What I’m reading

I finally got my hands on a copy of Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism by Arne Johan Vetlesen. I first heard about the book and author on the Nordic Animism podcast, which I recommend generally, but this interview about the book in particular was excellent.

This is the abstract printed before the numbered pages (and on the back of the book):

Arguing that matter, and, more broadly, the natural world, has been misconceived since Descartes, it explores the devastating impact that this has had in practice in the West. As such, alternatives are needed, whether philosophical ones such as those offered by figures such as Whitehead and Nagel, or posthumanist ones such as those developed by Barad and Latour. Drawing on recent anthropological work ignored by philosophers and sociologists alike, the author considers a radical alternative cosmology: animism understood as panpsychism in practice.

This last line, “animism understood as panpsychism in practice,” is what got my attention during the podcast interview. I have some admittedly limited knowledge of panpsychism, mainly from exposure to Whitehead’s process philosophy or philosophy of organism. But the main point, as I understand it, is that there is an element of mind or mind-like quality present in and constitutive of the whole of nature. Vetlesen puts it this way: “There is the easy part and there is the difficult one. The easy part is to do with the claim that everything that exists exhibits mind, by which is meant (in various degrees, from the primitive to the most advanced) mentality, interiority, intelligence, and purposiveness.” (10) The difficult part is a conceptual problem that elides very different kinds of beings in the phrase “everything that exists,” and, “risks ignoring or denying the differences that make a crucial difference between them. Only at the cost of gross simplification can we describe in like manner, using the same terms, so unlike entities as stones and gorillas, tables and oaks, molecules and brittlestars, creeks and peccaries, worms and dogs.” (12) But for now, I just want to focus on the easy part.

In the introduction to his book The Nordic Animist Year, Rune Rasmussen defines animism as, “the idea that we humans are entangled in multiple relationships with the living world. Animists treat the natural world as interconnected and filled with living, personal beings that we should engage with respect and kindness.” (15) And when Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, discusses the challenges of learning the Potawatomi language, it is because of what she calls the grammar of animacy:

“In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.” (55)

But she takes it a step further: it isn’t just beings like plants and animals that are respected with the language of animacy, but also rocks, water, fire and places. This grammar of animacy presumes a sort of panpsychism.

It would seem, however, that this language and grammar are not spoken by many people today. The dominant language is mechanistic, whereby the nonhuman is denied subjectivity and agency, and therefore without value except as a resource for the human. Vetlesen says in the introduction to the book:

“Anthropocentrism is not merely, or even primarily, descriptive. It is normative in postulating that human beings are superior to all other beings and forms of life on Earth, thus meriting a moral standing denied everything nonhuman. This normativity informs anthropocentrism as a practice, as acted upon individually and collectively. The practices to which anthropocentrism gives rise, and which it helps legitimize, span the entire range of institutions characterizing modern society—initially, Western society, today the whole world. Whether it be the institutions of economy, of politics, of education, of health or of law, they are either exclusively or primarily preoccupied with human agents and their perceived interests and needs. That this is so, and ought to remain so, serves as the pivotal “reality principle” on which the socialization of every new generation is premised: in the course of childhood the anthropocentric point of view is internalized so as to become second nature—always presupposed in relating to other-than-humans as well as fellow humans, never seriously questioned by adults taken seriously by others.” (2)

One paradox arising from this anthropocentrism is the way it reifies the nature/culture bifurcation. As a practice, anthropocentrism enacts the exploitation of nature which in turn legitimizes the belief that nature is a separate domain from (human) culture that can and should be exploited. A key part of this is the association of certain features to each side of the nature/culture divide: “[human] culture connotes subjectivity, activity, signification, meaning, identity, and purpose, and nature connotes object, passivity, body, instinct, animal, and law-like.” (2)

While this analysis isn’t new, there is something about it that helped me to frame an issue I’ve been wrestling with for some time: the ways that people with intellectual or developmental disabilities are aligned with the nature side of the dichotomy. Vetlesen mentions that this dichotomy is taken to be a matter of fact yet hardly conceals, “a highly charged normativity: everything to do with agency and full-fledged moral standing is reserved to the humans constituting culture, and everything to do with being acted on, understood as passivity, as being at the receiving end, to its other, nature.” (3)

Those people who are intellectually disabled are viewed as lacking agency and the capacities for reason. Their treatment, historically and presently, reveal that they lack the benefits and privileges of full moral standing in the human world. Because they have been and still are associated with the nature side of the divide, their fate is equally perilous, I would argue.

Thinking about the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in terms of panpsychism and animism is exciting to me. I have been struggling recently with how to understand the responsibility I feel to care for my brother (who is developmentally and intellectually disabled), the inherited cultural views I have about his worth and value, and the immense tension I feel—on a daily basis—from these opposing forces acting upon me.

Put differently: can the labor of caring for my brother specifically, and people with intellectual/developmental disabilities in general, be understood as a way of caring for nature? I have a suspicion my socialization into anthropocentrism has undermined my ability to see my brother not just as fully human—because that would be to continue down the wrong path of strengthening the divide between nature and culture—but instead to see him more completely, as both nature and culture somehow. The divide runs in me as well, separating me from my nonhuman family, separating me from my brother, separating me from myself.

This is a big topic, but reading the introduction for this book has given me a renewed sense of hope that it is possible to describe and frame this tension I’ve been experiencing.

There is one other passages in the introduction that caught my attention, although for slightly a slightly different reason. When discussing the difficulties and challenges of disproving the mechanistic worldview and the reasons for adopting a panpsychist one, he admits, “the reach of our well-proven knowledge about entities other-than-human remains limited, stubbornly and frustratingly so…” (12). There would seem to be a hard limit to what we can know about nonhumans, and, some would argue, that is reason enough to abandon any attempt to do so. However, he goes on to say:

“I am deeply dissatisfied with this limit: not with there being one, but with the tendency to premise the limit as we understand it upon the sole criterion of the reach of our knowledge. That is to put the cart before the horse: it is to perpetuate the privileging of what we humans can know over what exists and the myriad ways in which entities different from us exist. This primacy of epistemology over ontology is axiomatic and as such unquestioned in the mechanistic worldview and its ally, the anthropocentric way of assessing what the world consists of… Moreover, the reasoning that the primacy of knowing over being comes down to is logically untenable: it does not follow from human’s not knowing whether nonhuman beings of various kinds possess the same (largely intellectual) capacities that we do, that we may treat them as though they don’t.” (12-13)

This point is beautifully illustrated, I think, in the opening chapter of the Zhuangzi. It begins with a description of an enormous fish, unfathomably huge. The fish spontaneously transform into an equally enormous bird, Peng. The vastness of these creatures is immeasurable, yet there is still something on which they rely, namely, a large enough volume of water and air: if the water is too shallow, the fish won’t be able to swim; if there isn’t enough air “piled up deep enough,” as the text puts it, then the bird won’t be able to achieve lift. But the smaller creatures can’t understand things on this scale:

“The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, ‘When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don’t make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!’

If you go off to the green woods nearby, you can take along food for three meals and come back with your stomach as full as ever. If you are going a hundred li, you must grind your grain the night before; and if you are going a thousand li, you must start getting the provisions together three months in advance. What do these two creatures understand? Littler understanding cannot come up to great understanding; the short-lived cannot come up to the long-lived.

How do I know this is so? The morning mushroom knows nothing of twilight and dawn; the summer cicada knows nothing of spring and autumn.

…The little quail laughs at him, saying, ‘Where does he think he’s going? I give a great leap and fly up, but I never get more than ten or twelve yards before I come down fluttering among the weeds and brambles. And that’s the best kind of flying anyway! Where does he think he’s going?’ Such is the difference between big and little.

Zhuangzi, Chapter 1, Watson trans.

It would be laughable to think that because the cicada or quail can’t fly as high as the Peng that means that there is no way that the Peng can fly that high. Shouldn’t it be equally as laughable to think that because humans can’t know whether nonhumans have the same mental capacities as humans that there is no way that they can?