Music for Mice

Born in 1980, Eva Meijer is an important new voice in animal studies and the emerging field of multi-species justice. Eva is a professionally trained philosopher and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her scholarly books and creative writing on animal and liminal language have been translated into almost two dozen languages.

Eva and I met at Danielle Celermajer and Anna Sturman‘s multi-species justice workshops at New York University’s MOTH Project. Eva’s focus on experimenting with practices that produce thought (rather than the other way around) led me to want to include her in this series on philosophy as a way of life.

October 21st, 2024

Dear Eva,

Thank you for engaging in this dialogue about the philosophical dimensions of your way of living. I recently heard you talk about playing music to mice with whom you live in your Amsterdam home. This stuck with me and my partner, Misty, echoed back my interest with a smile, “music for mice.” That made me want to name our interview accordingly.

Can you talk about that practice and what playing music to mice means to you and, in so far as you can tell, to them?

Warmly,

Jeremy

October 28th, 2024

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for inviting me.

When the dogs and I moved to a small village just north of Amsterdam in 2020, I decided to adopt a group of ex-laboratory mice. These mice were part of a pilot project in which small lab animals were re-homed. I was looking forward to being friends, but the mice thought my hands smelled bad, and generally did not want much to do with me. They did like my voice, so I began to play music for them in the evenings. This was the first covid-year, with lockdowns and cancellations, and I spent most evenings in this way. I learned that they liked certain tunes on the ukulele and guitar, and made up songs for them. They did not like the songs as much as fast and high riffs on the ukulele. Sometimes the house mice who took up residence in this house also joined from behind the books in the bookcase. When the mice were older, they could roam freely in the room and would sit on my feet when I played for them.

Playing music for the mice was part of getting to know them. When I adopted these mice and two more groups after them (25 mice in total, all of whom are now dead), I learned that there is no literature about the social lives of laboratory mice and only a few articles about the social life of wild mice. So, I decided to write about them myself, which included looking at them a lot. With time I began to recognize them as individuals, learned about their friendships, rituals around death, preferences with regard to housing, their projects (mice are always working on their projects), and many other aspects that mattered in their lives. My presence was also part of that structure of meaning. With Spokie, the last remaining mouse of the last group, I developed a friendship. Or actually, she developed a friendship with me, our interaction was mainly on her initiative. I took her on tours around the house and we often spoke—I would come to her house and speak with her, and she would come out of the sleeping house to listen. When she invited me to groom her, in the way that mice invite one another to groom them, I understood that she actually saw me as a companion. She liked to sit in the sleeves of my sweater.

As a philosopher, I often write about nonhuman animals, and I learned that an important part of doing so is first engaging differently with animals. Human knowledge (including scientific knowledge) about them is often biased because we live in anthropocentric societies. This can be remedied partly by critically looking at the history and meaning of concepts (like rights, justice, language) and rethinking them in a multispecies context. But thinking clearly about other animals also involves becoming attuned to their ways of living and giving them the space to affect the relationship and the research questions at stake. With the lab mice, our embodied dialogue included music and sounds. Playing for them also created a new habit, something that gave all of our lives meaning. 

More generally, I see philosophical thinking as always a social practice. Because of how academia is formed we often do not recognize it, but all thinking is thinking with others, even though it sometimes requires solitude, silence, and stillness. Taking this seriously in the multispecies context involves moving beyond only using human language, and attending to practices or setting up new ones.

And lastly on the topic of meaning: caring for the mice has been one of the most meaningful things I have done so far. I also have a toad and frog group with which we assist the amphibians to the other side of the street when they come out of hibernation in March/April, and that is similarly relevant. Being of use for small animals, for whom life is also the whole of life, puts everything in perspective.

Best wishes,

Eva

October 30th, 2024

Dear Eva,

These answers are amazing. However, I don’t think anthropocentrism is the problem but rather a failure to practically structure the relational core of humankind. Humans are a relatable kind. But we need social practices that bring out our relatability and the underlying political structures that preserve and enhance that side of our nature. For that reason, despite disagreeing with where the problem lies, I love what you say and suggest. What the mice showed and suggested to you.

How do you approach what the mice learn from you? I mean, from their perspective, they are caught up in human decisions. What is a mouse existence in the midst of human society? How do you conceptualize our interrelationship, where “our” includes mice and human beings?

The larger issue here has to do with what academics would be if it were multi-species? What could that mean, both theoretically and in practice? Supposing that wisdom is found in living well with other species, how should that be learned and practiced in a consistently well-structured set of institutions that educates people to be part of society? Here, “society” includes other forms of life.

Jeremy

October 31st, 2024

Dear Jeremy,

My first response would be—and this is a response to several of the things you mention—that I don’t really see myself as part of human society in the way that I suspect many humans see themselves. I live with a dog, cats, and guinea pigs. And in the town where I live my neighbors are human, but also bird and amphibian. Studies show that speciesism is a learned ideology that children are socialized into. I suppose this never happened for me. So, on a very personal level I am with the other animals, and in a we/them situation, I am with them. This is actually one of the reasons why I began to study philosophy: to understand better why my intuitions and ideas about animals are so different from most, and to be able to give arguments for them.

At the same time, I feel a strong responsibility as a human in this time because of the great human violence towards members of other species (as well as against humans, of course). In the case of the mice and the other nonhuman animals with whom I live, this means that I do my best to let them have a say in as many matters as possible. Because we need to conform to the restrictions of human society, the lives of rescued lab mice are worth living, but there are many problems. I had to keep them captive. There is a lack of adequate health care for mice, although we know so much about mouse bodies. In general, I made many decisions for them concerning their daily lives. That could not be avoided, but I could listen to them. I bought tunnels for the second group that went through the whole room because they wanted to get out of their house. I write about them and try to change public opinion and legislation in that way.

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka describe a distinction between micro-agency and macro-agency in the context of political multispecies relations. They point out that nonhuman animals should not only have the right to take part in pre-existing (or human-made) political systems, but should also be able to affect and change the institutions and practices that shape these relations. With the mice, I respected their micro-agency and tried to give them as much space as possible, while at the same time working to change the political structure so the macro-agency of other animals would be taken seriously too at some point in the future.

Respecting the agency of other animals (and other earth beings) is a political endeavor. But it is also connected to co-creating new knowledge about living together in multispecies ways. We do not know what these others want from us because we never asked. So, we need to develop new questions and new ways of asking.

Last year, I worked together with art space/restaurant Mediamatic in Amsterdam to develop dog dinners. These are vegan dinners for dogs and their humans in which both species are treated similarly. They all sit around the same low table and eat the same food.

The organization and I developed the dinners together with dogs. We did several test rounds, for the food, the table setting, drinks, social set-up. Dogs and humans came and gave their opinions on the night itself through their preferences about the food (a certain bean dish scared the dogs, and they were also not fond of one specific mushroom) and, for the humans, through a questionnaire. The nights were a great success. The dogs loved it, and there was no chaos or fighting. It was very sweet and peaceful.

The working process was for me as a philosopher most interesting. It showed that you can develop new rituals with other animals through an embodied process of question and response. More generally, I think that academic philosophers should recognize that our thinking is always porous. We always think with others (living colleagues, dead philosophers, students, friends). We think in many kinds of practices some of which are multispecies. To think-with other animals requires moving beyond human language, becoming better acquainted with nonhuman languages, paying more attention to our bodies in the space, and so on. 

Academic philosophy creates a different understanding of the world than poetry, novels, essays, and language works differently in these cases too. I also work as a novelist and artist, and for that kind of work, one needs to be as porous as possible in order to be able to breathe the world in and out. Making something—as I’ve found it—is more a matter of letting the work speak for itself than shaping it. Along with an understanding of how different kinds of knowledges are generated in different kinds of practices, I learned that for seeing the world one needs to be as open as possible towards it, in order to be affected. Both philosophy and art have to do with seeing the world, and showing the world differently to others (Jane Bennett describes a similar kind of receptive agency in Influx & Efflux). 

In a multispecies context, how academic philosophy should look depends on the other beings involved as well, but it should be practice-based and involve multispecies deliberation. I recently read Pattrice Jones’ book Bird’s-Eye Views, a collection of essays about how we can live differently in the world with others. It is informed by her work in VINE Sanctuary, a multispecies community/sanctuary which is co-governed by humans and other animals. Jones shows how other animals can lead the way in living differently and how humans can change their attitudes toward them.

One last related point is that I have been speaking to children about multispecies education. Children are not taken as seriously as they should be in academic philosophy, even in knowledge that concerns their lives. So, when I was asked to write a paper about education and animals, I spoke to different groups of children in order to get their opinions about the topic. I spoke with a class of 11 to 13-year-olds at a special school and a group of 6 to 12-year-olds in a community center.

You mention learning and practicing living well with others. Well, this is precisely what we spoke about and what the children felt strongly about. New forms of education, in which other earth beings are recognized as teachers too, matter in learning to live and think differently. Many different people, human and nonhuman, have ideas about this that for democratic reasons should be heard.

It’s a source of great richness, all these different voices—sharing the world with many others who are other. Sometimes humans say they have to give something up or lose something when they go vegan or if they must share the world in more just ways with other beings. But it’s the opposite! Sharing allows you to see and experience much more. I do not see a clear distinction between my work and life (and I am not so interested in my life but much more interested in the work I do), but doing the work definitely opened up life.

This is already a very long answer to your questions, so we should maybe discuss the point about the meaning of anthropocentrism some other time.

Best wishes,
Eva

November 6th, 2024

Hi Eva!

Misty and I love the dog meal practice! And I love the reforming of environments to reflect the agency of the participants.

I feel that how you relate is the essence of human society. Humans could use more of the forms of humanity that are relatable. There is an equivocation in the word “society.” On the one hand, it can mean a given community and its way of operating, as when one speaks of “American society.” On the other hand, it means a way of being with others, as when one speaks of “sharing a moment of society” with others.  

Similarly, one can speak of the human and mean the kinds of beings, homo sapiens. Or one can speak of the quality of the human, humanity. I mean “human society” in these second senses: sharing a social moment in the ways that human beings can do even with Earth others.

Humanity involves a potential to relate to others through wonder. The thing that makes humans most relatable, in my view, is this capacity, which draws on our self-determination as thoughtful beings who use symbols to expand the field of imaginative possibilities in our playful relationship to the reality we form with and against fantasy. Given your art, music, and philosophy with non-human Earth others, I see human society in powerful form.

You noted the study about speciesism. That reminded me of Cora Diamond’s work on other animals in the 1980s and 1990s. She asked in one important article, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” how it can become that we sit around the table while they sit on it. She was talking about us eating animals we killed. The point for her was that such a possibility depended on an us/them divide that had to be formed through acculturation since children do not often see it. You mentioned the formation of this divide earlier, but placed yourself “with them.” As a philosopher who has been shaped by speciesism and lives against it, how do you understand its persistence?  

It would be interesting, in the spirit of Epictetus, to see a handbook of undoing speciesism that included a to-do list of ten or so things that someone can do to counteract it daily.

Warmly,

Jeremy

November 10th, 2024

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks. I am sorry about your election results of last week—about a year ago we had national elections, and the far-right party Partij voor de Vrijheid won. They are now in parliament together with the farmers’ party that represents the interests of the agricultural industry and two other parties. They manage to consistently distort political discussions and generate a narrative of fear. For example, they claim there is an asylum crisis, while there isn’t one. But humans do perceive it that way now (alongside a climate crisis and a housing crisis).

This relates to our conversation, because over here, we’ve gotten to witness the erosion of a way of political speaking and understanding that democracy is based on difference. While there has always been racism, islamophobia, and antisemitism, it is now increasingly acceptable in my country to be outspoken in terms that broadcast these forms of identity. The politicians in charge do so. Although who belongs to “us” and “them” in Diamond’s terms seems to have always been part of socialization practices, linguistic and other forms of violence are increasingly part of our human society over here.

I reread Diamond’s paper this morning, and was thinking about how the discourse about eating other animals in philosophy changed since her paper was published in 1978. One development that stands out is the growing recognition of animals as part of shared multispecies communities and of social classes. Now philosophers argue that dogs should get the vote. Philosophers also can these days speak more eloquently about interconnected oppressions of human and nonhuman groups.

For a long time, nonhuman animals were mostly discussed as species or as individuals. Due to the work of Donaldson and Kymlicka and others, scholars look at them now as workers, companions, sovereign communities, and so on. Connected to this view of animals is another view of the position of humans. Humans do not automatically have the right to the land or other resources, and in developing an understanding of rights and duties, we need to take into account the violent history of relations (including processes of domestication, genocide, and so on).

It’s a different narrative, more contextual and historical than the way of theorizing Peter Singer and Tom Regan did. But the most important change as far as I am concerned is a turn to the perspective of other animals (and toward other earth beings, but I am still responding to Diamond). It is no longer enough to determine as humans what is right in relation to other animals. We should also try to consider what their perspective could be on us. Of course, this completely changes the question when it comes to eating and killing them.

Above I mentioned “rights and duties.” I agree with Diamond that the positions of Singer and Regan are flawed because they do not tell the whole story about relations between humans and other animals. They argue in a very specific language-game: that of argumentative moral philosophy. Yet contra Diamond, I would say that her language-game and that of Singer and Regan both have a role to play in finding out what it means to eat or not eat other animals as humans. 

Furthermore, in the words of Wittgenstein, I want to note that the “clothing of our language makes everything alike.” Concepts confuse us because of their form. When we read words, like “love” or “rights,” we take them to refer to one kind of practice or idea because they are one word, while they actually refer to a range of language-games.

In a text about the duties that humans may have towards islands, Mary Midgley writes something similar about “duties.” In philosophy, she writes, this term is used very narrowly, in a social contract kind of way, while in daily language it is used for a variety of duties (towards humans but also cats, gardens, and so on). What I like about Midgley’s point is that it allows us to look at language and concepts in a more open way, as a tool in understanding what goes on, instead of a philosophical verdict. 

The “political turn” in animal ethics offers us a toolbox of new concepts to understand relations between humans and other animals: like “democracy,” or “rights,” or “justice.” In using these concepts, we should be critical of their exclusionary histories. We should understand that they already have different meanings that also often differ between western and non-western philosophical perspectives. We should then also rethink these concepts in conversation with other animals, and in relation to other earth beings.

When it comes to challenging speciesism and developing new understandings of what means to be human in this age, different language-games have a role to play. This includes philosophical critique, but also education, art, and so on. One thing I learned by working in different genres is that a novel, a philosophical text, or a drawing offer different ways of portraying and seeing the world that cannot be reduced to each other.

Moreover, different people, I find, are open to different forms of argument. Drawing attention to the perspectives of other beings is important, because this can make humans see their position in the larger whole differently. This is also why I enjoy speaking about animal language research: if you tell humans that dolphins and bats have names, or that elephants have a word for human which also means danger, or that prairie dogs discuss humans in detail, this shows people that the world around us is fully alive and looking back.

Your mentioning of relating to others through wonder connects to many of these points. There is an openness that humans can have, even though it sometimes seems lost under capitalism’s force. That is still hopeful. I see this openness when I give talks or speak to other humans in the context of activism. Many humans are nicer than they seem on the internet! However, it is easier to see how this works in relation to individuals and small groups than in relation to political communities. I’d be interested in how you think wonder works culturally and politically. But maybe the problem of larger social/political/economic structures is that they leave little room for wonder.

Best wishes,

Eva

November 13th, 2024

Dear Eva,

I write this morning reading of the proposed dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education. Democratic education is at the core of democracy. Without making education central to a nation, it can hardly remain effectively democratic. The loss of a department in federal government means the loss of education as a governing priority. This is the worst news I have heard since the election.

It also speaks to the question you left me with. Wonder can be set into practices. I wrote about practices of wonder in an open access/OA publication not long ago and also in the book Misty and I co-created, which, while in paperback now, won’t be in OA format for a couple more years. In that book’s third motet/chapter, I write about an early childhood educational approach in Chicago from the 1990s that I studied with researchers at the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development. Their work, We Are All Explorers, shows concretely and clearly how early childhood education can structure practices of wonder. It informed how I approached the collective moral wondering of my public-facing ethics professorship when I came to my current institution.

What interests me about your work is the possibility of developing institutional practices of animal wonder. This seems so far from existing political realities in the growing global authoritarian turn many think we are experiencing. But that doesn’t make it less important. I believe that people have to press for idealism continually, especially in desperate contexts like the despair that is gripping so many nations now and their electorates or populaces. There is always hope to be found when people learn to communicate and be in touch better. This includes with other animals.

Thank you for this correspondence. I was interested in how you live philosophically with other animals. Now I have a better idea. Philosophy can be a way of life with Earth others, not just with fellow human beings.

Jeremy

November 14th, 2024

Dear Jeremy,

Our government is not dismantling the ministry of education yet. But they did announce huge budget cuts for schools and universities. It seems to be part of dominating the larger narrative about things like truth, for example about the climate crisis. Scientists and students had planned a large demonstration for today, but it was prohibited by the mayor of Utrecht. The official reason is that they had received signals that pro-Palestine activists were going to join and make trouble. But the scientists also fear this is part of a larger scheme of keeping them silent and are planning new protests.

Thank you for giving me more insight in your practice. I am glad I learned more about the way you do philosophy, as well as your approach to practices of education and concepts like wonder. I have the feeling that we are just beginning our conversation. So, I hope we can continue it at some later point in time. I often write about attention, not so much about wondering, so I’d be curious to hear what you think about the relation between these concepts. In any case, I am glad you are taking education so seriously, because learning is, as you mention, connected to hope and transformation. 

Best wishes,

Eva