We Never Hear the Wind Itself: The Nonhuman Within the Humanities—A Talk with Arielle Saiber

“What is like to be a bat?” Nagel asked in 1974; “How do forests think?” asked Kohn in 2013. How can we ever truly know anything outside of ourselves? We can’t even seem to fully know what it is like to be another person, much less fully understand our own selves; how can we even begin to know what it is like to be a chair, a coastline, or a virus? Given the state of the world today, thinking about how we “think about” the nonhuman is urgent. Yet any time we think, speak, and write about the nonhuman, the nonhuman is inevitably filtered through our humanness. How can acknowledging these “hybrids” help us to better share the planet and, difficult that it may be, better empathize with one another? This talk will look at examples of how the humanistic arts, from antiquity to today, have attempted to decenter the human, empathize with things of this world, and “think like” the nonhuman.