EPISODE 3: Relations with Animals [SCRIPT]

-INTRO-

Hi guys, this is one of my more favorite modules in the course, so I hope you enjoy it. The title is based on the
readings I gave last semester, most of which were about animals. But for this semester, I only retained the reading
about cats by David Wood, and the new ones are Hua Hsu’s The Secret Lives of Fungi and a documentary on Youtube
about living bridges in a region in northeast India. All three resources highlight a particular way of relating to
nonhuman beings in the world. So I want you to just pick one from the three, and read or watch them in relation to
the required reading of David Abrams. How do they coincide or not with the points raised by Abrams? But also, how
is our relationship with nonhuman beings related to aesthetic experience? How is giving attention to them connected
to the attention we give to artworks?

-INTERLUDE-

Before we talk about Abrams, we need to understand that he is coming from a phenomenological standpoint. He
borrows from the ideas and concepts of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology as a
philosophical system focuses on the lived, immediate world as experienced by our senses. It takes as its primary
consideration this perceived world, and not the world that had already been abstracted by our knowledge systems. In
other words, if you live in a seaside community, you have this primary experience of the sea, of its movement, of how
it behaves during summer, of how the wind shifts during the rainy seasons. And these perceptions of the landscape,
which you experience with your body, comes before any scientific knowledge about it. Before your knowledge from
school of the movement of water currents, it comes before your ability to name and identify the different kinds of
animal species living in the coast. This is related to an important concept Husserl called the “life-world”. From page
40, “The life-world is the world that we count on without necessarily paying it much attention, the world of the clouds
overhead and the ground underfoot, of getting out of bed and preparing food and turning on the tap for water”. So it’s
the world that is just there, that we immediately perceive and take for granted. For Abrams, every society and culture
have particular life-worlds, and have distinct ways of perceiving and being-in-the-world. It is also interesting that he
extends this notion of life-world to include nonhuman beings. Animals also have life-worlds of their own that are
diverse and beyond our perception and comprehension.

-INTERLUDE-

Another important concept from phenomenology that is relevant to Abrams is the idea that we enter into an
intersubjective awareness of the world through our bodies. So we have sensing bodies, through which we interact with
and become aware of other subjectivities. It is through the body that I can see, feel, touch, taste, and be aware of the
things in the world. At the same time, it is also as a body that I am perceived by other beings in the world. So it is this
body, that can sense and is sensed by others, I look at the cat and the cat looks at me. In other words, it is the body
that allows us to be in a relationship with other things in the world. And it is Merleau-Ponty that really highlights this
idea of the self not as a disembodied ghost or phantom inside a shell, but existing through the corporeal reality of our
flesh (45).

-INTERLUDE-

David Abrams is an ecologist and philosopher and is said to be an academic outsider in the West. In Chapter 1 of his
book The Spell of the Sensuous, he questions the ways in which people from industrialized societies relate to the
world. He argues, instead, for an awareness of the world as an animated force. He talks, for instance, about the role of
the healer or a shaman in certain rural villages in Asia (Indonesia, Nepal), saying that the shaman serves as mediator
between the human and nonhuman communities. Which is to say that the societies he has visited has a particular
awareness of a “larger ecological field” (7), and mediators are there to maintain a reciprocal relationship between the
human and nonhuman domain. The world is not something from which you just take, but rather there is an
interconnectedness, a kind of mutual relationship.

In juxtaposing indigenous cultures and industrialized societies, I am reminded of this concept from Martin Heidegger
of “standing-reserve”. Heidegger argues that in modern society, we frame the world as a “standing-reserve”, which
means that nature is an out there (separate from us) that we can manipulate at will, in order to extract resources for
our needs. At risk of oversimplifying Heidegger, I would say that in his conception of the “standing-reserve”, the
world is regarded as passive and inert, while we are active agents imposing upon it. And it’s not just a matter of
perception or representation, it’s not just in how we see nature, but more importantly, it is concretized in how we
have existing technologies and systems in place that actively (sometimes very violently) shapes and manipulates
nature. We literally move mountains and rivers to supply us of our needs. So for Heidegger, a river, for example, is
not for us an active force that we have to contend with, we do not anymore have any particular sensitivity to its
movements and behaviors, or we do not recognize it as an integral part of the natural ecosystem in a place. Instead,
it’s a potential water supply source (if you can construct a dam), or it’s merely part of the landscape, as you pass by
over the bridge you have constructed over it. A chicken is not another sentient being with its particular life-world, it is
livestock, it is dinner. Its body had been engineered to provide us with larger fried drumsticks. And we do those things
on a regular basis, on a large scale, regardless of the effects, of the suffering it induces, on the animals themselves.

-INTERLUDE-

Parallel to Heidegger, Abrams argues that our view of nature has become rather simplified and impoverished. When
we are not trying to encroach upon nature, it is something that we keep out with the use of technologies. He mentions
how we see nature as the outside that we have to keep out with our airconditioning, or something we just pass by
while we are in our vehicles. And when we do encounter nonhuman elements or beings, when we encounter animals
in a zoo, the encounter is sanitized.

For Abrams, indigenous cultures that recognize the world as an animate force also recognize that we are part of it, it
envelops us. And if you think about it, we are not self-contained beings, despite our attempts to push out nature.
There is a certain porousness between our bodies and the world. The food we eat still (mostly) comes from the land,
we breathe in oxygen from our surroundings, we have bacteria and fungi in our gut that are beneficial for our
digestion. The minerals in our bones were probably inside another animal millions of years ago. And millions of years
from now, it will be probably be part of some other object in the world.

-INTERLUDE-

Abrams has been criticized for generalizing the experience of indigenous cultures (by glossing over the differences in
their worldviews) in order to support his arguments, (Brundige and Rabb). They argue that Abrams could have used
phenomenology to further understand and highlight cross-cultural differences, due to phenomenology’s recognition
that we approach the world from different and varied perspectives. This is an endeavour that other thinkers have
more successfully navigated than Abrams. But there are signs that he is aware of the differences and nuances of the
worldviews that he mentions, although he doesn’t really highlight that in his book. So critics argue that he missed out
on further strengthening his arguments by making this mistake. Nevertheless, Abrams presents engaging, if not
poetic, arguments for rethinking our relations with the world. And these are points that we can take note of as we
reflect on how we relate with nonhuman beings and things in nature.

-INTERLUDE-

To end this podcast, I want you to ponder on how we sense, and how we are sensed, through our bodies. In one of the
readings, there is mention made of us staring at an animal (the Other), and of it staring in return. In this interaction,
we become aware of them, but also we become aware that they are aware of us. So there is mutual recognition but also
a mutual strangeness. [At the heart of the interaction is an ontological questioning.] And some of you might ask, well
what does this have to do with art? And to answer that, it might be good to go back to our last module and try to
remember Berger’s white bird.

-END-

References:

Abrams, David. “Philosophy on the Way to Ecology”, Chapter 2, in The Spell of the Sensuous Heidegger, Martin. “The
Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. 1977.

Brundige, Lorraine F. and J. Douglass Rabb. “Phonicating Mother Earth”,

http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~agaamiz/Phonicating%20Mother%20Earth.pdf.