Je est un nous. Enquête philosophique sur nos interdépendances avec le vivant. Jean-Philippe Pierron

11.5 × 21.7 cm 176 pages softback february 2021 retail price: 19 €

The philosopher Jean-Philippe Pierron teaches at Burgundy University. He has wonderful recollections of his childhood in the eastern rural Vosges region of France. He works on the poetic dimension of human activity, including ecology. He seeks to promote the ethical and political importance of our own first-hand experiences of nature.

Enquête philosophique sur nos interdépendances avec le vivant

I IS US

A philosophical investigation into our interdependencies with the living

Jean-Philippe Pierron

As Nancy Huston so magnificently demonstrated, human beings are a storytelling species and live from the tales they tell. These innumerable life narratives inform how we connect with the world at a very intimate level and tell of our relationships to nature, animals, trees, rivers, mountains and our daily environments. Our Western culture has actively sought to erase these relationships. They are dismissed as irrelevant yet their complexity and importance constantly resurface unbeknownst to us. “What’s the weather like?” is the question that proves our unconscious connection to the world and the importance of the sky on our interior climates. Jean-Philippe Pierron takes us on a philosophical exploration of a series of historical characters and thinkers in order to understand how they were able to understand the importance of these relationships and integrate them into their philosophical systems. We follow Ulysses into his father’s orchard, we discover Job grieving amid the ruins, we ascend Norwegian peaks with Arne Naess, and we encounter hippopotamuses in the heart of the African jungle with the famous Doctor Schweitzer. There is also the story of Val Plumwood who nearly died between the jaws of a crocodile and Aldo Leopold who was converted to the ecological cause by a dying she-wolf. The simple word “I» expresses how we are related to nature through a multitude of capillary actions. In reality, when we say “I” we are in fact, unknowingly, saying “us”. Jean-Philippe Pierron’s essay is an invitation to become aware of the multitude of beings we are and to realize that “I is others”. This is the principle of “ecobiography”, a poetic revisiting of our own experience, emphasizing the ecobiographical dimensions of our lives. He also asks questions of the social and cultural conditions that hinder their expression within which lie the reason for the crisis of our relationship to nature. A fresh understanding of the self, as an entity aware of its responsibilities, first begins with the awareness of our belonging in the world. Changing our approach to nature implies teaching it how to sing.