Nowadays, nature is something foreign to the human being. It is material that the human being uses, makes available, and exploits without scruples. But the human being is never a subject outside of space: he is always in lived and experienced relations to space, which determine and influence him. The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. In order to fulfil his or her life, the human being has to be able to listen to the voice of (...) nature, and abstain from the wish to control it. In such a field the lost reverence for the living world can be cultivated. Responsibility for nature is not an empty phrase, but a moral imperative that is directly connected with human life and survival. This is why we must protect the integrity of nature, and demand there be a better relationship between the human being and nature. This paper discusses the bioethical principle of 'reverence' (German Ehrfurcht ) for the living world, a concept initially presented by Albert Schweitzer using anthropological-pedagogical methods. The point of view advanced here is based on the anthropological approach of the philosopher and pedagogue O. F. Bollnow, and makes use of work by the pedagogue Yukichi Shitahodo about the anthropological preconditions of relations between a human being and the exterior world. The thesis that 'reverence' could be the basic bioethical principle governing the relationship between a human being and his environment is also founded on the modern bioethics, particularly the 'principle of responsibility' and the 'ethical imperative of prudence' as these have been formulated by philosophical biology and anthropology. (shrink)

Against the prevailing outcomes-based education and the instrumentalization of education, a movement has arisen towards holistic education. This aims to go beyond objective measurement of the outcomes of education in order to treat the student as a whole person. In this paper, we shall examine some strands of education in Japan which in some way or another feature the idea of the whole person. This includes the tradition of clinical pedagogy, which originated in Kyoto University, Yukichi Shitahodo’s educational anthropology (...) (Kyoiku-Ningengaku), Kuniyoshi Obara’s Zenjin Education (the education of the whole person) and holistic education. Notwithstanding the fact that such education is benevolent in intention, it can be miseducative in some respects. In the light of this, and with some reference to criticism of the idea of the whole person, we shall point to an alternative vision of education of the whole person following Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism – a perfectionism that is thoroughly anti-foundationalist and that transcends self-entrapment in circulatory discourse on the whole. In critical dialogue between the rich traditions of Japanese thought and the critical voice of liberalism raised from within the West, we hope to find a more nuanced answer to the question of how being a whole might make sense. (shrink)