The Flesh of the world and Indigenous thought: An inter-species art of not knowing it all in the age of the climate emergency

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, at his Collège de France lectures, asserted our sharing in the flesh of the world. His comment has implications beyond those commonly discussed in the post-Enlightenment West, and we are yet to learn how to interact with some of these. Incommensurabilities between Indigenous and Western paradigms require our openness to methodologies of allowing methodology to emerge where familiar categories prove insufficient.

An intersection of contemporary Western science, Western phenomenological thought, and Indigenous philosophies, which was first explored during a series of trans-disciplinary academic conferences known as the “Dialogues”, offers initial shared ground as a starting point for subsequent Western interaction with Indigenous philosophies on their own terms.

Indigenous conceptions of participationalist paradigms, when granted space to emerge beyond the boundaries imposed by previously familiar categories, extend our comfort zone in their engagement with co-creative processes of inter-species, shared becoming. Unilateral human control of such processes reveals itself to be a questionable quest, not least when the climate emergency is contextualised with the necessity of our inability to preconceive all that we may be co-creating.

An alternative of mutually responsive forms of inter-species relationship is explored against a background of Indigenous philosophies embracing the embodied as an element of rationality alongside those accessible to linguistic expression. A case study involving an ancient evolutionary relationship and its role in Indigenous story is offered as a seed we may wish to grow into our own, original, post-Enlightenment Western forms of inter-species interaction in our own, Western localities.