Ecosophy
ecosophy (angl., Arne Naess) — de oikos, la maisonnée, + sophia, la sagesse
A term coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess: not a science of nature, but an inhabited wisdom—a worldview inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere, guiding the concrete decisions of those who embrace it. Ecology describes; *ecosophy* commits. Each person articulates their own: Naess calls his own variant “Ecosophy T,” without claiming it should be adopted.
So an ecosophy becomes a philosophical world-view or system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere.
The compound word oikos—the household, the “Earth dwelling” that Naess extends far beyond family and village—and sophia, wisdom. The choice of suffix is not neutral: Naess distinguishes compounds in -logy (biology, geology), which aim at impersonal knowledge, from those in -sophy, where insight must be “directly relevant to action.” An ecosophy is not what we know about nature, but what we decide from.
Hence its status: “an ecosophy is a personal system, a personal philosophy.” It is neither proven nor imposed; one inhabits it, revises it over the course of a lifetime. Naess does not present the ecosophy but constructs an ecosophy, which he arbitrarily names Ecosophy T, and invites each person to develop their own—Ecosophy X, Y, or Z. The gesture is deliberately non-doctrinal: a wisdom that would prescribe the same system for all would cease to be wisdom and revert to dogma.
To be distinguished from ecology in the strict sense, the descriptive science of relations among living beings: the latter settles no question of value. To be distinguished, too, from managerial environmentalism, which optimizes resources without altering perspective. And finally, to be distinguished from any closed system imposed uniformly: an ecosophy is plural by design, akin in this to reliance and complexity—not a received order, but a way of holding together one’s thought and one’s dwelling.