Erosophia: Proposal for Philosophy as
Transformative Practice
Beth G. Raps, Ph.D.
The need for this [work] comes from the following concern: that the
language of love is today an extremely solitary one. This language
may be spoken by thousands (who knows?), but is defended by no
one. It is completely abandoned by the languages which surround
it, or ignored, or deprecated, or mocked by them, cut off not only
from power, but also from the mechanisms of power--the sciences,
knowledge, the arts. When language is thus dragged by its own
force out of the current, deported outside all gregariousness, all that
is left is for it to become the locus, however tiny, of affirmation.
This affirmation, in sum, is the subject of the [work] which is about
to begin. (Fragments d'Un Discours Amoureux, Roland Barthes,
Editions du Seuil. 1977, 5, my translation).
Background: I am a practicing philosopher third, after mothering,
and managing a research project for which I am also principal
investigator. My philosophical practice occurs in the interstices of
these, and centers on the reconstruction of the lay
knowledge/academic knowledge relationship, especially as it affects
domestic climate change policymaking and the claims of the climate
justice movement. (See the "Honors and Awards" section of my cv
posted on this website for some of the paths this work has taken.)
I thus do not currently teach in a classroom, which may make me an
odd duck in this gathering. I am a former grassroots organizer who
remains in practice by the ways I work now. My suspicion of
academic knowledge is grounded in my experience as an organizer
and in current conversations in many communities, academic and
non-academic.
Introduction to the Submission: What have I uniquely to offer this
gathering, of people who call and respond to transform philosophy?
What say I to its questions powerful for me, of “distinctive forms of
philosophical practice in the face of…crisis,” and of philosophic
“projects that play to our strengths and [are] profoundly
transformative of the culture”? What of its underlying question:
what are its strengths? Where should it be modest?
My former postdoctoral mentor recently gave a talk to philosophers
at a small progressive Midwestern religious college. Those good
people found so little resource in their own discipline that they
avowed that what gave their campus life meaning was the service
work they did replanting the surrounding prairies. We want
philosophers who plant prairies. Yet the Call asks us to locate
strengths in philosophy proper. What can we contribute qua
philosophers? What can we offer from its local knowledge system to
other local knowledge systems?
Submission, Part I, Existing Tools: Influenced by the inner task of
joining my organizer and academic selves, I have developed irenist
constraints and conditions needed to bring academic and nonacademic knowers together in ways that I find transformative of our
culture. Greatly reduced from my dissertation "An Ecology of
Knowledge," I argue these must be at least:
 Interepistemic respect (among communities)
 Ontologic mutuality (the ground assumption that we actually
do need each other to transform crises)
 "Diplomacy" (a set of irenist epistemic practices which include
assuming the non-universality of one’s own knowledge, the art
of “translation,” and seeing even conditional consensus as
hard-won success).*
I offer a session working with these three constraints, telling stories to
start us off from the climate policymaking worlds I work within. The
session readily invites other stories as we elaborate ways of working
in the world philosophically that are transformative without
epistemic imperialism and epistemachia.
Submission, Part II, New Construction: I offer a new tool shaped for
this gathering by more recent personal epistemological integrations.
The result is a tool I term “erosophia,” a way of replanting prairies
within philosophy.
Erosophia: Isabelle Stengers writes that “knowledge
presupposes the creation of a link.” G.W. Carver learned botany from
listening to the plant spirits. Barbara McClintock won the Nobel
Prize for "listening" (by her own account) to the genetic material in
plants. Robert Frodeman views geologists as ones who “ask
pertinent questions of the outcrop."
We may read Diotima (in “The Symposium," her words spoken by
Socrates) as articulating a much older coming to knowing embedded
in the patriarchal epistemology our culture has inherited. Diotima is
phronetic, embodied, wild. We hear her impatience with Socrates.
Love is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate
between the divine and the mortal. This Love is always hungry,
always thirsty, poor and powerful simultaneously. He is anything
but tender and fair, as those imagine who mistake Love for the
beloved, the object of desire, which is always perfect, but never
reached.
What do we thirst for? What does the daimon Love drive us to want
to know? When we thirst, when we are "erosophic," we make
ourselves one not with the beloved, but with the quest for the beloved.
The academic community’s relationship to non-academic
knowledges is typically disdainful yet quietly envious that the
grasses are more meaningful on the other side. This is because the
academy has committed (to) the fact-value bifurcation of emotivism
about which Alasdair MacIntyre has written powerfully. I offer to
facilitate participants' exploring our erosophia so that we restore to
philosophy its power to plant conceptual prairies.
I approach erosophia with a Walt Whitman poem, “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking.” The poem is a paean to unsatisfied desire and a
promise to live powered by it.
Erosophic methodology: A Diotiman way to view the way I
constructed erosophia is that, in questing as I did, passionately, for
what to offer this gathering, I used Love to gain the gods’ insight.
This for example caused me to open "The Symposium" and make the
apparently bizarre move to read Whitman's poem against Diotima's
instruction in love. Erosophia structures serendipity. This way of
using Love does not emerge from philosophy’s primary practices of
analysis and construction, but from practices of the wisdom
traditions which educate insight and intuition. For the excessively
modern thinker the main problem with such practices is that they
work. I offer the gathering a practicum in these practices.
*Credit for these and much more is due to the thinking of my
mentor, the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers.
See especially her series, Cosmopolitiques and her L'Invention des
Sciences Modernes.)
© Beth G. Raps, Ph.D. 2010