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| dark_ecology_morton [2018-10-25 13:57] – nik | dark_ecology_morton [2020-09-24 08:23] (current) – nik |
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| <blockquote>Very well, says the hesitant humanist. Anthropocene may not be colonialist or racist, but surely it must be a blatant example of speciesism? Isn't the term claiming that humans are special and different, unique in having created it? Humans and not dolphins invented steam engines and drilled for oil. But this isn't a sufficient reason to suppose them special. Etymology notwithstanding, species and specialness are extremely different. Just ask Darwin. Unfortunately he had no recourse to emoticons, for if his masterwork's title had contained a wink emoticon at its end, he could have said it succinctly: there are no species—and yet there are species! And they have no origin—and yet they do! A human is made up of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. Lungs are evolved swim bladders. Yet a human is not a fish.32 A swim bladder, from which lungs derive, is not a lung in waiting. There is nothing remotely lunglike about it.33 Let alone my bacterial microbiome: there are more bacteria in "me" than "human" components. A lifeform is what Derrida calls arrivant or what I call strange stranger: it is itself yet uncannily not itself at the same[...]</blockquote> | <blockquote>Very well, says the hesitant humanist. Anthropocene may not be colonialist or racist, but surely it must be a blatant example of speciesism? Isn't the term claiming that humans are special and different, unique in having created it? Humans and not dolphins invented steam engines and drilled for oil. But this isn't a sufficient reason to suppose them special. Etymology notwithstanding, species and specialness are extremely different. Just ask Darwin. Unfortunately he had no recourse to emoticons, for if his masterwork's title had contained a wink emoticon at its end, he could have said it succinctly: there are no species—and yet there are species! And they have no origin—and yet they do! A human is made up of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. Lungs are evolved swim bladders. Yet a human is not a fish. A swim bladder, from which lungs derive, is not a lung in waiting. There is nothing remotely lunglike about it. Let alone my bacterial microbiome: there are more bacteria in "me" than "human" components. A lifeform is what Derrida calls arrivant or what I call strange stranger: it is itself yet uncannily not itself at the same[...]</blockquote> |
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| <blockquote>If you have some hesitation or difficulty proving that humans imagine, that's fantastic. It means that you have accepted modern science, which means you have accepted modern philosophy since the start of the Anthropocene. And if you try not to collapse the hesitation, like the hesitation of an ant on a tiny ladder, that's even better. It means you have accepted the deep reason for the validity of modern science and philosophy. You have not collapsed the wonderment. You have become scientific, but not scientistic. You are refusing to pounce on things with metaphysics. You are beginning the difficult upgrade of concepts such as person and thing and species so essential to human thought in an ecological age, and indeed so essential for the continued existence of lifeforms. You are beginning to think at Earth magnitude.</blockquote> | <blockquote>If you have some hesitation or difficulty proving that humans imagine, that's fantastic. It means that you have accepted modern science, which means you have accepted modern philosophy since the start of the Anthropocene. And if you try not to collapse the hesitation, like the hesitation of an ant on a tiny ladder, that's even better. It means you have accepted the deep reason for the validity of modern science and philosophy. You have not collapsed the wonderment. You have become scientific, but not scientistic. You are refusing to pounce on things with metaphysics. You are beginning the difficult upgrade of concepts such as person and thing and species so essential to human thought in an ecological age, and indeed so essential for the continued existence of lifeforms. You are beginning to think at Earth magnitude.</blockquote> |
nik