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this piece reminded me of the way i sometimes regarded the world, maybe specifically the natrual world, as a child; that is, i felt that every piece of it was just bursting with meaning for its uniqueness. e.g. a tiny sun-speckled piece of ground under a pine, covered in needles and maybe some bugs, was sacred merely for being singular in its configuration in space and time. and the world felt so, so huge then because every bit if of it was overflowing with information. it would be impossible even in a lifetime to make it from here to the edge of town and know everything about all of it.
within the last couple years i've been occassionally trying to cultivate that sense again, but with only blips of success.
Wonderfully formulated!
I have been making a similar effort and found that gradually these glimpses became easier to get into and I've even had some spontaneous ones.
I do wonder how much this can be expanded alongside an urban 9 to 5 life.
This is a central practice of Buddhism; consistently taking the time to deliberately stop and observe things gradually teaches you to appreciate things for what they are and helps to ween you off of your preconceived notions of what you think things are.
For example, after my first few months of practice I increasingly got awe struck by everyday things. Even though the bricks of the church are identical in that they were made from the same mold, they are all unique after centuries of erosion and sun exposure. This might be intellectually obvious, but is a whole other thing to realize through subjective experience (as if looking at a masterpiece painting up close).
“the disenchantment of the world” or “re-enchanting the world” is a body of literature probably worth your time to look into.
This sounds similar to what both psychedelic trippers and meditation practicers often describe.
I bought a microscope from a second hand shop. I guess it was obsolete medical equipment (it didn't have a built in light, you had to fiddle with a mirror, so make that very obsolete). I never got the hang of the higher magnifications, but even the x50 lens showed vast amounts of hidden detail.
Everything was singular in its overwhelming confusion of intricate detail.
Perhaps a microscope could give you a few more blips of success?
In the heady days of post-Vatican II theological free for all, panentheism was humorously known as “beer-can theology”.
As in, “well, even that beer can has a little bit of a soul “.
As a motivator for care and stewardship of our world, you could do worse!
It's honestly surprising to me how many commenters accuse the author of magical thinking. The genuinely magical thinking is in the dualism necessary to reject the argument, summarized well by the Latour quote in the article:
“When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,”
The interesting observation in the discussion is just how quickly people turn apprehensive when any notion of individual human supremacy is challenged, even when it rests on entirely arbitrary distinctions. Rather than just focussing on the natural world it seems even more obvious when it comes to institutions. Nation states, corporations, churches, all of them vastly outlive their individual members the same way a human outlives its individual cells. And just like we attribute agency to human beings rather than solely their cells, it makes perfect sense to think of non-human entities in the same way.
A paragraph that stuck with me was Yuval Noah Harari's description of agriculture:
"“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
Indeed. How would you go about scientifically assigning something like "agency" or its lack to any particular entity?
In ordinary language we are perfectly happy to use agency-adjacent words when talking about non-animal entities "I'm hiding from the rain", "That marble on the floor isn't going to get away from me" etc. Obviously in many cases we would also deny them agency, but I think it's hard to be too dogmatic about this unless you're playing some specific language game.
Good point. but it's way easier to "impart your will" onto humans IMO. probably easier to understand sometimes
I suppose every way of understanding (even a scientific law) is just a model for how things might work. Some of these models (Newton's laws of motion) are more useful than others but are obviously still fallible (Relativity being a correction to Newton's laws). I'm not sure how useful of a model animism is but maybe it's reasonable to keep it in mind for some edge cases? Even if it is just emotionally satisfying, I guess that's kind of an edge case.
The modernity of the nonsense seems to matter more to the HN front page these days more than the degree to which something is nonsense.
According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore.
And here is where she completely loses the plot. Up until that point it's kind of a bass-ackward way of acknowledging that human beings are not special and not fundamentally different from the world around us. Her "everything is magic" conclusion is 180 degrees off correct, which is that nothing is magic, including human agency.
What's the meaningful difference though of your conclusion?
"Everything is magic" vs "nothing is magic". Why do you care more to side with "nothing". Just curious, personally my vote is on "everything".
Is it just a preference, or is there more?
Because magic isn't real and hoarders are people whose mental illness compels them to live in filth. We've finally grown out of applying the "noble savage" myth to aboriginal peoples only to turn around and apply it to anyone with a damaged mind. The five hundred boxes of dried-out ink pens are not reaching out to you through the luminiferous aether, you just need therapy.
How come anything exists at all?
I'd say everything is magic is a much better description of reality than nothing is magic.
"nothing is magic" falls back on science as a model to describe the universe. "everything is magic" doesn't mean anything because "magic" has no specific meaning other than "not science."
I dunno Bennett's work at all so I can't speak one way or the other but that quote is not a quote from Bennett, it doesn't even appear to be a paraphrase. The article as a whole feels more like a puff profile of Bennett rather than an real attempt at a popular audience explanation of her academic work.
not even a mention of animism?
I think these two things are quite distinct. To assert that objects have a kind of fundamental agency because of the forces they can exert on our world, to put it simply, is totally distinct from speculating/having faith that there is a turnip spirit in the turnip.
What she is talking about is more about questions of philosophical priority than metaphysical/spiritual assertions.
It's not entirely distinct. One could just as well describe the "spirit in the turnip" as the sum of the potential forces it can exert on the world, the effect of the cultural image of turnips, even its "essential turnipness" in a Platonic sense. We have no problem referring to the "personality" of an old house, the "menace" of a gun or gendering cars and ships as female because they "embody" certain gender archetypes. The philosophy and metaphysics are both approaching the same essential concept from different directions, with different assumptions.
The word isn't used, but isn't that exactly what's being described?
Yes, it's weird. The article even claims the premise begins with French philosopher Bruno Latour, but this just seems like a modern interpretation of the oldest metaphysical framework in human history.
This is simply magical thinking in the guise of academic philosophy.
Where is this generation's Carnap?
I think Peter Singer challenged a lot of deluded, 'magical' thinking in the 1970s when he wrote in Animal Liberation about realizing that animals are not mere tools for human use, to be exploited in any and every possible way, but fellow beings. We know this about dogs and cats, but ignore it in the case of cows, sheep, ocean life, and, for example, the billions of living baby chickens we grind in "macerators" every year.[0] He is a philosopher who believes in living things. This article is just embarrassing.
I don't think a logical positivist would have much a problem with the content (although perhaps they wouldn't like the language used). How would you go about verifying that the Mississippi does not have "agency" but a slow worm does? They'd perhaps dismiss it as a meaningless question in the context of scientific enquiry, but fine to discuss in another context (in another "language" as they might put it).
I concur on the magical thinking. Calls for a new Carnap are a bit excessive though. The position displayed in the article is fringe. It does not in any way represent the academic mainstream.
I disagree.
From reading the article, neither the author nor Bennett is arguing that these objects are actually the mechanism or cause to which these events occur.
To rephrase their underlying worldview, Bennett seems to find intellectual and epistemic merit - or at least interest - in exploring the notion that some objects have properties which make them more or less likely to initiate or augment human, natural or other actions, on or around those objects.
From my reading of the article, this isn't someone trying to explain causal relationships but rather someone highlighting the benefits of different modalities of thought, as they relate to the intellectual and cognitive experience of the reader.
HN: Ascribing agency to things is silly. It’s all just cause and effect.
Also HN: This program is my new search engine and chat buddy. Shouldn’t we face the possibility that it might have a sort of sentience?
As far as I know, Jane Bennett and I have never met. But we've gotten lost in some of the same places, and found some of the same things there. People who haven't don't know what they're missing, and I mean that in the literal sense; I don't expect anyone so impoverished to understand all of what she's saying, or of what I'm saying when I talk about the marks this town has made on me in the near quarter century and counting it's been my home - some of them in, and by, Druid Hill Park itself.
Such thinking is largely in bad odor among the sorts of people who tend to congregate here. Who cares? Who should? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
HN is not a single person. It is a diverse group of people.
Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. We talk about cold and warm fronts and circulatory patterns instead of Thor being angry.
Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science.
I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
I figure this would be the kind of response to this article here.
please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science. it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose.
in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at its own peril.
Unless and until someone can identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction, people making such assertions are divorced from fact, reality, and science.
They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs.
That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't science either.
Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
> it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate"
From the article:
"A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you."
No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it cannot and does not have agency. (I can't believe we're having this conversation on HN. WTF is going on in the culture that makes animism suddenly attractive?)
EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not even notice it to pick it up.
> Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures.
This is very poetic, but it's incorrect. The divide between religion and science is largely historical, not inherent. Latour was mentioned and is a great read, and I'd also recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which characterizes knowledge and how we refine it. It doesn't really talk about gods all that much.
Indeed. Science "chasing the gods out" is merely a consequence of science not finding any evidence for the existence of god(s) so far.
If we ever find evidence for the existence of god(s), science will happily accept it like any other provable theory. Science couldn't care less about religion one way or another.
>Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science.
This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If you look you’ll find this is a relatively modern condescension.
>I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.
"If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.”
No, the Mississippi is a river: A collection of water acted upon by gravity and weather. It does not have agency - the Mississippi cannot decide to flood a town or breach a levy.
I don't see how that is any different than a human being. We are all just a collection of particles being acted upon by certain fundamental laws of the universe. Why do you think you're so different?
And yet we cannot tame it.
I understand the objection - clearly the Mississippi is not sentient, does not consciously choose what to do. It's a collection of matter that obeys the statistical laws of physics. Clearly the intuitive sense of the word 'agency' does not fit, at least to me. I think of agency as having the capacity for decision. But when I look at my dictionary, I see this definition first: "Faculty or state of acting or of exerting power; action, instrumentality".
We certainly cannot stop the Mississippi from flowing; is that not an exertion of power?
It doesn't "decide" to do anything.
Discounting the utility of describing an unspeakably great swarth of jostling particles with one word is foolish though.
It's effective to discuss large segments of reality without having to know the position and momentum etc of every particle, assuming those segments have somewhat well-defined and known behaviour.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan.
I'm going to get so much shit for this, but I looked up this philosopher and considering her philosophy was thinking 2000 years ago she would have been the tribe's shaman, respected and feared but ostracized and dressed for the part. Two thousands years later, she is a professor of "philosophy" at John Hopkins University.
and p.s. before you get the urge to bang on that arrow consider this: under this philosophy we could easily support annual virgin sacrifices as a necessity to appease some unseen 'agency' in the natural world.
Some aspect of philosophy considers what place and impact we, humans, have in the world. In that regard, from the second half of the century onwards (earlier as well, but less specifically), there's been a resurgence of these questions with the emergence of globalization and neoliberalism, and theor consequences on global systems.
I noticed that anthropology seemed more and more cited as a source of diverse perspectives. See Descola specifically.
As an example, I heard a recent quote from an environmental activist that I found striking: "We are jot defending the Nature. We are the Nature defending itself".
I'm not advocating for or against the quote, but it deserves a thorough analysis, in 202x, and cannot be dismissed easily.
Ecological responsibility, recognizing that humanity is a part of nature, etc. are not in anyway connected to assigning 'agency' to natural pheneomena. However there is a plain (with historic empirical data /g) showing that there is a direct connection between assigning agency to natural phenomena and someone in a robe (priest or priestess) saying "The river god is upset. We must sacrifice a virgin to appease the river god".