“ in some fundamental sense be problems of our grammar too?”
I suspect so too. Hearing calls for a more relational, or even fundamentally relational onto-epistemology, I wonder just how well the subject-object grammar of English supports such a Weltanschauung?
OK, so "we" might be problematic, but in some languages like Japanese, the subject of a sentence is entirely omitted and understood only by context and guessing.
I wonder if there's a different axis to "we" than just the clusivity one. Perhaps it is presumptuous to speak for the whole world, but I find it problematic to speak only for my "self" as well. Like Whitman, we all contain multitudes, often echoing voices and cries from the past that either haven't been heard, or which we don't know [how] to dampen.
There is real reason for the vague we. We can venture away from it, but it takes a lot of skill and courage to start suggesting specific responsibility in a climate charged with as much emotion as carbon.
Eager to read subsequent posts connecting this insight to fractal agency. It seems you might weave threads of Indra's conception of cosmolocalism into this fabric. Thanks for this.
Claire Dederer, in her book Monsters, interrogates the we: "But hold up for a minute: who is this 'we' that's always turning up in critical writing? 'We' is an escape hatch. 'We' is cheap. 'We' is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. 'We' is corrupt. 'We' is make-believe... When I say 'we' I mean I. I mean you."
“ in some fundamental sense be problems of our grammar too?”
I suspect so too. Hearing calls for a more relational, or even fundamentally relational onto-epistemology, I wonder just how well the subject-object grammar of English supports such a Weltanschauung?
OK, so "we" might be problematic, but in some languages like Japanese, the subject of a sentence is entirely omitted and understood only by context and guessing.
I wonder if there's a different axis to "we" than just the clusivity one. Perhaps it is presumptuous to speak for the whole world, but I find it problematic to speak only for my "self" as well. Like Whitman, we all contain multitudes, often echoing voices and cries from the past that either haven't been heard, or which we don't know [how] to dampen.
There is real reason for the vague we. We can venture away from it, but it takes a lot of skill and courage to start suggesting specific responsibility in a climate charged with as much emotion as carbon.
Eager to read subsequent posts connecting this insight to fractal agency. It seems you might weave threads of Indra's conception of cosmolocalism into this fabric. Thanks for this.
Stephen Harold Buhner also goes into the bafflement of we-ness in his book Earth Grief, which I wrote about here:
https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/hyperobject-polycrisis
Claire Dederer, in her book Monsters, interrogates the we: "But hold up for a minute: who is this 'we' that's always turning up in critical writing? 'We' is an escape hatch. 'We' is cheap. 'We' is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. 'We' is corrupt. 'We' is make-believe... When I say 'we' I mean I. I mean you."