Thinking about Bats in Vienna

Konstantin Deininger, Katharina Leibezeder, and I were recently interviewed by Mara-Daria Cojocaru about our contribution to the project "Philosophy in the Wild. Finding Hope in Mixed Communities," a project that between April 2025 and April 2026 will collect fieldnotes and multispecies poetry in an anthrozoological vasculum that represents Mary Midgley’s biscuit tin. Mary Midgley was a philosopher and a writer who thought deeply about ethics and human-animal relations.

(Image credit: Notes from a Biscuit Tin)

At roughly the same time Konstantin and I were talking about how we would like to approach our contribution to Philosophy in the Wild we went on a tour of the Austrian Bat Station, an urban sanctuary in Vienna that cares for and releases injured bats. We listened to Kathy explain the lives of urban bats and the incredible dedication of volunteers to them returned safely to their habitats. Slowly an idea for a project focused on cities, philosophies of hope, and bats started to take hold, and we viewed Philosophy in the Wild as a perfect opportunity to explore connections between our different fields of interest.

In our interview with Mara, we talked about our various encounters with bats in Vienna, including watching them hunt in the evenings, and Konstantin’s experience of finding a severely dehydrated bat in July 2024. We then handed over the reins to Katharina to explain in greater detail some of the urban challenges these creatures face. Katharina explained how bats face different concerns depending on the season and their age, unpacking how their hibernation and social needs as well as urban policies and practices can shape their rehabilitation. Konstantin and I also gave some of our thoughts regarding how we can know bats and what we think of when we say hope, and while these ultimately didn’t make it into the finalized interview, we wanted to return to these questions here, especially considering our team has grown since then. Carlo Salzani, another member of VAS and author of

Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism, is the latest person to join this project and added to our thoughts on these two questions.

Mara: There is a bit of a quarrel between philosophers who side with Nagel and those who don’t. The famous literary character Elizabeth Costello, penned by South African (now I think Australian) novelist J. M. Coetzee, has been said to have been partly inspired by Mary Midgley. Now, Midgley’s view of anthropomorphism and ethology are more complex, but perhaps she would agree with Costello who, in the novel, takes issue with Nagel’s pessimism and says: “If we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?” What are your views on this? And how much does it matter?

I (Claudia) tend to agree with that assessment. While I think it is generally impossible for us to fully comprehend of understand any experience (even our own), I do think that we can tend towards approximation of understanding and empathy. The more work we do to understand different animals’ physiology and psychology as well as the ways in which they organize themselves culturally and socially in the face of environmental demands, then the closer toward understanding them I think we get. I think we can have informed speculations. I’m not sure if Konstantin would agree, he has much more grounding in these areas than me. Konstantin?

I (Konstantin) think that’s a very interesting question—especially since I take Coetzee’s novel to be more a lesson about the failure of empathy than its success. But that’s another issue. I agree with much of what Claudia has said. When it comes to speculation—or the imagination more generally—there are no boundaries. But when it comes to taking the perspective of another animal, for example empathizing with a bat, especially one that navigates the world in such an idiosyncratic way, there are obvious limits.

Any attempt to think oneself into the life of a bat is necessarily, at least to some extent, anthropomorphic. That’s not necessarily a problem. But all these considerations already move us into highly philosophical territory, which, while fascinating, somewhat misses the point of encountering other animals directly. Why do we think it so important that we can imagine their lives? Is it so we can convince ourselves they are not so different from us after all? Personally, I find it more compelling to try to attend to other animals (directly or imaginatively) and be struck by their difference, their alterity—to remain open to wonder.

What I learned from speaking with people at the Austrian Bat Station is that it is possible to form a relationship with a bat and to appreciate her individuality—but it takes time and effort. And I think that kind of active, embodied interaction with other animals is not what Costello’s quote captures; nor Nagel’s criticism of reductionist accounts of consciousness.

I (Carlo) have little to add to what Claudia and Konstantin have said. I would like to emphasize, though, that for Coetzee the failure of empathy – as an attempt to “put oneself in the shoes of the other,” which ultimately ends up, as Nagel argues, in a projection of the self onto the other – opens the possibility for a different kind of encounter, where the subject gets out of itself and tries to meet the other halfway, as it were. The failure of empathy, that is, opens the way for an emptying out of the self that can lead to a more attentive, more respectful, and more just encounter with the other. Elizabeth Costello insists on the “fullness of being” against the disembodied cogito of the Western tradition (and of Nagel’s defeatist position) precisely in order to re-centre our encounters with (animal) otherness not on mind and understanding but rather on bodies and sensations, whereby the self is the result of the embodied encounter.

After all, all attempts of understanding, not only the other, but also oneself, are limited, partial, and ultimately failed (think of Freud).

In a 2015 long interview with Arabella Kurtz (centred on psychoanalysis and fiction), Coetzee stated that all sympathetic/empathetic identifications (including with oneself) have a fiction-like status and can yield only fictional truths – but these are the only truth we can get. In the end the point is not that of understanding the other (the what-it-is-like issue) but of meeting and treating them with justice, care, and love. I take this to be Coetzee/Costello’s true point.

Mara: I love that you are planning a podcast series on ‘hope’. Nick Cave once said: “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” What is your take on hope?

Well, we are figuring that out. I (Claudia) tend to think that for many of us the big words we use like “hope”, “love”, and “care” often sound nice but that we need to spend more time unpacking them and thinking about what work they do. There has been a lot of conversation, for example, about care and animals but sometimes it is also cloaked in a way that justifies doing harm to animals. I am cautious about overly optimistic words, but I am interested in how hope can operate and spaces that can generate hope.

This is also where our interest in the Austrian Station is. It is, I think, a space of hope. Behind the scenes are a dedicated group of people who spend massive amounts of their time and energy in unpaid service of bats. I suspect the more we look into this we might also find despair and frustration, alarm at how people treat bats. But, in the presentation we attended there were also signs of potential hope for the bats in action. The sanctuary itself but also the deployment, for example, of bat accommodation to reduce casualties.

I (Konstantin) agree with Claudia that there are certain pitfalls in using “positive” terms like care or hope, as they can sometimes overshadow the many problematic ways people treat animals. But I don’t understand hope in a naïve sense. Rather, I see it as a productive way of imagining better futures. Hope is not detached from the facts of the world or from our responsibilities. When it comes to urban animals, however, hope can be hard to sustain. Just last year, the hedgehog was added to the international red list as potentially endangered—a disaster. Even more so, as many people don’t even seem to care about that fact. It’s easy to lose hope in humanity when confronted with such widespread indifference to the fate of animals. As understandable as that reaction may be, it risks leading to paralysis rather than action. And this is not what we—including all other not human animals—need. As Claudia notes, there are hopeful institutions, such as the Austrian Bat Station. Through their work, they not only educate the public about bats but also help to inspire productive imaginaries of improved human-animal cohabitation—especially since, as you put it, Mara, cities can serve as catalysts for better human-animal relations. By talking about hope, I want to help to open alternative perspectives—which, hopefully, eventually result in action.

I (Carlo) am not an optimist by nature and the state of the world can indeed lead to hopelessness and despair. There exist, however, everywhere in the world little oases of hope – I think mainly of animal sanctuaries and refuges (like the Austrian Bat Station), which represent a refusal of the status quo and a concrete, material step towards a different world. As Konstantin says, we need an imaginative effort to envision a way out of our bleak present, and imagination, some theories argue, needs a “scaffolding,” some concrete handholds to rest on and enable us to go ahead. Sanctuaries and refuges are for me this scaffolding, what Claudia calls “institutions of hope,” and in them I put my hope. Though I do have “a broken heart” (how could one not?), I try not to let this paralyze me, and therefore I look at these institutions of hope to help me go on.

So, for us (Caro, Konstantin, and Claudia) being part of Philosophers in the Wild is the beginning of a much larger and more complex conversation about the relationships between urban animal studies, bat futures, and philosophies of hope. We look forward to expanding on these over the course of the year and exploring some of them in a workshop that brings together policy, bat ecology, and poetry. But more to come on that soon!

Some stories from the Austrian Bat Station (Credit: fledermaus_station_oesterreich Instagram page)