‘The Thing and Its Relations’, in Essays in Radical Empiricism.
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Thomas Alexander, personal communication.
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In constitutive relations, as Roger Ames explains, ‘the dissolution of relationships is surgical, diminishing both parties to the degree that this particular relationship has been important to their continuing identity. …Under such circumstances, people quite literally “separate”, “change each other’s minds”, “break up”, and “divorce”’ (Ames 2007, p. 55).
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As Heisig explains it, for Nishida I am an event, a ‘locus of activity’ rather than a ‘preexisting entity’ (Heisig 2001, pp. 73–74).
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On the influence of James’s radical empiricism on Niels Bohr, see Snyder (1994).
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Revealingly, Habits of the Heart author Robert Bellah published in the 1960s ‘the first essay about Watsuji in a Western language’. William LeFleur, forward to Watsuji (1996, p. viii).
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Hito to hito to no aida. In Fūdo, Watsuji makes clear that his ethics extends to the in-betweeness of persons and nature, offering at least implicitly a resource for environmental ethics. Odin (1996, p. 397) defends this position.
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Yuasa Yasuo, Appendix to Watsuji (1996, p. 315).
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See Dewey, Democracy and Education, Chapter 7.
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This is not to suggest that Dewey’s political stances were unproblematic. Biographically, both Dewey and Watsuji at least tacitly supported disastrous wars for the sake of a national ideal: America making the world safe for democracy (WWI, for Dewey), and Japan liberating Asia from Western colonial hegemony (WWII, for Watsuji). Dewey, while sharing none of the three myths he found prevalent in Japanese culture during his 1920 visit (see ‘Liberalism in Japan’, MW 11:156–73), believed in the late 1930s that American culture was unique in its liberation from European bickering, and at that time he urged isolationism on this basis. Watsuji, meanwhile, upheld the uniqueness of the Imperial system that he believed essential to unify and preserve Japan’s traditional culture. The three Japanese myths Dewey criticized were (1) ‘racial homogeneity’, (2) ‘continuity of the imperial dynasty’, and (3) indebtedness to ‘the original virtues of the divine founders and to those of their divine descendents’ (MW 11:172).
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For a general survey on the embodied basis of meaning, see Gibbs (2005).
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For a book-length treatment of Dewey’s theory of imagination in a contemporary context, see Fesmire (2003).
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Dramatic rehearsal is one phase or function of the deliberative process. But this function is so essential for Dewey that it lends its name to the whole process.
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The adjective ecological is preferred here because, like the Japanese word kankyo, ‘environmental’ dualistically connotes external surroundings. The term ecological accommodates the concept of a live creature stretching to notice the very relationships that synergistically constitute it.
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In 1936, Nishida wrote in the Preface to an edition of An Inquiry into the Good: ‘That which I called in the present book the world of direct or pure experience I have now come to think of as the world of historical reality. The world of action-intuition—the world of poiesis—is none other than the world of pure experience’ (Nishida 1990, p. xxxiii).
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Ecology has become more than the science of the relationships between organisms and their environments. The meaning far exceeds what Ernst Haeckel had in mind when he coined the word ecology in 1866 (a word that had been casually tossed off by Thoreau earlier) or Arthur Tansley when he coined the word ecosystem in 1935 (to substitute quantifiable energy fields for fuzzy, quasi-mystical eulogies to universal connectedness (see Callicott 1989).
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On Lakoff and Johnson’s (1998) view, metaphors are not limited to elliptical similes for illustrating concepts that, for sharper minds, could be replaced with a precise literal rendering. Our sense of who we are, how we understand situations, how we relate to others and to nonhuman nature, and what we see as possible courses of action and mediation all depend significantly on the stable metaphors and models we inherit, share, and live by.
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‘Aims’ are here understood in Dewey’s sense in Democracy and Education: ‘The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming’ (MW 9:54).
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Cf. Dale Jamieson’s (2007) analysis of harm and global climate change.
- 29.
On this theme, see Hall and Ames (1999).
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In 2006 and 2008 presentations at the Terra Madre international Slow Food gathering in Turin, Italy, representatives of Green Mountain College in Vermont presented on a college-scale version of Berkeley’s edible schoolyard.
- 31.
Cf. Capra (2005). On the Edible Schoolyard Project, see: http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/cla_eco.html. A free packet titled Getting Started: A Guide to Creating School Gardens as Outdoor Classrooms can be obtained at: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/getting-started.html. On ecological education, cf. Orr (1992).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by a Fulbright lecturing-research grant which allowed me to teach and conduct research at Kyoto University and Kobe University from March through August 2009. I am grateful to David Satterwhite, Mizuho Iwata, and their colleagues at the Japan-United States Educational Commission in Tokyo for their generous support. James Heisig at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture generously hosted a brief yet productive visit to Nagoya. I am also grateful to Tomida Yasuhiko (Kyoto University), Kazashi Nobuo (Kobe University), Abe Hiroshi (Kyoto University), Carl Becker (Kyoto University), and many others for their unfailing support and friendship. Any scholarly errors in this chapter are of course entirely my own.
Note on Abbreviations
All references to Dewey are to 1969–1991. The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 37 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Citations are to EW, MW, or LW (Early Works, Middle Works, or Later Works), followed by volume number, followed by page number.
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Fesmire, S. (2012). Ecological Imagination and Aims of Moral Education Through the Kyoto School and American Pragmatism. In: Standish, P., Saito, N. (eds) Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4047-1_9
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