On Founding A Slow Institute

Hello and welcome to Life as Lab, a column on Lebenskunst in messy times.

As some of you know, I am running an institute called Institute for Practical ekoPhilosophy (IPeP). We have published our quarterly newsletter yesterday which brought me to some further reflections that I’d like to share with you today.

IPeP is still small. We are growing slowly, deliberately, taking our time to lay foundations that can support something for the long term. Yet things are also moving faster than I imagined they would when I first began this a bit over a year ago. Nevertheless, the best overall description is: SLOW.

IPeP is being established to be a living laboratory for regenerative futures.

But unlike most laboratories or even living laboratories, the object of investigation is not something separate from ourselves, but it is ourselves. Our lives themselves are the inquiry.

How do we learn to live well in an age of social and ecological disruption? How do we cultivate wisdom, responsibility, and imagination? How do we experiment with different ways of being human together? How do we live with the more-than-human world?

These are not questions that can be answered from a distance.

They require radical participation.

The questions can only ever be answered from the inside.

There are many reasons why the project of separating the observer from the observed doesn’t work.

Our work is thus radically phenomenological.

And in that sense, IPeP is also a radical experiment in philosophy as a way of life. Philosophy as a practice of self-transformation, like Hadot, Foucault and others have described it.

The moment I say that life itself is the site of inquiry and transformation, people can understandably become suspicious, though. It can sound like self-help, individualistic navel-gazing.

At the same time, if I wish to be taken seriously in academic contexts, I must also demonstrate rigor. My ideas need to be articulated clearly, methods need to be explained, arguments need to withstand critique. In practice, this means publishing journal articles and participating in scholarly conversations. I love this kind of work. It’s also slow. And one of the reasons why IPeP is a slow institute.

As you can see from Leonie Trutschler’s essay in the IPeP newsletter, we take the world of lived experience just as seriously: conversations, experiments, practices, communities, questions of meaning, beauty, grief, and belonging, more-than-human communications, making moral choices in an immoral world.

All these messy dimensions of being human can be either lived through on autopilot, or they can be deliberately investigated and lived.

The starting point for us at IPeP: I don’t know how to live in these messy times.

Life is too precious to do it “wrong”.

And while there is no wrong way, there are a million possibilities and we’d like to try out at least some of them.

Mostly, because anything autopilot and inherited doesn’t seem to work well anymore. Not for us as individuals, not for our society at large, and especially not for our more-than-human companions.

All of that also obviously takes a lot of time. And is another main reason that we are slow.

We also believe that this sort of work situates us somewhere between a research institute and a university — in the best sense. And we, those of us working for the institute, are studying as well as being the subject of study. Though, like I said, not in a self-centered way.

I believe the self-help, navel-gazing orientation of many of us (especially in WEIRD cultures) is a manifestation of trying to eliminate us as subjects in the first place, which is impossible. As David Abram argues, perception itself is ecological and participatory. The world is not merely an object for consciousness, consciousness is already a mode of participation in a more-than-human field of life. So another question we are sitting with is how to bring back these always already implicated selves, which are never individuals to begin with, but entangled super-positionalities that come into being through their intra-action.

That’s a mouthful.

In other words: selves that are always co-constituted with others.

Let’s try again: relational selves.

Again: Inter-beings.

Not better.

And that’s a third reason why IPeP is so slow. We are operating from a different paradigm, which automatically requires a different language. And that language is often alienating to 99% of other people. Which makes it incredibly hard to talk about what it is we are doing in terms that resonate with others. One of the reasons, we are working with the fantastic Rosie Spinks soon, who will help us find words for our mess.

Which brings us to the 4th reason. The mess.

Doing this type of work requires establishing a different science.

Sometimes I say life is the lab and love is the method.

Which I love for its poetics, but what does that even mean?

What I know: the science we need is a science of quality. It’s holistic. It’s post-structural, post-disciplinary and definitely post-human. It’s more like a Goethean science. It’s phenomenological. It’s more like natural philosophy before it was split into science, ethics, psychology, spirituality and others.

Natural philosophy — in it’s best way — was an attempt to understand both the nature of reality and how one ought to live within it. Learning about the universe and how to create a good and wise world were seen as interconnected aspects.

Today, we often have sophisticated knowledge about ecosystems, climate systems, and social systems, while simultaneously struggling to answer the seemingly simple question of how should I live.

In my work, and at IPeP, we want to bring these ideas back together — something that encompasses them, while developing them further. We refer to this as an ekoPhilosophy — as a bridge between its relational nature (eco) and the self (ego).

Other brilliant people — like Matthew David Segall and many others — as I understand their work — are already working on something similar. And learning from them, and many others, takes me a lot of time.

Especially because I have a rather slow comprehension and many of the ideas I encounter require me to read and re-read them several times. I also find that some of them can’t be grasped in a “typical” manner but need to be experienced themselves. Like Goethean Science — which is the reason why I am currently learning to draw on the right side of the brain.

Which…

yes. Takes a lot of time.

With all of that slowness, I am learning to trust that clarity is not always something we begin with. And that that’s okay. Because the other option is that I get utterly bored and burned out at the same time. Because the opposite of sustainability is boredom, I opt for the former.

Thank you for being here 🙏🖤.

This space exists because of people like you who ask and wonder what it means to human well, for people who are curious, and who deeply care for the living world.

There is a real cost to creating this column. If you’d like to support it, becoming a Paying Member is one way to help sustain it. Every little bit truly makes a difference.

And if you’re a fellow writer on Substack who enjoys what I share, please consider recommending my publication. That’s one of the most powerful ways this conversation grows.

Share