writing as species-being - by rachel jepsen
philosophy of writing
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writing as species-being<br>(Artificial Writing and Philosophies of Alienation #4)
rachel jepsen<br>Jun 16, 2026
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“Once I held thinking to be the purpose of life, but now I hold life to be the purpose of thinking.”<br>—Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of Philosophy, 1843-1844
Iain Baxter&, Golden Gate Bridge from Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots (1979)
The writer’s purpose is to relate, in all of the senses of this verb. The original sense, from the 1520s, “to refer or report,” was based in the Latin for “bringing back, bearing back” from the past. To bear and carry something through time, to report or refer to someone else.<br>By the 1640s, relating meant “to stand in some relation; have reverence or respect,” and slightly later to “bring something into relation with something else”—to connect, and make connections, which is what creativity does. This idea of bringing things together made relating something intimate, and by mid-century it implied a fellow-feeling, to “feel connected or sympathetic.” Today we say, “I can relate to that.” Meaning, of course, “I relate to you.”<br>Feeling connected and sympathetic with others, standing in relation to others and with some reverence and respect, and bearing back from our experiences something worth reporting to someone–these are just some of the human relationships that writing can be engaged with. Writing is made up of so many human relationships. There are collaborators and editors and readers. There can be friends. There must be friends. There are characters and subjects and sources. There are real-life writing groups and reading clubs and bookshops and libraries where people are waiting to help you, waiting for your questions and your presence and to share.<br>There are people to talk to, always. Some are in your head–those dead or far-flung writers and loved ones who you can imagine into your writing space, who can support you with their presence even in your mind. There are real ways of bringing these relationships into your writing, of being inspired and supported through these connections. There are other writers and artists, dead and alive, who have struggled and found joy in creative work, the hard, fulfilling, necessary work of relating–bearing back, standing in relation to others with some reverence or respect, and creating connections through sympathetic understanding.<br>In my work as a writing coach, I always say that the relationship you have with writing is a lot like the relationship you have with yourself. As that relationship changes, becoming more positive and supportive and free, I’ve seen profound shifts in the real relationships that writers have with others in and around the world of their writing, with siblings, partners, kids, parents, friends, other artists, ‘the reader’ or other, the source or subject or inspiration for a story, the stranger, the human-out-there-and-within. What they write about and how they write becomes more concerned with real conditions and people, more interested in who they really are and what they need. In intimate writing, they are not alienated. They are related.
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In response to Karl Marx’s work on the alienation of labor, which I wrote about last month, the German-American philosopher Erich Fromm wrote:<br>“Joy, energy, happiness, all this depends on the degree to which we are related, to which we are concerned, and that is to say, to which we are in touch with the reality of our feelings, with the reality of other people, and not to experience them as abstractions that we can look at like the commodities at the market.<br>Secondly, in this process of being related, we experience ourselves as entities, as I, who is related to the world. I become one with the world in my relatedness to the world, but I also experience myself as a self, as an individuality, as something unique, because in this process of relatedness, I am at the same time the subject of this activity, of this process, of relating myself. I am I and I am the other person but I am I too. I become one with the object of my concern, but in this process, I experience myself also as a subject.”1
In contrast to this related, intimate, or non-alienated activity, Marx wrote that “estranged labor estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.” In a state of alienation, “life itself appears only as a means to life.”2<br>In my piece applying Marx’s theories of alienation to AI and artificial writing products, we left off with the fourth kind of alienation he describes as a product of capitalism, that of “nature and the life of the species.” Marx believed in “species-being,” that the essence or nature of our...