Belaying the Inevitable: On Intellectual Collaboration in the Anthropocene

We argue that inheritors of Euro-modernity must find new ways of engaging perspectives that have been coercively displaced by the very modernising forces that now imperil the viability of all human societies. We elaborate two models of cross-cultural engagement: (1) philosophical ‘braiding' (Allard-Tremblay, 2022), per which disagreements between traditions are thematised without merging, and the possibility of irresolvable contradiction is acknowledged. Lingering concerns about appropriation and epistemic 'tourism' are then addressed by the secondary model of philosophical ‘belaying' (2). In its non-metaphorical capacity, 'belaying' is a facet of mountaineering safety, whereby the climber and the belayer mitigate the danger of falling by deploying orchestrated tension and friction through hitches and anchors. In both cases, the goal is to facilitate new self-understandings and unexpected constellations of ideas from within one’s own philosophical perspective—asking why ‘we’ persist in conducting our research or teaching in the manner that ‘we’ do.