Eva Meijer, philosopher and artist, joins me on episode 245 of the Sentientism YouTube and Sentientism Podcast.

Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. They write novels, philosophical essays, academic texts, poems and columns, and their work has been translated into over twenty languages. Recurring themes are language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. Meijer also writes essays and columns for Dutch newspapers, is a member of the Multispecies Collective and De Vereniging ter Bevordering van Troost (The Association for the Promotion of Consolation). Here you can find a page with links to her work about long covid.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

“Ideas about what kind of beings animals are have changed a lot in the past decades.”

“The basics of life, love, community, care, these matter for all of us in more or less the same ways.”

“We have stereotypical views about mice that really do not do justice to the kinds of beings they are.”

“If we would abolish the practice of animal testing, scientists would have alternatives in two weeks or a month.”

“When I write a poem, the language enables me to shift shape. So I can turn into a mouse or a community of mice and I can see the world from there.

00:48 Welcome

JW: “… many of the people I talk to have an ambition that maybe stops at the end of exploitation and you have a much more radical vision than that.”

03:28 Eva’s Intro

“I do a lot of different things. I’m here mostly as a philosopher who writes about nonhuman animals, politics, language, multispecies relationships, multispecies communities.”

“I’m also a novelist and a poet and I’m a visual artist. I’m a member of The Multispecies Collective which is a multispecies art collective…”

“I also try to be of use for the nonhuman animals around me. So I share my life with quite a lot of nonhumans.”

“I also have a toad patrol group here in the town where I live. So we assist the amphibians across the road.”

“I try to influence the public debate to also make room for the voices of those who are not very loud.”

“The political debate and the public debate are now very much focused on the loudest voices.”

“I also write a lot about social justice and justice in general.”

05:12 What’s Real?

“I immediately think of some lines from a poem that I wrote a while back… ‘maybe we only really exist in the eyes of other animals.’”

“Very often when I write something, I don’t really know why I write it…. I don’t first think about what I write and then write it. It’s usually the other way around. I write something and then I think about it and adjust it and edit it and work on it.”

“Two of the most real experiences of my life… have been living with ex-laboratory mice and the work that I do with the toad patrol group.”

“I adopted 25 ex-laboratory mice in 2020.”

“In the Netherlands about 200,000 mice are used in labs… but the same amount of mice are bred to be used, but they’re not actually used in experiments.”

“A cluster of animal rights organizations and animal protection organizations teamed up with the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to devise an adoption program for these mice.”

“I learned a lot from them… we have stereotypical views about mice that really do not do justice to the kinds of beings they are. Mice have friendships with each other. They care for each other. They even bury their friends when they die. They have they always have lots of projects that they’re working on. They build great nests.”

“They didn’t like me so much. So, they didn’t like my hands, but they did like my voice. So, I played music for them. And this was how we began to connect.”

“And at first, I didn’t recognize them… this is something that humans often experience in in relation to mice and other small animals. They don’t recognize them. They don’t see them as individuals.”

“But after a while, I devised the system in which I could learn to know who was who. And then I found out much more about their personalities and friendships.”

“I’ve written about these mice and about the kind of beings laboratory mice are… what this means for the practice that I think should be abolished.”

“But there was also something else that they taught me because mice only live for two years or two and a half years. So I also witnessed 25 deaths”

“There’s not a lot of health care for mice and this is of course deeply problematic because we so know so much about their bodies. We know nearly everything, but humans do not take the next step of actually applying that knowledge to create something that’s useful for them.”

“…animal testing is generally not very reliable and there are other options like computer models and also in vitro cells that are being used now and experimented with.”

“If we would abolish the practice of animal testing, scientists would have alternatives in two weeks or a month.”

“We have the all the knowledge for it. But there’s just bureaucracy and habits that’s stopping us from changing the practice.”

“I experienced their whole life cycle and the also the ways in which they gave meaning to their to their lives and dealt with challenges, with illness, with the death of their companions.”

“At the same time that the first mice died in the same week… my father also died. And in the year that followed, my dog companion Ollie also died… it was just a lot of death.”

“The mice really taught me something about the meaning of life.”

“We are really only here very briefly, all of us, and the basics of life, love, community, care, these matter for all of us in more or less the same ways.”

“Through living with these mice I really saw something about the fragility and strength of life and I felt very honoured to be able to witness that with them.”

“The second example… the toad group, the amphibians that I help cross the road with group of around 20 volunteers.”

“Each year, the amphibians, frogs, toads, and newts. They hibernate in the gardens in the town where I live and then they go to the ponds to find partners in spring. But they need to cross the road and that’s dangerous.”

“And when I came to live here, I saw that many of them were killed by buses and cars. So I set up this group… it’s walking the street with a lantern and spotting them and then helping them to cross.”

“But this practice… it makes me a bit obsessed every year because I know that when I walk, I will be able to assist some individuals that might die if I don’t do it. So, I usually walk every evening during the days that they cross the street.”

“But it’s also a very basic activity. It really matters. It’s something that really, really matters for others.”

“In our societies, we try to arrange life in such a way that we stay away from what really matters for others.”

“Think about the ways in which humans eat… they go to a supermarket. There’s nothing about the production of the food.”

“… You can find it on the internet or you can look it up… but there’s nothing about the journey that the food made to get there, the exploitation of human workers, of nonhuman workers.”

“There are pieces of dead animals and they are covered up like that’s normal…”

“This is a sense of unrealness with regard to others, other humans and also the nonhumans with whom we share this planet.”

“That’s really characteristic for relationships between humans and other animals in at least my country in the Netherlands, but in many other places as well.”

“This disconnection is very alienating for humans, but it’s also at the basis of a lot of destruction of lives and life worlds.”

“When you ask about what is real, these experiences immediately come to mind.”

“It’s a very important question for philosophers because a lot of philosophers tend to want to abstract from the world and construct a model or principles that are somehow separate from reality.”

“Even when they do this with the best intentions, it’s problematic.”

“It’s especially problematic when it comes to nonhuman animals because our ideas about them are strongly biased.”

JW: “When we’re talking about different choices of epistemology, one classic choice is a naturalistic approach using evidence and reason set against things like revelation or faith or some form of religious authority…”

JW: “Even the naturalistic approach… evidence and reason, some people can do that in a very narrowly scientistic way that does what you’re suggesting… trying to abstract away. We’re trying to detach ourselves from reality to understand it better because we want to be impartial.”

JW: “That can lead to missing out a lot of the most important things about reality because if you only think about the things that you can put in a spreadsheet or you can cut up with a scalpel or look at through a microscope… has to be randomised control trials done by a guy in a white lab coat… you’re missing a lot of reality.”

JW: “Recognising the relationships we have with others…. the subjectivity of others… these are deeply important aspects of understanding what’s real too… To do evidence and reasoning well, you have to engage with that stuff richly. You can’t put it in a spreadsheet and slice it and dice it away.”

JW: “Is there space for the spiritual, the mystical, the magical, the transcendent, something beyond, or do you prefer a sort of richer understanding of the natural world which includes subjectivity and relations?”

“… Different language games… different arguments and methods can play a role in shedding light on an aspect of reality.”

“I work as a novelist, poet and philosopher and in these three fields I use language in a very different way and this enables me to say something different about reality.”

“So when I write a philosophical text, I mean I’m still on the narrative side compared to some of my strictly analytic colleagues, but I do use arguments. I use a type of language that is common in the field in which I work, political animal philosophy.”

“My aim is usually twofold. It’s ontological but also normative.”

“But when I write a novel this might be about the same topic… relationships between humans and other animals and how we should live as humans… language enables me to say something about the ambiguities of the relationships that exist, about the difficulties of doing the right thing, about the hesitations, about all of these human things that make it difficult for us to act in a certain way… also the fact that sometimes there is no right way to act.”

“… Then when I write a poem about the same thing, the language enables me to shift shape. So I can turn into a mouse or a community of mice and I can see the world from there. Of course, not in the mouse way, it’s the human way of being a mouse… but it’s something else.”

“Something else happens and I think for a reader something else happens too.”

“… Fiction is also real in a sense but it’s a different kind of reality than the reality of science.”

JW: “It might be a reality of the ideas in our minds or on the page… we write a story about the unicorn but we think it’s unlikely there is one in the forest.”

“Sometimes with a story you can catch something in reality.”

“You can catch a feeling or a time… novels are very often about time and they’re always also about the time in which you write them.”

“I wrote a novel, Sea Now, which is coming out in English soon… this is a novel in which the North Sea floods the Netherlands.”

“Of course, this did not really happen… but it still says something about our time, our attitude towards the more than human world and also how humans behave in the face of the climate crisis which is, in the Netherlands, just ignore it…”

“This is what I mean with stories being real. You can use a story to say something about reality.”

“Critique of ideology matters a lot because, on the level of society, a lot of humans are caught in narratives that are seducing them to have certain opinions, desires that are not actually real, but that are just what they see around them all the time or what they hear repeated.”

“What is real is also a matter of critique.”

JW: “the tools of fiction or art and creativity can be intrinsically valuable in their own right… the experience they can give us the joy the pleasure the exploration… but they can also be useful tools for understanding reality itself – for exploring, for thinking about ideas, for imagining different futures or different ways of being.”

JW: “As long as we remember which parts are fictional and which parts aren’t, so we don’t lose our tethering to the reality which I think we probably do share.”

JW: “As long as we don’t lose that connection, we can mitigate the risks of people believing what they want to believe or believing some narrative structure that is politically convenient… that’s partly why I think a naturalistic epistemology is an important thing.”

JW: “If we want to make reality better, it’s good to understand it accurately.”

JW: “Good people can do terrible things if they’re factually wrong about stuff.”

“This point that you’re making is especially important in this time because there is so much fake news… it’s also news catered for certain audiences… this is why I find the model of the dialogue so important in thinking about truth and reality and justice.”

“We are losing the space for being able to discuss what is real and what is not. Because different audiences or groups of humans or political humans with different political affiliations are in their own corners”

“Technological developments are just making it harder and harder for them to look over the wall and see the others.”

 “I’m absolutely in favour of all the good things that the internet brings…”

“But I do feel that there’s a real danger in the way that social media and also other media works at the moment.”

“I don’t think that art is the danger here. I think it’s more about propaganda… the loss of dialogue and the active pollution of our common spheres online… this then spreads out in other spheres.”

“The second thing… has to do with how science functions and specifically how we think about nonhuman animals.”

“Ideas about what kind of beings animals are have changed a lot in the past decades… scientists from all kind of fields, biology and ethology, but also fields in the humanities have really changed the view of animals…”

“From them as instinctive, simple beings that are lesser than human and whose intelligence, culture and so on should be measured with regard to or in relation to human intelligence, culture and so on.”

“To complex beings who form their own communities, have their own views on life and so on. And this field is very much in movement.”

“There’s a lot of discussion about new empirical facts, but there’s also a lot of discussion about how we should interpret these and how we should act ethically because of what they tell us about what kind of beings animals are and with plants the same.”

“These are slightly different questions and plants are different beings, but animals is also not one group. It’s a very heterogeneous group.”

“We should also, when thinking about facts, be critical, because for a very long time science has not done justice to nonhuman animal subjectivity.”

“On the one hand we should have faith in the facts and in science as much as we can.”

“But it’s also really important to teach humans to be aware of what can go wrong, especially when we’re dealing with marginalised groups like nonhuman animals.”

JW: “Epistemics (how do we know stuff) is not some separate realm which is just about the technical question of ‘are our beliefs accurate or not?’ It is richly shaped by our values and our ethics and our culture and our history.”

JW: “The field of science is a very human endeavour… the scientists have their own values that shape and direct their work.”

JW: “You can talk about whether there’s an is-ought barrier or not, but in the real world these two, how we understand reality and who and what we think matters are deeply intertwined and they circle around each other.”

“I really like this debate that’s going on in plant research at the moment about whether or not plants are sentient or have subjectivity because these are not just empirical questions.”

“There’s a lot of new research about plants showing, for certain species, that they discriminate between their kin and others or themselves and others… also about their ways of experiencing the world, social relations and so on.”

JW: “I had a fascinating conversation with Justine Karst about the science around that and where it’s got to so far.”

“This now raises all kinds of questions about agency, subjectivity, our ethical relationships with plants, perhaps even our political relationships.”

“A lot of humans want to answer these questions using existing human interpretations of these concepts. But as animal scholars, we are really making the move to approach them from a multispecies perspective.”

“I’m very curious to see how it how it continues as someone who cares about the flourishing of other beings, but also as a philosopher interested in how concepts change and how science and philosophy relate.”

33:17 What Matters?

“I think that we as humans don’t matter so much. I don’t know if this is a good answer.”

“What I’ve learned from the other animals with whom I live is that what matters is not the big concept or getting away from our everyday interactions and philosophising about…”

“But it’s very much about the being together. When you mention care and love I think that these are concepts that are expressed on a on a day-to-day basis in interpersonal relationships.”

“At the same time I’m very aware of the fact that we live in a world that’s extremely unjust and extremely violent towards many beings, nonhumans and also humans. And I’m deeply committed to changing that in any way that I can.”

“These levels are so thoroughly intertwined because the larger power structures in society shape how we think about relationships with human others and nonhuman others and the other way around.”

“The way in which we practice life with those who are close to us and what we learn from them can inspire how we navigate the social and political life with others.”

“When you ask what matters, I think it’s not about finding principles or choosing one concept that’s determines everything.”

“For me personally, it’s really about making myself useful for others.”

“I’m very lucky because I have my work and, for me, my work is much more important than my personal life.”

“I don’t care so much about my life. For me.”

“I was ill for a long time. I had long COVID for two years and I couldn’t do much.”

“Suddenly my life became very important because you’re sick. When you’re sick you can’t really be of use to others and you can’t read or write or do the things that you’re used to doing to connect to the outside world.”

“But now that I’m not sick anymore, and also very happy about that, I can say again that life doesn’t matter so much.”

 JW: “That idea of being useful to others or helping others is absolutely core to a common sense understanding of what morality is about.”

JW: “There are moral systems that aren’t interested in others directly because they might be concerned with personal virtue or with contractual systems of negotiation or even divine command theory or ethical egotism or some forms of moral relativism where it’s not really about caring about others. It’s about social norms or commands of God or something else.”

JW: “But intuitively there is a common sense understanding of morality that it is about caring about others, however we do that.”

JW: “I guess your ‘being useful to others’ is because of that sense of wanting to right injustice or move towards a more just world, but it is also an expression of that love and compassion… that relational connection, that obligation of care to others as well.”

JW: “There are some types of nonhuman animals that are not social… they might have a k-strategist ‘fire and forget’ approach with their offspring and then they might live quite solitary lives, like an octopus… they probably also don’t really have any concept of justice or injustice at all. For an animal like that… what might matter to them? Would anything be left that matters to an octopus?”

“I saw a really nice clip a while back from a study about female octopuses who were being harassed by male octopuses and then they were using coconuts to hit back… When you were speaking about justice, this immediately came to mind.”

“What matters for other animals?… On the one hand they’re flourishing as the kind of being they are… also it’s not up to me to decide that.”

“I’ve become very aware of the problematic position of the philosopher in relation to nonhuman animals in the language game of philosophy.”

“Philosophers really like to think about what’s just for everybody else and what everybody else is experiencing and how we should then measure their interests or their ideas about the good life or whatever from the outside.”

“We’re very eager to determine, ‘this being is like this, this being is like that’ and then ‘we need to act in such and such way.’”

“We now know so much about the complexities of the inner lives of others, but also simply from a common sense perspective, they have their view on life and they should be able to discuss that with us.”

“So if I would want to answer your question, I could not do it here and now in conversation with you because I don’t know enough about the beings that we are discussing.”

“I would need to go and find the specific beings that we’re talking about, learn more about them, perhaps even engage in their forms of life to be able to understand something about it.”

“And then still it’s an open question especially because we as humans already determine so much for other animals.”

“In the context of human domination, what matters for other animals might also be different than in a world without human domination.”

JW: “It brings us back to the epistemology question… the way I resolve this is by saying ‘what matters to a being is their own subjective perspective, their interests, their desires, their preferences, their experiences… their flourishing. Their ability to carry out their natural capabilities, their well-being, their suffering, these things matter to a being.’”

JW: “But it’s very easy to go from that, a genuinely empathic, compassionate, moral stance that is trying to say ‘It’s not about me. It’s really about you and it’s about them’… To then jump into saying ‘and now I’m going to work out what your perspective is from the outside with a spreadsheet.’”

JW: “That’s where it can go wrong, because we forget that the point of doing that exercise, which is supposed to be a genuine moral attempt to understand the other and then to help them… can slip into something that again is all about us and our perspective.”

JW: “What matters is the perspective of each being. Is that something we can all come back to?… The reason I care about justice and injustice is ultimately because those have a negative impact on the experiences and the interests of a being. And the reason I care about love and compassion is because they can have a positive [impact on their] experience… And the reason I think torturing an animal or a human animal is bad is because it has a negative [impact on their] experience… All of these things seem to collapse back down to their perspective and what it’s like for them.”

“There’s one other thing I would like to add to that… I’ve written a lot about the languages of other animals… On the one hand we should be cautious to not attribute all kinds of ideas and thoughts to them as humans when we don’t know about them.”

“But on the other hand, there’s very often a lot of scepticism about getting to know other animals at all. And I’ve called this species scepticism.”

“A lot of humans do assume that they can get an idea of what other humans are thinking and feeling and experiencing because we share the same language.”

“But with other animals suddenly there’s this species barrier that shuts off all views into what they are thinking and what’s in their mind.”

JW: “That can even lead some people to claim that we have no idea if they’re experiencing anything at all. Maybe they don’t have a perspective and then you’re back to where we started which is a completely anthropocentric exclusion of anybody else.” “Yeah. It’s important to be critical of this position… Language is not just words and understanding does not just come out of the kind of conversations that we are having now.”

“A lot of animal languages are embodied and include not only sounds but also sense and colours and bodily movements.”

“Even our human interaction includes a lot more than simply speaking.”

“Language can also deceive us. We can lie and we can use it in ways that are problematic.”

“These questions of knowing and understanding are not tied to the species barrier… Humans attach too much value to the distinction between species.”

“Yes, of course animals of different species experience the world differently and have different ways of expressing themselves.”

“But social relationships are also important and of course individual preferences and characteristics in how we experience and shape the world and how we co-constitute relationships with others.”

“So all of these ingredients matter; species, social relations, and individual relationships.”

47:10 Who Matters?

“Studies that show that human children are not speciesist. They’re not born speciesist, but they’re made speciesist.”

The Matti Wilks Sentientism episode “Children are much less speciesist than adults”

“For young children, they think that humans and pigs and dogs all have moral value. And then this changes as they grow up and are socialised into speciesist societies that we live in.”

“I never was fully socialised out of that… I always stayed in the idea that other animals matter too and that they were my friends.”

JW: “Is that because of the way your family thought?”

“No, no, it’s just my own strangeness.”

JW: “A running theme in these conversations is the wonderful weird strangeness of many of my guests.”

 JW: “What was that experience like for you because obviously you live in a culture which… has some radically different views about the value and the worth and the moral salience of nonhumans. How did you experience that as a child? Was there friction or were you just one of those strange people who don’t care about the friction.”

“I don’t care about the friction.”

“When I was 10 years old, I visited a friend and she told me… I’m a vegetarian I don’t eat meat and then I suddenly I felt very ashamed because I hadn’t thought about this as a possibility.”

“I came home and I said to my mother, ‘Mom, I’m a vegetarian… She said, ‘Okay.’ Because she knew that if I wanted something, I would do it anyway. No point in fighting.”

“I never experienced this as difficult… this was just the way it was from then….”

“When I was in my teens, I became active in animal advocacy and joining street demonstrations and also feminist and anti-racist activism.”

“This then later also led to me being a vegan.”

“In the Netherlands it was more about vegetarianism… very well known and, in a sense, quite accepted. But veganism was in the 1990s, for me at least, growing up in a small town, not so around.”

“Now you have the internet… but it wasn’t there right then… it was a question of knowledge but also a question of attention.”

“I had quite a difficult childhood… I became depressed quite early on when I was 14.”

“I was, in a sense, also taken away from the animals maybe before I could come back to them… taken away by my own difficulties.”

“But then my work helped a lot.”

“Fast forward some years later when I was a vegan and also still doing activism and living with nonhuman animals and I studied at the arts academy.”

“I was working as an artist and musician, but I still did feel that I wanted to know more about why humans treat other animals in the way that they do and also the kind of arguments that I could give when I was having discussions with other humans about this.”

“I also felt drawn to philosophy already at earlier points in my life… I was reading Descartes when I was 13 and got very upset about it.”

“So philosophy was part of my life but really studying philosophy was, for me, connected to knowing more about the animal question. This then led me to the work that I’m doing now.”

“I found out that the intersubjectivity and the attention for the voices and perspectives of nonhuman animals that is really at the basis of my work… wasn’t very present in philosophy, at least not in the curriculum at the University of Amsterdam.”

“When I started to do more research… I found work of all kinds of scholars that inspired me.”

“That’s how I came to this question of who matters. And I think it’s evolving.”

JW: “Getting to the stage of recognising that animals, human and nonhuman, matter, is a really important staging post… for many people that’s where they stay… your work is really interesting because you actually challenge the boundaries… is that far enough?”

JW: “I think there’s at least two ways you could test that boundary… one is… test where the boundaries of sentience are… could plants be sentient? Could bacteria be sentient? Could fungi be sentient? Could ecosystems be sentient? could artificial intelligences be sentient?… You can keep sentience as your guide but test the boundaries… with good epistemology so we’re not led astray.”

JW: “The other approach is… to go beyond sentience itself… some of the people I’ve spoken to before like Susana Monso will talk about whether there can be entities that have dignity that maybe aren’t sentient. And I’ve talked to the philosopher Nico Delon who’s testing out whether there could be entities that could have agency that might not actually be sentient… they could set and pursue goals… maybe there’s another understanding of what value can mean that doesn’t require the being to feel something in itself.”

“When I had long COVID, I was mainly on the couch, the green couch in my house that is now over there to the left. And I looked out of the window at the trees and I also looked a lot at the plants on the windowsill.”

“These plants really helped me and the trees as well because they showed me something about enduring time and about living in one place.”

“On a poetic level or a metaphorical level or a very real human-plant level, I began to see them differently.”

“I always find plants like I always find sick animals… house plants that humans grow somewhere and then I take them and they grow… they have babies and then so the whole house is filled with plants.”

“But I didn’t consider them so much… there’s so much nonhuman animal suffering that it always feels problematic to spend your time to not focus on that.”

“I was there and I was sick and I was looking at the plants, and they helped me, and they comforted me.”

“I began to write about plants and trees as fellow beings.”

JW: “Was it almost as though you were finding a solidarity with the plants because you were being forced to live a plant life existence yourself… stuck on the couch?”

“Yes… I also became more Aristotelian because of it… I really felt, ‘oh, I’m a human. I should be able to move. I’m an animal.’ I felt that a lot more than before.”

“I also felt a lot more connection and solidarity to the plants and the trees.”

“I’ve always photographed trees since I was 17 or so. So I had a strong connection with trees that was intuitive.”

“At the same time, I was thinking about developing a political model together with nonhuman animals.”

“I told you about my reluctance to defining, as a philosopher, what is right for other animals… to defining how we should live… to defining political systems and principles.”

“But I still get a lot of questions about how we should do politics with nonhuman animals.”

“I’ve written a lot about political agency of other animals and about language as well.”

“I would always say ‘well I don’t know if we need to do this together with animals’ but then I thought ‘well, let’s just think about how we can do this.’”

“What would be a fair way, a fair procedure for developing new political practices and institutions together with animals.”

“When you think about doing politics with nonhuman animals, there are a few things that are immediately clear. It’s going to look quite different from how we do politics with humans.”

“A lot of humans see politics as voting in elections or perhaps discussions in parliament and these acts are obviously not very suitable for thinking about doing politics with other animals.”

“They don’t want to go into parliament. They don’t want to speak with us in human language.”

“But there are all kinds of political practices already existing. Think for example of the resistance of nonhuman animals. Dinesh Wadiwel wrote about this and Jason Hribal in much detail. That’s a very clear political act.”

“There are also forms of refusal, cooperation and deliberation.”

“And with deliberation, I don’t mean deliberation in human language, the way we are speaking with each other now, but embodied ongoing dialogues that may involve interventions in the landscape or direct encounters…”

“Or sometimes human language, to think about how we speak with our animal companions or other domesticated animals, but sometimes also much more distant processes of question and response.”

“I was thinking about developing this model of politics from the ground up that should be local and involve specific forms of deliberation.”

“I thought about the model of the assembly which is an ancient model for political decision making.”

“Those of us who studied Greek in high school know about it because it’s how the ancient Greeks made their decisions. They came together on a square or in another specifically designated place and they spoke about what mattered and then made a decision.”

“But it’s also a model that you find in non-western societies and in many other settings like workplaces.”

“It’s not just for the whole of society, but it can also be to simply discuss a question of common importance in any kind of group.”

“There’s a lot of attention for citizens assemblies. These are gatherings of humans that are elected by lottery and then chosen to be a good representation of the people of a specific city or country.”

“Then they’re given education and space to deliberate about questions and they’re asked to come up with a solution.”

“The citizens assembly is seen as a really powerful tool for making decisions about the climate crisis, specifically, because our political systems are not well suited to address the big problems that we’re facing.”

“They’re typically only looking at the next four years, because we have four year election cycles.”

“Most humans don’t have a say in what’s happening. So there’s a large distance between politicians and citizens.”

“And there are other factors, for example, that interests of many groups are not adequately taken seriously, like children.”

“Also children of other animals, but let’s focus on human children. They have different interests in relation to decision making about the climate crisis than adults because for us it will probably be fine but for those being born now or very young it’s different.”

“Citizens assemblies are used for this. So I’ve been thinking about how to extend this model.”

JW: “They also seem to be able to cut across the problems you were talking about earlier on with the fake news separate bubbles where people have their own epistemic environments with their own facts, their own knowledge… whereas a citizens assembly seems to be able to bring people together into a much richer dialogue where they can leave the groupishness outside and find undiscovered common ground and find a way forward.”

“It’s, an important insight about deliberation that it’s more than simply the calculation of interests.”

“We often think about politics as some kind of struggle in which competing interests clash and then the strongest wins.”

“But the idea of deliberation is that, through dialogue, we can get to a solution that’s better for all of us, or at least that’s the ideal.”

“In citizens assemblies you see that humans generally take decisions that are a lot more just than politicians in our systems tend to do.”

“They’re a promising tool for human politics, but then from the animal political perspective, there’s also scope for including the voices of nonhuman animals.”

“If people want to read about it, they can read my book about it.”

 “The idea is that some nonhuman animals will be able to speak for themselves. Those with whom we already have quite close relationships and encounters like city animals or birds.”

“With those, we can create procedures for deliberation and sometimes perhaps decision making.”

“They can participate in the assembly, but other beings should be represented like nonhuman animals who do not want or who cannot participate.”

“These processes of representation should also be informed by interaction with them as well as education.”

“There are more creatures in the world than simply humans and nonhuman animals.”

“There’s quite a lot of literature about the political agency of human children and ways in which they can participate in political processes. There are many experiments with this worldwide even though they are not always taken seriously. Their voices too should be heard in these assemblies.”

“They should also participate when they can and perhaps be represented when they are really young.”

JW: “Would you extend that to future generations as well? Some governments already have at least a minister or some group that is trying to represent future generations.”

“Yes, definitely. The interests of future generations also need to be thought about.”

“And the other way around. Many non-western philosophies and epistemologies have reserved a special place for ancestors.”

“In Aboriginal and Maori thinking, ancestors are also present and should also participate. So, we could imagine assemblies taking place in these cultures also reserving a place for that. This is an open question. I will leave that open for now.”

“Then there’s also the question of the wider natural world. So, the question of plants matters, how should we deal with them? Are they capable of deliberating with us?”

“I’m organizing a workshop about this later this year with some humans who are thinking a lot about plant deliberation. This is a question that’s being investigated right now.”

“They should at least be represented by humans in the assembly.”

“The question of natural entities, ecosystems, forests, seas, and others. There’s currently quite a lot of attention for rights of nature.”

“Many humans across the world are trying to get natural entities recognized as holders of rights. This means that they should have the opportunity to protect them better and bring lawsuits against humans or companies who pollute them.”

“This is built on indigenous views and many non-western communities already recognised the rights of these more than human entities before western philosophy is keeping up.”

“I was thinking for this model about these different kinds of agents and how they can speak for themselves and how they should be represented.”

“Indeed this goes beyond the question of sentience or it simply looks at reality from another perspective.”

“Because of the work that I’ve been doing on political agency and language I bypassed this question of sentience and suffering and I don’t think it’s not relevant.”

“I think it’s very relevant but I think it’s another lens to look at reality and describe reality to others… This also matters from the perspective of advocacy.”

“It matters in itself because I think we need to take other animals much more seriously than we’ve done. If we only speak about them in terms of sentience, then this might obscure some other ways in which we can speak about them.”

“Different philosophers have different roles in the story, but I also think it matters from the perspective of advocacy.”

“Humans need other stories to imagine another world.”

“When we speak only about the abolition of certain practices… humans feel like they should give something up or they lose something… They have to sacrifice something.”

“It’s completely the opposite… some people see veganism as a sacrifice, but it’s great, it’s wonderful.”

JW: “It’s a release, a joy.”

“To be able to choose for that, to not hurt and harm these other beings. It’s just really great that we have that choice.”

“We need different strategies and ways forward in thinking how to address the large scale exploitation that we are still facing every day.”

01:12:11 A Better World?

JW: “You’re thinking about a broader conception of language and dialogue.”

JW: “Using assemblies and multispecies politics is your answer of how we could get to a better world.”

JW: “Politics should be the process whereby they, as far as they’re able, should have the ability to represent their own interests and then we have a dialogue and a process that can hopefully find some mutually beneficial way forward.”

JW: “You might resist answering this question because you might say ‘that’s not for you or me to answer, Jamie’, but do you have a grand utopian vision… If you imagine a world where we’ve really implemented multispecies assemblies and a sort of sentiocracy (a multispecies democracy) and it’s been running and it’s working, it’s operating at local levels and it’s operating at national and super national levels as well. What story would you tell about that utopian future, acknowledging that ultimately it won’t be up to you or me to decide. It’s something that comes out of the deliberation.”

“I sometimes find it so strange that we’re not already doing it because the way in which we live now is so clearly very harmful to so many beings, also humans.”

“Especially now, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the situation in Ukraine.”

“Here in the Netherlands, there’s so much attention for what Trump does that we’re not really discussing anything else anymore.”

JW: “That sucks all the attention in… Which is ultimately what he’s about because that’s all he really cares about.”

“It’s like a pop star politician thing and everybody’s buying it.”

“I was in China to teach a summer school just now… I met some Chinese animal activists and I was so impressed with the work that they’re doing because it’s dangerous for them and it’s difficult to speak out.”

“Since I came back I’ve been thinking why do not more humans speak out and organize and make a change? Because we can, we’re free.”

“I know that it’s not easy to establish change and it asks for not one action but a lifetime of actions and then it still goes wrong… But it’s really doable to change our societies.”

“It’s not that hard, if everybody who wants a better life for everybody does something, we can we can move it and change it.”

“One of the problems that we have is that there are just so many humans. There are so many humans in the world and for them to live justly together with each other and with the other animals is going to be a challenge given human psychology and capitalism.”

“But after we’ve overthrown capitalism and liberated all the nonhuman animals, I think we will live in smaller communities and in ways that are peaceful…”

“… Still very difficult because there are just basic difficulties of life and death and illness and related things that will always be there. But I’m hoping that we would address it with care and love and not with the neglect and violence that we’re using now.”

JW: “That feels emotionally quite an attractive vision, but I wonder if there is some danger… a romantic vision of an idyllic imagined past when there were less people and we lived in smaller groups… maybe were slightly more in harmony with nature.”

JW: “That imagined past wasn’t quite as idyllic as we like to think and there were deep problems of oppression and violence and so on that we shouldn’t skim over.”

JW: “Would it mean turning away from some technological opportunities to really do radically positive things that might be good for multispecies communities. If we’ve moved to something that is more small scale and non-capitalist, are we turning away from an opportunity that might be more technologically enabled and might be more innovation enabled, or do you think we could we could do both?”

“If you would ask for my personal preference, this would include a community with nonhumans and not so many humans.”

“I completely recognise the dangers. I’m not romanticising. I’m not saying we should go back to anything, and especially as a queer person, and also as someone who experienced lots of kinds of violence in their life. Small communities also have danger.”

“I was thinking more about anarchist experiments with just living and in a critical spirit.”

“I was also thinking about the experiments in just living that I see happening right now.”

“In the Netherlands we have a place called Stichting Kapitaloceen where they try out just farming.”

“They farm in ways in which the land is half for the other animals and they also share part of the land and then there’s a bit for the humans as well. So, this is an experiment in living differently.”

“I’m also thinking about VINE sanctuary in which other animals form the government with humans… Their agency is fostered and taken seriously.”

JW: “How do we think about agriculture in a world where we’re trying to recognise the agency and maybe the interests of plants? Because often, as a noisy vegan online, when I most hear ‘plants feel pain too’ or ‘plants matter too,’ it’s normally coming from someone who’s desperately trying to justify animal agriculture.”

JW: “They’re perpetuating a sort of ethical flattening. They’re not acting in good faith. They don’t really believe these things, but they are using it as a rhetorical argument to try and flatten everything. They’re saying, ‘Look, if humans matter, animals matter, rivers matter, rocks matter, trees matter, plants matter, but the circle of life still exists and we humans should be humble and play our role in these systems and predation is part of nature, so I’m going to have a Big Mac.’ That’s not a good faith intervention.”

JW: “But there are real questions there if we’re thinking about plant agency and interests. How could an agricultural system work and respect that?”

“The Stichting Kapitaloceen are saying they’re against monoculture and they also see that as problematic with regard to the dignity and interests of plants.”

“But with regard to eating plants, there are very significant differences between eating animals and eating plants.”

“So animals die when you eat them, but a plant can lose up to 90% of their body mass before they die.”

“Indigenous theorists like Robin Wall Kimmer write that you can use a third of the plant without harming them. So there are ways of eating plants that are significantly different in terms of harm than when it comes to animals.”

JW: “Which would imply that they wouldn’t feel pain or be sentient, at least not in the same way as we think nonhuman animals are… Pushing a knife into a pig is still a radically different act from cutting off a branch.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a radically different act but I also think that there’s a lot that we don’t know about plants yet… It’s something that we need to investigate further.”

 “Otherwise we can all become fruitarian.”

“You were asking about the big global structures and also technological interventions in trying to establish a better world for everybody.”

“This is a question that I’m thinking about right now because in the coming three months I will be doing a planetary fellowship at University of Giessen.”

“I will specifically focus on how to connect assemblies in federations or in other ways and this will probably address some of the points that you are speaking about now which means that I can tell you more about this at the end of the year.”

“Humans are talking a lot about AI and this matters because AI can be very harmful for nonhuman animals. So, as ethicists and philosophers, we need to think about this and address this.”

“There’s also this kind of futuristic hope that the technology will save us. And of course, right now it’s only being used to harm others more or at least mostly being used for that purpose.”

“Yes, maybe we will need technological interventions even for our survival… all of our survival but I think it’s wise to also be not too optimistic about them in the road towards justice.”

“As long as human prejudice and the discrimination of other species exists, our technological systems will mainly reflect that.”

“Humans can do a lot if they put their mind to it.”

JW: “If we have a very expansive view of political agency and moral consideration as well that might go out to include plants and fungi and even non-living entities. Does that also lead you to be quite open-minded about the political agency or moral salience of AIs themselves, regardless of their impact? Should we consider them and involve them in these multispecies assemblies?”

“It’s a good question, I haven’t thought about it enough.”

“One other thing that I’ve been thinking about is art because art obviously does not have agency and interests in the way that nonhuman animals do. But it’s valuable in a special way for humans.”

“I’m a bit animistic when it comes to my own work. So, I also have a special relation with that topic.”

“I’m watching the discussion about AI evolve from a little distance. I’m following it but I’m also a bit sceptical about many of the grand stories that are going around.”

“It’s a threat for funding research projects because a lot of research for philosophy and applied ethics… a lot of the funding for that goes to projects about AI.”

“And that’s not going to projects about animals, the climate crisis and the world for everybody. So don’t believe the hype is my last word on that.”

JW: “I did have one final question… about how your artistic work relates to your philosophical thinking. Is it something that is a way of representing your worldview and a different way of influencing and steering culture for you or is it an independent thing that’s just about creativity and joy and exploration or a bit of both? How do you think about your poetry and your music and your novels and your other artistic work?”

“I think it’s a bit of both. I think you described that well. For many of the novels specifically. I think when I begin writing a novel I have an idea of what it’s going to be about. But only in the writing it really does come into existence.”

“This is different for me from my philosophical work where I’m much more aware of what I want to do and why I want to do it before I started. And this is also why it’s more fun, in a sense, to write the novels, because it’s like being in the movie… it’s just unfolding while I’m doing it.”

JW: “You don’t know what’s going to happen either.”

“Characters from novels always come to visit me. I have a very nice relationship with my work.”

“Specifically the closest connection between my philosophical work and my art, even though some of the novels, are explicitly about human animal relationships.”

“My second novel is about a woman, an older woman, a performance artist who blows up butcher shops when she meets an animal activist and is really aware suddenly of the fact that she needs to do something.”

“My third novel, Bird Cottage, is about a woman, Yan Howard, who really existed, who lived with birds.”

“My other novels are about other things. But there’s a close relationship between my philosophical work and the work that I do with the Multispecies Collective, the multispecies art collective in which I and another human collaborate with a couple of dogs and cats that we know well.”

“The project is partly an investigation into what art is and nonhuman artworks, which is also an exploration into how other animals give meaning to their lives.”

“So we have a blog and there we post lots of examples of animal art like beautiful holes that insects make or songs…”

“We also create art with our collective of humans and nonhumans and sometimes also for nonhuman audiences.”

“We made a fountain in collaboration with birds and insects that’s also really meant for that audience and not so much for humans.”

“A couple of months ago, I created a commemoration for the amphibians who died in my town in the past years because humans just forget them, but for them it’s their whole life.”

“I wanted to create a ritual. To have some time for that with people from the group and also musicians who used underwater sounds to play with. They played guitar and clarinet and then used underwater sounds.”

“This project is very much about investigating the boundaries of what is art but also trying to find new ways of living with nonhumans and to learn to appreciate their forms of expression without labelling them immediately.”

“A lot of the time we also don’t know what they’re doing or saying but we do appreciate it.”

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