Please pardon the pun – well, really, a double pun, though that may not be obvious just yet. Read on to see what I mean.
How did I come to be writing a paper about, of all things, sleep?
It’s the convergence of threads which have been running through my research, some of them stretching all the way back to my dissertation, three decades ago.
First, there’s the idea, which emerged sometime between my dissertation and the book derived from it, that the project might serve as an appropriate focal point for ethical consideration. I developed the idea more fully in my second book, but have only recently returned to the, um, project project in more recent years.
For a while now, I have been trying to develop a book (working title: Project and Prospect) on a “project approach” to ethics, but I was struggling to find a compelling hook for the thing. It occurred to me that part of what I need was first to test the putative “project approach” on some concrete examples. I had several in mind, but was on the lookout for more.
Second, while I was investigating the connection between music and ethics, first introduced in much earlier entries in this blog, my interests drew me into cognitive archaeology. As it happens, there is some really interesting work on what might be called the the prehistory of music which turned out to be relevant to my interests.
Cognitive archaeology turned into a rabbit-hole, though. While I was tumbling down, I came across a hypothesis regarding the role in the evolution of human cognition of the transition from sleeping in trees to sleeping on the ground.
(I cite that hypothesis – from Coolidge and Wynn (2018) – in Part 1 of the paper, which drops here Tuesday.)
Hmm, I thought. perhaps I could consider sleep as a project?
Third, I developed and revised several times a draft of “Sleeping through the Night” but, like the project book, it was lacking something. A hook? A spark? A soul?
Something.
A few more pieces clicked into place. What makes sleep a challenge is that it is compulsory, but it also makes us especially vulnerable in the world.
Click! A investigation of sleep as a project connects to past work I’d done on human vulnerability in the face of environmental change.
Now, I thought, I’m getting somewhere!
Fourth, the work on vulnerability fed into my proposal of a “Darwinian humanism, ” set out in a pair of papers published nearly a decade ago – 2007 and 2009 – cited in the Introduction of “On Sleeping through the Night.”
Fifth, the threads on vulnerability and archaeology intertwined with my initial investigations of sleep as a human project to underscore that a key problem of sleeping through the night is that of trust.
That led me to the work of Niklas Luhmann, whose functionalist account of trust became the linchpin of the paper.
Sixth and finally, it occurred to me that part of the struggle giving life to the sleep paper – and ultimately to the project book – is that it did not have a purpose beyond just serving as “proof of concept” for the project approach to ethics.
That’s when it hit me: I had allowed my research focus to drift away from environmental philosophy and policy after the metropolitan growth book, in 2010, and I had been consciously avoiding a definitive turn back in that direction.
But that turn back to environmental ethics and policy, I realized, is exactly what I need. That’s how the sleep paper – and the project book to which it will ultimately contribute – came to be a work of environmental philosophy.
And that’s how my “sleeper project” – the “project project” no less! – finally stirred itself to life and began to gain some traction.
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