Coming back from my vacation, I feel a bit lost. Not so much in terms of what I want to do, but in terms of how to do it. There is so much I want to share - with you, with the world. I deeply believe in philosophy as a practice, as a lifestyle. During my travels not a day passed in which I didn’t draft an idea for an article. Now, being back, it seems overwhelming where to start. I love substack. I love the possibilities of social media. The weekly deep-dive format I’ve been pursuing has been demanding—not just for me to create (about 2hrs each day, 10hrs each week for each essay), but as many of you have kindly shared, also for you to read. Some of my pieces are dense. At the same time, I’ve also felt that I’m often not doing the topics justice. Many of these ideas are so potent that a weekly skim feels like a disservice to their depth.
I know we are all overloaded with information and I don’t want to contribute to a noise. I want to offer rather something like an attention: a moment of clarity or a spark of curiosity you can carry through your week - for your own sense-making.
In the next couple of weeks, I will therefore experiment with shorter weekly pieces. Perhaps they are not essays anymore, as they are prompts for thought, brief meditations, dispatches from the practice, or philosophical vignettes. I will commit myself to staying below 700 words in those weekly pieces.
My idea is to let the larger, more complex explorations evolve into quarterly booklets, where they can breathe and unfold with the care they deserve. So, instead of the messy middle-ground pieces I've been writing, I'm shifting to two poles: the short and the long.
I'm excited about this new rhythm and would love to hear any thoughts you might have on it.
It was last Wednesday. My partner and I were checked into a beautiful, simple hotel near the Alps. Despite my inability to eat anything typically served at hotel buffets due to health reasons, I decided to join him for it, just for the coffee. The staff was incredibly kind, the place exceptionally charming, and the breakfast—at six euros—super cheap. Because I only had a coffee, I decided to prepare a bread roll to take for my partner on our hike later.
I shouldn’t have.
It was cause for a one hour (loving) “argument” about whether it was okay to take the roll or not.
In theory, I could argue that it was okay, I hadn’t eaten anything and, despite the low price, it still felt "fair." On the other side of the argument was the principle that it was plain wrong to take something from a buffet. That’s not how they work, and if everyone were to do that, the prices would have to increase.
Was it okay to take the roll?
Kant would obviously argue that it wasn’t. His categorical imperative would say that if everyone took food for later, the system of a buffet would collapse, the act cannot be made a universal law. A Utilitarian, however, might argue that it was. From that perspective, my action was justifiable. I hadn't consumed “my share” of the buffet, and taking the roll would increase my partner's happiness without causing any measurable loss to the hotel. The greatest good for the greatest number.
I would argue that theoretical ethics often collides with real life. In theory, I can be with Kant, and I can be with the utilitarians.
In practice, context mattered. Had this been a huge corporate hotel with hundreds of people going in and out, we likely wouldn't have cared so much whether it was right or wrong. In this particularly wonderful, rather intimate hotel, we did.
What I ended up doing was telling the owner what I did, explaining why, and apologizing. I also asked her if it was okay to do the same thing the next day, and she was nothing but nice about it.
But I should have asked before.
Despite all the theory, what felt right in my gut—without any theory needed—was that in this specific circumstance it simply was wrong to take something without asking. In fact, through using theory, I made it worse. I needed to construct an argument for myself to feel okay about it.
This is something I witnessed many times when I worked as a fraud investigator, where people who did wrong had the most elaborate arguments for why they did so. Not to convince me, but mostly to convince themselves.
This is also something I witness all the time in our collective inaction towards sustainability. Arguments, reasons, theories. All the while, in our gut, we know what we are doing is wrong.
It makes me question whether we—whether I—misunderstand ethics altogether. Perhaps I’ve been asking the wrong question. I ask, "What is the right thing to do?" as if the answer is a timeless truth waiting to be uncovered by reason.
But the bun suggests the real question is, "What does this specific situation—this kind owner, this charming place, this web of relations—ask of me right now?"
Ethics, from this view, is not a universal law applied from above, but an embodied response offered from within. It’s a practice of attentiveness.
The answer wasn't waiting in my head or in a book, it was waiting in the hotel, ready to be co-created through our intra-action.
Thanks for reading wild:philosophy 🙏.
I genuinely appreciate your time and attention 🖤.
If you find this valuable, I'd be grateful if you recommended it to someone who might appreciate it too – it’s a simple way to support my work and help it find new readers. Also, please reach out anytime with ideas, comments, or thoughts. I'd love to hear from you. -Jes
I like the shorter format! Something to digest and reply to more quickly, very suited to Substack. Question then is, how do you (does one) get meaningful engagement with much longer pieces? My working hypothesis: the longer (and more complex) the piece, the more specifically defined the audience needs to be. And, the trickier it is to find them, and them to find you, amongst the noise. I don't think "the algorithm" will hack it. Here's a piece I wrote a couple of years back. I appear not to have made a note about the stimulus, but I think it may have been prompted by dialogue with Anna-Marie. https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/ch:words
And perhaps you've heard my critique of Substack (and all the other commercial writing platforms), but for the benefit of other readers … yes it looks benign enough at present. But … it's hooked into a shareholder capitalist economic model, which inevitably means, sooner or later, that instead of serving us the writings that are most likely to be beneficial for us, the private reader, they will serve us the writings that those who pay want us to read. And heaven knows what that will result in — one of the most subtle forms of propaganda you can imagine.
What I want to see is a cooperative platform owned by the writers … and writers who subscribe to the principle, not wanting primarily to get more reads (we really don't want to compete in the attention space) but instead, serving the readers by trying as well as we all collectively can to serve up the best fitting read to the best fitting reader. And … a platform that makes it easy, not difficult, to copy text; and perhaps even, instead of asking for individual monetary support, invites supporters into a human circle of care for the writer, each offering what they are called to do.
Though I wish that no one had to ask for support to write and share those ideas that are intended for the common good.
I am feeling that this important nuance is sorely missing from understanding in permaculture concepts around "ethics" (as one who identifies with the core concept of a durable culture, but sees much more potential in such a design system concept).. thank you for the clear provocation to take an intra-active/nested/field/agential/processural point of view.