Being Alive with Melanie Challenger

Wonder Cabinet

In this episode, philosopher and naturalist Melanie Challenger discusses her books How to Be Animal and Alive, arguing that life is fundamentally about embodied agency rather than disembodied computation.

Key takeaways

• Challenger worked with war survivors and genocide victims early in her career, which shaped her focus on dehumanization and the moral stakes of how we define humanity.
• She describes an eye-to-eye encounter with a blue whale off Chile that fundamentally shifted her understanding of sentient intelligence and ecological empathy.

Main topics

• Embodied intelligence vs. disembodied AI
• Aristotle's concept of psyche and living bodies

Notable quotes

"To be alive is to be a living body."

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling philosophical and biological framework for reclaiming our connection to

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. Speaker 3 (0:03) I'm Anne Strandchamps. And Speaker 2 (0:04) I'm Steve Paulson. Speaker 3 (0:05) 2,000 years ago, one of the most famous philosophers who ever lived posed a question we're still asking today. Speaker 1 (0:13) Aristotle stands on a pale hasp of land, on the crook of one of the crooked fingers that reach out into the Aegean. Writer and philosopher Melanie Challenger. His gaze settles on a difference somewhere out on the distant sea. And then all of a sudden... An arc of flesh lifts clear of the blue like some of the depths tugged free. Not the wind then, but life unmistakably. A dolphin! Not one, but four or five of them, maybe more. Aristotle feels a surge of excitement. Why? he asks himself. Why and how and when and for what purpose? Speaker 3 (0:57) That's the perennial question, isn't it? What is life? And if the answer seems obvious, just think of the many ways we're extending it all the time. The Rights of Nature movement considers rivers alive, and at the opposite extreme, there are software engineers who think AI models are conscious and alive. So real-world consequences follow from how you define life. Speaker 2 (1:23) One of the most interesting people writing about life right now is Melanie Challenger. She's both a philosopher and a naturalist, a National Geographic explorer who spent years in the field studying birds and whales and other animals. And she believes that life is neither a machine-like organism programmed by genes or a disembodied intelligence. To be alive, she says, is fundamentally about being a body. And we're in danger of forgetting that. Speaker 3 (1:51) We met Melanie recently at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany. She was there talking about her most recent book, Alive, the hidden intelligence of the natural world. Speaker 1 (2:03) OK, bonus points for anyone who knows where I am in this picture. Speaker 3 (2:08) I am Speaker 1 (2:09) in the sub-Antarctic. Yeah. So this is King Edward Point. This is an emperor penguin. This was really when I was starting. I was in my 20s here. I was a writer-in-residence for the British Antarctic Survey. But what I fundamentally cared about is why is that penguin and how is that penguin turning around and responding to me? Why are living beings acting in ways that matter to them? Where is that coming from? Why has it been left out of many of our discussions of life now? These were the questions I was concerned about. Speaker 2 (2:47) You've talked with Melanie Challenger a couple of times now, and I know her thinking has evolved over the years and maybe taken her to some unexpected places. Speaker 3 (2:56) Yeah, the last time we talked, she had just published How to Be Animal. You remember that book? Speaker 2 (3:01) And Speaker 3 (3:01) that was a look at the long human history of pretending that we are not. animals, of trying to separate ourselves from the rest of nature. So it's kind of a call to return to a more embodied relationship with Speaker 2 (3:14) the world. But in this new book, Alive, it seems like it's less about bodies and more about cell biology and microorganisms, plus ancient Greek philosophy. Speaker 3 (3:24) Right. So in this one, she's extending her argument, making the case that all living beings have purpose and agency all the way down to the cellular level. And yes, then she winds up reinterpreting Aristotle. Speaker 2 (3:39) But I know you. You are not a fan of big, abstract, philosophical ideas. So I'm guessing that is not the main reason you wanted to talk with Melanie. Speaker 3 (3:47) You know, we just really connected the first time we met. We wound up talking about motherhood and breastfeeding and how having children changes you. But... At heart, I guess, Melanie's project, I think of it as a form of re-enchantment. Because it's about restoring a sense of this pulsating aliveness that surrounds us at all times. And then thinking about what might follow if we really embrace that. Speaker 2 (4:18) And that really comes through every time she talks about any of these ideas. Speaker 3 (4:22) I wish people could see some of the photographs we've seen of her, you know. Looking into the eyes of an emperor penguin or a puffin or just looking absolutely delighted to be holding a raccoon. But the other thing that I really admire is the moral drive behind her work. So she doesn't actually talk about this all that much, but when she started out in her 20s, she was not a naturalist. She was working with war survivors and children of genocide. And that's the experience that led to everything else. Speaker 2 (4:53) Wow. You know, it is so interesting, the turn that a life can take. Speaker 3 (4:58) Listen, I want to take you back to your development as a naturalist, as a philosopher. Speaker 1 (5:06) Because Speaker 3 (5:06) you started by interviewing and working with survivors of genocides, of war crimes. Will you tell me a little bit about that work? Speaker 1 (5:16) Well, that's right. So I was growing up in a generation affected both by the environmental crisis... But I was also growing up in the shadow of the Yugoslavian conflict. From that, I got involved with a fantastic, very special person called Zlata Filipovic, who lived through the siege of Sarajevo, wrote a diary, she became known as the Bosnian Anne Frank. Her diary that the UN found, and it was eventually published in France, became the kind of helping hand that pulled her family out of the siege. And Zlata became then a bit of a sort of... spokesperson for war in general. And together we worked on an epistolary history of 20th century conflict. It was called Stolen Voices. Speaker 3 (5:59) And so this wasn't just stories of the conflict in Yugoslavia? No, Speaker 1 (6:02) this was all 20th century conflict, World War I, right the way through to then the Second Intifada and the Iraq War. The point of this is that right at the very beginning, I was listening to the testimony or reading the testimony. of hundreds, hundreds of people who've been affected by the worst that human beings are capable of. And that completely transformed me, actually. It continues to... That's active in you forever. I became very interested in dehumanisation and the underlying conceptions of humanity, of nature, of other, of self. of agency, of intelligence, that justify violence. You Speaker 3 (6:53) wrote a really beautiful piece that I read some years ago. The title was either Death and Love or Love and Death. Speaker 1 (6:59) But Speaker 3 (7:00) you wrote about a particular woman who had been a Holocaust survivor who you spent quite a bit of time with and it sounded like an extraordinary and devastating experience. Speaker 1 (7:14) Yeah, so separately to Stolen Voices with Zlata, I also got involved in an adaptation of the diaries of Anne Frank, which was partly for the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust. Anne Frank's diaries have never been allowed to be adapted in its history, and suddenly we were given permission. Speaker 3 (7:32) Quite a responsibility. Speaker 1 (7:33) Yeah, and don't forget, I was only in my 20s at the time as well. Through that, I met a woman called Susan who was just extraordinary, who I became friends with. She was a Hungarian-Jewish woman. She had been on a death march from Hungary, survived that, and then ended up in Bergen-Belsen, survived Bergen-Belsen. And... Speaker 1 (7:55) It's very difficult for me to talk about. And I haven't, in fact, ever talked about it publicly. I've written about it just once. But I've never told anyone what Susan said to me in those... times that we spent together. But I learned something very important. I think this is something that it's not disloyal for me to share, which is that what it is that many survivors are sharing publicly is often a sanitized version of. So Susan would go through two registers with me. She would do what it was possible psychologically and emotionally for her to deliver to the journalists who were phoning in and asking her questions. And she would deliver the manageable version. And then she would soften and she would talk to me and she would just talk to me. I didn't ask anything to say anything. And another testimony started emerging that was horrific. It's already