Belaying the Inevitable On Intellectual Collaboration in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Humanity has entered an era of perennial wildfires, expanding floodplains, population displacement, and broken supply chains, giving rise to an urgent need to prepare current and future generations for radical contingency. Inheritors of Euro-modernity, whose societal model is deeply implicated in the acceleration of climate change, must find new ways of engaging perspectives and lifeways coercively displaced by the very modernizing forces that have imperiled the viability of all human societies. We elaborate two metaphors for cross-cultural engagement. The first is philosophical ‘braiding,’ wherein disagreements between traditions can be thematized without merging discourses, and the possibility of irresolvable contradiction can be acknowledged. The second is philosophical ‘belaying,’ inspired by mountaineering safety practices, whereby the belayer supports the climber with minimal force and reduces the risk of sudden collapse. In asking why ‘we’ academics, involved in intellectual labor, persist in conducting our research or teaching in the manner that we do, our goal is to facilitate new self-understandings and unexpected connections from within one’s own philosophical perspective. In turn, this fosters a needful epistemic humility for thinking and being otherwise, even to the point of epistemic surrender. We thus encourage a shift towards a more collaborative model of intellectual practice better suited to manoeuvring amidst catastrophe, loss, and uncertainty.