Attuning to the World’s Needs

Affordances are typically defined relative to the abilities of an animal, and inviting affordances are defined relative to the needs or concerns of an animal. Both bring with them the normative demand for an animal to attune its perceptual systems relative to its needs and abilities. The question we are pursuing in this paper is how it is possible for perception to get attuned not just to the animal’s needs and abilities, but to get attuned to the world’s needs and abilities as well. We start from the idea that animals and environment are entangled with one another and pursue this entanglement in two complementary directions: multispecies entanglement and the logic of the gift.