Ways of Being Alive

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Baptiste Morizot. Ways of Being Alive

CONTENTS

Guide

Pages

Ways of Being Alive

Foreword Creative Fire

Introduction The ecological crisis as a crisis of sensibility

A crisis of sensibility

Animals as intercessors

The ecological crisis as a crisis of political attention

Lack of political attention to living beings

Finding a way out

Notes

1 A season among the living. Episode 1: In the fog of the encounter

Episode 2: The barbarian of a beast

Episode 3: Millions of years folded into a song

Episode 4: All of language unseparated

Episode 5: Following the tracks left by song

Episode 6: Being part of a gang – whatever the species

Episode 7: The art of living variants

Episode 8: Translating them in the spring

Episode 9: Composing a body for yourself

Episode 10: A season in super-faces

Episode 11: So many ways of being alive

Epilogue: The incandescent alloy

Notes

2 The promises of a sponge

Descending from those we are wiping out

The futurology of forms of life

A speculative biology of humanist virtues

Our place in evolution: contemporary developments in the philosophy of biology

The banality of miracles

Contingency and convergence: life

Do human beings occupy a comfortable place in the coral reef of evolution?

Burning more than a library

Ancestor worship

Notes

3 Cohabiting with our wild beasts: the diplomatic ethics of Spinoza

Taming the horses of the passions

From one map to another: reason/passions vs joy/sadness

Relationship with our animal nature, relationship with ourselves

An ethology of the self

Plato vs. the Cherokees

From taming by force of will to diplomacy with your wild animals

From the coercive charioteer to the diplomat of the passions

Fortifying the white wolf without subduing the black wolf

Ascensional ethics

Notes

4 To the other side of the night: towards a politics of interdependences. Nights on the watch

Vita incognita

Becoming-diplomat. Briefing in the open

There remains a span of sunlight

The threshold of twilight

‘Do not go gentle into that good night’

‘Before nightfall you must light your torch’4

The dark side of the night

Going over to the other side

Dawn on the other side

The political philosophy of night ‘If the night turns dark, make yourself even darker’6

Being a guardian of interdependences

Thinking like an alpine meadow: profiling alliances

The creative dimension of the intercessor

Communities of concern

You are not born a diplomat, you have the role thrust upon you

Being captured together from the point of view of interdependences

Composition and struggle

Concern for interdependences as care for the self

Notes

Epilogue Adjusted consideration

Notes

Afterword

Free living

Repolytization

Always inside, never in front

Style in philosophy

The incandescent alloy

Notes

Credits

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Отрывок из книги

Baptiste Morizot

Translated by Andrew Brown

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In my opinion, then, these two formulations of the problem of the relationship between human and animal nature are false and toxic: animals are not more bestial than us, nor are they freer. They do not embody unbridled and ferocious wildness (this is the animal tamers’ myth), nor do they embody some purer innocence (this is its reactive reverse side). They are not superior to human beings in authenticity or inferior in elevation: what they mainly embody is other ways of being alive.

It is the ‘other’ that is essential. It expresses a whole quiet logic of difference against a background of common ascent. It’s a quiet grammatical revolution that’s happening – the revolution that sees the addition of one little word flourishing in all those everyday sentences: ‘human beings and animals’, ‘the difference from animals’, ‘what an animal does not have’ …

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