Introduction
Observing the complex of crises – what some have called a “polycrisis” – that is threatening the planet and human societies at an alarming rate and putting young people in a constant crisis mode, contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues that a philosophy of education must be reimagined to preserve both knowledge and democracy. He recognises the need for a new pedagogy to address the gravity of the polycrisis in its many environmental, economic, technological and social dimensions, as well as the root causes of our collective inability to respond to it meaningfully. Consider, for example, how the climate crisis, a defining threat of our era, is profoundly reshaping the learning environment for students. The World Court has declared climate change an “urgent and existential threat…of planetary proportions” (The Economist, 2025). Recent extreme weather events have destroyed communities and disrupted education for millions of students globally (UNICEF, 2024). Equally worrisome are the diminished biodiversity and the depletion of natural resources such as clean air, water and arable land. Other devastating effects of the polycrisis can be seen in the growing accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, raising the Earth’s temperature to a dangerously high level. All told, the eroding conditions for planetary life have only amplified anxieties about the planet’s future.
Scientists over the last decade have increasingly recognised crisis-related emotions, such as anxiety, guilt and grief (Pihkala, Reference Pihkala2022). Anxiety is particularly prevalent among college students, who see the impact of climate change and are fearful if not overwhelmed about the environment’s future (Khalaim et al., Reference Gebrechorkos, Sheffield, Vicente-Serrano, Funk, Miralles, Khalaim and Budziszewska2024, p. 308). It is quite alarming that eco-anxiety is increasingly influencing major life choices of the younger generation, particularly the decision to have children (Sasser, Reference Sasser2024). To the extent that the polycrisis and the resulting anxiety hinder student learning, they impede the cultivation of future crisis action leaders. Our inability to address effectively the multitude of threats – threats that are caused mainly by humans – is indicative of a deeper “metacrisis.” This metacrisis is driven largely by our failure to abandon the modernist mindset of domination and conquest to reimagine a mutual relationship with the environment and our fellow human beings, as well as an inadequate educational system that has failed to engage people in such a reimagination. We experience anxiety, frustration and despair over the lack of political leadership in confronting the existential threats we face, and the inability of social and educational institutions in helping us navigate them. Caught in a numbing inertia that is difficult to move beyond, we are increasingly withdrawing into isolated virtual spaces as our only refuge. It is clear that new ways of thinking about our connection to the environment and its inhabitants, and with that, new pedagogies to engage students in meta-level analyses, are needed as first steps to mitigate the metacrisis.
To that end, we adopt an existentialist framework, particularly one based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of human freedom, to analyse our crisis situation through the lens of human authenticity. We extend Sartre’s framework to explore contemporary theorist Anne Dufourmantelle’s philosophy of risk and her call for gentleness, to propose a pedagogy of gentle risk-taking. We argue that a committed response to the metacrisis requires that we embrace freedom by taking risks passionately, wisely and responsibly. Following Dufourmantelle, we further argue that gentleness, as an eco-emotion, serves an important role in genuine risk-taking; it is simply an authentic way to be in a crisis-stricken world. A pedagogy of gentle risk-taking goes a long way to achieve Stiegler’s goal of negentropic education as an authentic response to the metacrisis through critical thinking, the deproletariatisation of knowledge, as well as a deeper engagement with ideas beyond algorithmic thinking. This educational approach acknowledges the existential weight of human choices in a rapidly warming planet, while recognising that meaningful responses can only emerge through situated engagement with our particular historical, technological and planetary conditions.
To develop these points, we will first take up the growing eco-anxiety by analysing the metacrisis as the deeper existential threat. From an existentialist perspective, such anxiety can be broadly construed as our feelings of being unmoored and powerless in the face of ecological disruption, augmented by our fear of a diminished, ominous, or empty future. The climate crisis threatens not just our survival, but the survival of future generations. Climate change thus poses an eschatological threat of human extinction as an imminent reality, which can be downright terrifying. We examine Sartre’s philosophy of freedom to lay the foundations for a meta-analysis of, and an authentic response to, the metacrisis.
Understanding existential threats
The term “existential threat” has gained widespread popularity, as it is increasingly applied to a wide range of issues that invoke fears and insecurities, from gun violence to AI to pandemics and more. For existential philosophers, the persistent use of the term “existential” suggests and then displaces a deeper analysis of existentialism. There is no explanation of how the threats are existential, and no guidance on how to respond to them. This omission is significant in light of the growing anxiety among the younger generation, who are most affected by the threats.
In popular discourse, the phrase “existential threat” commonly refers to any occurrence that poses risk, harm, or danger to our well-being. For existentialists, the term further evokes any experience of alienation. It can be a flash of self-awareness of how we appear to others, as depicted in Sartre’s example in Being and Nothingness of a waiter who feels vulnerable and out of step when approaching a table of diners, realising that he now exists at their disposal as a being-for-others (Sartre, Reference Sartre1968, p. 101). Alienation can also be experienced in the sudden awareness of our own contingent existence, as captured in a famous scene in Nausea, where its main character Roquentin’s sense of unease at the sight of the chestnut tree root in its pure organic form sparked the consciousness of the gnarled corporeality of his own existence (Sartre, Reference Sartre1964, pp. 126–127). The word “nausea” invokes the anxiety of our ephemeral nature: as embodied consciousness, we may find our body suddenly erupting in a feverish, dizzying state of queasiness beyond our control.
Why is the experience of alienation, and with it existential angst, so central to human existence? For Sartre, this goes back to his basic idea that we exist as freedom. Freedom is first and foremost understood in the ontological sense as constituting the very structure of human existence. We exist, says Sartre, by moving beyond what we are (i.e., our past) toward what we will become. Every moment of our existence is characterised by a simultaneous flight and leap: a flight from facticity and a leap toward a freely chosen possibility. By realising one possibility after another, we engage in an ongoing process of defining and redefining ourselves, through a dynamic and fluid structure that frees us from any fixed or congealed identity. As “nothingness,” we exist without the thing-like qualities that determine and cement the identity of non-conscious beings. This ontological structure of human existence as freedom exemplifies the idea behind Sartre’s famous dictum, “Existence precedes essence” (Sartre, Reference Sartre and Kaufmann1975, p. 349). We first exist, he claims, and then we make of ourselves what we will afterwards. There is no preexisting human nature or essence to define us once and for all. Such is the contingency of human existence: there is no God to justify our existence, no absolute being to prescribe actions or values we should uphold. Our existence is nothing but an ongoing project of self-creation, with the responsibility for our choices and actions resting squarely on our shoulders.
The same contingency that permeates human existence is also reflected in human history. With our fellow human beings, we fashion our world and make history by surpassing the given, and in so doing, inscribe our actions onto what Sartre calls the “practico-inert” out there (Sartre, Reference Sartre1976, p. 67). The practico-inert is the material world, one that is thoroughly transformed by past human endeavours, or “praxes,” that in turn shape not only present and future actions but also our relationship to one another. Highlighting our role as free agents, Sartre maintains that human history can turn out differently, and how it will turn out is ultimately contingent upon our choices.
Sartre further argues that the contingency we experience, both in our own existence and in the world, is a common source of anxiety and anguish. In the absence of any divine guarantee for either our existence or our actions, we are left on our own, without justification or excuse. This feeling of abandonment is exacerbated by the anguish of realising that we are responsible not just for ourselves and our choices, but also for humanity as a whole. After all, it is our praxes that shape humanity and its future. At the same time we are also acutely aware that we co-exist with others, who, like us, are also free, and whose actions, like ours, can also yield monumental consequences that affect our collective future. Sartre thus concludes that to exist as freedom is to exist with great anxiety and anguish stemming from the insecurity, uncertainty and responsibility that freedom brings. Sartre would relate some of the eco-anxiety we experience today to the realisation that we are all responsible for a polycrisis that is largely brought on by human activities.
And yet Sartre also believes that, as free beings, it is up to us to choose an authentic, freedom-affirming response to our existential angst, or an inauthentic, freedom-denying one. He laments that we are prone to choose the latter, committing what he calls bad faith. It is the effort we make to destroy human freedom, and to hide from ourselves the very freedom that is rooted in our existence, in an attempt to avoid the daunting anxiety, contingency and responsibility that freedom entails. Bad faith can manifest itself in many different ways, for example, when we act in self-serving ways without regard to other people’s freedom, or surrender ourselves mindlessly to external systems of value, or refuse to see ourselves as responsible agents of our choices. However, Sartre reminds us that all of our bad faith projects are doomed to failure. We cannot ultimately hide from our freedom because, after all, bad faith is itself motivated by the desire to avoid emotional responses like fear and anxiety that are triggered precisely by the very awareness of our own freedom. Haunted by such awareness, we turn to bad faith as a way out. Hence bad faith really amounts to the ill-fated attempt to deny our freedom, when we already know from our lived experience that we are free.
Rather than succumbing to the temptation to commit bad faith, Sartre encourages us to respond to our existential angst by embarking on an authentic, freedom-affirming project, which for many of us would require what he calls a “radical conversion” (Sartre,Reference Sartre1968, p. 598). We begin by accepting with fortitude the contingency, responsibility and anxiety that freedom yields. Furthermore, to live fully in the world, we must not merely embrace our own freedom but also the freedom of others, knowing that we can not be genuinely free if our freedom comes at the expense of other people’s freedom. This involves forming a mutual relationship – a “mitsein” – with others as we work toward shaping and reshaping a world in which a more open future can be realised for all. It is a relationship predicated on the recognition that our freedom is coextensive with that of others; our choices affect them as much as theirs affect us. More importantly, it is an empowering relationship that unites and strengthens us in solidarity, as a community of authentic free beings who see existential angst as an impetus for change, who believe that change is always possible, and who affirm that freedom will always prevail.
Sartre’s account of human freedom and authenticity provides a valuable framework for a meta-analysis of the environmental crisis as an existential threat, and the deeper metacrisis that undergirds it. We can extrapolate from his ontology that the crisis strikes at the heart of human existence. Because we exist not as God or angels but always as embodied beings, we are inseparable from the material world in which we dwell. As beings-in-the-world, we are intimately, intricately and inextricably linked to the environment, actively engaging in a dialectical relationship with the world around us. Our actions shape the world, transforming it into a hodological space that, in turn, sets the parameters for all human activities. In this way, our choices are instrumental in creating certain possibilities while precluding others, for ourselves and for future generations. To be sure, when the earth that grounds us is threatened by a global climate crisis, we feel unmoored and our anxiety further acquires an eschatological edge when we hear, for example, about supercharged temperatures that approach the limits of human habitability (Gebrechorkos et al., Reference Gebrechorkos, Sheffield, Vicente-Serrano, Funk, Miralles, Khalaim and Budziszewska2024). Such threats compel us to think as a unitary species across continents, nations and epochs, as they raise questions about the survival of our planet and, along with that, our destiny.
Given the prominent role of human choices in shaping the Anthropocene, Sartre offers us an existentialist perspective on eschatological threats to analyse the metacrisis in terms of the critical choice between authenticity and bad faith. We have seen that, by exploiting the environment irresponsibly, our actions have led to alarming threats that are destroying the planet and curtailing our ability to thrive as free beings. Worse yet, we are apt to respond to such threats in much the same way we created them, namely, in bad faith. A common form of bad faith response is to engage in a deceptive project of denial. Climate deniers attribute the climate crisis to unavoidable natural causes rather than human choices, while downplaying the severity of climate threats as needing any urgent human intervention. In so doing, they hide behind the excuse that there is nothing we can do and nothing we need to do. But in truth, climate denial is a denial of human agency in shaping the practico-inert, a denial of our collective freedom and responsibility. This is compounded by the failure of political and educational institutions to take the threats seriously and address them effectively. Indeed, climate change literacy curricula are rarely adopted by schools, and are often understudied even when they are (Sato & Park, Reference Sato and Park2025). The combined effects of climate denial and institutional irresponsiveness put us in a crippling state of resignation and inertia.
And yet authenticity demands that we take responsibility for the destruction we have caused, and work together to find viable solutions. To mitigate both the damage to the environment and the anxiety we experience, we must resist the nihilistic attitude that we are doomed and nothing matters, as nihilism is an easy expression of bad faith. We must face the crisis with fortitude, and make a firm commitment in solidarity to promote human freedom by restoring our broken relationship with nature. Because our response to the crisis invariably affects not just ourselves but future generations, authenticity also demands that we find new ways to enhance student learning toward the cultivation of committed and effective crisis action leaders. The harder question is how to promote human freedom across the globe by abandoning our attitude of domination to restore our intimate relationship with the environment – dare we risk the hope for a better climate future?
Risk, anxiety and the metacrisis
An existential response to the multitude of crises that builds on Sartre’s ontology of freedom and his call for authenticity requires us to embrace risk, including the fundamental risk of living itself. If to exist as freedom is to exist by surpassing ourselves toward open possibilities as Sartre says, then we must see each surpassing as an engagement with risk. It was existential psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle who took up this long-neglected notion of risk as a central feature of human existence. She begins with the proclamation that life is a “headless risk” because, as finite beings, we are perpetually subjected to the uncertainties of life and the potential of death (Dufourmantelle, Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 1). For her, risk is an integral part of living; to live at all is to embrace an openness to what is hidden, what is beyond, what is unknown and unpredictable, to push the boundaries of our finitude. While Dufourmantelle does not directly address the polycrisis, her work, like Sartre’s, offers valuable insights into understanding authentic and inauthentic responses to it, allowing us to reframe our pursuit of a meaningful existence on a warming planet. Dufourmantelle’s central claim – that risk is praiseworthy – challenges the prevailing view that risk should be avoided under all circumstances. We first address her explanation of our aversion to risk before presenting her argument as to why risk-taking is an indispensable part of living a full and meaningful life. Ultimately, we argue that appreciating the importance of risk-taking has significant educational value in the metacrisis.
The flight from risk
In our increasingly fast-paced, high-tech, consumer-oriented society, the tendency is for us to prioritise security and safety over freedom above all else. Rather than embracing the unknown, we favour certainty, habits and convention. Hence, we are willing to subject ourselves to extensive surveillance practices at all levels, in all areas of life, in exchange for a greater sense of protection. We see this in the proliferation of gated communities, tracking apps, public surveillance cameras, smart doorbells and the like, prompting Dufourmantelle to lament that “the principle of precaution has become the norm” of the present age (Dufourmantelle, Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 1). We adopt a zero-risk approach to life as if it were an achievable and coveted ideal. What is it about risk that we fear, and why should we embrace risk?
Dufourmantelle believes that we fear risk because it is, in her words, “pure madness.” Here, she adopts a Sartrean stance to suggest that the source of this terror relates directly to our freedom. As freedom, our lives are not pre-determined and the future remains open to us, leaving us with the unsettling realisation that we are capable of completely upending life as we know it. Hence, what we call risk is, in essence, freedom wrapped in anxiety. Because life is full of danger and uncertainty, we protect it by shying away from risk. Invoking Maslow’s Jonah syndrome here, the fear of losing or upending life can ironically lead to the fear of truly living life to the fullest, which invariably involves embracing risks boldly to realise our fullest potential.
Elaborating on Sartre’s account of anxiety, Dufourmantelle identifies many of its physical symptoms, including migraines, vertigo and other ailments that can be so overwhelming as to paralyse us from acting. She cautions that anxiety “sparks intimations of an impending and ever deferred catastrophe” (Dufourmantelle, Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 64). This description aligns remarkably with the younger generation’s experience of eco-anxiety over the polycrisis. Students reported “the constant worry in the pit of my stomach,” being in a “hot emotional state” and “feeling out of breath.” One student summed up the experience by stressing how eco-anxiety “gets into you deeply and cannot leave you” (Khalaim et al., Reference Gebrechorkos, Sheffield, Vicente-Serrano, Funk, Miralles, Khalaim and Budziszewska2024, p. 316).
For Dufourmatelle and Sartre, anxiety signals fear that must be confronted if we are to overcome the metacrisis to live authentically. Fear, Dufourmantelle explains, “is like an anxious, unhappy mother, whom you will never appease” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 43). Confronting fear involves risking the pursuit of our aspirations. It is by opening ourselves to risk that we can create new, vibrant and transformative possibilities for ourselves, for others, and for future generations. With risk comes a sense of optimism and hope. Without risk, we are prone to default to a life of fatalism and immanence, resigning ourselves to a banal existence, a hopeless future, or a crumbling world. It is a life of alienation, in which passion is replaced by indifference, a main ingredient of the metacrisis. As we face the present climate crisis, reversing the effects of global warming requires a shared commitment to bring about change, which, in Dufourmantelle’s view, is a commitment to embrace risk openly and responsibly.
To praise risk, as Dufourmantelle advocates, we would do well to manage anxiety by tracing it back to its source, namely, to what we fear. Drawing upon Kierkegaard’s work on anxiety, Dufourmantelle characterises anxiety as a spiritual battle. It is the workings of the self – or what Kierkegaard calls “spirit” – relating itself to its own inner conflicts. Anxiety is therefore a vital form of self-knowledge, but one that can prove difficult to access because, as Dufourmantelle points out, anxiety functions as a concealment of “the conflict that underlies it” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 64). It cannot reveal those powerful inner conflicts independently, nor can it prevent them from manifesting physically in our bodies. A major source of conflict that anxiety conceals is our fear of finitude, not just as it relates to our mortality but, on a broader scale, to the possibility of species extinction brought on by such threats as climate change and our inability to mitigate it. This allows us to understand eco-anxiety as a complex phenomenon. And yet Sartre and Dufourmantelle both recognise anxiety as potentially liberating, as every concealment holds the possibility of revelation. While Sartre speaks of quietism and the flight from freedom as bad faith, Dufourmantelle sees the flight toward freedom as a necessary risk that reveals hidden possibilities for transcendence. For both thinkers, an existential approach that embraces passion provides the best response to anxiety. The spiritual battle of eco-anxiety is a battle for the planet. Liberating it from the many destructive forces requires a collective commitment that is driven by passion.
Wise risk-taking: Confronting fear and embracing passion
For Dufourmantelle and Sartre, passion gives intensity to life and therefore remains vital to our humanity. Passion can motivate either authentic or inauthentic responses to anxiety. It can be destructive, as in crimes of passion. Or it can be exhilarating and liberating, elevating us to excel in our highest aspirations. It is this authentic kind of passion that Dufourmantelle develops, suggesting that passion can be a form of self-discovery, a “rebirth” that simultaneously “dispossesses and reveals us” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p.18).
Dufourmantelle further argues that risk-taking is a profound expression of passion, making it the most authentic response to anxiety. Freedom means we can take risks. But risk always comes without guarantees: it could make things worse, and we could lose everything. What makes risk simultaneously frightening, thrilling and necessary, says Dufourmantelle, is precisely its madness. In risk-taking, we fling ourselves against the unknown, toward the boundless and bewildering possibilities before us, with the exuberant awareness that our chances in life are not limitless. Dufourmantelle thus concludes that we cannot engage with risk without genuine passion, any more than risk can be separated from passion. As she puts it, “Passion is the very substance of risk” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 18).
As a passionate response to anxiety, risk-taking can reveal the fear that our anxiety conceals. Dufourmantelle suggests that this can be achieved by examining our past through what she calls “philosophical anamnesis,” an exploratory path of psychoanalytic self-reflection that seeks to disclose “an unequaled reserve of freedom” that lies deep in our being (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 7). This process is intimately connected to our mortality. Dufourmantelle writes: “Death, we know, is what is risked in us. …Risk is the event of not dying; it is beyond choice, it’s a wager in the face of what precisely remains undesirable. It thus opens the possibility that something unhoped-for will happen” (Ibid). Like the fear of death, we gain greater freedom and self-knowledge by confronting our emotions passionately through risk. Consider the case of sadness. Dufourmantelle argues that, by risking sadness as an authentic response, we do not “enter into melancholy” but on the contrary, disclose sadness as “the secret underside of beatitude” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 48). Through such disclosure, we come face-to-face with our own freedom, as we become aware of new possibilities ahead of us. In this way, the project of authentic risk-taking involves seeing ourselves as more than victims of circumstance. Here, Dufourmantelle agrees with Sartre that it is not a matter of denying that our situation restricts us, but rather affirming that we have the power to define “the manner in which we let it infringe upon us, no matter its gravity, or even ferocity” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p. 38). Ultimately, it is up to us to choose our own path in response to life’s challenges.
Relating this to the climate crisis, beneath the most intense fear and anxiety of environmental threats lies a deep passion and love for the earth. Eco-anxiety thus strikes us at the most primordial level. While some people live their lives disconnected from nature, others, including many of our rural students, are much more integrated with nature both in their daily experiences and their consciousness. Hence, their climate anxiety, which is likely compounded by the grief for what is being threatened or lost, is intensely personal. It can disrupt not only their lives and their relationship to the environment but also their deepest sense of self. It is important for these young students to see that confronting the gravity of the metacrisis requires all of us to act authentically and to risk wisely.
Following Dufourmantelle, we understand that, just as passion adds vitality to human existence, an exuberant engagement with risk is likewise necessary for living rich and meaningful lives. Pulling together Sartre and Dufourmantelle’s insights, passionate risk-taking is an authentic way of surpassing that, by disclosing what is hidden in life, puts us on a path of self-discovery that could lead to a deeply transformative rebirth. But what does it mean to respond authentically to climate anxiety within the larger socio-political context that seems disconnected from humanity’s higher possibilities? This question highlights the ongoing challenge of integrating existential insights with practical responses to the metacrisis. An existential approach recognises that living with eschatological existential threats is never easy. Recognising this, Dufourmantelle introduces the emotion of gentleness that she takes to be essential to authentic risk-taking.
A pedagogy of gentleness
In a companion book to her work on risk, titled The Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, Dufourmantelle offers a new perspective on gentleness (douceur) that can serve as an effective and timely teaching tool in the metacrisis. She begins by clarifying that gentleness is not to be confused with the “diluted form of mawkishness” (Reference Dufourmantelle2018, p. 19). Underscoring its enigmatic character, she observes: “gentleness is not exactly kindness, it’s not exactly the good, it’s not exactly generosity, it’s not exactly the taste of sugar (sweet), it’s not exactly the quality of velvet, it’s not exactly a low-intensity sound (quiet music, soft pedal), it’s not exactly the clandestine (leaving on the sly). It is all of this simultaneously without being any one of these elements more than another” (Reference Dufourmantelle2018, p. 11). With this description, Dufourmantelle calls attention to gentle qualities that have traditionally been associated with the feminine and thereby dismissed as passive, to show that they hold the power to bring forth revolutionary transformations. Counteracting the modernist mindset of control and domination, gentleness marks our direct and unmediated experiences of the natural world. These experiences reinforce not only our inextricability from the world, but also our intuitive awareness that this world is “our” world, one we share with all creatures inhabiting it. More importantly, Dufourmantelle stresses that gentleness operates as an active passivity, a subtle, creative form of power that transcends both submissiveness and domination. When we approach risk with gentleness, gentleness opens up a pathway to self-discovery and rebirth; when we face fear with gentleness, it becomes a quiet force for resistance. It is by embracing gentle qualities like compassion and care that we gain inner resources and strengths to navigate life’s hidden secrets and vulnerabilities. As the purest expression of life, Dufourmantelle echoes Marcus Aurelius’s proclamation that “Gentleness is invincible” (Reference Dufourmantelle2018, p. 18).
In an era overtaken by extreme climate events and eschatological threats, gentleness represents an important eco-emotion in our response to the metacrisis, one that may redirect our engagement with risk. To risk living a meaningful life, which in the current milieu must include climate awareness, an existential shift in the relationship between humans and nature is needed. Gentleness defines our immediate, lived experience in and of our natural environment, fostering within us an awareness of belonging to the earth, an awareness that is often clouded by a plethora of distractions in our everyday world. Through our lived body, we are aware of our close and familiar connection to nature, experiencing nature not as a separate enterprise but as an integral part of our being. Given this intimate relationship, we have a moral duty to treat nature with utmost care, in humble gratitude for the countless ways nature has nurtured us. Gentleness is therefore an authentic way for us to be in the world, and an appropriate response to our eco-anxiety amidst the escalating polycrisis that is destroying the earth in which we are rooted. The challenge, then, is to educate a new generation of climate action leaders who will replace the human power to exploit global systems with the wisdom to reimagine a more nurturing relationship with the environment guided by gentleness.
Negentropic education
Recognising the need for radical social change, Dufourmantelle turns to Stiegler near the end of her book on risk. It is in Stiegler’s critique of hyper-technology and consumerism under modern capitalism that she finds a broader social framework for her own ideas. While Dufourmantelle’s work has concentrated more on our alienation in the everyday world, Stiegler was concerned with education as a driver for change (Mui & Murphy, Reference Mui, Murphy and Bradley2021). Indeed, no philosopher of technology has had such a sustained focus on student learning in the metacrisis. Stiegler has been writing about it as early as his 2003 essay, “Our Ailing Educational Institutions” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2008). In 2006, he founded the Institut de recherche et d’innovation for the study of technology’s effects on society, an increasingly relevant and important area that would occupy him until his death in 2020. In this final section, we discuss Stiegler’s vision for the future of education in the metacrisis.
In several major works, Stiegler expressed serious misgivings about the techno-corporate takeover of education (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2010, Reference Stiegler2015, Reference Stiegler, Jugnon, Nancy and Ross2019). What was particularly concerning to him was the “war for attention” in the technological world and its disastrous impact on student learning and memory (Mui & Murphy, Reference Mui, Murphy and Bradley2021, Reference Murphy and Mui2025). Stiegler was right in sounding the alarm. Technology is undeniably encroaching on every aspect of our lives at a disturbing pace, as we are even able to carry the internet on our person nowadays with smart watches, glasses and phones. As our brains become more and more muddled by endless information emanating from social media, we are growing more and more detached from one another and our surroundings. Such detachment is antithetical to the existentialists’ understanding of us as relational beings. Sartre has argued that true freedom can only be achieved when we form a close relationship with our fellow human beings based on mutual recognition, and a dialectical reciprocity with the environment that we strive to preserve. It is abundantly clear that, to maintain our authenticity – indeed, our humanity – in a hyper-computational world, drastic change is needed in education.
To that end, Stiegler champions the concept of negentropic education to counter the toxicity of the Anthropocene. Seeking to replace the Anthropocene with the vital, creative Neganthropocene, a negentropic education strives to resist the entropy of disorder, biodiversity decline, eco-systems disruption, hyper-consumption and hyper-technology. It is an entropy that contributes to what Stiegler calls “the proletarianisation of knowledge.” This term refers to the deskilling of workers (savoir-faire) whose function is increasingly replaced by AI, and the loss of cognitive skills (savoir-vivre) that enable critical thinking, imagination and knowledge about the meaning and purpose of life.
As agents of negentropic education, the university has the duty to resist the disruptive forces of hyper-capitalism and exploitative technologies that are driving students into “a state of absolute nonknowledge” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2017). Scholars have noted that Stiegler was most troubled by “a ‘post-truth’ crisis (in education) wherein the social processes of memory, exteriorization and dissemination were under attack. He claimed that ‘technics’ – that is, the processes that underpin the very possibility of knowledge, were endangered” (Letiche et al., Reference Letiche, Lightfoot and Lilley2023, p. 238). To remedy this, education must restore “deep attention and the cognitive functions of rationality” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2015, 173). It must resist the proletarianisation of knowledge by reintegrating knowledge with the production of value for young learners, particularly value that is inextricably tied to economic equality and public welfare.
If negentropic education is to be an offramp out of the Anthropocene, its transformation cannot be carried out in isolation from major economic, political and social institutions. It would be an enormous undertaking that involves, among other things, the reclaiming of human agency over alienation through the redirecting of technology away from hypercapitalist ends. As one Stiegler scholar observes, “technology may well allow for the radical redistribution of wealth, which is to say, the redistribution of knowledge wealth, that is wealth understood not solely in monetary but also in educational terms” (Bradley, (Reference Bradley2022) p. 461). We must rethink technology to “pose the question of the communal and universal redistribution of the wealth of knowledge to all – to insist all belongs to all” (Ibid). And because knowledge of any kind “adds something to this world,” the transformation to negentropic education would also involve the revaluing of the role of knowledge in making the unfinished world “unfold towards a future, to create the advent of something new. This adding something, through which the world happens through knowledge, contributes to human worlds in a way that is neganthropic” (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2021, p. 27). This cannot be accomplished without breaking away from the modernist worldview decisively to reimagine our relationship as producers of knowledge to the world.
What does this mean for education? Stiegler offers some direction in one of his final works, Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative. Here, he uses the term not in its ordinary meaning but in the Derridean sense of différance – i.e., as forging a path that is prohibited by the very system it seeks to change, such that it escapes or supplants that system in so doing. A negentropic bifurcation charts a new path or direction that does not seem possible within the current system, one that would prioritise the well-being of humans and the environment over profit and greed by reshaping our relationship to technology, politics and economics (Stiegler, Reference Stiegler2021). But most importantly, to bifurcate is not only to change the system but to transform ourselves (Ritter, Reference Ritter2024). Applying this to education, this bifurcation would transform young learners with new forms of critical consciousness, commitment, and public power necessary to replace resignation with action in their resolve to combat nihilism and climate fears.
As educators, our focus is on pedagogy. What new pedagogies might restore critical thinking and student attention to move beyond the “post-truth crisis”? What must negentropic pedagogies involve to overcome the metacrisis? In light of what we have discussed throughout this essay, we suggest that effective negentropic pedagogies should have at least some of these features: i) address students’ profound eschatological anxiety by inspiring their confidence that, as free beings, they have the power to effect and promote positive change; ii) encourage active engagement with our surroundings as beings-in-the-world, to be fully present and grounded in a world we strive to care for and preserve; iii) combat the temptation of nihilism as a form of bad faith by engaging students with a philosophy of wise-risking; iv) embrace gentle teaching by affirming the eco-emotion of grace as an antidote to the toxicity of the metacrisis; v) impart the skills of meta-critique to evaluate critically the current economic, political, social and technological forces that are shaping students’ consciousness and posing serious challenges to real learning. With these aims in mind, we can co-create negentropic praxes that allow for a critical re-examination of fundamental planetary questions of knowledge, value and purpose, to reassess our place in the world, and our relationship to others and to the environment.
Conclusion
Whereas Sartre’s existentialist stance encourages us to undergo a “radical conversion” to avoid bad faith and take up our freedom when faced with existential threats, Dufourmantelle inspires us to risk the future passionately by enacting a gentle revolution to restore our intimate relationship to the planet. She portrays our fear of the future as one whose “extreme toxicity already overwhelms us like an unkept promise” (Reference Dufourmantelle2019, p.155). This metaphor of a failed promise captures the grave disappointment, along with many raw emotions, that we experience over the loss of something so basic to our survival that we tacitly assumed was guaranteed. An analysis of gentleness as a powerful eco-emotion and environmental stance might provide the sort of public power Stiegler envisioned for a climate-responsible future. As a transformative force, negentropic education requires innovative pedagogies led by educators who are in an ideal position to guide students both to form an existential response to anxiety through wise risk-taking and gentleness, and to conduct the kind of meta-analyses that the metacrisis demands. As we sketch out the beginnings of a pedagogical path forward, our students continue to live in a metacrisis mode, no longer surprised by the latest climate disaster, school shooting, or economic threat. They are watching the leadership gamble with their future, indeed, with the very possibility of a future. They may be ready to co-create with us some important negentropic bifurcations.
Acknowledgements
We dedicate this work to the memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Americans slain by Federal immigration officers, and to all the people who risk their lives courageously and passionately to exercise their right to protest against the brutality in Minnesota and elsewhere.
Ethical statement
Nothing to Note.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Author Biographies
Julien S. Murphy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, USA. Her publications explore the intersections of French philosophy, technology and education with a focus on Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida. She has also published articles and book chapters on Simone de Beauvoir, feminist theory and reproductive ethics.
Constance L. Mui is the Rev. Scott Youree Watson, S.J. Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. She specialises in continental philosophy and has published articles, book chapters and edited volumes on phenomenology, feminist theories, Sartre and de Beauvoir. She is an executive editor of the journal, Sartre Studies International.
Open access
