Enlightening the Anthropocene: reconsidering anthropocentrism for environmental education

Abstract

This paper argues that the Anthropocene must be understood not primarily as a geological epoch but as an epistemic and ethical condition in which human action becomes inseparably entangled with natural and technological processes. In this hybrid world of “third nature,” the most urgent challenge is a pervasive misrecognition of humanity’s own role in shaping planetary systems. Against the objection that appeals to an undifferentiated humanity conceal specific interests, this misrecognition is reconstructed as unequally distributed and in part deliberately produced, which makes recognition a political rather than merely cognitive achievement. The paper develops the concept of Anthropocene enlightenment as a form of collective self-understanding that exceeds the individually addressed notion of Enlightenment. Because responsibility presupposes recognition, the primary educational task is argued to be hermeneutic before it is moral. Education emerges as the infrastructure of collective recognition, and is specified here in a worked pedagogical sequence.