Another truth is possible

It is an obvious fact that needs to be repeated from time to time: philosophy is not at odds with life. Thinking is also a way of acting. The German Carolin Emcke (Mülheim an der Ruhr, 1967) has done both. As a reporter, between 1998 and 2014 she was in conflict zones, from Colombia to Afghanistan, from Kosovo to Iraq. As a philosopher, she had studied at the London School of Economics, at Harvard and in Frankfurt (with Axel Honneth), and has taught classes at Yale, among other places. For years she has been organizing discussion series in Berlin. And she writes essays. The latest one to reach us is What Is True (Arcàdia, in translation by Anna Soler Horta).

In it, she deals with violence and the climate crisis. I have read it after Blocus and in the middle of the UN climate conference in Turkey, with the threat of El Niño at the doorstep. Violence is a subject that Emcke has been dealing with for some time; the climate is newer for her. In this new text, she seeks truths from the consciousness that "reflection on what is true needs doubt, skepticism and the proof of critical questioning". It requires humility, a moral quality of which we are not in excess. It requires the courage to dissent and to ask uncomfortable questions, both in relation to the facts and to others who are not like oneself and do not think like oneself. It requires taking distance from the chaos of social networks and the potential of AI.

"If someone were to ask me about the keys to my writings on the suffering and pain of others, the answer would surely not refer to anything I have ever written, but rather to what I have not managed to describe, to what I have sometimes refrained from saying," notes Emcke, for whom one must respect the dangers faced by her interlocutors when they tell her about their lives. She is also interested in knowing how violence is transmitted from generation to generation, often assimilated in language but also in silences. There are things that are difficult to say: "Whoever has seen a landscape destroyed by war, an earthquake, a bombing, or a fire never forgets it."

Emcke defends subjectivity, first-person narration; and the humor that accompanies tragedies: "There are always moments to laugh or love." "Beside, below, and above suffering or fear, simultaneously, there is also room for joy." Above all, she defends humanizing victims, distancing them from collective labels (immigrants, Muslims, foreigners, lazy people...), treating them as unique individuals, explaining their personal history. This is her ethics and her art of narration: "Writing presupposes the possibility of empathy [...], it presupposes a humanist us."

She observes the climate crisis as "another form of violence" resulting from wanting to profit from nature instead of understanding it as a reality intertwined with us, humans. About global warming? About the melting of Greenland and the erosion of the Amazon? She notes: "Irreversible means irreversible." A catastrophism in which we are trapped. "It is not understood why right-wing ideologues are left the development of radical fantasies." In any case, far from fantasies, she proposes concrete things: just as in ancient Babylon a map of the world was made that incorporated unknown regions, Emcke advocates for a new cartography: making "the map of cooperative multilateralism" or a "CO₂ tax" of distributive justice. Instead of this, she notes that "manipulative agitation, misinformation, lying, and defamation" ignore the excess of emissions and fossil fuels and, instead, describe containment measures and the shift toward green energy as "impositions."

Acting against climate aggression is burdensome. Even dangerous. The public space has become coarsened: ultra discourses make a lot of noise. They proclaim an "ecodictatorship" and have appropriated social unrest. They are professional agitators, categorical, skillful at avoiding solutions and the links between the climate struggle and the equality-freedom binomial. How to deal with it? The formula of Emcke the journalist and essayist: "A narrative that, even in the moment of hopelessness, seeks that which is also true".