An Ecological Crisis with an Epistemological Cause
Most accounts of the Anthropocene run on carbon, capital, or population. Elisa Frassetto’s runs on knowledge.
The term is recent. Anthropocene — from the Greek anthrôpos, human, and kainos, new — was popularized around 2000 by the Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen and the American biologist Eugene Stoermer to name an epoch in which human activity has become a geological force. Frassetto, who completed a doctorate in education sciences at the Université de Haute-Alsace, accepts the epoch and rejects its usual picture. Domination is the wrong metaphor. Her word is avulsion, borrowed deliberately from medicine and law: a part torn away from the body it belonged to.
Her example is the flooding of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, where recurrent inundation has buried some of Europe’s most intensive farmland under successive layers of mud. That agriculture did not conquer its ecosystem. It seceded from it, and now cannot survive the ecosystem’s ordinary violence. The failure is not excessive power but lost membership. And membership, in Frassetto’s account, is lost first in how we know.
Three Ways of Knowing
The argument rests on a taxonomy of three cognitive faculties.
Conceptual thinking explains the world by freeing itself from images and, partly, from the senses. It has an analytic form — Cartesian, working by reduction and specialization, insisting that the subject be severed from the object to guarantee objectivity — and a synthetic form that moves inductively toward unity. Held in tension, the two produce what Frassetto, following the French philosopher Edgar Morin, calls complex thought: the alternative Morin proposed in 1990 to what he named “blind intelligence.”
Imaginative thinking produces knowledge through images and symbols. Frassetto draws on Gilbert Durand’s work on the symbolic imagination, and on the Greek root of symbol: an object broken in two, each half held by one party, meaningful only when rejoined.
Social thinking is not the sum of individual minds. It is the output of an organism in which the parts are shaped by the whole they contribute to — swarm intelligence, collective learning. Its classroom form is cooperative learning.
The thesis follows: European epistemology progressively expelled the second and third faculties, and school still teaches almost exclusively the first.
Seven Steps Away from the World
Frassetto tracks the widening split across seven stages, marking each with a two-letter icon — S for subject, O for object — that drifts from union to separation to strikethrough.
In prehistory, the Acheulean handaxe testifies, in Marcel Otte’s reading, to a refusal of biological limits; language then names the real and by naming pushes it away. In Greece, the Homeric world of Bruno Snell’s philology, where nature works within the person, gives way to the abstraction of Plato and Aristotle. In the Middle Ages, Averroes makes knowledge supra-individual, with imagination bridging universal and individual intellect, while Thomas Aquinas insists that intellect alone distinguishes true from false. In modernity, Descartes’ division of thinking substance from extended substance meets Giambattista Vico, who defends imagination as the primordial explanation of phenomena and the art of topics against Cartesian “solipsism.” In the industrial era, Comte’s positive spirit relegates imagination to the arts while Goethe pursues the urphänomen, the archetypal form a plant expresses. Then the sixth step: eugenics, Social Darwinism, racial theory, and the subject reduced to object of measurement. Then the camps and the bomb — and, from physics itself, a glimmer: quantum non-separability, and the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck’s topos, a structure uniting geometry, algebra, and arithmetic through the shared essences of their objects.
Where the Argument Strains
Frassetto writes that she must validate the narrowing of theory of knowledge “as the cause of the Anthropocene.” What follows is a curated procession of exemplary figures. That establishes plausibility, not causation. Charitably, she elsewhere calls the result a framework — a “category” that groups elements into coherent structure — and she works within an article’s limits. But the vocabulary of proof outruns the method on offer.
The paired-thinkers structure, a champion and an antagonist per era, is memorable and plainly pedagogical by design. In one place it costs her. Aquinas appears only as the man who says no faculty but intellect knows the true from the false. Absent is his conversio ad phantasmata: the doctrine that the human intellect cannot think at all without turning toward images. The strongest counterexample to Frassetto’s Aquinas is Aquinas. Naming it would have cost her little and strengthened the chapter.
She is in fact more scrupulous than her structure suggests. She notes that the Cartesian school, more than Descartes, performed the narrowing. And at the sixth step she concedes that social thinking was itself captured — by nationalism before 1914, then by Nazism. That admission is the essay’s most interesting unresolved tension. If the faculties she wants restored proved as available for ideological capture as the one she indicts, the diagnosis loses its asymmetry. She raises the problem and moves past it.
The turn to physics is the weakest link. Quantum non-separability concerns relations between physical systems, not between knower and known. Treating entanglement as evidence that subject and object “would be one” is analogy dressed as support. Grothendieck is the stronger case and receives less room.
The Vico She Doesn’t Use
Vico carries the anti-Cartesian argument nearly alone, and he is cited from a single 1708 text, the inaugural oration On the Study Methods of Our Time. The instruments that would serve her best go unused. Verum ipsum factum — the true and the made are convertible, so we know with certainty what we ourselves have made — is precisely the epistemology her framework requires, because it grounds knowing in participation rather than detached observation. So does sapienza poetica, the poetic wisdom of the New Science, in which the first humans thought in images because they could not yet think in concepts. Frassetto asserts that imaginative thinking precedes conceptual thinking. Vico wrote a book arguing it. Given the weight he bears, the thinness is conspicuous.
Conversations Not Had
Snell’s claim that the Homeric Greeks lacked a unified sense of self has been contested for decades, most influentially by Bernard Williams. Frassetto cites it as settled.
The absences are more striking. Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist account of “hyperseparation” describes almost exactly what Frassetto calls avulsion. Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture treats the nature-culture split as one ontology among several rather than the human condition. Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind proposes the systemic epistemology she wants, arguably more directly than Morin does. None appears.
She also cites Jason W. Moore while passing over his central claim: that the Capitalocene, not the Anthropocene, names the culprit — a specific way of organizing nature, not humanity as such. Frassetto’s universal “Man,” a French-language convention that lands differently in English, is exactly what Moore disputes.
The bibliography compounds this. The reference list stops at Russell; Snell, Otte, Baschet, Coccia, Villani, Sartre, Comte, Galton, Grothendieck, and others are cited in text without entries. Vico is dated 1708 and Aquinas 1267, by composition rather than edition, leaving the reader unsure which text is in hand. Nearly every classical source is read in French translation, which narrows engagement with the anglophone scholarship on these same figures.
What Would Change on Monday
The pedagogical payoff arrives late and briefly, and Frassetto says as much, directing readers to her thesis and a companion article. Flipped classrooms, self-regulated learning, problem-based learning, transdisciplinary curricula organized around projects, cooperative learning made structural rather than occasional, and regular exercises in reading images for their symbolic weight. Sensible, and largely present already in the literature she cites.
That is the honest accounting: the history is the contribution, the pedagogy is the promissory note. Read as a proof of causation, the essay overreaches. Read as what she calls it — a framework for grouping elements into coherent structure — it does something useful and rare. It lets teachers see subject divisions, assessment habits, and the default to individual work as epistemological commitments rather than administrative facts. That reframing is worth the seven steps.
Frassetto, Elisa. “How Can We Educate for a Sustainable Future? An Epistemological Framework to Investigate the Path Leading to the Anthropocene and How School Can Prepare for the Future.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d.
Leave a Reply