Abstract

In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant (1784) proposed the close connection between the Enlightenment political project, the aims of education and the philosophical logic of emancipation. In short, he confirmed the Enlightenment subject and condition as an “ultimate destination” of humanity and thus a central aim of education. In this chapter, I aim to articulate how the conditions of the Anthropocene—as revealed through the Anthropocene subject (see (Dufresne, The democracy of suffering: Life on the edge of catastrophe, philosophy in the Anthropocene. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2019))—problematises or distorts this prevailing view of emancipation as handed down from Kant and the Enlightenment, with significant implications for education. Interestingly, this comparison reveals that, while Kant’s Enlightenment subject is rather an archetype proposal for a globalist, cosmopolitan world of the future, unbound by dogma and religion, the contemporary Anthropocene subject is not an idea or proposal at all but rather, a real, material and embodied instantiation—the result of being thrown into a world (and a body) irrevocably changed and marked by human exploitation of planetary resources and systems. I conclude by sketching a notion of emancipation suitable or responsive to life and education in the Anthropocene. I propose, engaging with Biesta (World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge, 2021) and Stables (Be (com)ing human: Semiosis and the myth of reason. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), that emancipatory education in the Anthropocene is cultivated through an awareness and responsibility that is enacted within realising limits and limitations, most fundamentally, the limits of a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity. In conclusion, I discuss how a wilding approach to environmental education (Morse et al., Policy Futures in Education 19:262–268, 2021) in the era of the Anthropocene may be resonant with the notion of pedagogical emancipation sketched in this chapter.