Jarrett Zigon, "How Is It Between Us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World" (HAU Books, 2023)
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Give the gift of scratchers from the California Lottery. A little play can make your day. Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello. Welcome to the latest podcast of the New Books in Anthropology. I'm your host, Yaron Lee, a PhD student in anthropology at Zulai University.

Ethics are the principles that guide us to pursue and live a good life. Because what is identified as good is tightly connected with the changing circumstances and wide socio-economic context, ethics must be periodically revisited and discussed to adapt to the contemporary situation.

Today's new book put anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics, which is relational not merely between people, but also between all existence. Written by one of the most important contributors to the anthropology of ethics, this is a groundbreaking book within that literature, developing a robust and systematic ethical theory to think through contemporary ethical issues and philosophy.

Today, it's my pleasure to be speaking with the New Books author, Gerard Ziegen. So Professor Ziegen, welcome to the Anthropology Channel of the New Books Network. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. Well, it's definitely my pleasure to have you on our podcast. The New Book today is How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World, published by How Books in 2023. The New Books author, Professor Gerard Ziegen, is a social theorist,

philosopher and anthropologist at the University of Virginia, where he's the William and Linda Porterfield Chair in Bioethics and a professor of anthropology.

So Professor Ziegen, as a graduate student interested in the topics of hope, ethics and time, I intellectually benefit a lot from your work and I can see how your new book is a very ambitious work, expanding your previous discussions on ethics and contributes further to this field. But for the audience who are not very familiar with this field of literature and your work, would you mind introducing yourself to your

to this group of audience. Thank you. Sure, of course. So yeah, my name is Jarrett Zagan. As Yerong said, I'm here at the University of Virginia, the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology.

I've been interested in ethics since I was really an undergraduate. I've probably I came to it in

slightly odd way that is to say not in the kind of normal tradition of philosophy where oftentimes people think that ethics sits but actually i came across it first in my readings of dostoevsky you know when i was a young student i was

really attracted to a lot of that existentialist literature. And Dostoevsky was a real kind of life-changing moment for me. I mean, I remember very well reading Crime and Punishment when I was traveling in Europe at the time and really needing to

to take a break after finishing each chapter. I really felt like after finishing a chapter in some way, the world had shifted for me. And if anyone's familiar with the work of Dostoevsky, not only are the questions of existence central to his work, but so too is the question of ethics.

So it was really kind of from that moment that I decided to begin to think seriously about ethics and really ethics not in the way that it too often gets considered today as kind of like the rules or the laws or the matrix by which we must learn to live, kind of the most,

banal manifestation of this notion of ethics today is what we see and especially in the realm of data and AI ethics, but also in bioethics, this notion of principles. You know, like you could just come up with, you know, four to 10 principles that you could put on your website and then call yourself ethical. This is, of course, nonsense. When I think about ethics, I really think about

a way of living, a way of life, a way of living well with others. So this is really what shaped me way back at that young age, not only the turning to looking at ethics in this very broad sense of how to live a human life with others, but it also got me initially on my trajectory toward doing research in Russia.

which is where I did my dissertation research and also a postdoctoral research project. So two of my first three books came out of that research in Russia and starting, you know, in the early 2000s and basically lasting the first decade of the 2000s.

you know, I could say more, but maybe that'll come out along the way. You know, it might be, perhaps it's important if you don't mind me just speaking for another minute, to mention that when I eventually did become a graduate student in anthropology, you know, I had done a master's at St. John's College, this little small liberal arts school that does the great books

as they call it, basically the so-called Western canon. And I had written my thesis there on a footnote in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. And so I knew that I wanted to continue to study ethics. And so when I was applying to PhD programs, I was applying to both philosophy and anthropology programs. And I eventually decided to go into anthropology because I thought it's important to actually, you know,

be around people and hang out with people when I'm thinking about ethics and not just read books and libraries. But then when I got into a PhD program in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, I discovered that anthropologists didn't really study ethics. And I thought that's really strange. And it was really my one of my supervisors, Talal Asad, who said, you know, you're right. Anthropologists don't study ethics, but you really should. So

So that was the trajectory I put myself on. Little did I know that at the same time, a few other anthropologists around the world who were a bit more senior than myself at the time, they were already established in their careers. I'm thinking of people like Joel Robbins and James Laidlaw and Michael Lambeck and a few others had already kind of come out and said that we really need to

to study ethics, you know, and they had started to produce some work. Joel's work, I think, was, you know, one of the real first ethnography's full-length books during this. But, and a few others, Steve Parrish, for example, did a great work. But the point is that

It was very new and it wasn't established and most people were really pushing back and saying, oh, anthropologists shouldn't study this kind of thing. And, you know, kind of separately, we all came together and made a case for why anthropologists should. And, yeah.

you know, it caught on and we can maybe talk eventually on why it maybe caught on, but it caught on and became by the 2010s quite a significant subdiscipline of anthropology. And I think that's pretty telling about the discipline and also maybe about the world we live in. So yeah, that's a bit of the background.

Thank you so much. It's such a wonderful origin story. And also it's interesting to know that your original interest in Essex stems from the reading of a literature, a novel. So it's fascinating to know this. And also it shows the connection between the different

academic disciplines of philosophy, literature studies and also anthropology. Thank you very much for this story. Now I think we, our audience have already known your personal connection and your personal journey towards the anthropology of ethics and why it is important to you. But I think from your early articles in post-Soviet Russia to more recent multi-sided ethnographic works about drug users around the world, morality and ethics are something you've paid attention to

throughout your career. So may I ask you what makes you realize that ethics and morality are important and urgent topics, not only for yourself and anthropology, but also for maybe philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, and also to this world in general, basically. Yeah.

Well, as I mentioned, you know, I made this choice to go to anthropology instead of staying in philosophy because I really wanted to be in the world with other people. If kind of my starting view on what ethics is, is how to live well with others, I thought it would be important to be with others while thinking about ethics. And also what I've learned

always found really important in terms of doing ethnographic work is not so much doing ethnographic work as a way to eventually end up doing the analysis of the findings of that ethnography, the analysis of the data, as it were, but really in order to kind of take

the people that I'm spending time with and the things that they're doing in the world as seriously as I would take the great works of ethical philosophy or literature. So what do I mean by that? I mean simply that, you know, when someone I'm doing research with is telling me their view on ethics or kind of how they do a certain particular ethical practice,

I take that just as seriously as I would any work written by Kant, for example. And in my writings, I try to put my ethnographic interlocutors into an equal conversation with these great philosophers and theorists that too often kind of get held up as authoritative figures in this thinking, right?

So, you know, so one thing, one concept that I wrote about that that's gotten some traction is this idea of a moral breakdown. And, you know, and that really comes directly from one of my interlocutors in Moscow when I was doing my dissertation research.

you know, when, you know, someone I had been spending very serious time with, I was basically doing something like life histories, but kind of existential life histories. It wasn't just interviews, but I was actually, you know, living day-to-day lives with a few people, kind of following them around in their days. And at one point she said to me something like,

You know, Jared, most of the time I'm just doing things that seem right and I don't really have to think very much about it. But every now and then something happens and I really have to stop and reflect on it. And it really struck me. It was like, first it struck me as like, wow, this...

That's a perfect encapsulation of something like what it's like to find yourself in an ethical dilemma. And it's also a really good description of, yeah, kind of everyday life when you're not thinking about this at all.

And then I thought it also sounds an awful lot like Heidegger's hammer, which is the philosophical example that I kind of compare it to in that original moral breakdown article. And it also runs counter to the way in which most of the moral philosophical tradition articulates ethics as something like, you know, something that's kind of constantly running almost as a program. And so

So that's just a very minor example of how I tried to kind of take ethnography very seriously in relationship and on equal footing with kind of these great texts of the philosophical and theoretical tradition. But in terms of the world,

So when I first went to Russia as a graduate student, and actually the very first time I went to Russia was as an undergraduate, and I did some research in the mid-90s there for my undergraduate thesis. And at that time, it was just very soon after the end of the Soviet Union, and it was really difficult for me

to look at a newspaper or watch television or read, you know, even some books that didn't say something about Russia and Russians living through some kind of a moral crisis, right? And that was obviously a big...

motivation and or let's say it provided really good cover for my long term motivation to go to Russia, which was based in my Dostoevsky reading and even my childhood of growing up in the late Cold War and being fascinated by what Reagan called the evil empire and all this stuff. So so it was a you know, it worked out really well to kind of go someplace at a certain time when

the public discourse was that there was this constant moral crisis. And in the writings that I did at that time, out of the dissertation research and then the postdoc research, I definitely gesture toward a kind of larger moral breakdown of society. And I definitely mentioned this a few times. But I focus more on kind of the moral experience of persons.

and their relationships with one another. Looking back, and especially thinking about and observing the world we live in today, I think there was more space there to interpret what I was finding in Russia at the time in terms of this larger societal wide breakdown. And I think we're seeing really the manifestations of it

today. I think what was happening in Russia 20 years ago, 25 years ago, was really the beginnings of something that has become more of a global phenomenon of a kind of societal and societal wide moral breakdown. Another word that we could use for this is a condition of nihilism. So I think that, you know,

If it is the case that today we are living in a condition of nihilism, then it seems precisely that this is a topic that we cannot avoid. How about listening to the sounds of Istanbul? Beautiful, isn't it? But you can't discover the coolest city in the world just by listening. Check istanbul.goturkiye.com now and plan your Istanbul trip today.

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Wonderful, thank you very much. And I think this concept of neolithim, it can be very helpful and maybe we will refer to it in our following conversation. So let's talk about the book itself. So in general articles, monographs and also co-edited volumes, as you mentioned, you have explored this topic of ethics from a variety of perspectives and contexts.

So for this book, what new sorts of yours does this new book bring to the reader? And as the author, what do you think this book is mostly about or what is emphasized basically? Yeah. Well, when I started my position here at University of Virginia about eight years ago now, you know, I was hired as this endowed chair in bioethics and I

Almost immediately upon arriving, I was being asked by people to kind of say stuff about topics that I didn't really know anything about. You know, kind of given an ethical evaluation on topics and issues that I just didn't know well and I felt that I really shouldn't. And what I would say would mostly be very uninteresting.

And of course, I was a trained anthropologist, right? And so my response in my head, at least, was oftentimes something like, oh, well, let me go do fieldwork on that and I'll come back with an answer in about 10 years. You know, kind of a standard anthropological sensitivity, I suppose. But I realized that, you know, actually, I've been thinking about ethics for quite some time.

I had been putting together something like a relatively coherent ethical theory for quite some time. Maybe it was time to try to lay that all out in one place instead of it being scattered piecemeal across various books and articles. And I wanted to do that in a way that didn't just completely rehearse some of my previous research.

but began to address topics that were important to the world today that I hadn't done in-depth research on. And I kind of wanted to frame this, and I did frame it in the preface of the book as, you know, really, as far as I know, the first book or text in the anthropology of ethics that

tries to actually engage and address ethical problems in the world today. Up to this point, the anthropology of ethics, and I would say that this is mostly true for anthropology in general, does analysis. And then oftentimes when there is applied work being done, it's very narrowly focused on something that

the anthropologist has done long-term research on and is a real expert on and can say real things about that a lot of people can't. But I think that, you know, after a hundred some years of anthropology as a discipline, we can step back at this point and say something about what we've learned about the human condition and human sociality as a discipline and then begin to

work that into, in my case, an ethical theory that's more adequate to sociality and relationality, situatedness. And so that's what I tried to do. Also, philosophically, you know, I come from a tradition of, you know, existential phenomenology, existential hermeneutics, however you want to name it.

As I mentioned already, going way back to my youth, reading Dostoevsky and the like. And one of the reasons that I continue to find that philosophical tradition so important is that I see a lot of overlaps with what anthropology has learned.

in terms of relationality, situatedness. And the third thing that I say that the two have in common is what I call sensibility, which I kind of think of as a kind of bodily, affective, cognitive responsivity to the world. That who we are is constituted from the outside rather than from the inside.

And it's not surprising that this philosophical tradition of existential phenomenology, existential hermeneutics, and anthropology would have these in common. We have to remember that these two disciplines, if we will, traditions, arose at the exact same historical period, the end of the 19th, turn of the 20th century. And they were both, I really believe, responding to

what they saw as a failure of the received Western intellectual tradition, and especially in the form that had taken in Kantianism to address the rapidly changing world of that time period. The explosion of technological innovation, the loss of agreed upon values and truths,

the massive disruptions all of this led to in social life, and the kind of despair that it led to in individuals' lives. And of course, all the political upheaval that this led to. And they were responding to that condition. And it's not unexpected that these traditions growing up and maturing basically in parallel.

have come to very similar conclusions. And I think that in the world today that we live in, that looks so much like how I described the end of the 19th century, we should turn back to some of that work. We should turn back not to necessarily say that there's answers, but to recognize that

those originators of those two traditions were responding to the sorts of things that we're concerned about today. And so, yeah, so that's what I'm trying to do in this book. See how those two traditions, anthropology and existential hermeneutics, can come together to think about how we can live differently in the world together.

Fascinating. I personally think one of the most important advantages or contributions of this book is it starts a dialogue between anthropology and existential hermeneutics and try to combine the two together in a very readable way. So, you know, it's a very fascinating work for me and I just, you know, gain a lot of insights from it. And basically,

as we have already mentioned about new rhythm and also you mentioned about how you find the similarity between the contemporary situation and the situation you found in the 19th century's works. So I think it's time, it's appropriate time for us to talk about the contemporary. So this new book is not only about the Essex, but also about the Essex, particularly in the contemporary world. So in the book, you state several times that the contemporary world

compels anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines to think of ethics in a more dynamic and relational way. So what is so special about the contemporary situation or neolithic? And what do you mean by this term, the contemporary? Yeah, so yeah, good question. I want to make a big claim that our contemporary condition, perhaps for the first time historically, reveals to us

the ontological relationality that is at the ground of not only human existence, but all existence. What do I mean by that? Well, I think it's obvious over the last several decades, you know,

economically and technologically and communicatively, the world has become much more interconnected. How it's become obvious that, you know, nothing can really happen, nothing really happens in isolation anywhere anymore, if it really ever did. But it's also, I think, becoming rather obvious that humans as a

species, which is a word I don't regularly use, but let's just use it now, is intimately interrelated with non-human beings. You know, this is what some people call the Anthropocene, shows us this. And the new technologies, these algorithmic-based technologies, especially in the ways in which they are increasingly, or at this point, entirely

work through machine learning, precisely relational technologies in a way that the hammer or the steam engine or the train or the automobile are not. So the world, wherever we look, is showing us this kind of relationality that is at the basis of

everything. Historically, ethical theory has not been relational. It's been based in what we could call a substance ontology, one substance standing over and against another. And these traditional ethical theories, which I, in the book and elsewhere, too often glibly refer to as the big three, virtue theory, deontology, and consequentialism,

you know, arose in a certain historical moment that's not ours. It's, you know, academics, especially when our paychecks are connected to such argumentation, have tried to turn these big three into universal, ahistorical pictures of what it is to be human

I maintain in the book and in general that these ethical theories, the big three, are just inadequate to the contemporary condition that so obviously reveals the relationality of all existence. And so what we need now, to reference Hannah Arendt's very famous claim in the post-World War II period, we need to learn to live without the banisters.

of these traditional theories. Without those banisters, we need to, on the one hand, create new concepts that are adequate to the new world we live in, but also do so in a way that doesn't just create another theory that is going to perhaps be adequate to a certain historical condition,

but is in fact always unfolding. And this is precisely what relationality is. Relationality is nothing other than the unfolding of existence as becoming, not as being. And so when we begin to think ethically and create ethical concepts that are adequate

to the becoming of existence, the continuous unfolding of relationalities, then perhaps we'll begin to finally have an ethical theory that's adequate not just to the contemporary condition but to existence as such.

- Thank you very much, Professor Ziegen for this explanation. And personally, I think a more concrete manifestation of you called the traditional or conventional approaches of ASIC is what we call liberal individualism. It is first ethnocentric because it emphasizes two humans. And secondly, it emphasizes more on the two subsets, two beings between. So in other words, in this discourse, I think ASIC is about

how to achieve the good relationship between the two human beings. And the emphasize here is about the two human beings rather than the between. But in this book, basically, I think you emphasize more on the between, which is a keyword in this book. Another keyword in my view is attunement. With the words between, you interpret where ethics come from. And with attunement, I think you first explain what ethics essentially requires us to do and achieve.

I think through these two keywords, you explain clearly and convincingly the relational perspective of ethics and why it is important. Here, may I invite you to explain what the intellectual sources of these two keywords are and how do you understand the two keywords yourself, basically? Yeah, well, it won't be a surprise to you and perhaps to some of your listeners, and especially after what I said a few minutes ago, that really the key...

intellectual sources and inspiration here is existential phenomenology and hermeneutics. You know, so Hannah Arendt again,

really fantastic thinker who I put right in the center of this existential hermeneutic tradition, although for some she's thought of differently. I think if you look at her own personal intellectual tradition or education, I should say, it's obvious that she belongs to the existential hermeneutic tradition.

She speaks very clearly that the human condition is the interest, the between. This is a notion that Heidegger writes about, but immediately dismisses the word between, which I agree with because he says if we use the word between, which seems like the word we want to use, it suggests the...

the pre-existence of two entities. So he tries to move beyond using that word. I have stayed with it, but as I say in the book with the caveat that we can never think of the between as somehow emerging between two pre-existing entities, but rather the between is that which gives way to temporarily existing entities.

So you and I right now, from the liberal individualist perspective or substance ontological perspective, we would be two pre-existing beings, two pre-existing entities that are somehow creating a between through language, for example.

From the position that I'm trying to articulate and which I take to be a broad existential hermeneutic, existential phenomenological perspective, the between precedes us and gives way to us. And you and I, whatever that might be, is unfolding in this hour-long conversation that we're having.

That who I am and who you are will be different after this conversation. So that's the important part of thinking about between, that we have to see it as that which gives way to us, allows us to be what we are now, who we are now in the unfolding of our existence.

And "us" is a really important word here, right? Because "us" together now is something like an assemblage, a constellation of existence temporarily. I hesitate to use "we" because it somehow suggests a kind of molding, a sameness. It's like a plural version of individualism, right?

Whereas us maintains the difference while allowing for some kind of connection. Right. But it's a difference that's unfolding together. And it's precisely with attunement that allows this kind of, let's say,

active involvement in the unfolding of the relationality that we are or that's giving way to us. Right. You know, we are constantly in our everyday lives getting caught up in relations and really having paying no attention to it whatsoever. You know, sometimes maybe that has no ill effects and sometimes it has the worst effects.

Attunement is precisely the kind of engaged relationality that's somehow trying to, I'm hesitating to use the word active because it's going to suggest somehow a kind of conscious, intentional process here. And I really want to maintain that this attunement is mostly happening at a non-conscious level.

kind of sensibility level. But of course, sometimes breakdowns occur and there's much more of an active engagement in the attuning process. But yeah, I don't know, maybe I'll give way to you at this point and you can help me think this through a little bit more. The rhythm of the holidays is in the air at Cartier.

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I actually think your example about the conversation or dialogue is very interesting and very important here to illustrate what do you mean by attunement and what do you mean by the between. And I think basically the concept of interspersed

intersubjectivity and dialogiality will also be very helpful to help us understand what you mean by attunement to keep the conversation flow rather than I speak my opinion and you speak your opinion which is not a conversation at all. So basically to maintain this conversation flow we need to engage with each other and to change each other in the conversation. This is basically what I understand

what you mean by attunement in the book. And I think maybe here it is more appropriate for us to enter more concrete examples and circumstances in your book to talk about what you mean by this term in real life, in real life political and maybe social issues. So the first

topic in your first, you know, more concrete entry point in the book is the post-truth situation. So in this book, you interpret the contemporary ethical conundrum in several, you know, specific situations, as I mentioned. The first is the post-truth situation. So why is truth important for ethics and for living an ethical life? Can you tell with us, maybe from a philosophical perspective or from your maybe ethnographic material? Yeah.

Yeah, great. But before I respond to that, though, maybe I'll just pick up real quick on your point about conversation, because I think that's really important. And indeed, I do write about that in chapter one. But I really kind of take this from Levinas. So Levinas in Totality Infinity writes that

The ethics, and he doesn't use the word attunement. And so, you know, in a way, I'm trying to build off of Levinas' kind of one-way trajectory of the ethical relation and trying to bring back in some kind of, you know, mutuality, for lack of a better way of putting it.

But he uses this idea of conversation. He says that the form of conversation is really the form of ethics. And by this, of course, and you didn't mean this either, but he doesn't mean conversation in the sense of, you know, let's talk it out and figure it out together. Right. But he means more the form of a proper conversation. And you said it perfectly. It's

It's not just you say your opinion and then I say mine and we kind of talk over and past one another. But it's the form of conversation, as Levinas puts it, is, you know, you speak and I listen. And in that listening, I become astonished, astonishment by the other. You know, that what you say is not what I would have said.

And then when you're done speaking, then I can reply to what you just said now as you listen to me and become astonished. And that's a real proper conversation and that's attunement. I really believe that's attunement, as you were saying. Truth, good question. One wonders really if it's even possible to have truth.

Certainly in the way that it's often talked about today. Oftentimes, if you spend much time reading about the post-truth situation, what you mostly actually are reading about is the inability to agree on facts. And so then the conclusion we have to draw is that many people today are equating truth with facts.

The philosopher Simon Critchley tells a funny story that one of his supervisors long ago once said, if you're interested in truth, open a phone book. Meaning that it's just what you mean by truth is facts. And you can open up a phone book and get a bunch of

corresponding representational facts. That's not at all how I tend to think of truth. I tend to think of truth as an unfolding, a kind of a constant kind of showing of itself in the context of a certain kind of situational and life trajectory.

And then therefore, as something that one has to kind of have fidelity to, as something that is, let's say, the guiding, I'm trying to think of what would be a good word to use. I don't want to say value necessarily, although we might say value just to keep the conversation going at the moment. But the thing that you always keep coming back to in this continuously coming back,

we have to recognize that in each return, we're returning to something different. This is the unfolding of truth, the revelation of truth. And again, when we speak of difference, we don't need to speak of radical difference. If we really believe in the unfolding, the becoming of existence, then from every moment to every moment, everything is different. So to speak of truth in this way,

is perfectly fine. But perhaps to anticipate your next question or your follow up, I would say that truth is less important today than thinking. And this is also where I go in that chapter on post-truth, that in a world where truth seems to be equated with facts and facts cannot be agreed upon, and where

People are struggling constantly to kind of know or have a sense of how to be comfortably in the world with themselves and with others. Perhaps what we need to do is think more than come to agree on one great truth, as it seems like people want to often say in response to the claim of post-truths.

thinking, perhaps a lot of your listeners who are anthropologists might know that, might think of thinking in terms of a Foucauldian kind of critical thinking, kind of, you know, you know, a stepping away, as Foucault put it, that moments of freedom are these stepping away moments when we're provoked to think. This was really influential on me decades ago when I was

thinking about moral breakdown and things like that. But that doesn't really get to the relationality of thinking. And here again, I turn to people like Heidegger and Arendt, both of whom wrote about thinking in relational terms. For Heidegger, he asks us, what calls us to think? Yeah, this essay, Was heißt denken? Which gets translated often as

what is called thinking, but you could also translate it as what calls to thinking, what calls us to think. And the idea here is that it's the thing that's thought, the situation that's thought that provokes the thinking, the between, such that thinking isn't this process that originates in our brain and somehow then kind of gets projected onto the world, but it's

Thinking actually begins in the world and thinking is this relational extension between myself and that which is thought. And Arendt similarly writes about thinking as the dialogue between me and myself. So again, Arendt is very clear. Most of the time we're not thinking. Most of the time we're just kind of going about our world in a rather non-thinking way. And that's fine.

But sometimes events, people, situations demand thought in this Heideggerian sense. It calls us to think and then we must think. And this is this internal relationship that we have with ourselves when we ask things like, "Is this how I want to act? Is this what I want to be saying?" And it's precisely our incapacity

or our refusal to do this thinking that has oftentimes led to the worst things of the world. So Arendt famously writes that Eichmann didn't think the thoughtlessness of Eichmann and others. You know, so for me, what's important about thinking is its relational connection with the world, but then also with ourselves. It's a way of kind of

allowing a between to emerge, both to use the wrong words here, internally and externally. And that's, you know, I think that's what the world is calling for today. More thinking, less truth. Jean-Luc Nancy, the contemporary thinker who recently passed, wrote about truth as punctuating, truth as separating, and

what he called sense as connecting. And I think thinking is a way of articulating sense in his use of that word. Thank you so much. It's a long and very fascinating answer, very insightful. I haven't asked the question about thinking, but thank you for giving a very detailed explanation of what do you think thinking is. And

And your answer about truth just reminds me of many things. So basically I taught cultural anthropology this semester at Tulane University and we write something about digital ethnography, online ethnography, and my students just write something about social media and the comments on it. And many of them write about us, us, us,

a term that which is objective facts. They say social media is negative, it can be really negative to our contemporary world because it is full of unobjective rumors or something and we need objective truths, objective facts. And it pushes me to think of what do we mean by this term and who can determine what is objective, what is subjective, what is rumors and what is fact.

And basically, I think it can be a starting point of thinking. And also, I want to change a little bit of my follow-up question about thinking, because you talk about an ethnographic vineyard during your first field work in post-Soviet Russia, in post-Soviet Moscow, about how one of your interlocutors told you that being ethical is about to act...

what he thinks is good, what is right. And you mentioned it is sometimes and most of the time it is unconscious, unintentional. But now you talk about the importance of thinking. And I'm thinking about should we see the post-truth situation in contemporary world?

pushes us or forces us to change our practices from the unconscious ethics to sometimes more conscious thinking and to be ethical, to be, to pursue the good in the contemporary world. I don't know if I, you know, phrase it clearly, but, you know, I'm very willing to rephrase it in other way. But so I'm really looking forward to your answer to this. Yeah. No, that's a, that's a great question because I'm,

So throughout my career, I've always made a distinction between morality and ethics. And the way I've tended to use these two words is that morality, or what I oftentimes, when speaking of people, I talk about embodied morality. So this embodied morality is something that's essentially non-consciously

enacted. It's very similar to the way in which some people might speak of a habitus, for example. But then, you know, every now and then this breakdown occurs, this dilemma arises, and then we have to switch to what I call ethics, which is this more reflective thinking process of, you know, what should I do now?

sort of thing. And, you know, throughout my career, I've articulated that in various ways and tried to create more nuance with it. So it's not such a kind of binary opposition, but that there's something like a spectrum of kind of moving into more conscious awareness that one can experience that's

that might be experienced more by moods than thinking. And this is something that I've been inspired by Jason Troop's work on. But precisely to get back to kind of the contemporary condition and post-truth, if, you know, and this really goes back then to my initial research in Russia and how, and as I was saying earlier, kind of reflecting on how I could have

analyze the Russian situation a little bit more broadly. I think, you know, we're increasingly living in this world. And I think this is what people are mostly getting at with this idea of post-truth. We're living in a world of breakdown. We're living in a world of nihilism. We're living in a world of anxiety and despair. This kind of

what's become normal in a way is this kind of low level anxiety and despair of like not knowing what matters, what counts, what I should be doing, how to live a life. And so this is precisely why I think thinking is what we need today. Kind of the easy answer, right? The easy answer, the

The kind of return to religion answer is, you know, we need truth. We need one truth which will like, you know, show us the way. If that ever worked in the past, I'm not sure it'll work today. We need to learn to think in the ways that I articulated a few minutes ago. Not in a brain-centered thinking, but in a relational connected kind of thinking.

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Thank you very much. It's such an insightful answer and I think for the

for the topic of post-truths, I really recommend our audience to read the section, read this chapter themselves and it's extremely insightful. So I think the next topic we are talking about is about justice. And so in discussing the situation of the state of morality and justice into this word, you use the term moral assemblages, which you have already mentioned in our conversation to emphasize the complexity of the contemporary moral landscape.

In such a situation, ethic is a matter of ongoing attunement to this ever emerging and ever shifting situated moral assemblages. So my question is, how can we imagine justice in this ever emerging and ever changing context? Furthermore,

On this view, can we say that both justice and ethics are open-ended without an end? And as you have already mentioned, we live in a world of anxiety. And in this situation, people are more and more eager to pursue certainty and people have different rules, principles, fixed principles of justice,

Essex. So do you think it is a worrying train, basically, according to this argument about the ongoing attunement? Yeah, so I write about them, it's very difficult to open up a newspaper or, as I suppose people do more regularly, scroll through their feed and not see some kind of call for justice.

But too often I wonder if we know what we mean by that call. It's just oftentimes I think meant in some kind of vague sense of fairness, which of course there's a tradition philosophically of thinking of justice in terms of fairness. But too often I think it's somehow a call for a realization of a particular kind of ideological political perspective.

And in that sense, it's not so much a call for justice as it is a call for doing it my way. Well, we live in a complex world where my way really only happens by means of violence. So that's not justice. I've been writing for a long time. This idea of moral assemblage actually emerged very quickly in my thinking after this idea of moral breakdown. And

I actually developed it in response to thinking about Joel Robbins' work on moral torment in Yap and his idea of value spheres, if some of your listeners are familiar with that. If you're not, you should go have a look at it. It's really interesting. But my thought at the time was that Joel's notion of value spheres, which he develops out of Weber,

didn't really account for the kind of messiness and the intertwining, the public nature of what he called values and I just call different moralities. And so I ended up articulating that we kind of do in a rather simple anthropological sociological analysis of, let's say, the moral landscape, we see that

You know, there's everything from what I call institutional moralities that institutions like, you know, the Roman Catholic Church or the university or hospitals all have some kind of sense of their institutional morality. And you can oftentimes find it on a web page these days. The public discourses of morality, you know, we're doing it right now. This is a public discourse of morality.

Or when you're at a family dinner and, you know, everyone's kind of articulating a slightly different version or sometimes a radically different version if your crazy uncle's there. To your own embodied morality that I already mentioned, right? And so these are kind of the three aspects that I say make up a moral assemblage. And this is a rather complex moral landscape. And

It's constantly changing. Every time another person arrives with their own singular embodied morality, the moral assemblage changes. And so when we're thinking about justice, then we need to think about attunements in this larger, let's call it societal sense, rather than earlier we were talking about attunement

between you and I and the kind of the form of a conversation. Well, that becomes very difficult when we're talking about, you know, tens or hundreds or thousands or millions, right, of people. And so what is attunement at this larger level? And much, but, and, and, and turns out that much like the form of conversation where you

where I listen to you and then respond. And what I don't do is say, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the same thing happened to me," and then try to turn you into me. But instead I let you be you and respond to your singularity. The same thing with justice. We must learn to respond, attune to the multitude of others in a way that lets them be

what they are in their difference without turning them into what I want them to be, right? Yeah. And then of course, you know, the real issue with justice is that it's ongoing, right? Again, this model of justice of turning the world or the other into what I want it to be

has this idea of an end, justice can be reached. Well, in that view, of course it can be reached because you've totalized the world and you've just basically made it into yourself. But if we think of justice as attunement to the constellation of difference, then we have to recognize that that attunement can only be temporary because in that temporary attunement, at some point, rather quickly, I argue,

another call for justice will arise. And so, again, this is just an ongoing attunement to the constellation of differences. I'm very inspired by the work of Iris Marion Young here, where she gives the example of the city. The city is, you know, probably in its kind of ideal form, but the city is a model of justice for her, because it's a city that's

again, probably in an ideal version of the city, is precisely a continuous attuning to the constellation of differences. I lived in New York City for almost a decade, and maybe more than any other city I've ever been or lived in, it's a perfect example of what she's trying to get at. I used to love getting on the subway in New York,

And, you know, in one subway car, there were, you know, like 10 different languages being spoken at once. It was wonderful, right? And I think something like that is what I'm trying to get at with this idea of justice.

I think now is time for us to turn to another concrete entry point of your book about datification, which is also very important in our contemporary world, a very important topic. So in the book, you discuss the topics of datification and interspecies ethics. And I think there are two topics that I think quite related, whether it is

understanding of data through the lens of gifts or the urgency of ethics of the planet, I think they all seem to me to revolve around the issue that the boundary of the subject of being must be understood in a more dynamic and a porous way under the contemporary situations. So it's how one understands his or her self

directly related to how one lives an ethical life should we continue to accept liberal individual individualism that people are autonomous and self-contained individuals and if we if not how can we understand others how can we understand others and ourselves um more appropriately in the contemporary situation yeah no exactly i mean this is what i was trying to get at earlier that um

whether it's the liberal individual or any kind of individualizing kind of substance ontology, that's just inadequate to our contemporary condition and the kinds of ethical issues that we must face today. And so this is why in the book I... And actually in my last three books, I've been arguing that

that we need to really always think ontology, ethics, and politics together. Because another way of saying that is our ethical theories, our ethical practices, our political theories, our political practices always have ontological assumptions built into them. You see this so clearly

with these two issues that you raised that are the topics of the last two chapters of the book, datification and the non-human. Obviously, in the world today,

you constantly hear, oh, we need AI ethics. We need ethics, an ethical relationship with the planet to deal with climate change. But of course, these are always, especially in the kind of dominant world outside of, you know, fancy theory, are coming from some kind of

if not liberal individualist, but certainly one of the big three traditional ethical theories. So in data ethics, for example, privacy is one of the key words. Well, privacy is a concept that comes directly out of liberal individualistic, you know, political perspective, ethical perspective, and ultimately

grounded in a substance ontology or think about the kinds of ways that people oftentimes talk about addressing climate change through something like carbon capture, for example, or

This idea of, you know, if you just recycle enough and in the right way, then everything will be okay in the end. You know, or if you buy the right light bulbs, everything will be okay. This is a neoliberal individualist notion of addressing a potential, I don't, I wanted to say natural potential,

disaster but that seems too too limited existential disaster um you know so so in those two chapters i try to show how a relational ethics might help us come to radically different notion of how to address these two issues and when we think about data

It's right there in the Latin roots of the word datum, something that's given as a gift, right? So relationality is built right into the etymology of the word data. And now it's built right into the technology of machine learning and algorithms and ultimately artificial intelligence. And so if we start having not just ethical theories, but then

ethical practices coming out of those theories that are relational, they'll, I suggest, not only be more adequate to the technology and the issue of data and everything else I just named, but then ultimately to existence as such. And this is precisely what we see also in the last chapter in the Beyond the Human chapter, that

We need to stop thinking of the human as the ethical being who needs to somehow pull up their bootstraps and start acting more ethically toward animals or toward climates or what have you. But we need to actually

take seriously the question that non-human beings are ethical beings. That's something that's not discussed in the Big Three. And I focus on the Big Three, not because I don't recognize that there are alternative ethical theories in the world, but because the Big Three dominate thinking in institutions of power, whether it's universities, but more precisely in policy institutions.

You know, so when we start taking seriously the idea that other animals are ethical beings, not just that we have a duty to treat them well, but that we should be in a relationship with them as other ethical beings, and that it also goes not just to non-human animals, but also to other forms of non-human life, and also to non-life.

that when we start to understand logical formations and climate itself as ethical beings that we can have a relationship with, then maybe we'll finally be able to start addressing the disaster that's underway. Too often we get caught up in, and this is to get back to, I know we're

We're pushing up and time is going to come in here in various ways. We're pushing up against the time of the podcast. Time is something you're interested in your own research. And time is really central to this final chapter of the book. That's, it sounds crazy to some people to think that, you know, we had to think of climate or geological formations as ethical beings. And of course it does when we're thinking about it in the kind of

right now face-to-face conception of ethics. But when we think about an ethical relationship expanding over time, then we can maybe begin to understand how geological formations and climate are responding to us and our activities. And that demands a longer scale temporal sense of what this intertwined relationship is between

us humans and these non-living, non-human entities. I hope that makes some sense. It makes total sense and I have too many things to say, but for example, I think that I'm very curious about, in your opinion, what is the position of violence in this relationship with other, I should not say species, but non-human existent

maybe but i think basically we can have a longer conversation maybe in our next interview uh when you have another book when you have another monograph or edited volume about essay which i totally believe you definitely well in the near future so we can talk we can continue this conversation and this dialogue and to continue our persuades of the ethical um and but finally i just uh

at that time at this moment i just want to know more about what you are doing now and what is now on your plan so can you share with us some information about your ongoing and future projects are they still related to ethics and hope or something like this yeah yeah i'll be quick about it because it's really just um things are just underway and every day um new ideas throwing out um things that i decided i don't want to think about but um

It probably won't come as too much a surprise to you considering some of the things I've said in the last hour. I'm very interested and concerned about our current situation that I'm really just going to call that of nihilism and the way in which this has given way to despair. As you know, one of the earliest things I wrote about was hope.

And in fact, hope dies last is a key part of that work. And so if I'm going to maintain that hope dies last, how can we have hope at the end of the world? And of course, thinking about technology, but also frankly, the role of science in

in our contemporary condition of nihilism and how something like an existential notion of science and an existential notion of technology might provide us with our last bit of hope. But we'll see. There's just a lot of sitting around and thinking with a coffee cup in my hand going on at the moment. Let's see if anything actually ever gets onto a piece of paper.

Cool. They all sound amazing, fascinating. I'm really looking forward to learning more about them in the near future and to have another, you know, more formal interview or more informal conversation with you. So thank you very much, Professor Ziegen. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast today and share with me and share with our audience the stories behind your book, behind your career and your ideas about ethics and the contemporary situation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you. So in today's podcast, I talk with Jerry Azigan about his most recent monograph that titled, How is it between us? Relational ethics and care for the world, published by Howe Books in 2023. Oh, by the way, because we talk about gift and how basically means the spirit of gift, which is, you know, not a surprise for many audience, but, you know, quite interesting to me. If you are interested in the anthropology of ethics and care or more concrete issues like multispecies relationships,

Deification, Post-Truth Condition, and the Complexity of Justice in Today's Word. This book will be a very helpful read to you. I'm Yadong Li. Thank you very much for listening to the New Books Network. We hope to see you next time.