Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Biography of the subject, sourced from his bio for a 2016 speaking engagement

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer is the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University. A passionate lover of educational innovation, he taught at Yale, University of Chicago, Colorado College, the Jesuit college LeMoyne, and helped build American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates into a global top 500 university. Besides writing two novels, as he calls them – The Ecological Life, and the forthcoming mixed genre Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time – he also co-created the seminal MIT volume, Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future and was on the project team for We Are All Explorers, the first study of a city-wide Reggio Emilia pre-school approach in low income, diverse neighborhoods of Chicago. A published poet, he was also a weekly writer for Emirates Today and a co-host of a weekly environmental ideas show on Dubai Eye Radio, both high access media in the Gulf of the mid-2000s. Around Cleveland, he has collaborated on socially engaged art and social justice initiatives and created the Moral Inquiries in Coventry, a community-based philosophy group that meets twice per month. Currently, he is also collaborating with Guide to Kulchur and SPACES on a project begun by Michael Rakowitz around police and gun violence.

What struck me most about the lengthy discussion with the author of our textbook [The Ecological Life], besides the augmentation of our zero-waste meal food, was his ideas regarding the dichotomies between actor and object as opposed to subject and subject. His explanation that this mindset was symptomatic of a capitalistic system wherein laborers are thought of in terms of productivity and are thereby rendered objects themselves, was curious enough to earn my considerations well after class was over. I was interested, mainly, in how his subject–subject mentality would apply to something like a conversation regarding politics, and whether the idea of activism could even exist within a system so preoccupied with avoiding the urge to change the other party’s mind.

I could understand, abstractly, how a subject–subject relationship could operate realistically in a handful of scenarios: an office, a household, a romantic relationship. But when it came to environmentalism, the foundational topic, of course, of our discussions, it struck me as a very peculiar approach. Wasn’t the point of environmental — and, indeed, all — activism to persuade others to take up your cause? Wasn’t this goal inherently dealing with peers and strangers as objects, as mere citizens to be converted? And, most importantly, would an “activist” taking the traditional actor–object stance even be distinguishable from another who had adopted Bendik-Keymer’s subject–subject mindset? Would there be a discernible difference to an outside observer, a measurable change in action outside the particular activist’s thought processes?

My frustration arises from a belief that many activists already approach potential comrades with a degree of respect indicative of some prototypical form of Bendik-Keymer’s subject-subject–ism. By simply hearing out another’s viewpoint and politely offering one’s own, could we possibly be already fulfilling the mission? While I enjoyed immensely the other conversations concerning global power structures and Marxist approaches to various environmental and general political issues, this subject-subject business was the bit that bothered me, even almost a week later as I pen this lab response. I suppose it’s that I feel the difference in approach is so conceptual and abstract as to be rendered largely meaningless. If nothing is altered outside our internal thought processes — as significant philosophically as that may be — does it really matter whether I approach others as subjects, the same as myself, or as objects to be swayed to my position? Does my intention matter if the outcome, my actions towards the other person, are, for all intents and purposes, identical? At any rate, I enjoyed having the author (and fellow Clevelander) in class almost as much as I appreciated the provided pizza and banana bread.