Kinning

A new-old way of thinking about nature and ethical development

Benjamin Wedemeyer on Unsplash

One of my favorite elements of Stoicism is the ancient Stoic theory of ethical development, called “oikeiosis” in Greek. It’s a beautiful idea, positing that humans are made to naturally develop toward virtue and social harmony, and that we can all continue to grow toward wisdom throughout our lives. However, it is technically complicated, and because there isn’t much surviving information from the original Stoics, many questions surround the exact definition and details of oikeiosis. These technical difficulties and uncertainties make the concept rather challenging to introduce to new Stoics, even though it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of Stoic philosophy.

Perhaps the biggest difficulty is that oikeiosis is, in the words of classicist Brad Inwood, “untranslatable.” We have no direct equivalent in English, and different scholars use different terms to translate it. I’m going to cite three passages here, each one from an esteemed classicist, each one deciding on a different translation for oikeiosis and explaining the difficulties of rendering it into English:

‘Orientation’ is the translation I use for the term of art oikeiôisis, adopted by the Stoics to describe their novel theory of the basic state of affairs which grounds all human and animal action. No single translation can capture the various nuances of the Greek word. The verb from which the noun is derived, oikeioô, suggests the process of making something one’s own, i.e. acquiring it or adopting it; it also suggests that one feels affection for something, is well disposed to it; and the thing to which one has an oikeiôisis is also thought of as being one’s own, the proper possession of the agent or something he has a strong natural kinship to. But these are connotations…the word is ultimately untranslatable.

Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, p. 185

This can seem more mysterious than it really is, because there is no good single English equivalent. I shall use ‘familiarization’; others have used ‘appropriation’ or ‘making akin to’. The root idea is that of making one person or thing oikeion to another. Oikeion in turn comes from oikos, the house or household. People are oikeioi if they are related to you, or in some other way attached to your household; so oikeion comes to mean both ‘akin to’ and ‘what belongs to you or is on your side’, as opposed to what is allotrion, alien, not belonging. … Perhaps ‘familiarization’ will suggest both the notion of family and that of being close to and coming to belong.

Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness, p. 263

The term ‘appropriation’ (oikeiōsis) suggests the notion of making something ‘one’s own’ (oikeios); development consists in making oneself (or one’s nature or constitution or other people of one’s kind) ‘one’s own’ in some way. The underlying motive is best understood as expressing care or concern for oneself or others.

Footnote: The term oikeiōsis is not easily rendered in English: other possible translations include ‘attachment’, ‘endearment’, ‘familiarization’, and ‘orientation’.

Chris Gill, Learning to Live Naturally, p. 163

In my own Stoic practice I have played around with using different translations. For a while I thought about using the neologism “hearthening,” which combines three highly relevant words: “hearth” to capture the idea of home and making something one’s own; “heart” to indicate bringing something into your heart and really caring for it; and “hearkening,” as in hearkening to the call of nature. I like capturing all these disparate elements of oikeiosis in one word. But on the other hand, it seems to me like the last thing we need in this discussion is more confusion, and hearthening might be even more confusing than the other translations already in play here. So I decided against using it, and for the most part I use the generic term “development” or go with the original Greek oikeiosis.

However, I recently found another word to propose for consideration: “kinning,” which comes from a slim volume of environmental writing called Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Volume 5. As the title suggests, this is not riveting nature writing, but rather a collection of essays by activists, academics, poets, nonprofit directors, and others who specialize in bringing people closer to nature. Volume 5: Practice is the culmination of the series, and I selected it because the focus is on putting ecophilia into practice, suggesting practical ways people can develop kinship with the natural world.

There are some really lovely suggestions for connecting with nature, which we will explore further below. But my primary interest is in the way the editors framed this ideal of kinship and belonging within the natural world. Among the editors is botanist and Native American elder Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, which is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Elsewhere Wall Kimmerer has proposed that instead of referring to animals and plants as it, we use the pronoun ki—with kin for plural. As she puts it in an article for Yes Magazine:

So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”

Linguists have long noted that many Native American languages are more verb-heavy than English, which tends to be noun-heavy. Kinship editor Gavin Van Horn argues that this reflects the relative lack of attention and importance we accord to natural elements: “The English language is noun dominant, and in comparison to many Indigenous languages, the animacy and agency of other beings and processes often receives less emphasis” (p. 3). Van Horn therefore advocates for a more active and dynamic form of kinship with everything in nature:

Kinship can be considered a noun, of course, a state of being—whether this is couched in terms of biological genetics; family, clan, or species affiliation; shared and storied relations and memories than inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet. But the voices in these volumes point us toward an alternative perspective: kinship as a verb.

Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning. Humans are born kin, in any number of ways. But the words in the Kinship anthology collectively express something more than birthright claims: they point toward how it is possible to become kin. In this understanding, being kin is not so much a given as it is an intentional process. Kinning does not depend upon genetic codes. Rather, it is cultivated by humans, as one expression of life among many, many, many others, and it revolves around an ethical question: how to rightly relate? (p. 3)

I love this suggestion and I think it fits well with contemporary Stoicism. Below we’ll look at how kinship-in-action has traditionally been a part of Stoic ethical development, and we’ll then discuss how we might incorporate this concept into a contemporary strand of ecological ethics within Stoicism.

Social Oikeiosis

The Stoics were well-known in antiquity for the seemingly extreme suggestion that we should care about all humans rather than just our family and friends; as Seneca put it, “This sense of companionship links all human beings to one another; it holds that there is a common law of humankind” (Letters on Ethics, 48.3). The second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles even provided a template for how we draw others psychologically nearer—how we become kin with them.

In a remarkable passage preserved by Stobaeus, Hierocles describes the (theoretical) concentric circles that encompass each person, beginning with the person’s own mind and body in the center. Surrounding this central node is a circle of close family members (parents, siblings, spouse, and children), encompassed by other family members (grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins), followed by more distant family members, followed by other circles with neighbors, fellow citizens, and eventually “the whole human race.” (You can read the full passage, translated in 1822 by Thomas Taylor, here.)

But Hierocles goes further, recommending that we draw in each circle toward the center, pulling each level of kinship even closer toward us. We should treat our siblings like we treat ourselves, we should behave toward our cousins as we would toward our siblings, and toward more distant family members as we would toward closer family members. That also means we should treat our neighbors like family members, fellow citizens like neighbors, and everyone in the world as if they were fellow citizens. The stated goal is “to reduce the distance of the relationship with each person,” since “the greater distance in blood will remove some affection” and “we must still try hard to assimilate them” (Hierocles, cited in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, p. 349).

In general Hierocles is rather vague about how we might draw people closer toward us, but he does offer one concrete suggestion:

The main procedure for this has been stated. But we should do more, in the terms of address we use, calling cousins brothers, and uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers…For this mode of address would be no slight mark of our affection for them all, and it would also stimulate and intensify the indicated contraction of the circles. (pp. 349-350)

This is in fact a common practice in many traditional cultures and in close-knit groups that intentionally build a sense of kinship (such as monastic communities, where people are addressed as Brother, Sister, Mother, or Father). Just to take one example which I know well, in Turkish culture it’s usually rude to call a person by only their name without any appellation of kinship or respect. An acquaintance of similar age is addressed as brother or sister, any familiar elderly person may be called grandmother or grandfather (or haci, which is a term of distinction for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), and terms such as aunt, uncle, or teacher are often used for unrelated adults. While it may feel unnatural to us in developed Western societies, the language and ideal of extended kinship seems to come naturally to humans in most other times and places.

Of course, just calling other people by family terms doesn’t guarantee that we will treat everyone like a family member—plenty of people don’t even treat their biological families the way they should! But it does indicate our values, our ideal of treating everyone as if we care deeply about them. And for many of us, thinking in these terms will indeed help us to feel more related to the people we interact with. Humans evolved to live in close-knit kin groups and tribes, and our psychology is primed for this type of relational thinking. We probably can’t eliminate this instinct from our psychology, since it’s so deeply rooted, but we can turn it around and use it in the service of our broadened understanding of who belongs to us.

Personally I wouldn’t be comfortable implementing Hierocles’ suggestion in a modern-day Western society—too weird. But we could start to think and act in these terms, particularly if we couple this suggestion with Stoic role ethics. We each have certain responsibilities toward others based on our relationship to them; we have stronger obligations toward those closer to us, but we do have certain basic obligations toward every person. So I think it’s actually quite an effective strategy to draw in the circles of care, showing a greater degree of concern for everyone: according all humans the respect we would give to fellow citizens, treating neighbors like friends, and caring for all family members like we care for ourselves.

Psychologically and emotionally, there are limits to how much any one human can care. In our ancestral environment, when we lived in small clans or family groups, it was quite feasible to care directly for everyone around you. Today it’s impossible. Societies have had to find ways of living together based on impersonal rules on laws, since ancestral norms of reciprocity can’t work in our hyperconnected world of eight billion people. However, our psychology hasn’t had time to evolve for this changing world, so we are still programmed to function based on the old kinship method.

So our task is to figure out how to unite our 100,000-year-old psychology of kinship with our modern-day society. This is obviously difficult and ongoing work, but I do think Stoicism can make a significant contribution through the principles of oikeiosis.

Ecological Oikeiosis

In an analogous way, perhaps we can develop kinship with the natural world. Perhaps we could think in terms of a strand of oikeiosis (in addition to personal and social), one that corresponds to environmental ethics. I think the question hinges on whether or not we can consider our affinity for the natural world an in-born instinct, one that could be perfected through mature rationality. Could we consider care for nature to be a human instinct in the same way that our care for other people is?

There is an increasing amount of evidence that suggests we can. We all know from personal experience that people are drawn to the natural world—its beauty, its vastness, its lushness, the mesmerizing capabilities of the animals, plants, and other life forms that inhabit our incredible planet. We go to nature to relax, to explore, to be amazed, to feel truly at home in the world. I think few people would deny that we have a natural instinct to connect with the elements of nature (even if this instinct is often suppressed or distorted in our modern lives).

Of course, it’s somewhat absurd to even talk about humans being separated from nature in the first place, since we are and always will be a part of nature. We are animals living on planet Earth, intertwined with and dependent on all other life on the planet. But insofar as we can speak of humans being cut off from the natural world by human-made constructions such as steel skyscrapers and coal power plants, not to mention our unfortunate habit of destroying natural ecosystems, it makes sense to speak of our relationship “with nature” and to discuss our connections to “the natural world.”

Current research supports the view that humans thrive when they are closely connected to nature. You don’t have to look far to find information on this; for me, a quick Google search suggested

• Nurtured by Nature, from the American Psychological Association

• The Mental Health Benefits of Nature, from Mayo Clinic

• Time Spent in Nature Can Boost Physical and Mental Wellbeing, from Harvard School of Public Health

• Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health, from Yale School of the Environment

We clearly need nature, and it needs us to be good caretakers. Given the evidence that humans have this basic need for belonging in the natural world—akin to our need for belonging in the social world—we are justified in potentially seeing communion with nature as a third strand of oikeiosis. Let’s return to some of the original definitions of oikeiosis we looked at above. Oikeiosis means

• making something one’s own, i.e. acquiring it or adopting it (Inwood)

• one feels affection for something, is well disposed to it (Inwood)

• the thing to which one has an oikeiosis is also thought of as being one’s own, the proper possession of the agent or something he has a strong natural kinship to (Inwood)

• ‘akin to’ and ‘what belongs to you or is on your side’ (Annas)

• the notion of family and that of being close to and coming to belong (Annas)

• expressing care or concern for oneself or others (Gill)

This is certainly the same attitude we want to develop toward nature if we are to care for it and live in harmony with it. We saw above how Hierocles recommended we increase our feeling of kinship with other people in order “reduce the distance of [our] relationship to each person.” Maybe we can we go through a similar process of “kinning” with the natural world.

Kinning with Nature

One option might be to develop a series of concentric circles based on our degree of relatedness to elements of the natural world: humans at the center, encompassed by all primates, encompassed by all mammals, encompassed by all animals, encompassed by all living things, encompassed by all natural elements. But I’m not sure this is a good idea—somehow I don’t feel comfortable doing this exercise myself.

A more realistic approach is to simply begin by reflecting on whatever nature you come into contact with in your daily interactions: raindrops, spiderwebs, leaves falling in autumn, sunlight streaming in your window, earthworms coming out in the rain, etc. We can appreciate and feel interconnected with these elements that organically form part of our lives. As Van Horn says in Kinship, “Becoming kin…consists of repeated intimacies, familiar encounters, and daily undoings and transformations that are dependent on visitations and conversations within a smaller circle of place” (p. 9). In other words, just like we begin by loving the people closest to us, we begin by loving the nature closest to us, which forms part of our everyday lives.

Several other contributors to Kinship make practical suggestions for environmental kinning. Botanist Matthew Hall recommends several strategies for appreciating plants, including deep observation and what he calls “botanical meditation”:

When in the garden, I extend observation into a meditation on the raw physical connections between my body and those of the plants around me. For example, take the old walnut tree that provides a bounteous supply of walnuts each autumn. I mentally rehearse how the flesh from the walnut both nourishes and becomes my body, the lipids and amino acids in the walnuts breaking down to form my own flesh and bone…

I do also mentally conjure our affinity through shared breath, forming mental pictures of the passage of oxygen from plants into my body and the carbon dioxide exhaled from my body into the body of the walnut tree. I find that a simple exercise like this forms mental and emotional connections and reduces the vast ontological distance between us. (p. 42)

This strikes me as very similar to Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, in which he constantly reflects on his kinship with other elements of the cosmos. Take meditation 5.4, for example:

I travel along nature's way until the day arrives for me to fall down and take my rest, yielding my last breath to the air from which I daily draw it in, and falling to that earth from which my father drew his seed and my mother her blood, and my nurse her milk, and from which day by day these many years I have gained my food and drink; the earth that bears me as I tread over it and make use of it for so many purposes.

In a similar refrain, Ajay Rastogi, former plant researcher and current director of the Foundation for the Contemplation of Nature in Northern India, recounts this experience that changed his view of the relationship between biotic and abiotic elements in nature:

One day the plants in the experiment revealed something fundamentally more than efficiency to me—they revealed their kinship…I noticed a conversation happening among the roots, the nutrients in the water, and the water itself. I realized that what we called abiotic (the water, even the nutrients) and what we called biotic (the roots) were entangled as one, in relation, as living kin. The roots, the water, the nutrients, and I were “kinning.” Never again could I reduce such a living dance of entanglement, such kinning, to the dichotomy of abiotic and biotic for the sake of efficiency. (p. 54)

Today Rastogi advocates merging biotic and abiotic systems through indigenous social and ecological traditions:

Kinship happens, and kinning occurs, when we actively engage in entangling biotic and abiotic systems. It is well-recognized that Indigenous science in traditional cultures made significant strides in understanding how the abiotic and biotic influence each other…Merging and rekinning systems previously reduced to abiotic (like water or soil) components within biotic systems such as plants requires us to merge the social and the ecological—the soil with the plant with the taste and sounds and smells of a family kitchen laughing over an ancestral recipe. (pp. 59-60)

I think this awareness of the interconnectedness of all things has always been at the heart of Stoicism. However, we do need to make some changes to contemporary Stoicism in order to reflect our changed understanding of humanity’s position in the universe. The ancient Stoics felt that humans were set apart from nature, and were superior to it, because of our rationality. But over 2,000 years later we recognize that humans are just one component within the wider system, and that every natural entity has an important role to play.

At the same time, our rationality—and our ability to change the planet for better or worse—gives us a special responsibility as caretakers and stewards of the earth. Returning to Van Horn’s essay in the Kinship volume, we find an optimistic view of the future:

A kincentric ecology emerges from cultures that recognize the importance of humans in maintaining right relations in particular landscapes. Far from presupposing that humans are a degrading force, sullying whatever we might touch, a kincentric ecology expresses the view that humans can actually play keystone roles in our landscapes, creating mutual flourishing. In other words, human beings are not merely kin by biological relation, but it is entirely possible that human communities and cultures can be good kin, salutary ecological collaborators alongside and with our nonhuman family members. (Van Horn, p. 7)

In Learning to Live Naturally, Chris Gill makes a very similar point—that “human beings have a special responsibility for maintaining the eco-system in a sustainable and coherent way…[and] a special role in promoting the welfare and flourishing of other forms of life and the stability of the inanimate elements in the eco-system, such as air and sea” (pp. 304-305). In our forthcoming book Stoic Ethics: The Basics, this idea is expressed even more forcefully:

Put differently, human beings should use their distinctive rationality on behalf of other (less rational) forms of life, and for the sake of the overall (rational) order of nature. This idea is sometimes described in contemporary thought as exercising ‘stewardship’ over nature, rather than ‘dominion’ over it. This kind of stewardship is, in fact, suggested by Marcus Aurelius in this passage, though it is an exceptional one in Stoic writings: ‘In the case of irrational animals and objects and things in general, treat them with generosity of spirit and freedom of mind, since you have rationality and they do not’ (Meditations 6.23). This idea is reinforced by reminding ourselves of the Stoic insistence that we (human beings) form an integral part of nature and are not separate from it, and that our value as human beings is substantially less than that of nature as a whole. (p. 144)

Growing into this mutual relationship with nature—in which we take care of the natural world, and it takes care of us—is a necessary component of wisdom and virtue. Past generations were able to take this relationship for granted because nature was always there, following pretty much the same patterns as always. Only in the 21st century are we learning not to take our planet for granted.

Concluding Thoughts

We might ask: is kinning necessary to be good environmental steward? Couldn’t you be a protector of nature for other reasons? Yes, of course you could. Some people may be swayed by arguments and obligations toward the environment that have nothing to do with kinship, such as practical necessity (if I pollute this river, I’ll have no fish to eat) or human ethics (if I pollute this river, my neighbors downstream will have no fish to eat) or politics (and then the neighbors will try to take over my land) or legal obligation (it’s illegal to pollute) or peer pressure (my neighbors won’t like me).

But the language of kinship is one of the most powerful metaphors available to us, and it has been used throughout history to characterize humanity’s relationship with elements of the natural world. The way we frame this relationship matters a great deal. In order to consistently treat nature with care and respect—not just when it’s convenient, but all the time—it's helpful for most people to think of nature in terms of kinship. Just as we can reduce the psychological distance between ourselves and people on the other side of the world, we can reduce the psychological distance between ourselves and nature, even aspects of nature we don’t normally think anything about (insects, soil, etc.).

Consistently reminding ourselves that we are just one part of nature, and that all the other parts matter too, will help us to act appropriately toward all of creation. Whether or not you choose to use the language of kinship is up to you. But whichever way you slice it, humans live best and happiest when they “belong” to nature. To conclude with an observation from Stoic Ethics: The Basics (p. 136):

The Stoics [make] a direct connection between happiness, understood as the best possible human life, and living in a way that brings us into harmony with the natural world or environment. The implication is that our happiness is not just a matter of leading the best possible human life but also living in a way that takes account of the proper place of human beings within the natural world.