What Is It Like to Be a Hawk? : Inter-Specific Empathy in the Age of Immersive Virtual Environments

“What is it like to be a bat?”. Asking this question in 1974, American philosopher Thomas Nagel raised the issue of the possibility of a human comprehension of non-human experience. Many years earlier – between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, Jacob von Uexküll had intensely worked around a paradox: on the one side, every animal species is confined within its own perceptual bubble; on the other side, the theoretical biologist must try to understand the world-view as experienced by non-human species. Within this conceptual frame, my paper will address the issue of aesthetic a priori and conditions of possibility of perception. I will propose a comparison between the view from above of the hawk and other aerial views performed by contemporary technical dispositifs such as satellites and drones. In order to question the problem of the sensory filtering of reality, I will finally address bird flight simulators offered by VR technologies.