Moominpappa and the Vibrant Matter : Tove Jansson’s “Moominpappa at Sea” as an addition to “Vibrant Matter” by Jane Bennet

Abstract

As humans we are constantly engaging not only with other humans but with plants, animals, and matter. This thesis examines the way we view our engagement with the materiality of the world around us, by looking at the work of philosopher Jane Bennet on vibrant materiality and author Tove Jansson. Bennet presents an argument that matter can be analysed as active and vibrant. While Western philosophers are used to viewing matter as passive and dead, seeing it as active makes space for different engagement with matter. One of the ways we can start engaging with matter, once we stop thinking of it as passive and dead, is through the lens of ethics. My aim in this thesis is to use Bennet’s and Jansson’s work as a way to consider matter as active and included in the ethical frameworks of the Western philosophical canon.

Jansson in her children’s book Moominpappa at Sea shows a possibility for looking at the material world through this ethical lens. This thesis will put these works in conversation by reading both as philosophical works that have nuanced engagement with the topic of how we can be in community with the things that surround us. This thesis argues that it is impossible to have interactions that are devoid of ethics. We are always already in community and therefore our actions always take place in an ethical register. This thesis concludes with an exploration of the ethical relations we already have with our material surroundings and a way to engage more actively with the ethical ecology of the things that surround us.