Howard Thurman and the Promise of Interspecies Communion
By Darian Spearman
What role do our relationships to other lifeforms play in our quest for liberation? This question takes center stage in The Search For Common Ground by Howard Thurman. Known as a poet, theologian, mystic and philosopher, Thurman seeks an answer to what he calls the “paradox of conscious life.” This paradox takes the following form—on one hand, each person must cultivate a rich level of interiority through boundaries that preserve their autonomy and individuality. On the other hand, we have a need to feel we are part of the ceaseless rhythms of life from which we originate. This means that the very processes through which we establish our individual sense of self can undermine our efforts to reap the possibilities of surrendering that self to different forms of communion. Thurman further holds that the fundamental relationship between individuals and community has become unbalanced, leading to a personal crisis for Black people living at the end of the 20th century.
In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurman believed that the Black community was forced to decide whether to continue with the project of integration, or to separate from the white community and forge its own path. While Thurman does not condemn these growing separatist movements—in fact, he sees them as necessary to develop the psychological and political resources to combat white supremacy—he does wonder if these separatist trends are in line with the ultimate aim of life (xiv). Thurman argues that the ultimate aim of life is the realization of its potential. He states that it “is only the potential, the undisclosed, the unfinished that has a future” (4). Furthermore, Thurman argues that this potential reaches its greatest possibility for realization through communion. Consequently, any person who makes the decision to permanently shut themselves off from others ultimately ruins their potential (104). However, how does one prove that that the purpose of life is realized through communion and not a different principle, such as survival?
[Carla Jay Harris, The Snake Bearers I, 2018]
The Search For Common Ground is an attempt to answer this question. For the sake of time, I want to first focus on the chapter entitled, ‘The Search in Common Consciousness,” wherein Thurman argues that possibilities of communication between humans and other life forms is evidence of a level of consciousness shared between all cognizant life forms. Thurman’s evidence for this shared level of consciousness is the depth of communication possible between humans and animals. Though Thurman also extends this shared level of consciousness to plants, he notes that extraordinary moments of intersubjective experience between humans and animals is easier to prove (59-60). In fact, he offers many examples ranging from an African prior who regularly spoke to warthogs to man who realizes he can learn some of life’s deepest truths through communion with a celebrity dog.
One story, in particular, is quite salient. As a small child, Thurman visited his friend’s house. Very soon after he arrived, his attention was directed toward a young girl, who was less than a year old, playing with a rattlesnake. The child would turn on her side and play with a snake who would crawl back and forth around her. He recounts:
I was sent back into the yard to stand guard to keep anyone from coming around the house to frighten them. For if their harmony were broken by sudden disharmony created by noise or sudden movement, there would have been violence on Earth. After a while the baby grew tired of playing, turned away, and started crawling towards the back steps; the snake crawled towards the woods on the edge of the yard…. It was as if two different expressions of life, normally antagonistic to each, had dropped back into some common ground and there re-established a sense of harmony through which they were relating to each other at a conscious level (57-58).
The key word for Thurman in this story is the word re-establish. For Thurman, the baby in question did not establish a new possibility for life through her communion with the snake. He does not view the baby as having a particular gift for relating to animals. Rather he argues that the harmony witnessed between the child and the snake was reflective of the primary state of life. In such a philosophy, life is the emergence of a particular possibility in the universe: that of self-realizing potential. Though life has realized this potential in a wide variety of forms, Thurman argues that the possibilities arising from life’s common origin are merely obscured, not blocked by the differences among lifeforms. He states: “My point is not that the sense of separateness [between different forms of life] is not authentic but merely that it is not absolute.… But where there is deliberate acceptance between men and animals, a fresh possibility of enlarged meaning for each emerges. I suspect that under such circumstances even the potential of each life undergoes a radical expansion” (63).
Thurman argues that the commonalities of lifeforms serve as a rich ground for interspecies intersubjectivity. He argues that whenever humans deliberately bridge the gap between themselves and other animals, new possibilities for meaning emerge which can expand the possibilities for all lifeforms involved. Thurman focuses on Humans not because humans are the only beings capable of deep forms of communion, but because Humans have gone further than any other species in separating themselves from interspecies-subjectivity. He argues that the very possibility of life actualizing its potential through communion is thwarted by the wanton destruction caused by a humanity disconnected from the ground of life, the “diffused consciousness or awareness” of which human subjectivity is but one emergent branch (65). Of this common ground of life, Thurman states:
It is possible for the individual to move out beyond the particular context by which his life is defined and relate to other forms of life from inside their context. This means that there is a boundless realm of which all particular life is but a manifestation. This center is the living thing in man or animal. If a man or animal can function out of that center, then the boundaries that limit and define can be transcended (75).
For Thurman, interspecies communion involves the ability for forms of life to be able to relate to one another from within their own context. When we step outside of our human context to enter a shared perspective with another lifeform our consciousness loses its individuality and drops back into “an original creative continuum” in which the boundaries of the human self are temporarily transcended. However, it is important to note that while this boundary is being transcended, the awareness of conscious meaning is not lost but “merely enlarged” (6). We become aware of self-imposed boundaries and the possibilities revealed in the lifeways and meaning-systems of other species. Instead of separatism, life is about communion.
If we return to our opening question concerning our relationship to other lifeforms, we see that Thurman’s work offers important insights. The most crucial is that efforts to transcend systems of oppression can benefit from practices of communion with other lifeforms. For Thurman, the most important of these benefits is the satisfaction of each individual’s need to feel they are part of the broader whole of life. When we transcend the boundaries which separate us from other lifeforms, we return to the foundational “creative continuum” that is the root of life. It is from this root that we can both replenish our individual psyches as well as generate the energy to realize the forms of community required to transcend limitations imposed by forces organized to dominate life.
References
Thurman, Howard. The Search For Common Ground. Richmond, VA: Friends United Press, 1986.
Cover Photo Credit: Carla Jay Harris, “Swirl” (2023).
Dr. Darian Spearman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. His research interests include Africana Philosophy, Ecophilosophy, Philosophy of Myth, and Philosophy of Religion. His work appears in Philosophy and Global Affairs and the American Philosophical Association's Black Issues in Philosophy Blog.