The Role of the Philosopher in our Times

Hello to rewilding philosophy, your newsletter on ^ekophilosophical health for our times.

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The way I understand practical philosophy is as a path for self-transformation grounded in values. Whereas personal development and psychology mostly lack a reflection and diffraction of values, practical ^ekophilosophy is built on chosen values.

In a minute, I will discuss what I mean by diffracting on values.

Before I do this, I want to clarify the problem that arises from not reflecting and diffracting on values.

Personal Development and Psychology without Values

By talking about personal development and psychology, I don’t mean to shuffle these two concepts together. While personal development typically focuses on self-improvement, goal-setting, and enhancing one's skills and qualities, psychology is an entire academic field and scientific discipline that studies the mind, behavior, and mental processes, with the goal of personal development in the broadest sense.

When we commit ourselves to either of these processes without reflecting and diffracting on our values, which ultimately stem from our worldview (something I refer to as A philosophy), the scripts we use will reproduce the same malfunctioning problems that led us to pursue these processes in the first place.

A typical topic in personal development is to be more successful, reproducing common ideas about success. These common ideas of success are still largely related to material wealth. The result is a pursuit of material wealth, which—more often than not—doesn’t lead to the success we were actually seeking. In some cases though, it might, but that’s why we should diffract on values.

Reflecting and Diffracting on Values

Diffraction is a concept from physics where waves (such as light or sound) bend and spread when they encounter an obstacle or pass through a slit. The feminist theorist and physicis Karen Barad uses it metaphorically to describe a methodology for feminist and posthumanist research. In Barad's terms, diffraction is about patterns of difference and interference, rather than mere reflection or replication. It’s “the difference that makes the difference” - as Gregory Bateson put it. It’s through differences that new understandings and realities emerge.

In my PhD research, I summarised diffraction as follows: Diffractive methods illuminate the fluid and ever evolving process of world making in which phenomena are constituted through their material entanglements. In contrast, reflective methods produce static representations of a reality that is assumed to be pre-existing and stable. Barad contends that reflection involves uncovering “pre-existing facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like statues positioned in the world”. In reflection, the emphasis is on what is reoccurring, what is the same, whereas diffractive thinking attends to interferences and differences that are enacted in the “specific material configurations of the world’s becoming”. Reflexivity is incompatible with a relational worldview because there is no external objectivity, and because we cannot represent outside of our entanglements. Rather than reproduction of the same, Haraway and Barad call for us to diffract into the new.

Diffraction on values than means that we don’t just replicate existing values, through reflecting on them, but instead it implies a non-linear, complex way of examining values, where we look at how our values interact, interfere, and are transformed through their entanglements with other factors (e.g., cultural, social, material).

Reflecting and diffracting on values thus means not only critically examining values in a reflective manner but also exploring how these values interact with various elements and produce new patterns of meaning and understanding. Values are not static but are dynamic and can change when viewed through different lenses or when they interact with other values, contexts, and entities. Diffracting on values means generating difference, rather than mere reflection of sameness and fosters accountability for the differences we try to make.

In practice, this might involve examining how certain values manifest differently in diverse contexts, how they might conflict or harmonize with other values, and how new values can emerge from these interactions. For example, my value of being vegan to minimize harm on the more-than-human world might change if I move to the countryside, where I’d have access to meat from regenerative agriculture, or if my physician advises me to eat meat due to health deficiencies.

The Fool

Through diffraction, the practical ekophilosopher becomes the fool, because they bring fourth a new way of thinking - a new value configuration. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes:

One of the roles of philosophy is to play the fool, or idiot. From its inception, philosophy has been closely tied to idiotism. Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom – a new language, a new way of thinking – has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other. Idiotism discloses a field of immanence of events and singularities for thought; this field eludes subjectivation and psychologization altogether. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms. Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes – who casts doubt on everything – is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic. It takes an inner contraction of thinking to make a new beginning possible. Descartes thinks by thinking Thought (das Denken denkt). By relating (only) to itself, Thought regains a virginal state. Today, it seems, the type of the outsider – the idiot, the fool – has all but vanished from society…BYUNG-CHUL HAN

Through pursuing our own philosophies, which are grounded in our specific, context-dependent values and ways of thinking about the world and by refusing to follow normative values that were often handed down to us by our family and society at large, we risk being the fool, or trickster.

Yet, it’s what’s often missing in society.

“Trickster energy is the creative force that keeps a culture in motion, mixing things up if they become stuck , restoring order if they become too chaotic, keeping the system on its toes.” MAUREEN O’HARE

In “Trickster makes this world” by Lewis Hyde, he describes the archetype of the trickster as a crucial figure in mythology, culture, and creativity. The trickster is a cultural boundary-crosser who challenges and disrupts societal norms and conventions. Tricksters operate at the edges of accepted behavior, often breaking rules to reveal new possibilities and perspectives and embodying the principle of creative destruction, where old structures and ideas are torn down to make way for new ones. According to Hyde, tricksters thrive in ambiguity and paradox, embodying contradictions and fluid identities. They are shape-shifters, capable of being both foolish and wise, destructive and generative. Because of these trades, Hyde argues that the trickster is an agent of change, necessary for cultural evolution and adaptation. By subverting the status quo, tricksters open up space for new ideas and ways of being through playfulness and humor, using wit and cleverness to outsmart opponents and navigate complex situations.

“Trickster is the energy that sees a way forward even when all seems lost. If we grew up learning always to be "good" and follow every rule, we might have lost touch with trickster's vivifying and renewing energy.” LUISA MARCHIANO.

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that the trickster archetype represents a universal aspect of the human psyche. Bayo Akomolafe describes himself as the trickster. I resonate with this. I am consumed with the the most basic questions about how to live life. My work is a reflection of how I find answers.

It’s the philosopher who, through constant iterations of reflecting and diffracting on their values, transforms the values displayed by society at large.

It’s the practical philosopher who acts accordingly.

It’s the practical ^ekophilosopher who orients those values in their home - a larger web of life.