quote of the day

"The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other."

- Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

Just a comment about this quote: pity is much like sympathy - feeling for another. The exchange mentioned here is external. But, empathy is unlike pity or sympathy in one crucial respect. Empathy is feeling with another. There the exchange is internal, immanent. This is the "firstness" or continuum of feeling - exchange - about which all of C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne wrote.

Here we might say that this first exchange of feeling is one of onto-empathy and is in another respect an Uexküllian standpoint, in the sense that from this sort of exchange through feeling one loses one's self in the objectivity of another's felt world.  It is the ultimate act of de-anthropocentrism ethically. Something hardly anyone in speculative circles addresses; actually, no one at all.

See After Nature posts "Emapthy in Rats" HERE and "Another Fantastic Uexküllian Paragraph" HERE.