That idea I had for a series of talks is underway. I have six speakers and in addition, I will be hosting an introductory session and two discussions. The only bad news is that the dates clash with the Gaudy at my old Oxford College next March. I was going to go - for the first time - but, hey ho, I can't. The speaker that night should be Erik Jampa Andersson and I can't not be around for his talk!
Anyway, I have started to work on an introductory talk and though this is subject to (considerable) change, I thought I'd share the opening part here as it is, after all, what I am currently thinking about.
The title of this series is Attending to the More than Human. I’ll start by unpacking that.
Firstly, more than human is a rather imperfect term because, like "non human" or "other than human" it seems to be setting what me might describe as nature, or other animals and plants, or flora and fauna against the human. And that’s not ideal. Firstly, we humans are animals and are part of nature; secondly because it seems to suggest that what is human is the norm against which all other beings are judged. But, there isn’t really a perfect term so this is the one selected – and in the context of the course what it implies is those beings, Animals, Plants, or ecosystems, rivers, forests and mountains, that we might overlook or upon whom we might look with restrictive concepts that limit our appreciation for and sense of connection with the more than human other.
Now for that key word, attending. Attending suggests both the act of paying attention and the kind of attending performed by a waiter, perhaps. And though the first of these is the primary definition, just hold in mind the idea that we humans may well also be called upon to tend to, tend for and attend the more than human world.
As for paying attention, this is critical to the thinking of some ethical philosophers. Iris Murdoch is a stand out example.
As Alice Crary and Lori Gruen write:
Murdoch acknowledges the danger that our various perspectives and preoccupations will lead us to project ourselves onto what it is we want to perceive, and she warns against the distorting influence of “the fat relentless ego” (see, e.g., 1970: 51). She also stresses that this worry should not keep us from registering that, if we want to see the world clearly, we need urgently to interrogate and develop our attitudes, interests, and empathic capacities.. [Thus] if we are to advance in our efforts to get the layout of the human and animal world into view, we need to resist oppressive social structures that mold our perspectives in damagingly distorting ways, and to agitate for more liberating forms of life that make room for new perspectives. (2022, 118)
By really paying attention to an Animal or a Tree, the suggestion is that we start to see beyond the distorting influence of the fat relentless ego and the truth of that Animal or Tree is revealed to us.
But how do we really pay attention?
Well, to start with, it’s worth noticing that we often don’t pay attention to others. Even other humans – a homeless person in the street can be unseen, unacknowledged by countless passer-by every day. And the same kind of blindness extends to “familiar” Animals and Trees in the world – the Crows in the park, the Lime Trees along the road, for example. What’s more we often don’t pay attention to the unseen Animal or Plant others who are harmed by our societies, farmed Animals, felled Trees, trapped Mice, poisoned Bees and so on.
As our first speaker, Silvia Caprioglio Panizza notes in her wonderful book The Ethics of Attention, “Attention is a way, perhaps the first way, of acknowledging another's existence. Everything follows from that. And yet, it is something we can fail to do so much of the time. In fact, attention is not easy at all.” (2024, 1) She goes on to describe attention as engaged, imaginative, truth directed and focused on an individual. Panizza suggests that attention is fundamental to morality. It shapes us and it shapes the world.
One key aspect of attention is that when we are fully engaged in attending to the other, it is they who fill our awareness. Our "fat relentless ego" is pushed aside, or, perhaps, disappears. During that period of attending, the other is front and centre: it is their reality and their needs which take precedence in our consciousness.
You’ll learn much more about this from her talk next week.
Our second speaker, Eva Meijer (2019) writes, referencing Simone Weil: “[T]o get to know other animals, we need to move beyond our own motivations and actually pay attention to them… To pay attention also means not immediately trying to understand them from our perspective, but rather taking the time to ‘look at them till the light suddenly dawns’”.
When we pay this kind of engaged attention to other Animals, we are granting them respect, acknowledging them as others capable of responding actively to the world. We see them as beings who have their own perspective, and, as Meijer will discuss, we relate to them as others capable of communicating.
In many considerations of the more than human world – whether in farming, research, or conservation – the perspectives of the Animals themselves aren’t really considered. We might say that, for example, that a Cow is a herd Animal and that herd Animals prefer to be in company rather than alone. But this is very different from treating a particular Cow as an individual with her own preferences, fears, friends, family members, and biography. Only in rare examples are Animals regarded as beings who could inform us of what they do or do not want. Partly this is a matter of the view often taken of Animals that they are dumb, operating on instinct alone and without the capacity to reason. Partly it’s because humans often don’t want to take Animals’ perspectives into account anyway. Attention can disprove those claims about Animals; and demonstrate the wrongness of a refusal to attend to their preferences.
As Meijer writes in When Animals Speak:
We should pay attention to the variety of ways in which other animals speak and act politically, and search for ways to form knew, better relations with them. This should not just be a human project, because other animals have their unique perspectives on their own lives and on their relations with humans, and their own ways of formulating these. Humans and other animals can, and already do, have relations in which species is not the determining factor in achieving understanding or intimacy, and in which humans aim not to oppress the other animals with whom they share households and land. These relations can offer us insights into how change is possible, and can function as starting points for thinking about new forms of coexistence. (2019, LOC 188)
Ralph Acampora has a body-focused take on attention. Like other Animals, we have bodies, senses, and physical feelings and it is that physicality or somaticity that opens us out into our environment, which is shared with various others of different species, with different bodies and senses, but who all sense, feel, and experience the world through their bodies. He uses the example of watching squirrels in a park and, by attending to the squirrels, sensing their related otherness and coming through that to an awareness of their vulnerabilities. This, he says, leads us to experience a moral demand or claim against hurting a squirrel. Acampora adds that this bodied form of attending leads to an awareness of the related otherness of plants as well. We all share in being flesh of the world....
Sounds good!