One species has been transformed into a material backdrop for its trials, the 10 million other species that make up its extended family, its giving environment, and its daily cohabitants. More specifically, it is a small population of this species that has done this, the carrier of a purely historical and local culture. Making all other living things invisible is a provincial and late phenomenon – not the product of humanity as a whole. Imagine a people approaching a land populated by countless other kindred peoples, declaring that they don’t really exist, and that they are the stage and not the actors (ah yes, it’s not a fiction that requires a lot of imagination, since it also covers large parts of our history). How did we accomplish this miracle of blindness to the other creatures of the living world? We could risk here – to exacerbate the strangeness of our heritage – a rapid history of the relationships between our civilization and other species, a history leading to the modern state: once non-human living things were ontologically degraded (that is, considered endowed with a second-order existence, of lesser value and less consistency, and thus transformed into “things”), people came to believe that only they really existed in the universe.
Judeo-Christianity was simply necessary to expel God from “nature” (this is the hypothesis of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann), to make nature profane, and then the scientific and industrial revolutions to transform the remaining nature (the scholastic house) in a matter devoid of intelligence or of invisible influences, available for extractivism, for people to find themselves as lonely travelers in the cosmos, surrounded by stupid, evil matter. The last act involved breaking off the last kinship: only in the face of matter did man nevertheless remain in vertical contact with God, who sanctified it as his creation (natural theology). The death of God brings with it a terrible and perfect loneliness, which we might call the anthropo-narcissistic prison.
This false clarity about our cosmic loneliness sealed the serene exclusion of all non-human beings from the realm of the ontologically relevant. It explains the ‘prison house’ of the philosophy and literature cultivated in the great European and Anglo-American capitals. My choice of this expression is not arbitrary: not only are these fields now a prison or ‘closed room’ in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit” – but also the prison is the world itself, the universe, which alone populated by us and the pathological relationships with our fellow humans that accompany the disappearance of our multiple, affective and active ties to other living beings, non-human animals and environments.
This ubiquitous theme in 20th-century literature and philosophy, which brings to the fore man’s cosmic loneliness, a loneliness elevated to grandeur by existentialism, is intriguingly violent. Under the guise of the heroism of the absurd (as Albert Camus defined it), under the guise of the courage to face the truth, this violence is a form of blindness that refuses to learn to see the existences of others, their existence denies. status as cohabitants, stating that in fact they have no communication skills, no native senses, no creative point of view, no predisposition to mode vivendi, not political hunches. And this is the great cunning, and therefore the hidden violence of Western naturalism, which aims in fact to justify the exploitation of all nature as a raw material available for our civilization project – it means treating others as matter ruled by biological laws, refusing to see their geopolitical hunches, their vital alliances and all the ways we share with living beings a large diplomatic community in which we can learn to live again.
The human subject alone in an absurd universe, surrounded by pure matter at hand as a stockpile of resources, or a haven for humans to spiritually recharge their batteries, is a fantastic invention of modernity. From this point of view, those great thinkers of emancipation, Sartre and Camus, who probably imbued their ideas deeply into the French tradition, are the objective allies of extractivism and the ecological crisis. It is intriguing to reinterpret these discourses of emancipation as vectors of great violence. Yet it was they who transformed the myth that we are only free subjects in a world of inert and absurd objects into a fundamental belief of late humanism, doomed to give meaning through our consciousness to a living world devoid of them. .
This myth took from that world something it had always had. The shamanists and animists described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola know very well what this lost state entailed, namely complex social relationships of reciprocity, exchange and predation that are neither peaceful nor peaceful, and that do not follow Isaiah’s prophecy, but are political in a still puzzling phrase, and call for forms of pacification and reconciliation, of mutualistic and thoughtful cohabitation. After all, there are meanings everywhere in the living world: they do not have to be projected, but found with the means at our disposal: translation and interpretation. It’s all about diplomacy. We need interpreters, intermediaries and intermediaries to start talking to living beings again, to overcome what we might call the curse of Claude Lévi-Strauss: the inability to communicate with the other species with which we share the earth. “For in spite of the ink spilled by the Judeo-Christian tradition to hide it, no situation seems more tragic, more insulting to heart and mind, than that of a humanity coexisting, sharing the joys of a planet with other living species. , but who is unable to communicate with them,” Lévi-Strauss said in conversation with Didier Eribon.
But this impossibility is a fiction of the moderns – it helps justify the reduction of living things to commodities in order to sustain global economic exchanges. Communication is possible, it has always taken place; it is surrounded by mystery, by inexhaustible riddles, also by untranslatable aspects, but ultimately by creative misunderstandings. It doesn’t have the fluidity of a cafe conversation, yet it’s rich in meaning.
As enigma among other riddles, the human way of life only makes sense if it is intertwined with the myriad other ways of life demanded by the animals, plants, bacteria and ecosystems all around us.
The always intact enigma of humanity is richer and more poignant when we share it with other life forms in our large family, when we pay attention to them, and when we do justice to their otherness. This interplay of kinship and otherness with other living beings, the common causes they promote in the politics of life, is part of what makes the ‘mystery of life’, of being human, so inexhaustible.
Baptiste Morizot is a writer and philosophy teacher at the University of Aix-Marseille in France who studies the relationship between humans and other living things. His many books include: Ways to live and Reviving Life: A Common Frontboth published in English by Polity Books.
This fragment is an adaptation of Ways to live by Baptiste Morizot and originally published in French by Editions Actes Sud © Actes Sud, 2020. It was translated into English by Andrew Brown and published by Polity Books in 2022. This excerpt has been edited and produced for the web by Earth | Food | To livea project of the Independent Media Institute.
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