Victoria LawsonIn personPracticing Val Plumwood’s Philosophy in the Indoor Spider EncounterWhen you experience physical bodily sensations of fear and disgust, beyond an immediate jump scare, of a spider inside your home, you experience a reaction informed by the separation, both conceptually and physically, of nature and culture in Western society. This separation, according to Val Plumwood, is not just a separation of distinct concepts, of a natural world and a human one, but a chasmic split between radically disparate and homogenised concepts. This informs her account of Western culture as a hegemonic centre – a dominant group forming an exclusive centre of moral and social reasoning – hyper-separating itself from nonhuman animals and the environment. This worldview requires individual maintenance, where experiences that resist conceptual separation elicit not just a physiological, but a conceptual reaction against the mixing of the boundary between nature and culture. I argue that spiders inside the cultural space of the home are an example of this boundary mixing, one in which you can choose to confront your own conceptual belief. This is important, as Plumwood argues the nature/culture dualism has given a conceptual basis for environmental destruction, a destruction which risks the ongoing existence of humans everywhere.
