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What Is It Like to Become a Bat? Heterogeneities in an Age of Extinction

What Is It Like to Become a Bat? Heterogeneities in an Age of Extinction In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Environmental Humanities Duke University Press

What Is It Like to Become a Bat? Heterogeneities in an Age of Extinction

Erev, Stephanie
Environmental Humanities , Volume 10 (1) – May 1, 2018
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Copyright
© 2018 Stephanie Erev
ISSN
2201-1919
eISSN
2201-1919
DOI
10.1215/22011919-4385498
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world.

Journal

Environmental Humanities – Duke University Press

Published: May 1, 2018

References

  • Encounter
    Barua, Maan
  • Seeing without Eyes: New Study Suggests Octopus’s Skin Possesses Same Cellular Mechanisms for Detecting Light as Its Eyes Do
    Cohen, Julie
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    Cronin, Thomas
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    Faier, Lieba Rofel, Lisa
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    Hall, Brian K.
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    Hanlon, Roger T.
  • Canadian Town Cancels Outdoor Halloween Because Polar Bears
    Holthaus, Eric
  • Baby Seal Found on Australian Cattle Farm Twenty-One Miles Away from Ocean
    Juaregui, Andres
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    Keller, David R. Callicott, J. Baird Frodeman, Robert
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    Margulis, Lynn Sagan, Dorion Cobb, John B.Jr.
  • What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
    Nagel, Thomas
  • Skin Senses Light in ‘Eye-Like’ Fashion
    Paddock, Catharine
  • Eye-Independent, Light-Activated Chromatophore Expansion (LACE) and Expression of Phototransduction Genes in the Skin of Octopus Bimaculoides
    Ramirez, M. Desmond Oakley, Todd H.
  • Invasion/Invasive
    Ritvo, Harriet
  • Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant
    Rose, Deborah Bird
  • Introduction to “Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions.”
    Rose, Deborah Bird van Dooren, Thom
  • Process Philosophy
    Seibt, Johanna Zalta, Edward N.
  • Order Chiroptera
    Simmons, N. B. Wilson, Don E. Reeder, DeeAnn M.
  • Fungus Causing White-Nose Syndrome in Bats Accumulates Genetic Variability in North America with No Sign of Recombination
    Trivedi, Jigar Lachapelle, Josianne Vanderwolf, Karen J. Misra, Vikram Willis, Craig K. R. Ratcliffe, John M. Ness, Rob W. Anderson, James B. Kohn, Linda M.
  • Scaling the Anthropocene: How the Stories We Tell Matter
    Veland, Siri Lynch, Amanda H.
  • Encounter
    Barua, Maan
  • Seeing without Eyes: New Study Suggests Octopus’s Skin Possesses Same Cellular Mechanisms for Detecting Light as Its Eyes Do
    Cohen, Julie
  • Seeing without Eyes: The Unexpected World of Nonvisual Photoreception
    Cronin, Thomas
  • The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
    Cronon, William
  • Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance
    Diprose, Rosalyn Patton, Paul
  • Defaunation in the Anthropocene
    Dirzo, Rodolfo Young, Hillary S. Galetti, Mauro Ceballos, Gerardo Isaac, Nick J. B. Collen, Ben
  • Ethnographies of Encounter
    Faier, Lieba Rofel, Lisa
  • The Paradoxical Platypus
    Hall, Brian K.
  • Cephalopod Dynamic Camouflage
    Hanlon, Roger T.
  • Canadian Town Cancels Outdoor Halloween Because Polar Bears
    Holthaus, Eric
  • Baby Seal Found on Australian Cattle Farm Twenty-One Miles Away from Ocean
    Juaregui, Andres
  • Deep Ecology
    Keller, David R. Callicott, J. Baird Frodeman, Robert
  • The Role of Symbiogenesis in Evolution
    Margulis, Lynn Sagan, Dorion Cobb, John B.Jr.
  • What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
    Nagel, Thomas
  • Skin Senses Light in ‘Eye-Like’ Fashion
    Paddock, Catharine
  • Eye-Independent, Light-Activated Chromatophore Expansion (LACE) and Expression of Phototransduction Genes in the Skin of Octopus Bimaculoides
    Ramirez, M. Desmond Oakley, Todd H.
  • Invasion/Invasive
    Ritvo, Harriet
  • Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant
    Rose, Deborah Bird
  • Introduction to “Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions.”
    Rose, Deborah Bird van Dooren, Thom
  • Process Philosophy
    Seibt, Johanna Zalta, Edward N.
  • Order Chiroptera
    Simmons, N. B. Wilson, Don E. Reeder, DeeAnn M.
  • Fungus Causing White-Nose Syndrome in Bats Accumulates Genetic Variability in North America with No Sign of Recombination
    Trivedi, Jigar Lachapelle, Josianne Vanderwolf, Karen J. Misra, Vikram Willis, Craig K. R. Ratcliffe, John M. Ness, Rob W. Anderson, James B. Kohn, Linda M.
  • Scaling the Anthropocene: How the Stories We Tell Matter
    Veland, Siri Lynch, Amanda H.