The cyanobacterium that I would therefore like to be. First-person sustainability and epistemic independence

Despite the significant delay that all Western democracies have accumulated in pursuing the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the failure to reduce carbon emissions at the levels indicated by the 2015 Paris agreement, European institutions and third sector organizations have recently made a considerable theoretical effort to propose sustainability frameworks.

With the so-called GreenComp (Bianchi et al., 2022), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) has proposed twelve competences for sustainability, organized into four dimensions: Values, Complexity, Future Imagination, Action. Twenty-three inner development goals have instead been identified by a transnational survey coordinated by a non-profit organization named Inner Development Goals (IDG)¹. In a manner not dissimilar from the GreenComp but with a non-institutional approach, the IDGs are organized into five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting, with an emphasis on collaboration, the bridge between inner growth and cultural change (Ankrah et al., 2023).

Both proposals, supported by years of field research and consultations with experts and scientists, implicitly or explicitly distance themselves from a traditional approach in terms of "problem and solution to the problem." The GreenComp does so explicitly by introducing the notion of a "wicked problem," a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve. In its glossary, we find both a definition of a "wicked problem" and a definition of "transformative learning" (Bianchi et al., 2022, p. 33). The latter is centered on the learner and a new epistemology that prioritizes a holistic first-person dimension, guided by the bodily metaphor "head, heart, hands," over the allegedly objective facts of third-person science (Bianchi et al., 2022, p. 17).

First-person sustainability

Starting to build from these premises, a lifelong learning (LLL) program for first-person sustainability should:

Criterion 1: Promote the ability to act creatively, distancing oneself from problems that might be unsolvable, with the additional conditions:

Criterion 1A: by drawing on direct experience and using language sensitive to nuances of meaning.

Criterion 1B: ... and through attention to the feeling of truth.

Condition 1B is derived from the reversal of one of the ten requirements that, according to Rittel & Webber, 1973, characterize a wicked problem. Among these ten criteria, all satisfied by climate change according to Richard Heinberg, 2023, the absence of "true" solutions stands out. The search for truth identifies a genuine philosophical horizon. Among the various possible philosophical approaches, 1A and 1B together indicate the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his interpreters as an ideal candidate, due to the emphasis on creative freedom, but not only. A quote from G. Deleuze clarifies the connection between this philosophy and Criterion 1:

We are wrong to believe that the true and the false can only be brought to bear on solutions, that they only begin with solutions. This prejudice is social (for society, and the language that transmits its order words, set up ready-made problems, as if they were drawn out of 'the city’s administrative filing cabinets' and force us to 'solve' them, leaving us only a thin margin of freedom). (Deleuze, 1991, p. 15)

The meta-problem of a philosophical approach to personal sustainability then becomes that of transforming a problem handed down to us through bureaucratic language without, however, discarding it. In my perspective, that of a hermeneutics of life, transformation can only occur if we rely on our organismic wisdom, also identified by Bergson, a theorist of evolution, as read by a Deleuze (writing in 1966, before his collaboration with Guattari):

Life is essentially determined in the act of avoiding obstacles, stating and solving a problem. The construction of the organism is both the stating of a problem and a solution. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 16)

I cited this passage from Deleuze, interpreter of Bergson, to demonstrate how even the most radical of "metaphysical" thinkers cannot help but project the object of cognition (the problem), which requires a subject to possess (solve) it, onto organisms that—very likely—don't solve problems but avoid them. And they avoid them not because they foresee a future different from the past before it becomes a dangerous present to tune into, but because they have inherited bodies so “embedded” with their nourishing environments that “all that they have to do” is to follow up. Bodies inherited from ancestors who “handed down” evolutionary niches in which to be born, grow, and die without crossing over into anthropized environments where the crossing means accidental death.

If we bear this in mind, the human-only problematic question “How can we then construct our action so that it corresponds to that of an evolved organism, simultaneously a statement and a solution to the problem” must find an answer that avoids cognitivism and its projection on living beings of brains, neuronal nets, digital and analogical machines. The theories that as human beings we can construct to respond to our life situations in the ecological crisis must form “naked universals” born out of an interaction with ancestral forms of life. It is clear then that an answer to this question is then to be found not so much in Bergson as read by Deleuze, but in Bergson as read by Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty & Sini, 2008, p. 35) and in Eugene Gendlin (1997). In fact, Deleuze (1991, p.18), considered the imaginative act that throws truth into the past to be an illusion. The other two philosophers instead have seen in the "retrograde movement of truth" a fundamental property of truth (Merleau-Ponty) or of the occurrence (emergence) of meaning (Gendlin).

A spiral of hermeneutic action

In my proposal - a reading of Gendlin, 1997, 2004, 2009 – the "retrograde movement of truth" can become anterograde, i.e. a spiral of hermeneutic action, provided that the feeling of truth occurs twice: once in the process of experiential 'derivation' of a sustainable action step, and a second (third, fourth …) time in the process of deriving new meanings from the decision to experiment with the action step in one or more given contexts of personal life. The retrograde movement of truth becomes heuristic action because in it we reconceptualize the past, we regenerate it and thus liberate the sense of self-efficacy that facilitates the transition to sustainable action.

Throughout his career, the pragmatist philosopher Eugene T. Gendlin (1926-2017) has given rise to two practices of reconceptualizing the past: i) 'Focusing' (reconceptualization of personal past, mostly painful or traumatic) and ii) 'TAE' (reconceptualization of the theoretical constructs of the collective past). Miniatures of evolution, MoE, is my proposal for transformative learning inspired by these two practices, which satisfies Criterion 1 and allows for hermeneutic action starting from a personal reconceptualization of the theoretical construct "evolution."

The proposal aims to facilitate the transformation of sustainability into an evolutionary task, filling a void of ideation between the "internal (personal)" and "external (collective)" dimensions, a void that shows how the weak, fundamentally siloed, interdisciplinarity allowed by normal science, the talk of a systemic “emergence” from chaos or complexity, and the very same frameworks I have mentioned at the beginning have not healed the wound that disconnects us from nature. In fact, we may suspect that this wound cannot be healed until we learn to unlearn our strong dependence from technology and our use of performative language to cover up what we do not know, instead of attending to it in silence, suspending judgement. Contrary to post-modernism and post-humanism that assume that language is everything, Gendlin, together with Merleau-Ponty and David Abram, holds a completely different view of the relationship between nature and culture. Here is what he says:

Today Merleau-Ponty is made to seem foolish, as if he didn't know about cultural differences once there is language, and as if he wrote in language about perception and a body without language, as if he didn't know that he could not know about how they functioned without language. No, that isn't so. It is rather from how perception and the body do now function, still in a much wider way than language, that he tried to show their primacy and priority. (…) it is not the five senses, but the sentient bodily interaction that takes on language and history—and then always still exceeds them. (Gendlin, 1992, p.345)

Of course, we do not now have the body just as it existed before and without language. But that first body still functions now. After and with language it implies and moves beyond language. (Gendlin, 1992, p. 350)

In my reception of this statement by Gendlin in MoE, I have not given it an axiomatic status. We must verify in practice, without assuming it, whether the postulated capacity of the body to go beyond what has already been said is an effective capacity that we humans still possess or can recover in a suitable learning environment. In fact, the personal theories of evolution are couched in a language that has only one-axiom for non-binary thinking,

“Evolution is not progress and is not non-progress.”

Abduction

But the transitivity law of equality or identity - that is traditionally credited to Euclid - does not come in MoE as a principle but rather as a rule of inference that leads to a puzzling conclusion and thus initiates the retrograde movement of trying to find an “explanation” for it. This expedient (no first principles, yes to logical patterns of inference as heuristic suggestions) might appear to be a technical gimmick, but it reflects a non-occasional reading of Aristotle. The aporia "we can prove nothing" (because first principles are unprovable and all proof depends on them) or we can prove everything (because circular proof exists for everything), which was highly debated in Aristotle's time, still holds true today. As is well known, Aristotle—a strategist in attributing to humans the mental capacities his metaphysics required—resolves it in a way that appears artificial by creating a specific faculty for apprehending first principles, the nous. When it comes to disseminating the geometric and scientific truths intuited through this faculty by the few “first-knowers”, however, both Euclid and Aristotle operate pragmatically, through a circularity between theoretical terms (first for things in themselves) and observational terms (first for human beings). This undoubtedly represents unprecedented historical evidence for the construction of abstract universals through their observable instances, and vice versa, of the construction of observational terms through the theoretical context that requires observation.

To demonstrate how the abductive rule of inference works in introducing new terms into personal theories of evolution, I offer my own example, already discussed in Galanti, 2024.

1. Evolution (B) = being surrounded by friendly green presences (A)

2. Evolution (B) = awaiting the return of the sun (C)

The first premise is a metaphor derived from the condensation of various personal life situations. The green presences are trees but also young people, surrounding me with their desire to remain alive in the ecological crisis. The second premise derives from third-person science: it evokes the beginning of life on earth with the production of oxygen from solar energy by cyanobacteria. Using the “abductive” rule of inference d) ², I derive the conclusion,

3. being surrounded by friendly green presences (A) = awaiting the return of the sun (C).

The feeling that “some truth must be there” is accompanied by surprise, as the “primacy of identity” breaks down as soon as we substitute real concepts to the variable letters: what do these two different situations held together by a generic equality sign have in common? What do they point to? Identity could drift away into nothingness or even despair, if we wanted to speak in deleuzian-guattarian terms. However, it is rarely so for the existential experimenter, who prefers to complete the enthymeme through what I call “naked universals” in a process that the medieval commentators on Aristotle called inventio medii.

Trust in the environment

From immersion in personal experience and biophilic imagination emerges the new, existential middle term "trust in the environment," by completing the missing links in a very adventurous process of free associations,

• being surrounded by friendly green presences = how can young people be friendly to me? = only if they were to trust me !

• awaiting the return of the sun = how beneficial for my aging body to sit on a bench in a park waiting for the clouds to move away from the sun = the cyanobacteria must find the sun beneficial as well, they remain in position and wait because the sun cycle on earth is very regular = cyanobacteria trust the sun!

The new hypothesis “Evolution = trust in the environment” is now ready to be tested in my personal life situations (where I now tend to build trust before going into a stage of common endeavors) and in nature (where I absorb the trust that big oak trees build in their trunk to ground myself on epistemic resilience). While I avoid charging the new term with all the silly inferences suggested by my body during the process, the main inference that emerges has given the title to this paper. It clearly echoes Derrida’s title in Derrida, 2008, underlying – not without irony – that the post-modernist scholar must confess his convergence with Aristotle for his clear identification of Derrida’s membership in the animal class. I, on the other hand, have no hesitation in acknowledging my debt to Aristotle for having emphasized, cultivated, and developed the persuasive power that personal inferences have when it comes to reading beyond what the opinions of the majority—the doxa—emphatically propose as possible.

Conclusive remarks

1. After one year of prototyping, Miniatures of Evolution has become a series of seven webinars that I will start offering online in April 2026 with the program you can find here and a presentation on January 20th, 2026, that you can attend by registering here.

2. Miniatures of Evolution has also brought me to develop “annexes” to my personal theory of evolution, where I try to bridge some of Bateson’s thinking with Gendlin’s and some of Heidegger’s. One such annex is the concept of “epistemic independence” defined as an emergent property of the triadic relation between patterned knowledge coming from a past tradition (usually from science), human body knowing coming from felt sense and all possible life situations deriving from actual living beings on Earth. “Epistemic independence” is then not an outcome of a human-only endeavor but is not a Platonist or metaphysical entity either. Writing personal theories of evolution facilitates the emergence of this evolutionary property, needed by human beings to face the challenges of a likely collapse of “modernity” without having first reclaimed agency.

3. Epistemic independence is ungrounded in Heidegger’s sense, but it grounds epistemic resilience, which is a state of recursive learning derived from keeping stable the context of the verification of the existential hypothesis. Epistemic resilience is then a key factor in the decentered version of humanism that I wish to contrast with post-humanism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism. Decentered humanism is a “re-humanism” where Indigenous knowledge plays a substantial role, especially as “second-order totemism”, an elective form of totemism shared by the creative scientist and the experiential-experimental philosopher alike.

Acknowledgement: I thank Francesco Varanini for recognizing my independence of thought and the inevitable outcome to which this leads: exclusion from the halls of power, including from peer-reviewed publication in academic journals that pursue lines of “research” whose outcomes are totally predetermined by the language they use.

References

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