Caring for Life

What is the right time to begin something? Which people should one listen to? What is the most important thing for one to do?

– Leo Tolstoy, paraphrased from “The Three Questions”

In a world that is inherently precarious and inclined toward bewildering complexity, what does it mean to care for life and to know what ‘the most important thing’ is at any given moment? How do we understand the multiple valences of care (i.e. care as a form of attention, care as an expression of sentience, care as a praxis for the here and now, care as an ethical imperative, care as a mode of moral reasoning, care as a form of relatedness…)? How can the work we do at MLE – rooted as it is in the enactive perspective – help us to both critically reflect on caring and apprehend it as something not separate from our very mode of being in the world? Can caring also be a deliberate practice? What might it look like in the mind and life of a scientist, a philosopher, a contemplative? Is there a care that can be as robust and radical as the other groundbreaking intellectual traditions to which we are indebted?

In 2023 we will attempt to unpack – playfully, enactively – the notion of care, in not just its theoretical guise, but as a form of ethical know-how and ecological imperative.