Radical alterity

I found this article that I really like. It's by a guy called Ritchie Nimmo.

I'm interested in this because I think hat the focus on shared consciousness and oneness has a tendency to homogenise and subsume all the unknown, the mysterious, the different, into and assumption of what "pure" consciousness is. The only access we have to consciousness is our own, and thus this seems to me a project of unwitting colonisation.

Nimmo's article suggests that many of the ways in which we claim "knowledge' of other animals have this colonising and even dominating flavour.

[T]his article will unearth some of the ways in which ontologies of proximity and distanciation can take unexpected forms, and argue that a counter-intuitive case can be made that ontologies of distance, absence and discontinuity, far from being indissolubly linked with anthropocentrism, may in fact proffer a different kind of non-anthropocentrism and a distinctive vision of human-animal intimacy. Moreover, it will be argued that this provides an important corrective to the colonisation of difference and the erasure of alterity that is an unintended consequence of the ontologies of co-presence and proximity that underpin both the practice of anthropomorphism and its theoretical articulations.

He introduces this "critical anthropomorphism" - which he thinks has many benefits - as a way to demonstrate our inclination to seek similarity rather than respecting difference.

Frans De Waal (1999) similarly distinguishes between ‘anthropocentric anthropomorphism’, which ‘naively attributes human feelings and thoughts to animals based on insufficient information or wishful thinking’ (260), and ‘animalcentric anthropomorphism’, which uses human experience as a sensitising metaphoric tool with which ‘to look at the world from the animal’s point of view, taking its Umwelt, intelligence, and natural tendencies into account’ (266).

These more nuanced understandings are undeniably valuable; not only because they explicitly problematise the anthropocentric assumptions embedded in ‘anthropomorphism’ as usually understood, but also because they retain the possibility of using the term in a critique of practices of interspecies meaning-making that are characterised by an inattentiveness to animal being. What even these more nuanced understandings still share with less sophisticated forms of anthropomorphism, however, is the attempt to bring animals near, to render them familiar and knowable, in order to establish their essential likeness and continuity with ourselves, in an assertion of ontological proximity which is taken to be the foundation either of ethical relations or of knowing per se.

He reminds us that these methods fail to acknowledge different ontologies and assume a shared epistemology, which privileges the human ontology.

...to avoid reinscribing the architecture of anthropocentrism and the Cartesian humanist subject in these ways, we must eschew the initial separation of knowledge from world that underpins the sceptical insistence upon inescapable self-referentiality.

As so often, Val Plumwood understood all this many years ago.

[A]s Val Plumwood argues:

The question of anthropomorphism can often be raised with some greater validity in the context of the denial of difference which is a key part of structures of subordination and colonisation to which animals are subject. The charge of anthropomorphism may then legitimately draw our attention to a loss of sensitivity to and respect for animal difference in humanising representation (2002, 59).

We seem to fear difference because we have the view that when two things are different, one must be better than the other. That simply is not so. And nor does similarity increase our ethical obligation to the other. Nimmo refers to both Levinas and Derrida, who both stress radical alterity.

As Susan Sencindiver explains: ‘For Levinas and Derrida, the hospitality towards the other is unconditional, the ethical obligation infinite; and to prevent converting and vitiating the other, defined by and for itself, into an other-than-self, they contend that otherness must always be recognised as Altogether-Other’ (2014, 1).

Nimmo continues:

...it is precisely the acknowledgement of the other as other, as absolute and incommensurable, hence as existing in-and-for-itself rather than in-relation-to-oneself, that is the true ground of ethical relations.

Thus he sketches out a way of responding to the other in new terms:

Liminal intimacy in contrast is predicated upon the maintenance of a tension between knowing and unknowing, familiarity and strangeness, in which intimacy consists in respecting, living with and even cultivating distance and alterity, rather than seeking a closeness that would obliterate these; it implicitly recognises the fragility of authentic encounters with the other, and the colonising tendencies intrinsic to proximate intimacy.

This is the end of the essay.

...some notion of human-animal relations in which the intimacy of mutual being-with-otherness-at-a-distance emerges as a lived alternative to the colonising tendencies of proximate intimacy, restoring the sense of animals as in some sense absent, autonomous, and irreducible to human understandings. In these examples this otherness is not a basis for indifference, objectification or negation, as in the dominant framing of discussions around anthropomorphism in the field, which equate distance and discontinuity with anthropocentrism. On the contrary, difference in these cases becomes the condition of possibility of a companionship at a distance that eschews the anthropomorphic embrace wherein the price of human-animal continuity is a world without radical otherness. Instead, for these liminal ways of thinking and being with animals, the extent to which the animal is like or unlike us loses its central importance; what matters is that the animal exists, that its existence is entangled with but radically irreducible to our own, and that we are privileged to encounter and partially share this other existence, albeit at a distance.

It is difference, otherness, unknowability which allows for enchantment, awe, and wonder.

My cats are not furry babies; Tane is not a little man. They are different. Themselves. They contain all the mystery of their own being.