Wondering Through Our Outlines

Abstract

Moving through a series of encounters, some with animals other than humans, some with other philosophers, this paper explores how Earth others can and do call humans to transformative and ethical attention. By creating a flow between creative non-fiction, and more discursive explorations of the process of encounter, it both considers and seeks to evoke the ways in which wonder transforms the outlines between humans and other animals. Whereas the ways of knowing that Val Plumwood called “master rationality” reduce the otherness of other animals to the negative outside of the moral human, they are always there to be apprehended as their own, positive presence. When one attends with what Simone Weil calls “passive activity,” the truth of others as themselves or in their world can appear, and a type of ethical responsibility follows.