In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively— as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world.

中文翻译：

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变成蝙蝠是什么感觉？灭绝时代的异质性

托马斯·内格尔（Thomas Nagel）在1974年著名的文章《蝙蝠是什么感觉》中，上演了一场人类蝙蝠的遭遇，以说明和支持他的“主观经验”不能归结为“客观事实”的说法：因为内格尔无法体验世界就像蝙蝠一样，他永远也不会知道成为什么样子。根据内格尔的说法，异质性被否定地视为失败或缺乏相似性，并且会限制他对蝙蝠的了解。如今，由于白鼻综合症威胁着北美的蝙蝠种群，作为创造力的条件，是否可以积极地解决异质性问题，从而开辟新的接受方式和对物种灭绝的反应方式？本文转向成为哲学，并探讨生物科学的最新研究以探索这种可能性。我建议，关注经验的异质性使我们警觉到存在的更多公共方面，从而有可能与这样的趋势背道而驰：将自己理解和体验为自给自足，彼此之间以及与我们共同的世界封闭。反过来，这可能会增强我们对事件，身体和体验之外的力量（包括蝙蝠和如今困扰他们的白鼻综合症）的纠缠感。我认为，对异质性的确认是创造力的条件，对当今的多物种伦理学来说是最大的希望，当它与对事物内部和事物之间的不相容性的肯定相结合时，它是异质世界中遭受苦难和破坏的真正力量。