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Overturning the Dogmatic Image of Thought in Science Education

Science education and its various actualizations, and education in general, are haunted by a dogmatic image of thought (Bang, 2017; Bang & Valero, 2014; Bazzul et al., 2018; Deleuze, 1994), a ghost of inadequate representation. As science education propels forward with new sustainable UNESCO goals for the twenty-first century, Baby PISA tests designed by the OECD and similar practices of international measurement in the higher education arms race, the problematic of the dogmatic image of thought continues to be repeated and reproduced ad nauseam. Science education in 2020 need concepts based upon an adequate understanding of humanity’s place in nature. Before outlining a reconceptualization of the Anthropocene in science education it is thus necessary to address the dogmatic image of thought and how that potentially limits the connection between learning about nature and being in and of nature, or more broadly, between the activity of the mind and the activity of the body. In science education, this is actualized both in general subject matter and specifically in regard to the Anthropocene, in subject matter such as sustainability, ecological footprint, carbon footprint, climate change, and so forth.

To address the dogmatic image of thought is to “overturn” it, to dramatize and unfold the idea, or perhaps more accurately to retrace the idea (Deleuze, 2004). The specific dramatization invoked here utilizes two historical cases related to contemporary science education and the philosophy of science. Firstly, the work and “event” of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), more specifically his germinal work A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities from 1825. Secondly, the “event” and work of Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988), a lauded educator of physics and Nobel Prize winner, and his lectures published in The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963), specifically the lectures on probability and the theory of gravity (Feynman et al., 1963). Pierre-Simon Laplace and Richard P. Feynman are, in Deleuze and Guattari’s lens, “conceptual persona” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), placeholders or envelopes for specific ideas on the plane of immanence.

Laplace’s essay is usually seen as a manifesto for determinism or as a work which captures the scientific zeitgeist of the era, building upon the scientific tradition of the French Enlightenment. The scientific tradition in the French Enlightenment is not a monolithic entity but rather the actualization of many different ideas combining both philosophical and ethical/moralistic ideas regarding humanity and reason (see for instance Michel Foucault’s essay on What is Enlightenment? for a reading of Kant’s enlightenment [Foucault, 1984]) and new scientific practices and breakthroughs in the French academies. In other words, in the French Enlightenment, we see a fusion of ideas of reason and progress with a specific moral character as belonging to the scientist, or as I have argued elsewhere, the rationality of the Man of Science (Bang, 2017). Rereading Laplace’s work, setting the rationality of the Man of Science aside for a spell, using Deleuze’s method of dramatization, one can see the contours of a new idea, of a science based upon a Leibnizian worldview incorporating a principle of sufficient reason (Van Strien, 2014). The Deleuzian monstrous reading forwarded here is thus to reread Laplace with a Spinozist, rather than Leibnizian, approach to utilize a new outline of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Feynman is quite literally a Man of Science and in many ways captures the new American scientific spirit of the 1960s; his lectures became famous for their ingenuity and clarity, representing the “best practice” of physics education. Additionally, Feynman became one of the first science celebrities and was greatly used by the media. A close “monstrous” reading of Feynman’s lectures points, similarly to Laplace’s, though the way to thinking of nature in terms of flows; the physics concept of gravitation and force is especially impossible to understand, without a concept of flow. Feynman’s moon example literally consists of flows and gravitational force and thus become a fulcrum, where Spinoza’s theory of learning becomes clear and the Anthropocene can be rearticulated.

Before the monstrous historical readings, it is necessary to map and enunciate the problematic concept and representation of the Anthropocene.

Map** Prevailing Remarks Around the Anthropocene

The concept of the Anthropocene was first forwarded by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 in their entry in the Global Change Newsletter (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). They wanted a concept and representation encapsulating the modern geological age and how mankind since the late eighteenth century (beginning with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784), have wrought geological, measurable changes upon the world. Despite their noble intentions of bringing the problematic activities of mankind and the impact of industrialization to the forefront of the climate debate with the new concept (or more adequately representation) of “the Anthropocene” (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), it is unfortunately in many ways an inadequate and flawed conceptual representation, especially when viewed through the lens of Deleuze’s philosophy and Spinoza’s metaphysics. The conceptual representation of the Anthropocene is useful though as an ideological rallying cry to address climate change and global warming, and my critique of the conceptual representation in light of science education is thus not a critique of activism against global warming or climate change, but merely aimed at arriving at a better concept to understand the role of humans on this planet and a concept of the Anthropocene cleansed of a dogmatic image of thought.

Claire Colebrook similarly points toward a certain ambivalence when talking and writing about the Anthropocene in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy:

It seems the only response to the vogue for Anthropocene thinking is ambivalence: yes we are finally—perhaps—thinking beyond our own time and interests, but we are doing so by way of a parochial concept of the species (“anthrops”), accompanied by a resurgence of seemingly counter-humanist rhetorics that are all too human. (Colebrook, 2016)

Colebrook’s solution is to relegate and de-universalize the Anthropocene to a narrative similar to the other narratives or strata that Deleuze and Guattari outlined in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and Anti-Oedipus (1983), while simultaneously retaining an inclusive disjunction retaining the ambivalence in the Anthropocene strata, as both productive and problematic. In term of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and especially their philosophical works on capitalism and schizophrenia (A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus) Colebrook’s solution, “the Anthropocene as strata in an inclusive disjunction,” is seemingly adequate. The problem with Colebrook’s ambivalence and the either/or and both/and argument concerning the Anthropocene is that it becomes a detached representation, a flawed concept and an abstraction at best. Spinoza’s metaphysics, which is a cornerstone in Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre, simply can’t accept such a “fuzziness,” when it comes to concepts and learning. In short, without connecting the Anthropocene amply to the body it never becomes an adequate concept, which is exactly the connection Deleuze and Guattari drew in their work Anti-Oedipus, where they connected capitalism with the body (bodily flows, desire, and the oedipal structure). After this map** and re-articulation of the problematic of the Anthropocene, it is necessary to readdress the dogmatic image of thought before demonstrating the interplay between these two issues.

The Nature of the Dogmatic Image of Thought

Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, “we do not speak of this or that image of thought, variable according to the philosophy in question, but of a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 167).

This sickness of representation, the dogmatic Image of thought and Deleuze’s “patient-zero” in the history of philosophy, has many fathers, and can be summarized as the subjective presupposition, which the above quotation also hints at. In other words, the subjective, anthropomorphic center of (hu)man who thinks thoughts and makes representations ad nauseam, or perhaps with a Nietzschean flavor—the tragic pretentious subject. To overturn and struggle against this dogmatic image of thought in its various actualizations (science education being the actual case here) is to arrive at a fresh philosophy, a new way of thinking education, which in Deleuze’s words would be:

the condition of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear more clearly: instead of being supported by a moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of this Image and the “postulates” it implies. It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical. (1994, p. 167)

Deleuze connects several postulates to the dogmatic image of thought, and in relation to the Anthropocene “overturning” outlined here the first postulate related to recognition and representation is especially critical in regard to the Anthropocene, which is why Colebrook was right in mentioning the other representations, such as the Capitalocene, the Corporatocene and similar versions of the concept of the human age (Colebrook, 2016). Following Deleuze’s method of dramatization in regard to science education to overturn the Anthropocene is thus not to ask, “what is it,” but instead “what can it do” and to locate the active affirmative part of the dogmatic image of thought within the Anthropocene and link it in turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of individuation and becoming. Science educators should didactically pose the active question, “What can the Anthropocene do?” in the largest sense of the word, linking the thinking about the Anthropocene with bodily activity. One such instance of “Anthropocenic” didactics, which recently has sprung up in science education in Denmark is the activity of picking up garbage near the coastline (or around the schools in general). Such an endeavor seems to both highlight the futility of the activity, while combining it with the larger question “What can I do?,” potentially opening up the issue that “I” is both the problem here and potential solution, connecting local bodily activity to global bodily activity. For the concept of the Anthropocene to be adequate in Spinozist and Deleuzian terms, it needs to be connected to processes of becoming instead of an “I,” or perhaps more aptly an fractured “I” showing the composition of processes of becoming, before the “we” can be articulated adequately.

The Anthropocene and Becoming-Animal

Climate change and global warming are starring in Hollywood movie after Hollywood movie depicting the end of days due to their vicious effects—now recast as the great villain of the twenty-first century. Climate change is a vicious monster and who other than the radical activist can combat it? However, the villainizing of climate change is an effect of the dogmatic image of thought—it becomes a person, a global international representation: “the evil corporate American president Donald Trump, who ignores global warming” or “the evil militaristic president Jair Bolsonaro, who ignores the consequences of burning the Amazon” and so forth. But make no mistake, modern capitalism and its various presidents and spokesmen are THE overall problematic of the twenty-first century (just to stipulate that this is not a defense or negligence of Donald Trump and his Twitter regime of stupidity or Jair Bolsonaro’s politics), and its effects are terrible, the personification and villainizing does not help us understand the Anthropocene and let us arrive at a point where it becomes clear that “man [sic] follows nature,” to paraphrase Spinoza. Only by connecting the drastic changes of the world to the multiplicity and the constant changes within us can one arrive at an understanding. Seeing the reason to change is a principle of necessity, not as a villain to fight, but simply as living a life.

Deleuze and Guattari drew upon the writings of H.P. Lovecraft to explain becoming-animal and our fascination and horror with the multiplicity within us and as an “Outsider.” Lovecraft writes in his novel The Call of Cthulhu about this condition of humanity:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (2002, p. 139)

Exactly the abject nature of the Anthropocene posited as something inevitable, something foreign and coming from beyond our existence and ultimately something outside of our scope, reason, and influence is the dogmatic image of thought conjured—a conjuration which installs a concept of the Anthropocene, as an inhumanity outside of our control, whose intent is to devour and dissolve us. In other words, to adequately understand the Anthropocene is to link it to Deleuze’s notion of becoming-animal (and other related becomings). Deleuze and Guattari drew upon the writings of H.P. Lovecraft to explain becoming-animal and our fascination and horror with the multiplicity within us and as an “Outsider.” Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming is on one hand drastically simple and easy to understand, as the myriad of biological processes within us, ever-changing and the engines behind our individuation, but following solely this vein of thinking leads us to Michael DeLanda’s somewhat “scientific” interpretation of Deleuze (see for instance [DeLanda, 2013], which in my perspective drastically reduces Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming). On the other hand, the connection between the biological processes of becoming and our psyche is harder to explain without unpacking Deleuze and Guattari’s particular take on Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychology in general (and how literature, the arts and so forth shows us / open up to processes of becoming). The various becomings (animal, other and so forth) are the realization, the crack in the surface of the “I,” where individuation slips through and the potential appears for the abandonment of subjectivity. To summarize Leonard Lawlor’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming:

In Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is never a process of imitating, yet the one who becomes finds himself before another who ends up being in oneself. With the other in me, however, I am not substituting myself for another; the structure of becoming is not reciprocal. It is a zigzag in which I become other so that the other may become something else, but this becoming something else is possible only if a work (oeuvre) is produced. (2008, p. 170)

The drawing called Dredging up the Arcadian Dawn by C. Bang, Fig. 5.1 below, depicts the problematic of the Anthropocene and the conceptual representation offered by the dogmatic image of thought, as a veritable Lovecraftian monstrous swamp thing rising from the undifferentiated ground and feeding when the stars are right. But the monster is dredged up “within,” it is always and already inside us. We are all Deep Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos, or as Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus, “We are all schizos” (1983, p. 87). To adequately capture the linkage between the Anthropocene and becoming, one needs a heuristic vehicle, actualized in a conceptual persona, which takes us by the hand and shows us how the determinism, causality, and inhumanness of the world are linked to our understanding, our ratio. In other words, we turn to Laplace’s writings and Feynman’s lecture to dramatize the idea of the Anthropocene.

Fig. 5.1
A drawing of a swamp area has trees on both sides, a moon at the far end, and a creature standing in the water in the center.

Drawing by C. Bang

Full size image

Overturning the First Trait of the Anthropocene: The Ordered Universe or God as a Hypothesis

In the last section, we saw the monstrous conceptual representation of the Anthropocene, as a veritable Lovecraftian monster. This heuristic vehicle for understanding the Anthropocene in science education has (at least) two traits, which allows us to crack it open, to dramatize it and potentially revisit the concept and overturn it through connecting it to processes of becoming. The first trait is the otherness, the abject nature of the Anthropocene, as something which happens outside us, outside our zone of control, something which escapes reason and our ability to do something about it. It becomes geological, inevitable, the churning of the age and epochs slowly moving toward humanity’s doom. This trait is a monstrous form of determinism which we trace and dramatize here through Laplace. The second trait is the doomed hero and antagonist in Lovecraft’s stories, the agent of reason, the Man of Science set up to fail in the uncovering of the monstrous. There is no salvation of reason in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, only the potential to go mad if you dare to look close enough. Lovecraft’s actualized Man of Science is the “shadow” or perhaps the unconscious of the Man of Science seen in Feynman’s lectures, which doesn’t allow for the monstrous, which sees science as an apt focus of reason, but fails to aim at a totality or synthesis between human and nature. In other words, the wild side of Niels Bohr’s complementarity principles and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity have been filtered out in favor of the zeitgeist of American reason of the 1960s where the Russians are winning in the space race.

Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer and mainly preoccupied with solving Newton’s problem of proving how the trajectories of the planets were stable and didn’t need God’s hand to uphold the machinery. Laplace used differential calculus to solve this problem, and his main work in five volumes is called Mécanique celeste. Newton’s Principia, the last volume of the Mécanique celeste, was published in 1825 (Rouse Ball, 1960). Rouse Ball refers to Laplace’s connections with Napoleon and repeats the famous conversations they anecdotally had, although other biographers are less convinced about the content of this alleged conversation, in which he famously retorts to Napoleon “I didn’t need this hypothesis (God)” (Rouse Ball, 1960).

Laplace writes famously in his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities from 1825:

We ought then to consider the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state and as the cause of that which is to follow. An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms. For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes. The human mind affords, in the perfection that it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble likeness of this intelligence. (1995, p. 2)

This account signals a certain kind of determinism, but as recently pointed out by Marij Van Strien (2014) there is more to Laplace’s above passage then a simple manifesto for causal determinism in a ordered universe. This casual determinism we often see repeated in science education as Newtonian mechanics. The intelligence Laplace refers to is God, and he conceptualizes our human mind, and the reason behind his/our discoveries, as having a resemblance, “a feeble likeness,” to this intelligence. Here we see a similarity to Spinoza’s statement deus sive natura (God or nature) and his conceptualization of human mind (Lord, 2010). The above quotation has also been termed Laplace’s demon, where the intellect referred to is a demon instead.

In other words, both in Laplace and in Spinoza’s physics and metaphysics we have a conceptualization of causality at work. To overturn the dogmatic image of thought in the Anthropocene and re-actualize it in a new science education requires a revision of causality, linking becoming-animal with the climate change (perhaps becoming-nature in its various forms), and bringing together both Laplace’s determinism and his ordered causal universe with Spinoza’s principle of sufficient reason, thus linking thinking (the dogmatic image of thought revisited) with matter in Spinoza’s parallelism. To reconceptualize the Anthropocene is to thus both to understand causality as a parallel movement consisting of (1) an expanded mechanistic determinism, a necessitarian principle and (2) the human activity of thinking. The movement toward understanding thus becomes a movement toward doing and changing according to the laws of nature, which we are governed by, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s term, understanding is becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). When humans do this, nature reacts as follows, or, as Spinoza says, in the Ethics regarding the causal nature of the Affects:

Most of those who have written about the affects, and men’s [sic] way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. […] Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies. (EIIIPref)Footnote 1

Our conceptual persona, Laplace, already had a principle of sufficient reason embedded in his philosophy (Van Strien, 2014). The task at hand with regard to the insertion into the Anthropocene is thus to slightly revisit it as a Spinozist principle of sufficient reason.

Overturning the First Trait of the Anthropocene: Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason and Laplace

Earlier we saw that the concept of the Anthropocene had two traits, which needed a revision. In the overturning, we propose that a connection has to be made between the concept of the Anthropocene and our human becoming. The first trait we attempted to overturn was a specific kind of determinism, and to overturn this I fertilized Laplace determinism with Spinoza’s metaphysics. A crucial part of Spinoza’s determinism, or more aptly his principle of necessity, is his principle of sufficient reason, which I shortly will unpack.

I agree with Michael Della Rocca’s (2003) interpretation of Spinoza’s principle of sufficient reason and how that in many ways is the overarching rationalism in Spinoza’s philosophy. The principle of sufficient reason is the “principle that each fact has an explanation or, equivalently, that there are no brute facts” (Della Rocca, 2003, p. 75). Or as we see in Spinoza‘s main work, Ethics (1996), “For each thing there must be assigned a cause for its existence and non-existence” (EIp11d2). This reading of Spinoza is more rationalistic than the more usual readings deployed by new materialists and similar contemporary readers as seen, for example, in Elizabeth Grosz’s work (1994). The necessary link between causation and conceivability points backs to both Laplace and Spinoza’s great “hope” for the human mind: that we are part of the system and can thus potentially conceive it, or order things by way of the common order of nature, which is parallel to the order of the intellect. Laplace and Spinoza’s “hope” is similar to a hope for science education, that through adequate concept, experimental didactics and so forth humanity can “become” more rational and wiser. This positivity of Spinoza’s philosophy is highly affirmed by Deleuze and is thus in sharp contrast to arguments more pessimist and fatalistic regarding the human race. In Laplace, we can see the principle of sufficient reason directly quoted just before the statement on the intellect/demon:

The connection between present and preceding events is based on the evident principle that a thing cannot come into existence without there being a cause to produce it. This axiom, known as the principle of sufficient reason, extends even to actions between which one is indifferent. The freest will is unable to give rise to them without a specific reason; for if, all circumstances of two situations being exactly the same, it (ie. the will) were acting in the one but not in the other, its choice would be an effect without cause; it would then, says Leibniz, be the blind chance of the Epicureans. The contrary opinion is an illusion of the mind that, losing sight of the fleeting reasons for the choice of the will in matters between which we are indifferent, persuades itself that it (ie. the choice) is determined of its own accord and without motives. (1995, p. 2)

In the above essay, Laplace’s account of the principle of sufficient reason refers to causes instead of reason, unlike Leibniz’s version of this principle. Van Strien rightly points out Laplace’s determinism is more in line with Spinoza’s principle of sufficient reason than Leibniz’s. We see causes in Laplace’s determinism, but not a notion of final causation, which again is similar to Spinoza’s refutation of this. I have argued that the principle of sufficient reason is a crucial rationalist strand in Spinoza’s philosophy and in Laplace’s physics and philosophy, and that this principle becomes a crucial pivot, which breaks the dogmatic image of thought open, potentially overturning by the mere inclusion of this principle together with the other major Spinozist principle—the principle of necessity or Spinoza’s necessitarianism.

Spinoza’s necessitarianism is linked to his principle of sufficient reason. Here I agree with Della Rocca’s conclusion that Spinoza’s dual commitment to explaining existence and causation leads to a necessitarian principle or, as he says, “to insist that existence not be treated as a mystery” (Della Rocca, 2003, p. 90). I think this insistence is the core of Spinoza’s rationalism and why you, for instance, in Spinoza’s work Theological-Political Treatise (Curley, 2016) encounter one of the first historical criticisms of the Bible and the “miracles” reported within. In other words, Spinoza’s philosophy is both a new naturalism and a new rationalism. Both principles articulated above, together with Laplace’s determinism, can be encultured, or perhaps injected like a virus, in the concept of the Anthropocene to be utilized in science education. First, when you have reiterated what a concept is (and can do) in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, we can fully understand the ramifications of how the Anthropocene can be actualized in science education. Before we can return to this enculturation of the Anthropocene, the second trait of the dogmatic image of thought in the Anthropocene needs to be briefly unpacked.

Overturning the Second Trait of the Anthropocene: Richard P. Feynman’s Man of Science

I stated earlier that the second trait of the Anthropocene was linked to a specific way of thinking by the scientific hero or the stereotypical scientist. Similar to our dramatization of Laplace, we are not presenting a critique of Feynman’s lectures here, rather we are searching for the instances where the lectures (or conceptual persona of Feynman) points toward a link between thinking in flows and forces, ultimately paving the way of seeing a connection between human nature and the forces of the cosmos. In short, we are searching for a new, more monstrous blueprint of the scientific hero. Feynman is a very good example of the Man of Science, and the lectures are another example of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, where he constantly links his teachings of space and the cosmos to the Russian success in this endeavor (this is 1963), thus politically highlighting issues regarding the state of science education in America and the higher education arms race. In his lecture on the theory of gravity (preempted by his lecture on probability) we see though how he opens up for a way of thinking science, of how to formulate an active participation in regard to understanding in his remarks “What else can we understand when we understand gravity?” and “What else can you do with the law of gravitation?” (Feynman et al., 1963). Earlier in the lecture, he used the example of the moon and the tides, which both shows the potential confusion of the human mind in regard to the phenomena, and also how the understanding of gravitation solves our “common sense” issues. Finally, he points toward the need to establish a connection between theories of different forces and remarks how closely electrical forces resemble gravitational forces. Feynman’s lecture thus overall becomes an example of the necessity of connecting our various ways of understanding, how everything fits together and how our understanding increases in terms of flows, seeing flows and systems between various forces. The revisited scientific hero or “Human of Science” sees in terms of flows and forces, constantly linking the cosmos and nature to the nature and thinking “within.” Feynman’s statement below aptly summarizes this particular form of rationalism and hope of understanding the universe and resonates clearly with Spinoza’s hope for humanity and our rationality:

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the effect on the history of science produced by this great success of the theory of gravitation. Compare the confusion, the lack of confidence, the incomplete knowledge that prevailed in the earlier ages, when there were endless debates and paradoxes, with the clarity and simplicity of this law—this fact that all the moons and planets and stars have such a simple rule to govern them, and further that man could understand it and deduce how the planets should move! This is the reason for the success of the sciences in the following years, for it gave hope that the other phenomena of the world might also have such beautifully simple laws. (Feynman et al., 1963)

The Gravity of the Anthropocene

After having unpacked and dramatized the two traits of the Anthropocene and how to overturn the concept of the Anthropocene, I return to science education and outline how this can be adequately linked.

I thus insert both Laplace and Spinoza’s principles and determinism in the concept of the Anthropocene as such together with Feynman’s new scientific hero, showing an outline of how science education can use the Anthropocene in its various practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between functives and concepts in their last work What is Philosophy (1994) helps us to didactically understand the dogmatic image of thought in regard to the Anthropocene and the task for educators. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The object of science is not concepts but rather functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems. The elements of functions are called functives. A scientific notion is defined not by concepts but by functions or propositions. (1994, p. 117)

If we take the law of gravitation\( F=G\ \frac{mm^{\prime }}{r^2} \), which Feynman famously dubbed “one of the most far-reaching generalizations of the human mind” (Feynman et al., 1963, pp. 7–11), we see an example of one of the functions Deleuze and Guattari refer to. This function “discursively states” how every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies (m and m’) is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them (Feynman et al., 1963).

This function has no relation to philosophy as such but is used by scientists to reflect and communicate (inserted in discursive systems and so forth). But as Deleuze and Guattari continue: “when an object—a geometrical space, for example—is scientifically constructed by functions, its philosophical concept, which is by no means given in the function, must still be discovered” (1994, p. 117). Gravitation is thus simultaneously a philosophical concept, a concept related to bodily individuations, multiplicities and becomings. For example, consider a child in the early stages of life experimenting with gravitation, with object-permanency and so forth. A life is by itself, experimentation with gravitation. We get up, we fall, we see objects falling, and so on. In other words, we are surrounded by forces of gravitation.

The function often referred to as mechanistic determinism in physics is \( \frac{d^2r}{d{t}^2}=F(r) \), a function which discursively states that if we have all the information of all the positions, velocities, and forces present, we can predict the future and past states of the system in question (Van Strien, 2014) is often attributed to Laplace. This function though has nothing to do with the philosophical principle of sufficient reason and isn’t derived from it. I agree with Van Strien’s conclusion (which corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctions quoted above) that Laplace’s determinism stems from his philosophy and the law of continuation, not from his mechanics (Van Strien, 2014). When inserting Laplace’s determinism in the Anthropocene it is a philosophical determinism we graft onto the Anthropocene, not specific functions. It is the Anthropocene as a philosophical concept we are interested in, wrested from a dogmatic image of thought. The didactical task becomes then a matter of connecting the understanding of how gravitation works in nature with how gravitation plays out in our body and daily life.

An Outline of the Revisited Anthropocene

A science education, or perhaps more accurately a science didactics, based upon Spinozist principles can only be outlined here but is necessarily linked to experimentation of bodies and of sensation as Aislinn O’Donnell points out (2018), while simultaneously being an activity of thinking, of ratio, and of linking functions to phenomena in an expanded notion of scientific inquiry (Bang, 2018). To understand the Anthropocene in terms of the principle of sufficient reason, Spinoza’s necessitarianism, and Laplace’s determinism is to understand climate change as a cause, the natural reaction to human capitalism and the folly of human being conceptualized as a “subject.” It is an insistence to understand and link the multiplicity and change outside us, to the multiplicity and change inside us, our various becomings. Understanding climate change and the Anthropocene is similar to understanding necessary bodily cycles like the menstrual cycle, bowel movements, human aging, and so forth. Linking the inevitability of the processes of the body with the inevitability of the geological processes. In other words, if we return to the example of garbage collection near the Danish coastline, children collect garbage in science education not to improve the environment as such but to understand the processes of waste in themselves and how they affect the world. Only through these didactics of connections through our ratio can we begin to have a practice in science education, which connects our bodies to the changes in the world bodies, linking weather systems to hormone cycles, starvation to fossil fuels, and, to paraphrase Nietzsche, everything is a matter of health especially our morals and collective living. Everything is devoid of notions of ecological morality, or perhaps more accurately we can glimpse a new ethics. “Thou shall not” has no place in Spinozist didactics, and the Spinozist virtues are what is already healthy for us—they are what we already are and become in nature.