process studies supplement...
Process Studies Supplement 12 (2008)
Overcoming Anthropocentric Humanism and Radical Anti-Humanism: Contours of the Constructive Postmodernist Environmental Epistemology
by Adam C. Scarfe, Ph.D., M.Ed.Drawing on eco-psychology’s central problematic concerning the assumed conceptual bifurcation between the human self and the natural world, which is prevalent in contemporary modern culture, this paper explores the main contours of constructive postmodernist environmental epistemology, as exemplified by Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational thought. With reference to characterizations of the modern and deconstructive postmodern paradigms derived from Sartre’s existentialism and Derrida’s deconstructionism, it sets forth a novel demonstration of how Whitehead’s process-relational way of thinking, as representative of a critical, non-anthropocentric organicism, overcomes both the anthropocentric humanist assumptions of the modern paradigm, which are at the root of the ecological crisis, as well as the anti-humanism common to both deconstructive postmodernism and radical ecologism. I show how process-relational environmental epistemology can contribute to the cultivation of a heightened awareness of the prehensive character of human experience in our culture, by which the human self is, in part, constituted, with a concern to limit the rate and extent of the appropriation, consumption, and destruction of “the natural” belonging to many forms of human creativity, thereby tempering the “attack on the environment” via reasoned self-limitation. At the same time, I point out that process-relational environmental epistemology seeks to allow for sustainable levels of development, human creativity, life-satisfaction, and self-enjoyment.