Towards an Environmental Ethic of Surprise: Adventures in Attention

This book argues that paying attention to nonhumans is an environmental virtue, making a case for why it matters and how it can be done well. While Western science and philosophy has tended to represent nonhumans as supposedly inert, passive, predictable, and prone to suffering, Justin Simpson highlights ways that nonhumans are surprising and creative subjects that go playful adventures, undergoing and enacting substantial change in the world. Given that one can never know completely in advance what a nonhuman is capable of, one must pay attention to nonhumans to not only understand them, but ultimately respect, care for, and reciprocate them. Contesting accounts of attention and environmental ethics premised on a self/other dichotomy, sight models, and self-sacrifice, Adventures in Attention: Towards an Environmental Ethic of Surprise advances an account of adventurous attention, which involves travel, chance, and risk. In particular, this approach entails affectively immersing oneself in the worlds of nonhumans in a playful and improvisational way. Informed in part by posthumanism, the book challenges scientific realism and other accounts of empathy and attention that frame it as a chore rather than a joyful and rewarding process that leads to new agential abilities and subjectivities.

Justin Simpson, PhD, is lecturer of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.