Presence-Centered Flourishing: A Proposal of Alternative Strategies to Promote Sustainable Living

Abstract

Flourishing has been identified as a central concept in the new approaches based on the idea of positive psychology emerging at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. A culture based on the idea of harmony may never have existed among the large public in the history of human thought. An educational system of this type could be based on what we propose here as a «presence-centered» pedagogy (in contrast to the contemporary «information-centered» and «skill-centered» pedagogies). The alternative education process that we propose is also particularly fitted to be conducted amongst nature and outdoor spaces rather than within a classroom, based on the extensive literature on the positive effects of contact with nature for human health and wellbeing. From a philosophical perspective, a presence-centered pedagogy would result in the promotion of a new sense of agency: an identity developed by exercising our co-dependence with the rest of the ecosystemic processes and life-support systems, as opposed to an identity conceived as being separated from the external environment. We argue here that such a revolutionary change of human’s self-definition could result in higher likelihood of changing our lifestyles in the direction of sustainability and collective wellbeing.