Radboud Philosophical Facutly Journal

Categorie: Authors

  • Op zoek naar de verhalen van de FFTR

    Een interview met drs. Ignace de Haes over het boek Denkers en Duiders: Een eeuw Nijmeegse filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen in honderd verhalen

    “Heb je al gehoord …”, “Wat er gister toch is gebeurd …”, “Wat ik nu toch weer heb meegemaakt …”: Deze en soortgelijke zinnen hoor je de hele dag door. Mensen vertellen elkaar continu verhalen. Verhalen over de man in de bus die zijn nagels zat te knippen, over de docent die op blote voeten college stond te geven, over de medestudent die een diepe zucht slaakte bij het horen van de naam ‘Plato’. Iedere gebeurtenis, iedere ervaring, alles wat we meemaken, het zijn allemaal verhalen. We vertellen, we luisteren en we vertellen verder. Alles wat we doen, wat we denken, wat we voelen, de keuzes die we maken, het draagt allemaal bij aan het verhaal dat we over onszelf, over onze omgeving vertellen, want wat is het leven als het geen verhaal is? Iedereen werkt dag in dag uit aan diens eigen narratief. Die verhalen komen bij elkaar, tijdens ontmoetingen tussen mensen. Op één dag lopen er al honderden, duizenden mensen op campus rond, die allemaal hun eigen narratief met zich meedragen. Moet je nagaan hoeveel verhalen zich door de jaren heen hebben verzameld, hoeveel er op je liggen te wachten als je de moeite neemt om te zoeken, te luisteren, hoeveel er voor altijd verborgen zullen blijven om nooit meer gevonden te worden. Al 100 jaar bruisen de gebouwen van de Radboud Universiteit van de verhalen. Je zult ze misschien niet iedere dag bewust zien, maar ze zijn er wel degelijk.

    Een faculteit vol verhalen

    Hoe bijzonder is het dan om bewust op zoek te gaan naar deze verhalen, om te vragen, om nieuwsgierig te zijn, om interesse te tonen, om te luisteren. Dit is wat drs. Ignace de Haes, twee jaar geleden, besloot te doen. Ter ere van het 100 jarig bestaan van de Radboud Universiteit, besloot hij om een zoektocht te starten naar de verhalen van de FFTR, want, zoals hij zelf zegt:  ‘‘We zijn een faculteit van grote verhalen, zowel bij de theologie als bij de filosofie. Met dit project wilde ik op zoek gaan naar de kleine verhalen, dat zijn verhalen die in principe subjectief zijn. Bij dat soort verhalen ga je uit van iemands ervaringen en herinneringen.’’ Ignace is twee jaar lang op zoek geweest naar die kleine verhalen. Steeds meer mensen sloten zich bij de zoektocht aan. Een jaar geleden, kwam ook ik het team versterken: ik ben in de archieven gedoken, ik ben met mensen gaan praten, ik ben gaan zoeken, gaan luisteren, om deze verhalen te verzamelen. Nu, een jaar later, hebben we met zijn allen maar liefst 100 verhalen bij elkaar gesprokkeld en gebundeld in het boek Denkers en Duiders: Een eeuw Nijmeegse filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen in honderd verhalen. Na het meewerken aan de zoektocht naar de verhalen van het verleden van de faculteit, ben ik benieuwd naar nog één laatste verhaal, het verhaal dat achter dit boek schuilgaat. Ik heb aan Ignace gevraagd of hij mij dat verhaal wilt vertellen.

    In het begin sch…

    Ignace is twee jaar geleden begonnen met het verzamelen van de kleine verhalen van de FFTR. Hij wilde zowel verhalen over de theologie als de filosofie vertellen, omdat dat de twee grote, oude pilaren zijn, waar de faculteit op steunt. Zijn idee was om 100 verhalen te gaan schrijven: één verhaal over ieder jaar dat zowel de universiteit als de studies filosofie en theologie bestaan. Poëtisch genoeg was het eerste verhaal dat hij schreef, het verhaal over het begin, over de schepping van hemel en aarde, of ten minste het ontstaan daarvan. Het is namelijk nog maar de vraag of hemel en aarde überhaupt geschapen zijn. Dit ontdekte Ellen van Wolde tijdens haar onderzoek naar de Hebreeuwse grondteksten van de Bijbel.  Ze kwam erachter dat het Hebreeuwse woord bara, in de Bijbel vertaald is als scheppen, terwijl het eerder scheiden betekent. Op het eerste gezicht lijkt dit geen indrukwekkende bevinding, het is slechts één woordje, hoe kan de vertaling van één simpel woordje nou een impact hebben op een verhaal, laat staan op een boek zo dik als de Bijbel? Toch wekte deze bevinding een stortvloed aan reacties op, allerlei deskundigen en gelovigen reageerden op en maakten zich druk om deze bevinding. Waarom? Daarvoor moeten we terug naar het begin, naar de eerste zin van de Bijbel, want ‘‘In het begin schiep God hemel en aarde’’ (Genesis 1:1) wordt dan: ‘‘In het begin scheidde God hemel en aarde.’’ Zo kan één woordje, één klein woordje, het hele verhaal van de wereld, het hele wereldbeeld van gelovigen op losse schroeven zetten. Wat betekent het als God niet de wereld uit het niets schiep, maar de wereld al bestond voordat God deze scheidde? Bestond er dan al iets voordat God bestond? En wat betekent dat voor het geloof? Wat betekent dat voor het scheppingsverhaal? Is dit een bedreigende vondst, of juist een verrijkende? Ellen van Wolde zette mensen aan het denken, aan het reflecteren met haar vertaling van één simpel, klein woordje. Bij het opnieuw vertellen van dit verhaal, grinnikt Ignace tevreden: ‘‘Ik vind het zo geweldig. Die eerste zin van de Bijbel bestaat al 2000 jaar en dan komt er een wetenschapper die zegt: ‘Ja, die eerste zin, die klopt niet, die is verkeerd vertaald.’ Eén woord anders, maakt een compleet ander wereldbeeld, wat het wereldbeeld van het Christendom in elkaar laat storten. Nou, dat vind ik prachtig.’’

    Diversiteit

    Ignace heeft niet alle 100 verhalen alleen hoeven schrijven. Dat zou onmogelijk in twee jaar tijd zijn gelukt. Sowieso paste dat ook niet bij de visie die hij voor het project had. Zoals ik al eerder heb gezegd, wilde hij namelijk op zoek naar de kleine verhalen van de faculteit, de subjectieve verhalen, de anekdotes, verhalen die in een hoekje liggen te wachten om ontdekt te worden, verhalen die al heel lang in het geheugen van verschillende mensen opgeslagen liggen, maar gewoon nooit of nauwelijks verteld zijn geweest. Ignace beschrijft zijn visie als volgt: ‘‘We hebben al genoeg wetenschappelijke boeken, dus het mogen verhalen zijn van alumni, van medewerkers, van anderen die iets observeren. Daarnaast mag het over alles gaan.’’ Hij wilde zoveel mogelijk mensen bij het project betrekken. Als je naar de laatste pagina’s van het boek bladert, kun je aan de auteurslijst, die maar liefst twee hele pagina’s beslaat met in totaal 48 namen, zien dat dit zeker gelukt is.

    Op deze auteurslijst staan namen van mensen die Ignace zelf heeft benaderd en gevraagd om een verhaal te schrijven, zoals prof. dr. Peter Nissen en prof. dr. Christoph Lüthy, die samen met Ignace de redactie van het project vormden. Veel mensen hebben zich ook via mond-tot-mond reclame als een soort sneeuwbaleffect bij het project aangesloten, zo heeft dr. Willem van der Kuijlen voor het verhaal van 1988 getiteld: ‘‘Filosofische stratenmakers’’, de vier filosofen: Pieter van Diesen, Theo Theunissen, Zafer Aydogdu en Henk Hoogervorst gevraagd om een verhaal voor het project te schrijven. Dankzij de veelzijdigheid van de redactie zelf en van alle mensen die hebben meegewerkt is er een boek ontstaan met een grote diversiteit aan schrijvers, stijlen en verhalen. Sommige verhalen zijn meer historisch, andere juist anekdotisch. Er zijn interviews, prozateksten, beschrijvende verhalen, en stukjes uit archieven in het boek te vinden. Sommige verhalen zijn grappig, andere zijn emotioneel, sommige zijn kritisch, andere zijn lovend, sommige gaan over gebeurtenissen in de geschiedenis die in de archieven verstopt liggen, andere gaan over wat recentere en meer bekende ervaringen. Al met al is het volgens Ignace ‘‘een kleurrijk, divers pallet van verhalen van vroeger tot nu’’ geworden.

    Favoriete verhaal van Ignace

    Uit dit pallet wilt Ignace eigenlijk geen favoriet kiezen, want het zijn nu eenmaal 100 prachtige verhalen geworden, die allemaal hun eigen charmes hebben en allemaal op hun eigen manier iets toevoegen aan het geheel. Toch is er één verhaal dat voor hem een speciaal plekje heeft. Dit is het verhaal van 2021 over Justine Borkes, een mevrouw die een vaste bezoekster was van de koffiehoek op de 15e verdieping. Iedereen kende haar, maar niemand scheen precies te weten wat ze daar nu eigenlijk deed. Ignace was nieuwsgierig naar haar verhaal en heeft haar gecontacteerd om te vragen of hij haar mocht interviewen. Dat mocht en het verborgen verhaal van de onbekende dame in de koffiehoek werd aan het licht gebracht. Tijdens het gesprek, kwam Ignace erachter dat Justine dichteres was en filosofie had gestudeerd. Ze wilde heel graag promoveren, maar dat is haar uiteindelijk niet gelukt. Toch bleef ze naar de koffiehoek op de 15e verdieping komen, want, zoals ze zelf in het interview zegt: ‘‘Filosofie is voor mij meer dan alleen de teksten van filosofen. Filosofie heeft voor mij alles te maken met ruimte en thuiskomen. Dat is de reden dat ik de ruimte opzoek waar filosofie bedreven wordt. Door die ruimte laat ik me inspireren, ook in mijn gedichten. […]De koffiehoek op de vijftiende verdieping was mijn thuis, mijn huiskamer, omdat juist die ruimte voor mij gelijk staat met filosofie en gastvrijheid’’ (De Haes, Lüthy & Nissen 2023, 13).

    Wat begon als een gesprek uit Ignace zijn interesse in en nieuwsgierigheid naar het verhaal van Justine, werd een afscheidsinterview. Toen Ignace haar interviewde, lag Justine al in het ziekenhuis. Nog geen twee weken later, is Justine overleden. Deze ervaring heeft veel indruk gemaakt op Ignace: ‘‘Dit heeft mij geleerd dat er achter iedereen een verhaal zit, alleen je moet er wel nieuwsgierig naar zijn, dan zul je zien dat iedereen bewonderingswaardige verhalen te vertellen heeft.’’

    De verhalen gaan verder

    Iedereen heeft een verhaal en die verhalen stoppen niet simpelweg met bestaan als je ze hebt opgeschreven en gebundeld in een boek, ze worden doorverteld, ze gaan verder, er komt altijd een vervolg. Wanneer mensen overlijden, overleven hun verhalen. Wie zouden we nog zijn en wat zouden we nog doen op de Faculteit der Filosofie, Theologie en Religiewetenschappen als we niet meer zouden putten uit de verhalen van het verleden? Als we niet meer vol verwondering en nieuwsgierigheid om ons heen zouden kijken? Als we het gedachtegoed en de levensverhalen van mensen, filosofen, theologen en schrijvers met hen zouden begraven om hun verhalen door ruimte en tijd te laten afbreken, vergaan? Zou er dan nog iets als literatuur bestaan? Nog iets als Theologie? Religie? Filosofie? Waarop zouden we bouwen als we geen verhalen meer hadden? Wat zou dan ons fundament nog zijn? Ons uitgangspunt? Ons bestaansrecht? We werken iedere dag met verhalen, of ze nu literair en poëtisch zijn of wetenschappelijk en feitelijk, of de filosofie in het wit tussen de woorden te vinden is, of op een zilveren dienblaadje aan ons wordt geserveerd. We zijn altijd op zoek naar de verhalen van het verleden en naar hoe we daarop kunnen voortborduren in het hier en nu, hoe de verhalen verder gaan, nooit af zijn.

    Denkers en Duiders: een eeuw Nijmeegse filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen in honderd verhalen

    Dit boek is dan ook een momentopname, een barometer, een peiling. 100 bewonderingswaardige gebeurtenissen zijn door de medewerkers en medewerksters van dit project verzameld en opschreven. Door dit boek zijn mijn ogen geopend en ben ik ze gaan zien. Tijdens het zoeken en schrijven, heb ik de universiteit en de FTR-Faculteit zelf op een hele andere manier leren kennen. Natuurlijk vraagt iedere student zich wel eens af, als ze weer eens in de overvolle bus 10 hutje mutje op elkaar gepropt zitten, waarom de campus niet gewoon in het centrum is, dat is toch veel makkelijker? Ook heb ik het wel eens vreemd gevonden dat we hier überhaupt de FTR-Faculteit kennen en niet, zoals bij veel andere universiteiten, een Faculteit der Letteren en Wijsbegeerte. Pas als je de geschiedenis induikt ga je hiervoor de antwoorden vinden, vallen dingen op hun plek en ga je op een andere manier om je heen kijken, ga je andere dingen zien. Zoals Ignace het omschrijft: ‘‘Je leert iets over de geschiedenis aan de hand van subjectieve verhalen en als je al die verhalen doorleest krijg je een rode draad van de geschiedenis te pakken. Dit boek geeft een mooi beeld van een eeuw Nijmeegse filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen in honderd verhalen. Nu ben ik natuurlijk heel benieuwd hoe de aankomende 100 jaar gaan verlopen.’’ De Radboud blijft bruisen. En wie weet, misschien komt er over 100 jaar weer een boek vol met de verhalen, die vandaag beginnen en die we samen mogen gaan beleven, samen mogen gaan schrijven, iedere dag weer.

    Weggeefactie

    Dit prachtige boek vol verhalen, die inzicht geven in 100 jaar geschiedenis filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen aan de Radboud universiteit, is niet alleen verkrijgbaar in de boekhandel, er worden binnenkort ook 3 exemplaren verloot! Op de Splijtstof Instagram zal een post geplaatst worden, waarop je kunt reageren, om kans te maken op een exemplaar. Uit de reacties zullen drie gelukkige winnaars worden geloot. Houd je ogen en oren dus goed open. Wie weet, staat Denkers en Duiders binnenkort bij jou op de boekenplank te schitteren en kun jij je verdiepen in de verhalen van het verleden.

    Bibliografie

    Haes, Ignace, de, Christoph Lüthy, Peter Nissen. 2023. Denkers en Duiders: Een eeuw Nijmeegse filosofie, theologie en religiewetenschappen in honderd verhalen. Nijmegen: Vantilt.

  • Off the Record with Marilyn Kallasse

    Marilyn Kallasse is a woman on a mission. She’s a 21-year-old international student from Estonia. Not content with simply studying PPS, she is the Chair of F.C. Sophia, and can often be found working at the Coffee Corner at the UB.

    Rather than starting by asking you for a fun fact about yourself, can you tell me a fun lie about yourself?

    ‘‘I can’t lie. I physically can’t lie. I have never successfully lied in my life. I don’t know. There are no lies… there is only truth. That is not a good answer, but YOLO. I can tell you a fun fact about myself, though!’’

    Oh! Go for it.

    ‘‘I am very intrigued by countries ending with -stan. Two days ago, I watched an hour-long video about Turkmenistan. They have all the Guinness world records for having the most marble buildings in their capital. Did you know that?’’

    I did not know that!

    ‘‘Now you know!’’

    What’s your favourite -stan country?

    ‘‘I am intrigued by Kazakhstan… the capital looks like a mixture of Dubai and Las Vegas together, and I am very intrigued by this. I watched a documentary about it, and the nature is very beautiful, so I am going to go there one day.’’

    What is it like to do a full-time study, a part-time job and a board year all at the same time?

    ‘‘…It’s sometimes a very silent, loud scream… Sometimes it’s hard, but I’m a big fan of time management. To be honest, right now there are only two things in my mind, board and work. I rest is kind of like, in the background. It’s stowed in my filing cabinet. It is tiring, but I’m trying my best and right now I’m doing fine with it. I feel like an actual businesswoman, ‘cos I need to have my phone ringer on all the time. It’s a thing.’’

    Speaking of being a successful businesswoman, what gives you a feeling of achievement?

    ‘‘If we talk about doing a board year, I think the most fulfilling feeling is when someone notices that I did this thing, or that thing, and says: ‘this was very nice’. I’m a big fan of words of affirmation. I’ve been getting a lot of ‘good job’s’ and pats on the back, and I’ve been going ‘whooo!’. It’s so goofy.’’

    Do you have some wisdom for us?

    ‘‘I don’t wanna sound too cheesy, but I think people should be more kind to themselves. If there are days where you feel like you can’t do anything, like if you went to the library for 9 hours and all you did was Buzzfeed quizzes, that’s fine. I try to practise with myself saying that it’s okay, life goes on, and I shouldn’t hold it against myself. I think some of my friends struggle with this as well. It’s okay to realise at 12pm on a Monday that you’re done and you can go home. We ball. And some of us are bald…’’

    [to me, as an aside] ‘‘You know how in courtrooms they have those keyboards to write everything down in shorthand? You would be so slay at that, typing all this down. It would be so slay.’’

    If 2016 was the year of realising things, what was 2023 the year of?

    ‘‘I mean, I feel like people started realising things in 2016 and STILL haven’t fully realised everything. 2023 is – okay, another very cheesy answer – but it’s about being kind to yourself and others, and it’s just… I don’t know, life is hard and there is inflation, like, beer is getting more expensive, it’s all a lot. But I feel like at the end of the day, what we have is other people and ourselves and we should just be kind.’’  

    What is your favourite word in every language you speak, and what does each word mean?

    ‘‘So in Estonian, my native language, my mother tongue, the word is ‘tohuvabohu’. It means chaos. It’s a goofy word because, like, you can literally use it for anything. It’s the Estonian equivalent of ‘goofy chaos’. It rolls very nicely off the tongue. It’s not a common word in the Estonian language anymore, like, you would hear a grandmother say it. I think that’s very beautiful.

    In Dutch it’s definitely the word ‘smoorverliefd’, because it means being ‘head over heels in love’ with someone, and I think it’s so nice in Dutch that it’s only one word. In other languages you have to use a lot of words to get the point across. But the Dutch came up with just one word for it, and I think that’s really beautiful. Also, shoutout to Doe Maar for writing a great song.

    I think my favourite word in English… is an adjective, though. Does an adjective count as a word?’’

    If I answer the question, am I allowed to keep this part in the interview?

    ‘‘Yeah… I guess… An adjective is a word, right?’’

    Yes.

    ‘‘Okay… It’s probably goofy! Because with goofy, you can give away so many things. ‘That’s goofy’, as in, ‘I think that’s weird’, ‘that’s goofy’, as in, ‘I think that’s funny’… if I don’t know what to say, I can say ‘goofy’. It’s a good word.’’

    Is it kind of like when Paris Hilton says, when you don’t know what to say, you can say ‘That’s Hot?’

    ‘‘Yeah, literally.

    …Oh, and I don’t have a favourite word in German.[1]’’

    Which musical album changed your life?

    ‘‘I think the album that has had a genuine physical effect on me was the first time I listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on the trolley to work – we have trolleys[2] in Estonia, goofy – and that’s when… I’ve always, you know, been surrounded by music, but that was the moment when I really realised what music can do to people. And it’s a great album!’’

    What are you reading right now?

    ‘‘I haven’t started a new book, but I love Dolly Alderton, and I just finished a book by her where people write prompts to her and she responds to them. Sometimes women in their 20s can feel like they need to have a boyfriend, bla bla bla, and what she writes is that the biggest loves in her life have been her friends. I think that’s really important.

    Next, I’m going to read Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma. It’s about a woman who moves to a different planet to start a new life. But I haven’t started, I’ve only read one page.’’

    Speaking of starting a new life, what are your hopes for the future? Where will you be, and what will you be doing?

    ‘‘I see myself staying in Nijmegen and doing my Master’s here as well, maybe another board year. Then, I would like to work, for example, as an ambassador one day. I would like to be the Estonian ambassador in the Netherlands… but maybe that’s too ambitious.’’

    Do you have any final messages for the Universe, before I end the interview?

    ‘‘Please come to F.C. Sophia’s Lustrum activities, it’s going to be really fun!’’

    Anything else?

    ‘‘That’s it!’’

    [1] I have received word that ‘tohuvabohu’ is also used in German. It is originally a Biblical Hebrew word meaning ‘primordial chaos’, i.e. the formless chaos/void before creation.

    [2] A trolleybus is an electric bus that gets power from overhead wires.

  • In Conversation with Professor Marjolein Oele

    Marjolein Oele is Professor of Philosophy of the Humanities. The new Chair position she occupies is aimed at bridge building between the Faculty of PTR (Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies) and the Faculty of Arts. Oele’s research intertwines: Ancient Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Environmental Philosophy. She is the author of “E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces” (SUNY, 2020) and co-editor of “Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations” (Springer, 2017). Her most recent book project thematizes a sense of loss in the relationship to our world, and is entitled “Elemental Loss: Shifting Constellations of Water, Fire, Air and Earth.” Her articles have been published in a wide range of journals, including Ancient Philosophy, Configurations, Environmental Philosophy, Epochê, Radical Philosophy Review, and Research in Phenomenology. She is also teaching the course “Critique of Green Ideology” in the PPS “Ecology and Sustainability” module. I, Laura Schranz, had the pleasure to interview her for Splijtstof .

    Laura: Thank you, Prof. Oele! You have a very interesting and niche field of research, at least I for my part have not heard of this way of doing philosophy before meeting you. Could you maybe give me an introduction to it?

    Prof. Oele: I have a few research fields that I’m interested in, the broader one being this question of affect and affectivity, how we’re being moved by other people, by the world as such, by other living beings, by our own bodies, our own thoughts, our own emotions. This question of how we come to become ourselves, or how the world comes to be itself in relationship to all those things. I’ve tried to unravel this bigger question with regard to a number of other big themes. One of them is climate change and the ecological crisis, because I think it is the predominant ethical question of our time. So, I have found it very important as a philosopher to use some of the philosophical concepts that I’ve been trained in, for instance through Aristotle or through Heidegger, and make them applicable towards this question. I also philosophize about pregnancy and embodiment as a part of that constellation, insofar as how we come to be.

    Laura: In the course you teach to me and other fellow PPS students, you indeed mentioned that you are very interested in incorporating pregnancy into your philosophy. In terms of how we come to be, that seems a very literal form of becoming then, no?

    Prof. Oele: Indeed, I have written about the question of embodiment in pregnancy. I’ve explored that by using, for instance, Plato’s Republic; thinking through how we become to be who we are. A big part of my research on pregnancy has been devoted to the placenta, an organ of the in-between which I think of as installing a pregnant city. What happens if we think about pregnancy in terms of the messy material of being, the emergence of community out of a space of the in-between rather than just being informed by individual beings? Beyond the obvious exchange of nutrients and other factors taking place in and through the placenta, when I looked at the placenta, there’s current research investigating the exchange of cells that are from siblings or even (miscarried) previous children. Maternal cells are also being transferred across the placenta. This “microchimerism” as it is called offers access to a community that is much bigger than that contemporaneous community of cells that’s there in the placenta.

    The mutual exchange happening is also cross intersected with lots of environmental factors that are seeping through, for instance toxins. Further, the traces of what happens in that community are being transported into the future. For instance, foetal cells will remain even if the pregnancy is interrupted. Microchimerism carries forward into the future in many unpredictable ways, insofar as bodies will retain those communities within them.

    Laura: You mentioned that you are interested in this messy material of being. The image of the pregnant city in the placenta very well fits that, do you like to think about the environment in such a way?

    Prof. Oele: I do! I also work with soil, which is also very messy. Oftentimes, we romanticise it and talk about Earth and its power, but I like to dig into the dirty, messy stuff of life. There is this new group of philosophers called the “new materialists” that draw attention to this notion of matter. I have found real inspiration in that, especially in combination with my background in medical school.  There is this tendency in modern culture to sterilise life, to use sterile concepts, and I think it’s a uniquely challenging thought to dig into the messiness of life, for instance into soil and into organs such as the placenta. So yes, I like to think about these messy interfaces, as I call them, or “e-co-affective interfaces”, as my book has it. And to make them philosophically appealing and interesting and complex.

    Laura: That is such an intriguing way of looking at it! You have also mentioned this term of the “pregnant city”. And you write about loss, too, both in the contexts of pregnancy and environmental loss. How does this go together with the community you are describing?

    Prof. Oele: Oftentimes we think about pregnancy as a one-way street towards birth, which is very much a misconception. 70% of conceptions, so it’s estimated, do not continue. This is a discourse that’s often forgotten, due to the teleology that exists around pregnancy. To philosophically thematize pregnancy and loss has recently been on the upswing, with a few publications coming out on miscarriage and stillbirth from a philosophical perspective. I find it important to write about this, as it is key to undo the silencing around these topics and use philosophy as a way to transform discourses, and, possibly, aid those suffering from such losses.

    Another topic that I feel very dear about is to think about questions of loss that don’t just have to do with the loss of a particular being, but with the loss of a certain kind of constellation. There is an intersection here. Both with environmental loss and with pregnancy loss (which I have named the loss of the pregnant city), you lose a certain kind of constellation, a world, and a certain kind of future. I am intrigued by what it means to be confronted with a world that shrinks or transforms, that is never ever going to be the same as what we had expected or hoped for earlier on. Moreover, what does it mean to mourn when you don’t exactly know what it is that you are mourning, since there is no one particular “thing” that you lose?

    These are losses that speak to a transformed world, and, at least in my experience, pregnancy loss involves such a transformation of world. I see a connection there to a world of climate change. We may mourn the loss of certain species, but we may be more affected by this larger question of a transformed world where we find less and less hope for places of refuge, of trust, of rebirth, where the world can reconstitute itself.

    Laura: That really resonates with me, these different facets of loss that climate change imposes on us. It reminds me of texts I have read on the way environmental grief is experienced differently, depending on your cultural relationship to nature and the world. What you say speaks of a deep relationality between us, each other and the world in all its forms.

    Prof. Oele: Right, I am after all a philosopher of affect. As Butler would say it, we are always originally composed of relationality, yes. And so, when we experience loss, we actually lose  ourselves, since we’re always relational. This notion of grief gets us into this sense of relationality that underlies us very deeply in a fundamental way, and can thereby make us a bit more aware of how we are connected to each other. If we would see ourselves as much more relational, also in terms of climate change, experiences of loss that we currently may have could possibly afford us a way forward. We become much more aware of the fact that the world as we had imagined it to be isn’t just our own mirror, but that we have always been part of this environmental ecological system. Much of the meaning of who we experience ourselves to be is dependent upon that larger network.

    I lived in the United States, California specifically, for a long time. We know how many of the indigenous populations have been uprooted or unsettled, long before climate change, due to the colonial settlers. These indigenous populations have already experienced loss for a long time. If we are now confronted by climate change and mention this loss as sudden, those indigenous populations would say “what event are you talking about now?” When I talked earlier about grief, how it may connect us and make us more sensitive towards the world, in some sense maybe our own climate grief now can also make us more sensitive towards the grief that others around the globe have felt regarding lifestyles and colonialism that we have imposed upon them. Therefore, it may not just make us more empathetic or sympathetic, but make us form alliances.

    And of course, I don’t want to say that suffering is a precondition for having a different kind of relationship to the world. But I do think that given the current crisis within which we are, suffering could instil transformation. Not just one-on-one, but also through creating different kinds of affective-sensitive dispositions and transforming political economic policies. In this regard, affective dispositional changes can transform societies.

    Laura: I think those are some beautiful words to end with. Thank you very much for the conversation!

  • Into the Black Hole with Jonathan Zackor

    The Valkhof Museum’s exhibition ‘Into the Black Hole’ opened in October of 2023, to much fanfare. Students from Radboud University (such as our very own Laura Schranz!) participated as ‘public-in-residence’ to co-design the exhibition alongside the Valkhof museum. I decided to interview Jonathan Zackor, a Master’s student in Tourism and Culture at Radboud, who was part of the core group of students working on the exhibition. I had a strategic advantage in scheduling an interview with him, owing to the fact that we have been boyfriends for almost a year and a half.

    I decide to spring a surprise interview on Jonathan during his shift at the coffee corner in the main University Library. He is wearing his black work polo shirt and a pair of comfortable-looking jeans, but his individuality is still obvious even through his uniform: his split-dyed hair (currently half-brown, half-orange), the tattoos on his arm and his nose piercings make him easy to spot. He is softly spoken, switching between English and Dutch to take people’s coffee orders, and apologetically defaulting back to English with a smile if someone tries to order using unfamiliar Dutch slang. In a quiet moment, I ask my first question:

    For the uninitiated, who are you, and what was your role in the Valkhof Museum exhibition ‘Into the Black Hole’?

    “I’m Jonathan Zackor, I’m an international student from Germany who is doing his Master’s in Tourism and Culture. While I was working at the Valkhof Museum, I was still doing my Bachelor’s degree in Arts and Culture Studies, so my Master’s orientation coincided with the work I was doing at Valkhof. I was hired by the Valkhof Museum, as a Radboud student, particularly as a student who could participate in giving a unique perspective on the collaboration between art and science.”

    He leans over to look at what I have written down so far, then asks, “Could you add that I was selected to be a member of the core group, not the senate?”

    On the topic of unique perspectives, I ask him if he noticed a difference in approach or mindset between him and students from different faculties. He begins to answer, but is interrupted by an influx of customers to the coffee corner. He diligently switches to taking people’s orders, and once the rush dies down, he returns.

    “A difference? Well, yes… I think a difference was already reflected in my motivation when I applied for this position. They were asking what our opinion about the black hole was, what initial thoughts we had about it. I told them that I wanted to become an academic researcher, that I’ve done some independent research on it already, and that I’ve done some independent research on Affect studies – with an A!”

    At this point, something shifts: Jonathan is no longer just chatting during his work shift, cleaning Billie cups and keeping an eye out for customers – he embodies an academic, a professor giving a lecture on cultural studies (one I am struggling to capture the true depth of in my hastily-typed notes).

    “In my opinion, the phenomenon of the black hole is extremely challenging to grasp, so I attached some thoughts to it that were inspired by my previous research, such as imagining the black hole as a void with all emotions absent, with all humanness absent. So I was considering the black hole from a Culture-studies’ perspective. I was not the only person working on the exhibition from the Faculty of Arts, obviously, but I was very willing to stand in for the initial idea that I had.”

    “I think the perspective I have is also important for people who don’t know anything about black holes. Like, I didn’t know anything about the scientific side, I think most people probably don’t. In antiquity, people came up with Greek gods to try to understand the phenomena around themselves that were beyond understanding, and I think the black hole represents something similar.”

    “In my studies, we are taught to be extremely critical. Our study is very theoretical, so I thought it was very different…”

    Jonathan dashes away for a moment to retrieve some returned Billie cups from customers, puts them in the sink, then makes his way back over to me.

    “…I feel like other studies from the Faculty of Arts might have more practical applications, like studying languages, but with Arts and Culture Studies, it may be a stereotype, but you can’t really do anything with it if you don’t have more education, like in a job. You know what I mean?”

    I am a PPS student; naturally, I do.

    So, being an Arts and Culture student, you’re used to having to deal with more abstract ideas that aren’t tangible. You’re used to studying things that can’t necessarily be understood, like a black hole.

    “Oh… you put that much better than I did.” Jonathan half-sighs, half-chuckles.

    What does the exhibition mean to you, firstly as Jonathan the Arts and Culture scholar, and secondly as Jonathan the individual?

    “As a scholar, it means a successful combination of art and science perspectives.”

    He doesn’t elaborate, so I nudge him:

    And what about Jonathan, the individual?

    He smiles, this question is more difficult. After thinking for a moment, he says: “I think one major component of the exhibition was that it was co-designed with students my age, and I think it’s quite an honour to be part of this. I think that the exhibition really thrives off of that as well, because you can hear the contemporary voices. That’s very cool. Like it’s very… in the moment, completely recent. It speaks for our generation.”

    You were talking about Affect earlier; how do you feel when you’re in the exhibition?

    “I feel fascinated by all of the voices that come together. It’s a very overwhelming experience. It leaves me in awe. It makes you wonder why museums don’t work with students more often.”

    What do you think a student from the FFTR could learn from a visit to the exhibition?

    “People can have different conceptions, theories, “scientific theories”…” (Jonathan mimes the quotation marks for “scientific theories” with his hands, half-mockingly, with the air of someone who has several strong opinions on the separation of scientific theory from cultural theory), “…but they can express them in artworks as opposed to in writing. In philosophy, I feel as though writing is the primary way of expressing and learning ideas and theories. In the exhibition, philosophy students could try to retrace the objects, and try to see what theories the objects might incorporate or represent. Obviously the written descriptions of the artworks on the plaques help people to interpret the work…”

    Jonathan hesitates for a moment to gather his thoughts, then confides in me: “If the museum wants to work with students and take them seriously, I think a point of improvement in the future would be for them not to pick and choose from our ideas as it suits them or the status quo.”

    I detect some frustration and, in the spirit of journalism, I resolve to delve deeper, devising a new question while Jonathan finishes his shift.

    Were there things that the senate or the core group had suggested, but weren’t able to implement in the final exhibition?

    “Since I was a member of the core group, we weren’t part of a lot of conversations that the senate had. So I can’t really say anything about that. But we, as a core group, were each given additional specific focuses. One idea we had was contrary to what museums usually do –  we wanted to not print dates on objects we were exhibiting. There are a lot of objects in the vitrines and exhibition space such as the mobile telephone, prints, books from Radboud’s special collection… Using these objects, we wanted to give a comprehensive overview of people from different cultures and different time periods gazing into the stars and making art about it, or wanting to explore what’s waiting for them in the universe, and inventing technologies to do so. This is a cross-cultural thing, and we wanted the visitor to think for themselves about what connects different cultures, in spite of temporal differences. So we were thinking about just completely removing the data and locations of objects from the objects themselves, to not have the dates printed in the object descriptions.”

    “We wanted to do away with museum traditions. The students had visions for how we could change things, and this was brought up in conversation. But I think this, and other ideas, were sometimes too progressive, I guess, in the museum’s eyes. ‘This is not how we do it here’, basically. So those ideas from the students were put to the side, I feel, because they were so out of the way of traditions. But we weren’t really told that this was something we couldn’t give input on.”

    “There was also an issue with language. We were a mix of Dutch and international students, and one of the museum’s missions with the exhibition was to attract more students, which was why they wanted to have our perspective as students. We basically told them: ‘to be inclusive, it would be best to have English as the main language of communication’. But then there is also the tradition of the Valkhof museum to cooperate with German partners and visitors, so in their tradition, the main language of communication is Dutch, followed by German and English (or English and German). We wanted the main language to be English, not only for the big texts, but also for the videos, to make it more attractive to the general student population. But the museum reverted back to what they were used to. It was a very small thing, but I think we could have spent our time better if we had known there were certain things we couldn’t have changed, and we could have dedicated our energy elsewhere, towards things that were possible to change. The boundaries were sometimes a bit blurred.”

    “Basically, how museums usually work, they work with internal and external stakeholders. That makes sense for the museum. We as a core group were basically put in charge of the exhibition concept, or so we were told, which included the upcoming written narrative – the story we wanted to tell to the visitors – and we had a lot of ideas. Each of us in the core group prepared little powerpoints, presented what we thought about black holes, our study backgrounds, and we really connected with each other. From those conversations, we came up with a ‘master narrative’ which included the narrative, but also how to set it up in reality, spatial design, colour coding. One member had a really cool idea for making a vintage space poster, like Star Wars.”

    “And once we were told there were also external stakeholders involved, like a design team, we were excited to work together with them, we spent a lot of time on it, which says a lot, as students. We had multiple meetings. But what we weren’t really told – and I’m just saying that this should have been made clear upfront, to make sure we spent our time properly – was that the design team were the ones in charge because they had a lot of practical experience. We could give them our plans, but they would then tell us what they could do with that. And once they got back to us, I think all of us were shocked because the plan was completely different from what we had in mind with the story we wanted to tell. It was very different. We all really had to get warmed up to the idea. This is not to say that I don’t like the exhibition space as it is now, but we really had to get used to the idea because, at first, we didn’t know how this was going to go. And I think we would have done things differently if there had been transparent communication. I don’t want to sound too critical, but I remember everyone having a moment of silence when the plans were presented in front of us. We were like: ‘Huh? How did they come up with that?’. It was a surprise.”

    Did you learn anything about philosophy, politics or religion while you were working on the exhibition?

    “Well, I did learn a lot, of course, because another member of the core group is literally studying PPS, and she was very inspiring in her talks. I feel like she had a very personal stake in it. I love learning from other people as well. We had a lot of different backgrounds in the core group, and, of course, in the senate, but we didn’t collaborate as much with the senate as with the other core group members. I like to just listen to the very amazing ideas people have around me, obviously there is a reason why the collaboration wanted to have a philosophy student, and I think it was a great mix.”

    “The connection emphasised to me that mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion are all around us. People look up at the same night sky, as part of this imaginary of people thinking about the universe – we are all part of this. But there are still structural things in place that means that this togetherness is obstructed. We set others apart – we obstruct this togetherness. We create Otherness, we perpetuate ideas of cultural supremacy, we try to separate art and science.”

    “In my studies this is very much a point of attention, but to also see these ideas and points of attention emphasised in the work we were doing together, across studies and faculties, was really nice. The exhibition united students of all disciplines in thinking about black holes, and this unitedness is one of the goals of the exhibition itself.”

    “I like that the exhibition shows that people always have been, and always will be, curious about the world around them. I really like that.”

    The location and the exhibition itself describes itself as “accessible to wheelchair users and the disabled” on the website. Do you think this is the case?

    “It is now! For people with physical disabilities. So basically, when the initial design plans were shown to us, and we had a discussion about it, people were like ‘is it accessible for people who use wheelchairs?’, because the initial plan had obstructed the wheelchair ramp with walls. This was rectified, so now it is accessible for people with a wheelchair.”

    “But for some exhibition pieces, specifically ones that use a lot of light and noise, I would have appreciated a warning for people who are sensitive to flashing lights or intense sensory input in general. I don’t think there’s a warning in place right now, and that might limit accessibility for some people. But for the videos, for example, the education videos, there was a lot of conversation about how to deal with the sound. So we finally decided on ‘sound showers’, which I really like. Sound showers come from a source in the ceiling, and you have to stand under it, literally like a shower head but for sound. If you’re not under it, you don’t hear it. So that is good for people who would be overwhelmed by a lot of different sounds in the same room.”

    “And I also remember when we first went into the building on the Keizer Karelplein before the exhibition was set up. A lot of people from our group felt that the physical space of the building was very disorienting, challenging, and we kind of wanted it to not be overwhelming. There are a lot of colours, weirdly-shaped pillars, and we just wanted to create a coherent environment. When we were walking through the building at first, we felt quite uncomfortable. We felt we really had to work with the space and we didn’t want it to be too overwhelming for visitors. I think the exhibition itself is quite a lot, you know, it’s a bit overwhelming in terms of the content and the fact that it makes you feel like a little thing in the universe, it’s quite existential. This is making me think about Camus. May I refer to Camus?”

    You may.

    “I think Camus would have liked this exhibition a lot. You see yourself as this tiny thing, right in front of a black hole, and you think ‘Yes, it exists, you can ask a lot of questions and learn about it, but you can’t escape it, so you just have to face it’… I do like Camus.” Jonathan laughs a little at his own admiration for Camus.

    I recall that the students involved in the exhibition were each asked to devise a question for the visitors to consider as they walked around the exhibition. Your question was along the lines of: “Imagine you are being sucked into a black hole and into a different dimension, and you have to leave something behind. What is it?”. What would you leave behind as you went Into the Black Hole?

    “I asked this question because I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to answer the question. I think that everyone does want to leave something negative behind, maybe they feel that it isn’t a part of their story. So I feel like it’s, again, a very existential question. Usually, I tend to want to think about it, not just give a funny answer. I guess I would want to leave behind the feeling that I don’t deserve good things. Because I do, and everyone else also does. I don’t like it when people question their worth.”

    Speaking of worth, and as a way to round off the interview, what do you think makes the ‘Into the Black Hole’ exhibition worth experiencing?

    “I think the fact that it encourages people to experience curiosity, in the face of their fear. People look at black holes and think: ‘this is scary, but I’m going to study it anyway’. This is very human. I think the exhibition is a testament to human beings doing things both because of, and in spite of, existential fear or dread. Students, artists, scientists, everyone.”

  • Towards a Decolonial Ecology

    Indigenous Conceptualizations of, and Cosmological Relationships to, the Natural World

    Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met – the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve – and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting. (Kimmerer 2020, 7)

    In the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants,Wall Kimmerer (2020), an Anishinabekwe[1] plant scientist from Eastern Canada, tells the Creation story that is shared by the Original Peoples throughout the Great Lakes in present day North America. In the story a woman falls from the skies and is caught by geese. Animals then provide her with mud, and a turtle lends his back for land to be cultivated on. The ‘Skywoman’ gifts a handful of fruits, plants, and seeds for the mud to grow into land. This is how Turtle Island is born. As the quote above shows, the story of Skywoman expresses a very different cosmology than the Christian Creation story.

    Creation stories express cosmologies in which history, identity, language, land base, and beliefs all connect, secure, and regulate one’s orientation to the natural world (Salmón 2000, 1327-1332). Humans’ orientation to the natural world is of particular importance when looking at the ecological crisis. The ecological crisis has not been caused by all humans, but by certain exploitative and oppressive systems in which humans relate to the natural world in a certain way. As an alternative to this exploitative and oppressive relation, this paper seeks to connect the wider decolonial project to ecological and environmentalist discourses by looking at different conceptualizations of, and cosmological relationships to the natural world as reflected in Indigenous languages.

    First, I will discuss the conceptualization of the natural world that is expressed in the Christian cosmological orientation to the world, that has resulted in the ecological crisis. Then, I will discuss various Indigenous conceptualizations of, and cosmological relationships to the natural world. As a non-Indigenous student, raised and educated in a Western (ontological, linguistic, and epistemic) frame of reference, and without prior long-term fieldwork experience with the Peoples discussed in this paper, I am aware of my limitation in understanding, translating, and interpreting Indigenous knowledges, sciences, and wisdoms. Therefore, I will closely follow the interpretations, formulations, and translations of the discussed authors. Moreover, I am careful not to generalize Indigenous languages as I am aware of the vast variety of Indigenous languages that express different cosmologies. However, this paper does build on the premise that Indigenous languages express abstract concepts related to the land and natural world differently than does the English language, thereby following (amongst others) Rarámuri scholar Enrique Salmón (2002). In recognition of the importance of place, I have added a notes section with short information on the Indigenous Peoples I discuss.

    1: The Epistemic Decolonial Turn

    Contrary to what the term Anthropocene suggests, the ecological crisis is not caused by a universal Human, but rather by certain humans behaving within oppressive and exploitative systems, such as capitalism, colonialism, racism, and the patriarchy (Di Chiro 2017, Patel & Moore 2017). These systems are founded on an ontological, epistemic, and linguistic framework that divides the world in hierarchically opposing concepts, including the dichotomies culture/nature, man/woman, colonizer/colonized, and human/nonhuman (Descola 2013, Patel & Moore 2017). Characteristic of these dichotomies is the hierarchical power relation between its counterparts in which one side is active, dominant, and highly valued, whereas the other is passive, to be subjugated, and lower valued (or not at all). Alluding to the social and the natural realm, Braidotti (2022, 75) states that whereas the former has rights and agency, the latter has none, and is accessible and disposable. Indeed, decolonial, Indigenous, and ecofeminist scholarship recognizes the entanglement of oppressive and exploitative systems, and hierarchical dichotomous thinking (cf. Merchant 1990, Di Chiro 2017). More specifically, some scholars show how these systems are entangled with a Christian orientation to the world. Ferdinand (2022, 42) recognizes the influence of Christianity on the justification of colonialism, and refers to ‘Christian colonial inhabitation’, and Patel and Moore (2017) make explicit the link between enslaved labor, capitalism and the Church.

    Following social- and political ecology, and ecofeminism, Malcolm Ferdinand (2020) argues that environmental destruction is inseparable from racial and colonial domination and stems from the settler colonialist’s sense of entitlement in appropriating the planet. In his book Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Ferdinand (2022, 42) further argues that colonial inhabitation was presented as the will of God, and that, after the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples, lands of the Americas were reduced to (exploitable) resources. Hence, the exploitative and oppressive systems can be considered expressions of a Christian cosmology in which history, identity, language, land base, and beliefs connect, secure, and regulate how people within these systems relate to the natural world. As such the oppressive and exploitative systems that have caused the ecological crisis are radically different from how Indigenous Peoples relate to the world.

    Notably, the Christian cosmology is the same ontological, epistemic, and linguistic framework that historically dominates academia, as has been recognized by decolonial- (Ferdinand 2020; Grosfoguel 2007, 217), and Indigenous scholars (Wall Kimmerer 2020). Although Wall Kimmerer has written the Creation story of Skywoman in English, the original is told across various Anishinabee languages. The differences between them are significant. Where English consists for 70% of nouns, Potawami consists of only 30% nouns, the rest is verbs; in Potawami nouns and verbs are animate and inanimate; and whereas European languages often assign gender to nouns, Potawami does not gender the world. In Potawami, one for example does not say ‘hill,’ as in English, but ‘to be a hill’ instead. Rocks, mountains and water and places are all animate, only human made ‘things’ are not (ibid., 53).

    Such linguistic differences express and influence one’s orientation to the world (ibid., 58; Salmón 2000; Flaherty 2001). Moreover, each language contains cosmology-specific concepts that are often difficult to translate, as I will further discuss in section two. Grosfoguel (2007) has therefore coined the term ‘epistemic decolonial turn,’ to call for a broader canon of thought than the Western canon; critical dialogue in what is recognized as a pluriversal world; and taking seriously epistemic cosmologies from (formerly) colonized bodies. The radically different cosmologies, and consequently ways of interacting with the natural world of Indigenous Peoples, that I will discuss in the second part of this essay, are situated within this epistemic decolonial turn.

    2: Indigenous Conceptualizations of, and Cosmological Relationships to, the Natural World

    Challenging western dichotomous thinking, posthuman feminism, Indigenous and decolonial feminists are sharing philosophies that emphasize a reciprocal relationship with land and nature that is centralized around care (Braidotti 2022). This reciprocal relationship is already present in various Indigenous conceptualizations of the natural world. The Yoeme of Sonora, Mexico, and southern Arizona[2] use the term huya ania to describe natural areas outside of their villages (Evers and Molina 1987 in Salmón 2000), which roughly means ‘nurturing life’. The Rarámuri[3] refer to their homeland as gawi wachi, ‘the Place of Nurturing’. The Hawaiian[4] concept ʿĀina, commonly translated as ‘land,’ literally means “that which feeds” (Beamer 2021, 350). Despite these conceptual similarities, among Indigenous Peoples, relationships to land and place are diverse, specific, ungeneralizable, and based on long histories (Lowan 2009, 47).

    This relationality is further reflected in Indigenous scholarship on Land pedagogy. Styres and Zinga (2013) purposefully distinguish ‘Land’ (capitalized), which extends beyond a material fixed space, from ‘land,’ which refers to landscapes as a fixed geographical and physical space including earth, rocks, and waterways. Like Lowan (2009, 47), they explain that “Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning, and is highly contextualized.” (2013, 300-301). For Kimmerer (2020, 124-125), this is a relationship of love:

    Knowing that you love the earth changes you, cultivates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

    Similarly, Innuit[5] have “powerful, intimate, and spiritual connections to country that center love and mutual respect,” for them “the land is alive and ‘nature’ is like another person” (Lobo 2019, 395). In these Indigenous cosmologies relationality to the natural world extends beyond relationality to Land. For Shawn Wilson, an Opaskwayak Cree from Canada[6], for example, relationships extend to interaction with all creation, meaning that relatedness transcends human beings, and is extended to Land, including animals, plants waters, the sky and spirits (Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew pii tai poo taa 2020, 67).

    For many Indigenous Peoples land and elements within the natural world are recognized as animate persons or relationships of kin (Salmón 2001, 1327-1332). Whitehouse et al. (2014, 59), for example, note that for Peoples on the Torres Strait Islands within Australia[7], “Land, water and sky become animate through relationships – to ancestors, to plants and animals, and to clouds, hills, rocks and mineral forms.” Knowledge is thus considered ‘living knowledge’. Similarly, Hawaiian scholar Manulani Aluli Meyer (2008, 219 as cited in Tuck et al. 2014, 9) writes:

    Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor. For the Native Hawaiians speaking of knowledge, land was the central theme that drew forth all others. You came from a place. You grew in a place and you had a relationship with a place. This is an epistemological idea […] One does not simply learn about land, we learn best from land.

    Such Indigenous conceptualizations of land and the natural world as persons or kindred relationships not only imply that humans are at an equal standing with the rest of the natural world and land, but it also implies that humans have a certain responsibility (Salmón 2001, 1327-1332). This is also present in Indigenous conceptualizations of sovereignty. In 1977, Hawaiian George Helm, whose words became the philosophical essence of the Aloha ʿĀina movement that challenges American capitalism, exploitation, and misuse of the Hawaiian Islands, notes:

    The truth is, there is man and there is environment, one does not supersede the other. The breath in man is the breath of Papa (the earth). Man is merely the caretaker of the land that maintains his life and nourishes his soul. Therefore, ʿāina is sacred. … My duty is to protect Mother Earth, who gave me life. And to give thanks with humility as well as ask for forgiveness for the arrogance and insensitivity of man. (Beamer 2021, 359)

    Similarly, Mohawk[8] scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2005, 45) points out that having “a spiritual connection with the land established by the Creator gives human beings special responsibilities within the areas they occupy, linking them in a natural and sacred way to their territories […].” Such relations and responsibilities are thus very different from the hierarchical dichotomies from the Christian cosmology.

    Leanne Betaamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe[9] scholar, writer, poet, and musician, connects several of the aforementioned points when she argues that through giving more than what we take from aki (the land), intimate webs of relationships between plants, animals, rivers, lakes, and the cosmos will flourish. In ‘Land As Pedagogy,’ she tells the story of Binoojiinh (meaning ‘child’), a nonbinary child, who learns how to extract maple syrup water by looking at a “Ajidamoo” suck from the tree “Ninaatigoog” (Simpson 2017, 146-149). Similarly to both Wall Kimmerer and Manulani Aluli Meyer, the story revolves around the Nishnaabeg values of love, compassion, and understanding, and portrays a relationship to land in which humans “learn both from the land and with the land.” (ibid., 150).  Although there is a wide variety of Indigenous stories and cosmologies, the examples of Indigenous conceptualizations of, and cosmological relationships with the natural world and land discussed above have important similarities that distinguish them from the western dichotomous thinking in the Christian cosmology.

    Conclusion

    This paper sought to connect the wider decolonial project to ecological and environmentalist discourses by looking at different conceptualizations of, and cosmological relationships to, the natural world as reflected in Indigenous languages. I have discussed decolonial and Indigenous scholarship that argues that Western science has historically been dominated with an ontological, epistemic, and linguistic framework that stems from a Christian cosmology. These frameworks consist of a hierarchical dichotomous thinking that separates and elevates humans from the natural world. As noted by decolonial, Indigenous, and ecofeminist scholarship, these are the same frameworks that have fueled the oppressive and exploitative systems of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and the patriarchy which, in turn, have caused the exploitation of the natural world that has resulted in the ecological crisis.

    In order to further decolonize Western academia, two steps need to be taken. First, there needs to be a more widespread awareness of the influence of the Christian cosmology on (a misleadingly assumed secular) academia. This influence is for example visible in conceptualizations of the natural world and humans’ relations to the natural world that remain unquestioned, with exceptions of decolonial and Indigenous scholars, ecofeminists, posthuman- and queer theorists. Second, more space needs to be created for Indigenous cosmologies that have been historically erased, oppressed, or disregarded within academia. Doing so requires the consideration of linguistic differences, and the risk of losing Indigenous cosmological understandings of the natural world when translating. Finally, following Wall Kimmerer (2020), different cosmologies and knowledges should be negotiated without prioritizing either one.

    Bibliography

    Alfred, T. 2005. “Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, edited by J. Barker. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE, 33-50.

    Beamer, Kamanamaikalani. 2021 “He Aliʿi Ka ʿĀina, Ua Mau Kona Ea: Land is the chief, long may she reign.” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhity, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, 348-361. New York: Routledge.

    Braidotti, Rosi. 2022. “Chapter 3: Decentring Anthropos: Ecofeminism Revisited.” In Posthuman Feminism, 68-104. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Cutting, Janna. 2021. “Anishinaabe Storytelling for Coping and Adapting to Climate Change Impacts.” Major Research Paper presented to The University of Guelph.

    Descola, Philippe. 2013. “Chapter 3: The Great Divide.” In Beyond Nature and Culture, 57-88. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Di Chiro, Giovanna. 2017. “Welcome to the white (m)Anthropocene? A feminist-environmentalist critique.” In Rouledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor, 487-505. London: Routledge.

    Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie, and Kate McCoy. 2014. “Land Education: Indigenous, Post-colonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives on Place and Environmental Education Research,” Environmental Education Research 20(1): 1-23, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.877708.

    Ferdinand, M., A. Chaillou and L. Roblin. 2020. “Why we need a decolonial ecology.” Revue Projet 2, 52-56.

    Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2022. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, edited by Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay. Translator: Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Flaherty, Mary. 2001. “How a Language Gender System Creeps into Perception.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(1), 18-31. DOI: 10.1177/0022022101032001005.

    Grosfoguel, Rámon. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 211-223. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162514.

    Lobo, Michele. 2019. “Affective ecologies: Braiding urban worlds in Darwin, Australia.” Geoforum 2016: 393-401.

    Lowan, Greg. 2009. “Exploring Place from an Aboriginal Perspective: Considerations for Outdoor and Environmental Education.” Canadian Journal of Education 12: 42-58.

    Mathews, A. 2020. “Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations. Annual Review of Anthropology 49, 67-88.

    Merchant, Carolyn. 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers.

    National Park Service. 2023. “Native Peoples of the Sonoran Desert: The Yoeme.” Accessed on 3 November, 2023. https://www.nps.gov/articles/yoeme.html.

    Opaskwayak. 2023. “About us.” Accessed on 3 November, 2023. https://opaskwayak.com/about-ocn/.

    Patel, Raj., and Jason W. Moore. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future. Oakland: University of California Press.

    Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. 2023. “Culture and History.” Accessed on 3 November, 2023. https://www.srmt-nsn.gov/culture_and_history.

    Salmón, Enrique. 2000. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications 10(5), 1327-1332.

    Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. “Land as Pedagogy.” In As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, 145-174. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press.

    Styres, Sandra, and Dawn Zinga. 2013. ”The Community-first land-centered Theoretical framework: Bringing a ‘Good Mind’ to Indigenous Education Research.” Canadian Journal of Education 36(2): 284-313.

    Vásquez-Fernández, Andrea, and Cash Ahenakew pii tai poo taa. 2020. “Resurgence of Relationality: Reflections on Decolonizing and Indigenizing ‘Sustainable Development’.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 4: 65-70.

    Wall Kimmerer, Robin. 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass. London: Penguin Books.

    Whitehouse, Hilary, Felecia Watkin Lui, Juanita Sellwood, M.J. Barrett, and Philemon Chigeza. 2014. “Sea Country: Navigating Indigenous and Colonial Ontologies in Australian Environment Education,” Environmental Education Research 20(1): 56-69. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.852655.

    Willox, Ashlee Cunsolo, Sherilee L. Harper, Victoria L. Edge, Karen Landman, Karen James D. Ford, the Rigolet Inuit Community Government. 2013. “ The land enriches the soul: On climatic and environmental change, and emotional health and well-being in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Canada.” Emotion, Space and Society 6: 14-24. DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2011.08.005.

    [1] Anishinaabe is a collective term for the Ojibway (Chippewas), Potawatomi, and Odawa nations who share similar cultures and language. Some sources suggest other groups such as the Ottawa, Algonquin, Slateaux, Mississauga, Nipissing, and Oji-Cree communities to be included in this collective term. The Anishinaabe territory spans from Southern Ontario, the Northern States, Northern Ontaria, and Manitoba, and includes a diverse landscape (Cutting 2021, 10-11). The Anishinaabe speak Anishinaabemowin with around 36.000 speakers today (Cutting 2021).

    [2] The Yoeme, or Yaqui or Hiaki, live in Sonora, Mexico, and southern Arizona. Their homelands include the Río Yaqui valley in Sonora, Mexico, southern Arizona in the United States, and they have communities in Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico. They speak a Uto-Aztecan language. Using their intimate knowledge of the Sonoran Desert landscape, the Yoeme cultivated a variety of crops, including maize (corn), various bean and squash varieties, cotton, wheat, and more. More information can be found on the website of the National Park Service (2023).

    [3] The Rarámuri, also known as Tarahumara, occupy one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world. The homeland, Gawi Wachi, is located in the eastern Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico. Approximately 60.000 Rarámuri continue to live a traditional lifestyle of horticulture, gathering, and agroforestry (Salmón 2001, 1327-1332).

    [4] The Archipelago of Hawaiʿi consists of eight main islands (Niʿihau, Hawaiʿi, Oʿahu, Maui, Molokaʿi, Lānaʿi, and Kahoʿolawe) and the uninhabited 124 Northwest Hawaiian Islands situated above Kauaʿi, situated in the North Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian is originally a spoken language, and can be written with Latin/Roman letters since it was first written down by American missionaries. Due to a ban on teaching or speaking Hawaiian language in schools, only around 24.000 people, including self-identified speakers, currently speak Hawaiian.

    [5] The study that is being referred to here was done with the Inuit populations in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada. See Willox et al. (2013) for further information.

    [6] Opaskwayak Cree Nation has over 6000 people, most of whom live on the 15.000 acres of Opaskqayak Cree Nation land which is located in Manitoba, Canada. More information can be found on the Opaskwayak website (2023).

    [7] Whitehouse et al. (2014) focus on various Peoples living on the Torres Strait Islands in the Coral Sea at the far north of tip of Cape York, Australia. They also discuss policies that address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories.

    [8] The Mohawk people are the most eastern nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or Iroquois Confederacy. Their original homeland is the north eastern region of New York State extending into southern Canada and Vermont. They speak Iroquoian. More information can be found on the website of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe.

    [9] Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory is along the north shore of Chi’Niibish, or Lake Ontario. Chi’Niibish literally means ‘big water,’ and this lake is shared with the Roinonhseshá:ka with whom they have good relationships. The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe are travelers, meaning they move through their lands rather than settling one place. They are the eastern doorway of the Nishnaabeg nation (Simpson 2021, 2).

  • What You See, When You Close Your Eyes

    Book Review of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    I would have liked to begin this story in the manner of a fairy tale.

    I would have liked to write:

    ‘Once upon a time there was a little prince

    who lived on a planet scarcely bigger than himself,

    and who was in need of a friend…’

    To those who understand life,

    that would have a much greater air of truth.

    (De Saint-Exupéry 1995, 18)

    Come on, come on, hurry, or we might miss it! Take bigger steps than you ever thought possible, push back against the wind slowing you down, and set your lungs on fire! Let us run barefoot through tall grass and over warm sand until every inch of our body aches, feel the pain and laugh out loud, because you know, we know, we will not be late. There is no time to catch your breath. This is important and we cannot miss it: the sunset. We are here! The sun paints the sky in the most magnificent oranges, yellows, blues and pinks. Rays of light write words in the clouds that read like poetry, grass tickles our toes and the sun kisses, caresses our skin. Let your eyes drink in the sight, as the day draws its last breath. The day has to die to make space for a new one to be born. During such a moment, you can either mourn the day that was, wish it to come back, or you can find joy and excitement in the day that will soon arrive. Can you even imagine that there is a planet where the sun sets forty-three times a day? Where you do not have to make haste as we just did? Where you only have to move your chair a little to see the next one? Believe it or not, it exists.

    Now that the sun has gone to sleep, we might be able to catch a glimpse of this planet. Light makes space for darkness waking up the moon. The stars wipe the sleep from their eyes to show their faces. If you lay down on your back you can see them better. The world disappears from view, all you see is the sky showing off its glittering treasures. There it is, the planet I was talking about. It’s a tiny planet, not much bigger than a house. If you squint your eyes you can spot it. The little prince lives there, with his rose, his three volcanoes, and the baobab trees. ‘‘Asteroid B 612’’ (15) is what the planet is called, or at least it is what grown-ups call it, since they just love numbering, systemising and explaining beautiful things that have no number, do not fit in a system and are inexplicable. The little prince did not always stay on his asteroid. He left it for a while to travel to other planets, one of these was our home planet: Earth. That is where he met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was a pilot stranded in the Sahara desert after his plane had crashed during a record flight. While he was trying to fix it, he heard a little voice saying: ‘‘If you please draw me a sheep!’’ (5). This is how he met the little prince. Six years later, in 1942, De Saint-Exupéry wrote a book about his experience, named after the little prince himself.

    De Saint-Exupéry writes about what the little prince tells him about his life on Asteroid B 612, about the rose he has to protect, about the volcanoes he has to clean to stop them from erupting, about the baobabs he has to uproot to make sure they do not destroy the planet, and about the countless sunsets he can watch by just moving his chair a little. He also talks about how he has travelled to other planets. On the first planet he visited, he met a king with no subjects, then he continued to a planet inhabited by a conceited man without any admirers, his journey took him further to a planet where a drunk was drinking to forget how ashamed he was for his drinking. Again on different planets, he met a businessman, who fancied himself the owner of the stars, a lamplighter, who could never rest, and a geographer, who has never travelled. After visiting these planets, he came to the planet Earth, inhabited by ‘‘one-hundred-and-eleven kings […], seven thousand geographers, nine hundred thousand businessmen, seven-and-a-half million drunks, three-hundred-and-eleven million conceited men… In other words, approximately two billion grown-ups’’ (77). During his visit he met several animals and people, who showed him what life on earth is like. The first animal he met was a snake, a small animal, who wields greater power than any king. The snake explained this power to the little prince: ‘‘Whomever I touch […] I return them to the earth from whence they came’’ (82). Moreover, the little prince met two people, first he crossed paths with a railway pointsman, who told him about the people in the trains, rushing from one place to the next, never satisfied with where they are, never knowing where they are going, always on the go. ‘‘Only the children are flattening their noses against the window panes. […] They’re the lucky ones’’ (104). After this encounter, he met a fox who taught the little prince how to tame him. A process which transforms something, or someone from being ordinary to being unique and one of a kind. Now, in the Sahara desert, after all his travels, the little prince longs to go back home, to his planet, to his rose, to his sunsets. He remembers what the snake told him and asks the animal to bring him back home. He will go back, leaving behind the old shell that is his heavy body. The pilot is sad to see the little prince go, therefore he ends his narration with a request for anybody who meets a boy with golden curls, a boy that never answers any of your questions, to alert him that the little prince has returned.

    This story about the little prince fits well among classics like Aesop’s and Jean de la Fontaine’s fables, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and more recent works like Carlie Mackery’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, James Norbury’s Big Panda and Tiny Dragon and Toon Tellegen’s fables. I can only describe it as a poetic modern fairy tale with an incredible philosophical depth to it. The story warms my heart, time and again. I certainly recommend reading and rereading it, not only because it is a short book that does not take too long to read, but especially because it provokes its reader’s thoughts and pushes them to reflect on it. The Little Prince wants to be shared and discussed. I myself have read it several times now, and every time I read it I discover something new: a new quote I had not really noticed before, a new meaning hiding just behind the words, a new thought I had not yet stumbled upon.

    Once you have read The Little Prince, it will take hold of you and never let you go. Time and again, I realise just how strong the hold of this story on one’s heart is. When I worked in a bookshop, customers, many a time, bought a copy of the book and told me with proud smiles on their faces that they collected copies from the different languages of the places they had visited. They showed me pictures of their The Little Prince bookshelves, which were way more than just a display of different copies of the book in different languages. These shelves, told stories of the journeys these proud owners had been on, what they had seen, the people they had met along the way. There is so much more beneath the surface, for those who are willing to look further than a picture, further than a children’s story about a little prince, for those who actually see that this book is trying to teach us a certain way of life.

    This way of life is important for all grown-ups. De Saint-Exupéry dedicated this book to children and to the grown-ups that can still remember they once were children, even though he thinks few of them do. The Little Prince teaches us to tap into our inner child, the child that has been silenced over the years, but that is still alive in each of us. The child that can forget all the systems, numbers, figures, and binaries we have forced our world into. The child that keeps asking questions without giving up, without preformulating the answers, without prejudice, without reasoning from an existing paradigm. The child that does not simply put labels on the people, animals, nature and other entities in this world, but actually looks at them with wonder, curiosity, and imagination. It sees everything as if for the very first time since it can still be in awe of the world. On page 101, De Saint-Exupéry (1995) lets us in on a secret: ‘‘very simply: you can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential, is invisible to the eye’’ (101). There is so much more than our eyes can see, there is more behind the numbers, definitions, systems, divisions and binaries. The world is more complicated and more beautiful. Let us close our grown-up eyes that have been shaped by paradigms, prejudices, and labels in order to enable our children’s eyes to be opened. Those are the eyes of our hearts that look at the world with wonder and without judgement. Let us take the time to fill the pockets in our heads and in our hearts with the sights these eyes give us.

    The stars shine bright tonight. The skies are clear and Asteroid B 612 is visible. If one day, in the future, you look up at the night sky and you cannot see it, that is fine. Now you know it exists, you will see it everywhere, even when it’s invisible. If you listen closely you will hear the little prince’s voice: ‘‘At night, you will look up at the stars. Mine is too small to point out to you. It is better that way. For you, my star will be just one of many stars. That way, you will love watching all of them’’ (122).

    Bibliography

    De Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. 1995. The Little Prince. Translated by T.V.F. Cuffe. London: Puffin Books.

  • Philosopher on the Job: An Interview with Lisa Doeland on Careers in Academic Philosophy

    It is that time of year again when many students are graduating and thinking about their next steps into the world of employment, taxes, and other aspects of life after university. By now, I ought to be used to the jokes I hear about philosophers struggling to find their place in the world after their bachelor’s or master’s degrees. To many philosophy students, continuing their research may seem like an obvious and straightforward path. If an academic career is something you are considering, I strongly recommend talking to your lecturers and professors about their experiences.

    As a philosophy student interested in political ecology and climate ethics, I reached out to a number of lecturers and researchers in relevant fields. I wanted to hear about the paths they had taken to work on these topics in the realm of academic philosophy. This project started as part of a course I followed during my bachelor’s degree, titled Philosophy in Practice. Throughout this course, I investigated some potential careers, hoping to be swayed towards following one path or another.

    However, as I neared the end of that degree, I quickly realised that there is no fixed path for everyone in navigating a particular career, academic or otherwise. A particular conversation that sticks with me is one I had with Radboud University lecturer and PhD candidate, Lisa Doeland.

    I open our discussion with some questions I had been pondering for a while: “How did you decide to pursue a career in academia? Did you always know that this was the right career path for you?”

    “No, I didn’t always know,” Lisa admits, smiling as she joins me at the table in her office. “I began with my bachelor’s degree in Literary Studies, but I became interested in philosophy before I completed it. During my first year, I followed a course on the Philosophy of Culture, and I really liked it.” Soon after, Lisa enrolled as a philosophy student, too. After seven years, she had completed two bachelor’s degrees and her master’s degree in philosophy.

    Upon learning this, I wondered whether Lisa had moved from her master’s degree to a PhD position in relatively short succession. Throughout the final year of my bachelor’s degree, I questioned whether I wanted to spend the next several years in academia. A big part of me wanted to explore other interests and see what would await me in the near future outside the university.

    While I am still undecided on what path I will follow after my master’s degree, Lisa shows me that it is alright to take the time to focus on other aspects of life and figure out what comes next.

    “I had my first child when I finished my bachelor’s thesis in Literary Studies,” she comments. “It wasn’t long after that until I wrote my master’s thesis, too. It worked out well because I had good focus, especially when my daughter was young. I would think, ‘alright, now you’re sleeping, I can write’. Within four or five months, I finished the thesis. I was amazed by that, but it happened.”

    Shortly after completing her master’s degree, Lisa started working at the university as a programmer of lectures and debates. She already knew that she would like to do a PhD but was not sure about the topic yet. “I really like doing philosophy – theorising – but I wanted to make sure that there was some societal relevance to my research. I hadn’t found my niche yet,” Lisa resumes. “I was about 30 by then. I had worked as a programmer for around three years when I finally found a topic that was both societally relevant and interesting from my philosophical perspective: waste.”

    The natural follow-up question is how she entered her PhD position in the Department of Philosophical Ethics and Political Philosophy. As Lisa has been researching the topic she found most intriguing, I was curious to hear how she got there.

    “I didn’t apply for a PhD position. It all started with Angela Roothaan, whom I met through a Filosofisch Café in Amsterdam,” she explains. “I did an interview with her, and afterwards, we got talking. She asked, especially because I’m a woman, ‘Why are you not doing a PhD?’ – I was asked this question many times over the years, mainly from women in academia. With Angela, I wrote the first draft of my research proposal. However, I knew I still needed a full professor as a supervisor. I thought, ‘alright, who would share my fascination with waste?’ This is where I was happy to have René ten Bos as my guide. Finally, I asked Cees Leijenhorst too, for day-to-day supervision.”

    “What does your day-to-day supervision entail?” I wonder, curious about the difference between thesis supervision at the bachelor’s or master’s level and PhD research.

    “Cees has been very important throughout my research process. This is not because he’s particularly interested in the topic of waste, but because he’s a good and critical reader. He would keep asking questions.”

    “What kinds of questions?” I wonder, especially since the ontology of waste is not Cees’ specific area of expertise.

    “‘Why are you making an argument in this way and not in that way? Where are the summaries? Where are the introductions? – I had become accustomed to writing for a more general audience, less so for academic audiences. Cees Leijenhorst has been a very helpful supervisor,” Lisa shares, appreciative of the advice she receives.

    I was particularly intrigued by the idea of formulating a research plan and proposing it to a potential supervisor. Lisa continues, “I needed some time to digest everything and complete my proposal, leading to my official enrolment as an external candidate. That was in 2018, so I am now five years into my PhD.”

    Curious to learn more, I ask, “what is it like being an external candidate at the university?” I wonder whether Lisa’s PhD experiences vary from those of an internal candidate.

    “I’m enrolled in the Graduate School for the Humanities. It is not just Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies – other humanities studies are a part of it too. The Graduate School hosts many events, but I don’t often attend them. Perhaps I would attend if I was younger. I think I’m quite old compared to other PhD students. Though, I want to emphasise that even if you’re an external candidate, the university finds ways to include you. There are also reading groups at the university. Finding and becoming a part of a community can be important as an external candidate. Otherwise, it might be a lonely project if it’s just you, your laptop, and your supervisors. I don’t think that would be healthy.”

    “How did you go about finding your sense of community?” I question, pondering Lisa’s earlier remarks on often not attending the Graduate School events.

    “For me, it’s been helpful to be a part of the philosophical cafe in Amsterdam. That’s a community in itself. It’s not an option, then, to limit yourself to your own research or interests because there are always other people’s lectures. You quickly find yourself reading, doing an interview, and then researching a philosopher that you hadn’t heard of before. It broadens your scope because you spend a lot of time developing and connecting philosophy to other themes – societal issues. Reading groups and philosophical cafes like that have helped me out a lot. Though, of course, you can also find this sense of community at the university. If you’re part of a PhD project, you will be inspired by other researchers that you’re working with.” Lisa sheds light on her experiences, and we continue to discuss the importance of building a network of people working as academic philosophers.

    Reflecting on her network before entering her PhD position, I ask, “how did you find the shift from lecture programming to working as an academic in the university?”

    “I already knew many professors and researchers at the university through my work as a programmer. They didn’t know me as an academic yet, but they knew I read their books and engaged with their work. As a result, the academics I have been working with already knew what they could expect from me and knew that I was capable.”

    “Was anything different than you expected?” I wonder, thinking about how her place of work remained the same while Lisa’s new position was quite different.

    “I always knew it was going to be hard work – especially teaching. Perhaps I could say, ‘I only have one or two hours to prepare, and that’s all’. But that’s not how I roll. For example, I lead a course called Classical Texts, where I read philosophical literature together with students. Last week, I thought I had a good understanding of a text until a student asked some interesting questions about it. When there are many students asking questions, I can’t always answer them all. I try to be upfront about it – ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got a proper answer for you right now’. Next week, I want to be able to explain it to them. This means reading up on Kant for a day and a half – it is important. It helps me out in my own research, and I feel obliged to guide the students properly. Some extra work needs to be done, but I create a healthy work-life balance for myself anyway. I try to make sure that I have enough time for everything, especially for my family, though I’m also intrinsically motivated to put in the work. I don’t mind reading up on Kant and putting in the extra hours.”

    This time, I meander to the topic of starting a family and being a woman in academia. Many higher-function academic positions are still male-dominated today. “Do you feel like women are still underrepresented in your field of philosophical research?”

    We take a moment to reflect, and Lisa shares her thoughts. “I think there are a lot of women in interesting positions today. When I think about the research and the literature that I draw on, I made a conscious decision to engage with certain authors. At one point, when I was 3 or 4 years into my PhD, I felt like I was working in a male-dominated field. From that moment onwards, I focused on reading published research from women, but now I don’t really have to think about it anymore. These women are still on my radar, but I feel like things have changed. It is also really changing at this faculty, and I’m very happy about that. It’s important to make sure that everyone is included and that there’s a good balance of different identities.”

    Lisa continues, “I think things are getting better for women in academia. Yet, for everyone, it’s harder to find academic positions abroad since you could find yourself filling precarious positions for a long time before landing a permanent position. Meanwhile, it’s not always possible to move to other cities for new positions when you have children and a partner.”

    I may not have decided whether to pursue an academic career yet, and I may sway to one path before jumping back to another many more times. Nonetheless, this conversation has been incredibly useful in understanding the many elements that need to be considered if I were to pursue a PhD position later. With this thought in mind, I ask one final question: “What advice would you give to a current student considering a career in academic philosophy?”

    Lisa takes a short moment to ponder my question before answering with a smile. “Do not simply focus on wanting to do a PhD and finding a position. Make sure that you engage with subject matter that lights your fire. You need to be intrinsically motivated, engaged, and feel like your research is important. There must be something at stake, and your heart needs to be in it, so to speak. The right way to go about this could be to do a PhD as an external candidate, but if you find a good position in a good research group, I imagine that’s amazing, too. You can flourish when you find passion for your field and discover your sense of community.”

    We exchange a few last words and wish each other luck in our future endeavours. Although I do not know what awaits me in the near future, I find a sense of comfort in knowing that there is no singular, fixed path to a career in academia or another field. The conversations I had with Lisa and other academics have been extremely valuable. If you find yourself questioning your potential place in academic philosophy, find a moment to enjoy a cup of tea with some of your lecturers.

    Shortly after our interview, Lisa published her book, Apocalypsofie, and is now working on the completion of her PhD. More information about this publication can be found following the link below:

    https://www.uitgeverijtenhave.nl/boek/apocalypsofie/.

  • Het applaus en de schilder

    Geïnspireerd op de filosofie van het applaus van Cornelis Verhoeven.

    Welk dier is de mens toch, dat het zijn voorste poten tegen elkaar slaat, wanneer het iets mooi vindt? (Verhoeven 1969, 139-154)

    Wat achterblijft als het applaus uitblijft is leegte. Stukgeslagen verlossing. Een aangapende ruimte die aarzelt. De stilte moeten verduren. Het slot als open vraag. Uitdovende extases. Een uitstel van volmaaktheid. Het is verschrikkelijk. Verschrikkelijk als het slot niet sluit, niets besluit. De speler op het toneel zit zonder applaus gevangen. Onvoltooid en onvolmaakt staart zij roerloos het publiek aan. Het slot mooi gemaakt, beladen met de betekenis van een mogelijk geheel. Maar zonder applaus geen geheel. Het hele stuk kleeft aan de speler, benauwd haar. Kleine stapjes voorwaarts, laat het stuk niet meer van mij zijn.

    • Publiek, roept de speler.
    • Verlos mij.

    “Men beziet zijn handen en denkt: waartoe dit ritueel?” (154) 

    Eerst is er het begin. Dan het slot. En dat wat ertussenin ligt, de grote eenheid van het stuk. Aan weerskanten het applaus. Eerst om de aanvang in te luiden. Uiteindelijk om het geheel af te sluiten. Om begin en einde bij elkaar te kunnen voegen. Om massa aan dat wat er tussenin ligt te geven. Een vergeten massa, want wie schoonheid in de slotzin brengt, laat achter wat ervoor kwam. Een wegvloeiend einde? Een harde breuk? Een abrupte onderbreking en dan met geweld het einde inzetten. Nog een kleine vlucht terug, samenvattend. Wij spelers staan klaar, ontvangen uw daverende voltooiing. Zonder jullie zijn wij niets. Zonder de vlakke hand geen dankgebaar.

    • Publiek, roepen wij.
    • Applaudisseer toch.

    Troostend is het applaus voor de gewone mens. Het harde kabaal overstemt de naaktheid van haar menselijkheid. Haar diepe goddeloosheid, haar aardse onvolmaaktheid. Naast het podium is alles miezerig en vuil. Klappen is instemming geven, de grootsheid bevestigen. Het is klaar. Er hoeft niet meer bekritiseerd of verwonderd te worden. Het applaus is de collectieve aanvaarding van wat de schamele niet-creatieve mens niet kan. Scheppen, tot leven brengen, van niets naar voltooiing. Applaus is danken voor de grootsheid. Een liefdevol gebaar voor het gebroken hart.

    • Dank u, roept het publiek.
    • Wij zijn getroost.

    Die eenzame kunstenaar die schildert. Mijmerend in tevredenheid verkeerd. Voor haar geen slot dat leegte achterlaat. Er was immers nooit sprake van chronologie, van tijd. Bij aanvang voor het doek brak zij de tijd en bracht zo nooit einde aan de ervaring. Zij hief de horizon op, dwong haar verder te zien. In volle vreugd trok zij de tijd uiteen en bracht haar terug in een enkele veeg over het doek.  De continuïteit tussen schilder en publiek is van fragiele aard, losjes zwiert zij over onmetelijke afstand. Afgebrokkeld. Zij wordt niet verlost door het collectief, afgesneden van de ritus van het applaus. De schilder besluit haar eigen einde, zij geeft de wereld het werk terug.

    • Wereld, fluistert zij.
    • Alsjeblieft.

    Stelt u eens voor. Klappend voor het geschilderde doek. De virtuositeit van de schilder bedankend. Perfectie, niets anders dan perfectie! Eenmanspubliek, gesloten in de individuele ervaring. Juichend, joelend, bravo! Maar de schilder is al vroegtijdig gevlucht, nog voor de aanvang van een individu. Nog voordat iemand het werk kon aanschouwen. Het applaus huldigt het werk, groeit uit tot een ovatie. Schepper van schoonheid! Het individu kan de stilte van het doek niet langer aan, daarom klapt zij, daarom ziet zij niets! Het kabaal overstemt het zicht. Begrijpt u toch, daarom kijkt zij niet langer dan een paar seconden naar het doek en waggelt zonder aandacht van het ene naar het andere.

    • Individu, smeekt het doek.
    • Blijf toch staan nu.

    Klappend voor het geschilderde doek, dat zou toch wat zijn! Het kijkende individu stelt dat zij dat ook had gekund, dat schilderen. En dat is omdat zij het doek niet rond krijgt, niet gegeven krijgt. Wat moet ze er mee? De schilder werpt het doek slechts in de wereld en alleen zij met een ontvankelijk oog voor ritme zal haar eenvoud en schoonheid zien. Het schilderij biedt geen troost. Het schilderij brengt voort waar het individu niets mee kan. Applaus is de bevestiging van ontvangst. Maar het schilderij geeft niets. Er valt niets te ontvangen. Er is niets geruststellends aan. Dat is wat troostend is, stevigheid, massa, densiteit van het voltooide werk, dat ik, als individu, heb mogen voltooien. Daarom klap ik!

    • Maar ik vraag, redt de schilder.
    • Ik vraag…

    Het podium bevrijdt speler en publiek. Brengt samen, bevriest mogelijkheden, laat voor even, gedurende de klappende klanken, het kunstwerk van iedereen zijn.

    Die stilstaande doeken, die geverfde objecten. Zo ver weg. Zo ver weg. Men is er stil van.

  • Philosopher Abroad: Philosophies of Life

    In Luang Prabang, Laos, I first learned that the word philosophy does not have a universal meaning. I was in Luang Prabang for an internship for about five weeks in 2019. During this time I regularly visited a center where travelers, expats and English-speakers went to speak with young locals. The purpose of the center was for these young people to practice their English free of charge and at the same time for everyone to engage in a cultural exchange through conversations. Every time I went to this center I discovered new things – both about the people I was speaking with, the culture I was immersing myself in and about myself.

    During the first few visits I learned about the different possible interpretations of the word philosophy. When asked what I studied, I always answered Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology (I was doing a double bachelor’s at Radboud University at the time). Most people that I spoke with immediately passed me the question ‘What is your philosophy of life?’ Every time I would stare at them blankly. I sort of grasped what they were asking, but I did not understand it completely. I asked them several times, but it was only through hearing other people’s philosophy of life that I came to understand – over time – what it entailed. These people referred to philosophy as a way of living, as a practice or process that is constantly in development.

    Since I studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology, this was exactly what I was interested in learning: how philosophies of life differed or were similar from person to person, and from culture to culture. Throughout my studies I tried to follow as many intercultural and non-western philosophy related courses as possible – at Radboud that included Intercultural Philosophy; outside of university I joined a Zen Buddhism meditation center. When I was choosing the university for my minor I wanted to follow subjects on Ubuntu and other ‘African philosophies’. I looked at the courses taught in several universities in Southern Africa and spoke with the study advisors. As I expected, what I was looking for did not really exist: philosophy is not a self-evident field of study outside of western academia. Perhaps university, which teaches in a mind-based way, was not even the place to learn about philosophies as a practice. For me to learn about philosophies of life across people and cultures I had to learn through conversation and experience.

    I ended up doing my minor on Oʿau, Hawaiʿi (yes!!) and did follow subjects on Philosophies of Hawaiʿi and the Pacific, and Hawaiian Language and Histories. However, where I learned most about Hawaiian philosophies was on a weekly spiritual event called Soulday. Soulday brought together people from various religious backgrounds and spiritualities. During the activities we made sure we took care of the aīna – which is usually translated as ‘land’ but implies a reciprocal relationship with the land. In other words, we take care of the land and the land takes care of us. Through conversation, practice, experience, and example I learned about such untranslatable Hawaiian concepts that for me formed puzzle pieces of Hawaiian philosophies.

    I learned that language is an important tool through which we learn to understand our worlds, but it is also limiting. I think that everyone who speaks more than one language knows that some words are simply not translatable – in Dutch the most known example is ‘gezellig’. In Hawaiian language I encountered words, such as aīna and aloha, that were not only untranslatable but also influenced my understanding of the world. What if a word like land was not a thing, but a relationship? How does that change our worldview and how does that change our ‘philosophy of life’?

    Several months ago I encountered the same questions when doing anthropological fieldwork in Udaipur, India to finish my Cultural Anthropology bachelor. Whereas my research topic was initially on ‘human-nature’ relationships, I soon found out that there is no translation to Hindi for the English ‘nature’. I had somewhat anticipated on this by asking Paul van der Velde how many translations or variations exist in Hindi for the English ‘nature’. There was only concept one that came close, which was prakriti. However, prakriti also meant ‘manifestation of the whole cosmos’. In Udaipur, I explored the understanding and interpretation of this concept further. Through various methods, including conversations, interviews, participant observation, participant sensing, and arts-methods, I learned that the philosophies of my Hindu research participants did not include strict categorizations of nature, people, and spirit as separate entities. Instead, the ‘categories’ that my research participants would make or experience seemed to be fluid and interdependent. This meant that my Hindu research participants had an entirely different relationship to their environment and each other: their philosophy of life was shaped by language, and their language shaped their philosophy of life.

    These various experiences abroad and encounters with different cultures, languages, and spiritualities have sparked an infinite curiosity for learning about philosophies of life. While western academia offers a structured approach to doing so, it is also limiting. Western academia has confined the dynamic and embodied character of philosophy as a practice of life to a structured discipline that focuses on the mind and is separated from other disciplines. This means that until the discipline of philosophy changes I will keep learning about philosophies of life mostly outside of academia. A question that lingers within me, however, is whether western academia is fluid enough to open up for learning through practice, experience and embodiment. To answer that question, perhaps it is necessary to first pose another one. What is the philosophy of western academia?

  • Telling Non-Human Stories

    Writing and reading narratives show us what other possible ways of encountering the world are possible, thereby potentially transfiguring our own ways of engaging with the world around us. Implicated in narrative, therefore, we find a transformative potential.

    Few problems faced by humanity require such a drastic change in engaging with the world as climate change. As a true multitude of authors from all sorts of disciplines now assert, climate change is only resolvable when we venture out of the confines of the purely human, into the breadth of an ecology that both encompasses and transcends us (Chakrabarty 2018, 6; Ghosh 2016, 82; John 2018; Kohn 2013; Morton 2012; Trexler 2015, 13-14; Ustler 2009, 173). Perhaps we can capitalise on the transformative potential of narrative to change the way we deal with climate change as well? Can we use narrative to escape our all-too human way of interacting with the world? To answer this question, we first need to have a clear conception of what narrative can do and how it works as a transformative instrument.

    In his Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) offers precisely such an analysis. To understand the transformative aspect of narrative, he introduces the term ‘mimetic circle’. This philosophical tool describes the way in which the reading of a novel – for simplicity’s sake I use the example of written narrative in this text, but Ricoeur’s theory is applicable to various other ways of experiencing narratives – presents a narrative world to the reader, which then potentially influences the reader’s own world, thereby transforming the way the reader encounters the world around them.

    So, does that mean we can simply take Ricoeur’s mimetic circle and start creating narratives that effectuate more climate friendly behaviour? Sadly, no. For all its philosophical depth, the mimetic circle always centres on human actions and narratives – it is quite literally anthropo-(human)-centric. This is a problem, because these narratives were supposed to help us overcome the anthropocentrism that led to climate change in the first place. We therefore need narratives that capture not only human, but also non-human, material forms of action, communication, and temporality. Only then can we expect of narratives the transformative potential to help us change our behaviour as drastically as is needed now.

    Hence, if we want to use Ricoeur’s mimetic circle to help combat climate change, his philosophy needs to be ‘stretched out’ to also encompass the non-human.  In this paper, I attempt such a broadening by consulting various concepts proposed in Levi Bryant’s Onto-Cartography (2014). More precisely, the primary question this paper poses is whether Bryant’s concept of non-human action can be used to widen the scope of Ricoeur’s narrative theory. I tackle this question in the following way: first, I examine Ricoeur’s theory of narrative by discussing his mimetic circle. Second, I introduce Bryant’s alien phenomenology as a conceptual framework for conceiving non-human action. Third, I incorporate Bryant’s non-human action into Ricoeur’s mimetic circle, thereby establishing a framework for the transformative potential of a non-anthropocentric narrative.

    Narrative Time and Anthropocentrism

    Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and the way it influences human consciousness is, for a large part, carried by his idea of mimesis. To understand what form this influence takes, and how it displays Ricoeur’s anthropocentrism, the mimetic circle itself needs to be elucidated. Afterwards, its anthropocentric elements can be distinguished.

    Mimetic Circling

    The mimetic circle is constituted by a “single continuous process” that is the rotation of mimesis. It is made up of three parts: mimesis1, mimesis2, and mimesis3. A rotation through these three sections describes three respective situations: a person before reading a book, the process of the person actually reading the book, and then the person changed by this reading. To understand the expanse but also the limitations of Ricoeur’s argument, the three steps are discussed separately. 

    Mimesis1 refers to the fact that we are always already capable of understanding actions. We have a so-called ‘preunderstanding’ of action. This preunderstanding becomes more well-defined in its three different elements: structure, symbol, and temporality. Structurally, mimesis1 means that we can differentiate between action and mere physical movement (Ricoeur 1984, 55). We do this using a certain “conceptual network of action” that is given to us through a combination of factors hailing from both the nature and the nurture register (56). Symbolically, mimesis1 refers to the fact that actions have an inherent readability, that is given through action always being “symbolically mediated” (57). This means that action is never done outside a sphere of “signs, rules, and norms” (57) – an action always already means something. Temporally, mimesis1 is largely defined by the Heideggerian idea of within-time-ness (62). Within-time-ness is a kind of preoccupied experience of time; time as the ‘thing’ in which our goals and plans are formulated (63). Mimesis1 is, then, “first to preunderstand what human acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality” (64).

    Upon this preunderstanding of action, Ricoeur says, a narrative is constructed by means of emplotment. The process of emplotment – to which mimesis2 refers – is the organisation of the as of yet unorganised events distinguished in mimesis1 (64). Emplotment mediates between the preunderstanding of action of mimesis1 and the ‘postunderstanding’ of mimesis3 (65). This mediation occurs in three ways: first, as already discussed, it mediates between the individual “incidents and a story taken as a whole” (65). Second, it mediates between the discordance of a heterogeneous set of elements of “agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, [and] unexpected results” (65), and the concordance of the plot (66). This mediation operates, third, on a temporal plane: a temporally ordered configuration is extracted from a temporally meaningless succession (66).

    This threefold mediation of mimesis2 allows for the creation of a narrative from the preunderstanding of action registered in mimesis1. This creation of plot, however, does not come forth solely from the individual human being’s preunderstanding. It also bases itself on a certain tradition, on the one hand characterised by novelistic paradigms that have sedimented into the tradition (68), on the other hand made up of the innovative potential of each and every unique narrative work (69). Mimesis2, therefore, is the fact of the production of a story by the mediation between incident and story, discordance and concordance, and succession and temporal order, using the input and rules inherited by a tradition.

    The narrative created in mimesis2 does not exist in a vacuum, of course; it is read. The encounter between reader and the work Ricoeur calls mimesis3 (Dowling 2011, 14). This confrontation is a conflict of the actual, practical world of the reader, and the formal, fictive world of the text. The interaction between these worlds is constituted by the fact that both worlds are, by genesis, built on the same preunderstanding of action Ricoeur argues is mimesis1 (15). A preunderstanding of action is needed to construct our own world of experiences but also to construct any narrative in general.

    With mimesis3 the world of the reader collides with that of the narrative, the latter exhibiting its different possible ways of experiencing the world to the former. What then occurs in the reader – if she is influenced by the text, of course – is a change of consciousness (16). This process thus refigures the prefigured consciousness of the reader through the mediation of a configured narrative work.

    Non-Human Action

    Now that Ricoeur’s mimetic circle has been expanded upon, we are ready to understand in what ways the non-human does not fit into the constraints set on narratives by Ricoeur. The problem of anthropocentrism discussed in the introduction resurfaces here: it is hard to conceive of a climate-friendly refiguration – an eco-refiguration, if you will – while only considering the human perspective (Ghosh 2016, 82; Trexler 2015, 13-14; Ustler 2009, 173).

    The threat of anthropocentrism is carried most urgently by the first stage of mimesis. This is because mimesis1 dictates which events in general are (pre)understood as an action. When the non-human is allowed into this category, it can be taken up in the process of emplotment that is mimesis2 and subsequently influence the reader’s world by letting it collide with the world of the narrative.

    The categorisation of non-human ‘happenings’ or “mere physical movement” (Ricoeur 1984, 55), as action is no self-evident manoeuvre for Ricoeur. His way of conceptualising action is implicitly and explicitly anthropocentric: structurally, he distinguishes between human action and its “goals … motives … [and] agents” and ‘mere’ physical movement (55); symbolically, actions are always mediated by an implicitly human plane of expression that includes “signs, rules and norms” (57); and finally, mimesis1 literally refers to a preunderstanding of “what human acting is” (64, my italics). Ricoeur clearly is not interested in non-human action.

    At the same time, I share Utsler’s (2009) optimism for a Ricoeurian eco-philosophy – provided it succeeds in shedding its anthropocentric limitations. To make eco-refiguration possible, the reader needs to be confronted with a configured narrative world that is composed of non-human agents and the accompanying non-human action. To incorporate these elements in mimesis1, I now turn to Bryant’s Onto-Cartography.

    Machines All the Way Down

    In Onto-Cartography, Bryant puts forward a world view in which all entities – whether they be bureaucracies, volcanoes, human beings, symphonies, or forests – are seen as machines. To differentiate between all these machines, Bryant introduces two theoretical tools: the dual face of machines, and alien phenomenology. In the following, I discuss both tools and explain their role in imagining non-human agency and action.

    Dimensions of the Machine

    In contrast to traditional philosophy, machinic philosophy is hardly interested in the qualities an entity has. It is mostly focused on what the machine does. Fundamentally, “[a] machine is a system of operations that perform transformations on inputs thereby producing outputs” (Bryant 2014, 38). Every entity that exists, therefore, has a certain set of transformations it operates on (flows of input), and a set of outputs constituted by these operations.

    This structure sets up a dichotomy between a machine’s operations and its outputs (40). The capacity a machine has for its specific array of operations is called a ‘power’ (a leaf’s power to photosynthesise, for instance). The outputs created by the machine’s actual operations are called ‘manifestations’ (42). These manifestations do all sorts of things for the machine: they can be the machine’s qualitative appearance (the leaf’s greenness, for example); they can transform the behaviour of the machine itself (its shrinking when there’s little water); and they can be a material output flow (the oxygen produced by photosynthesis) (44-45). The powers a machine has dictate which operations it undertakes, which subsequently generates the entity’s observable facts.

    Machines are not open to all inputs, neither do they possess an endless array of powers. To illustrate this, Bryant talks of how machines are respectively ‘structurally open,’ and ‘operationally closed’ (55). The leaf acts as an example again: in terms of the inputs it is receptive to, it is structurally open to the specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum leaves use for photosynthesis (Heliospectra 2012). A machine’s operational closure refers to the finite selection of powers a machine has (Bryant 2014, 56). It also comprises the fact that an input flow is never encountered by a machine ‘as it is’, it is always encountered “in terms of how its operations transform it” (57). According to Bryant, the input flow ‘as it is’, that enters the leaf is a photon with a certain vibration length. By contrast, the leaf encounters it as fuel for internal energy production.

    By combining the abovementioned facts – machines have a ‘power-face’ and a ‘manifestation-face,’ and are open to a selection of flows and work on these flows in specific ways – Bryant argues it is possible to infer how a machine encounters and experiences its world (62). His method for this procedure is discussed below.

    Alien Phenomenology and Action

    The inference of such an encountered world first entails questioning to which flows a machine is structurally open and how the machine structures these flows; second, how the machine operates on these flows and what functions the transformed flow has in the machine; and finally, how the machine encounters the world around it (62).

    Bryant’s aspirations must remind readers familiar with phenomenology or philosophy of mind of Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ (1974). In this paper, Nagel argues that we cannot reduce the “subjective character of experience” to simple physical terms – something Bryant definitely seems to be doing when he wants to describe the phenomenology of all machines (Nagel 1974, 436-37). To speak with Nagel: ‘we cannot possible know what it is like to be a leaf!’ Bryant readily accepts this critique; indeed, his kind of “second-order phenomenology” does not enjoy the same level of epistemic reliability that traditional ‘first-order’ phenomenology does – the fact that we cannot ‘move’ into the point of view of other machines makes all statements about the content of these other points of view merely inferential. But, Bryant argues, “[o]ur alien phenomenologies will always be imperfect, but as we will see, as imperfect as they are, they are nonetheless preferable to the epistemic closure of humanism that approaches all of being in terms of what it is for us” (64). Put more simply: it is better to have an imperfect understanding of the world of plants, couches, and bureaucracies, than to have none at all.

    The Nagelian critique can perhaps be further suspended with a short example of the alien phenomenology of one unassuming protagonist: a patch of grass. When a gardener mows down half of this patch, the mown down grass produces a plant stress hormone called GLV (Green Leaf Volatiles) (Dombrowksi et al. 2019). These GLV-molecules enter the rest of the grass patch machine. The GLV-flow is canalised into the receptor kinase of the grass leaf cells (Dombrowski et al. 2020). There, the transformed GLV-flow primes certain “wound stress pathways” in the cell – putting the plant in a sort of ‘defence mode’ (Dombrowski et al. 2020, 780). Put in Bryantian terms: the grass patch is selectively open to GLV-flows, through the receptors in the grass’ cell membranes the flow is structured into the right cellular mechanisms. The grass cells have a multitude of powers for operating on this flow – together constituting the operational closure – that are far too complex to be discussed here, the eventual result of which is that the grass ‘readies itself’ for being wounded – the GLV-flow has become a warning signal to the grass. Finally, we may now carefully conclude that the patch of grass encounters a world populated by all sorts of plant hormones, one of which is GLV, to which it can react defensively.

    How does this conclusion imply non-human, plant-action? The answer is quite simple with Bryant: the grass patch machine, like every other machine, operates in accordance with a combination of environmental input flows it takes in, and the specific powers it has – thereby producing a multitude of manifestations. The production of a manifestation by the exercise of powers on flows of input – that is action in both a human and non-human sense.

    Non-Human Mimesis

    The problem this text has come to is the following: is the description Ricoeur gives of action in mimesis1 compatible with – stretchable to – Bryant’s machine-action? If it is, non-human actions can be emplotted into narratives, these narratives eventually eco-refiguring the minds of their readers. This final section discusses this problem.

    As became clear in the section on Ricoeur, mimesis1 grasps those events as actions that have structural “goals … motives … [and] agents” (Ricoeur, 1984, 55) and that are symbolically mediated by a plane of meaningful communication of “signs, rules and norms” (57). The problematic bifurcates, consequently, into a problem of non-human ‘goals’ and ‘motives,’ and a separate problem of ‘meaningful communication.’[1]

    To start off with the second problem, the idea that only humans are capable of meaningful communication is wholly alien to Bryant. He claims that “it is likely that planes of expression [fields of meaningful communication] are to be found throughout the animal kingdom” (133). Bryant can say this because a machine never encounters an input flow ‘as it is,’ but always “in terms of how its operations transform it” (57). Especially in highly complex machines like organisms and groups of organisms, input flows can – by repeated reinterpretation by the machine – become meaningful signs. A signal that is utterly meaningless to other machines can thereby become full of meaning for other machines configured to operate on it – for grass plants, the GLVs are a sign of danger, for humans, they just smell good (Ford 2022). Examples of non-human, meaningful communication are virtually endless, moreover: “Acacias alert other acacias to prowling giraffes. Willows, poplars, alders: all are caught warning each other of insect invasion across the open air” (Powers 2018, 176-77).

    Bryant’ plant-action thus fulfils the symbolic exigency of action in mimesis1. This redirects us to the first problem: the structural requirement for goals and motives behind an action. Alien phenomenology shows that any given machine can be seen as a whole that encounters the world in a certain way. This tremendous broadening of ‘subjecthood’ is accompanied by Bryant’s insistence that organic machines do have goals: ranging from the goal to “preserve their organization” to the complexity of being “intentionally goal-directed” (Bryant 2014, 30).

    These new, strange subjects have their own goals and motives: according to Bryant we may intelligibly speak of the goal of the patch of grass to mitigate the damage done by the grass mower; we may intelligibly think that the plants in our home have the goal to capture as much light as is internally useful to the plant. Hence, it is very possible to imagine complex motives behind non-human action. The only problem that remains, and seems insurmountable, is the fact that we may never know about these motives with the same certainty as we know about our own and other humans’ motives – that is the upshot of Nagel’s barrier. Whether we are convinced of Bryant’s insistence that accepting this limitation and prolonging our efforts to imagine these non-human worlds is better than closing ourselves off to them, in the end, seems a question of intuition, more than one of philosophical argumentation.

    Conclusion

    Lastly, to return to the problem that spawned this text, is it possible to perform a non-anthropocentric Ricoeurian mimetic circle – to create non-anthropocentric narrative worlds that influence people into changing their stance towards climate change? I started this investigation by discussing Ricoeur’s mimetic circle. The ontological understory of mimesis consisted of first localising the anthropocentrism in the prefigurative part of mimesis. This mimesis1 excluded non-human action on both structural and symbolic grounds. Bryant’s concept of non-human action was a structurally open and operationally closed production of manifestations by the exercise of powers on flows of input. With this, the symbolic grounds for dismissing non-human action could be rejected. The structural grounds proved harder to counter for Bryant – plant-machines can indeed be thought to have motives and goals, but due to the epistemic uncertainty of alien phenomenology we may never know these for sure.

    Overcoming this problem can perhaps only be done by making it practical – something we as philosophers have a tendency to refrain from. What are the practical implications of refusing to believe that non-human machines may have goals and motivations – or put more technically: to go along with Bryant’s epistemic uncertainty regarding non-human phenomenology? Most importantly for this paper, they are that non-human ‘actions’ cannot be categorised as real actions because of Ricoeur’s structural requirements. This would, furthermore, mean non-humans cannot be taken up in the mimetic circle, meaning non-anthropocentric narratives that influence human ways of engaging with their world cannot be conceptualised in any serious way. Finally, our own anthropocentrism is therefore made inescapable, we cannot flee from it through telling stories and creating narratives – climate change becomes insurmountable.

    So perhaps, indeed, we must remain epistemologically pure and reject non-human actions; with such dire practical consequences, however, this epistemological purity comes at a very serious ethical cost: the evaporation of our ability to create real change in real people. It may come as no surprise that I myself look forward to new, inventive non-human narratives.

    Bibliography

    Bryant, Levi R. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

    Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory 57, 1: 5-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12044.

    Dauenhauer, Bernard P. 2013. “Ricoeur and agent causation.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, 6: 523-537. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453713485720.

    Dombrowski, J.E., Kronmiller, B.A., Hollenbeck, V.G. et al. 2019. “Transcriptome analysis of the model grass Lolium temulentum exposed to green leaf volatiles.” BMC Plant Biology 19, 222. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-019-1799-6.

    Dombrowski, James E., Brent A. Kronmiller, Vicky Hollenbeck, and Ruth C. Martin. 2020. “Transcriptome Analysis of Wounding in the Model Grass Lolium temulentum” Plants 9, 6: 780. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants9060780.

    Dowling, William C. 2011. Ricoeur on time and narrative: an introduction to Temps et récit. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

    Ford, Jez. 2022. “The Smell of Fresh-Cut Grass is an Attack Warning.” Science Illustrated. Retrieved on the 10th of June 2023. https://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/ask-us/the-smell-of-fresh-cut-grass-is-an-attack-warning/.

    Ghosh, Amitav. 2016 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Heliospectra. 2012. Which regions of the electromagnetic spectrum do plants use to drive photosynthesis? Retrieved from heliospectra.com on 5th of June 2023. http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/Which-regions-of-the-electromagnetic-spectrum-do-plants-use-to-drive-photosynthesis.pdf.

    Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. California: University of California Press.

    Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

    Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, 4: 435-50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.

    Potter, Henry D. & Kevin J. Mitchell. 2022. “Naturalising Agent Causation.” Entropy 24, 472: 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24040472.

    Powers, Richard. The Overstory. Dublin: Vintage Classics.

    Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative: Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen MclLaughlin & David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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    [1] The question of agency is a separate and incredibly complex problem that can and should be discussed in a more spacious text than this one. The problem is, however, not at all insurmountable: as we can read in Dauenhauer (2013, 523), Ricoeur in principle uses ‘agent causation’ instead of the ‘distributive agency’ of Bryant (2014, 180). Although these two positions, when taken to their extreme forms, do most definitely contradict one another – extreme agent causation places the source of action fully inside the entity, while extreme distributive agency places next to no source of action inside the entity – I believe they can be synthesized quite elegantly. This should be done in two steps: first Bryant’s insistence on the unity of a machine (while at the same time being a part of a world of other machines, and being made up of endless machines itself) and his subsequent alien phenomenology proofs the distribution of agency implied by his theory is not boundless – the source of a machine’s actions is always also internal. Second, Ricoeur’s agent causation is not boundless either: the source of a person’s actions is never fully internal (as is clear from the effect sedimented tradition has on the types of novels people can and do write). Moreover, as is clear from Potter & Mitchell (2022, 3) for agent causation to be naturalised, it needs, among other things, to take account of both endogenous, and exogenous activity of the organism. A synthesis, hence, is possible, but we naturally need more space to develop this point in its entirety. For now, a discussion of non-human action will have to suffice.