Philippe Descola

When Philippe Descola arrives among the Achuar of the upper Amazon, in the late 1970s, he encounters a people for whom the plants of the garden and the animals of the forest are not resources but persons — partners with whom one speaks, negotiates, dreams. This young anthropologist, the last student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, makes there a discovery that will reorient his entire body of work: the great Western divide between nature (the world of things, governed by laws) and culture (the world of humans, endowed with meaning) is in no way universal. It is our own way of composing the world — one among others.

Four ways of composing a world

In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), Descola proposes a grid of striking elegance. Faced with any being whatever — a tree, a jaguar, a river, a machine — every culture answers, implicitly, two questions: does this being have an interiority similar to mine (a soul, a point of view, a consciousness)? and does it have a physicality similar to mine (a body of the same stuff)? Depending on the answers, four great ways of ordering the real take shape.

Naturalism — ours — grants all beings continuous bodies (the same biology, the same matter) but reserves a true interiority for humans alone: we share the matter of the world, yet we alone are held to have a mind. Animism exactly inverts this distribution: all beings have an interiority (a soul, a point of view), but different bodies. Totemism groups humans and non-humans into classes sharing both interiority and physicality; analogism fragments the world into an infinity of singularities linked by correspondences (astrology, ancient China, Renaissance Europe).

Denaturalising naturalism

The force of this schema is not to draw up an exotic catalogue. It is to make our own ontology appear as an ontology — that is, a situated, historically dated way of carving up what exists. The dualism that seems self-evident to us (subjects on one side, objects on the other; mind on one side, matter on the other) ceases to be the neutral backdrop of any sensible description of the world. It becomes again what it is: a choice, powerful and fertile, but a choice — one that three other great civilisations of thought did not make.

Descola guards against a misreading: to recognise this plurality is neither to sink into relativism (“anything goes”) nor to lapse into an idealism that would forget the all-too-real relations of force. It is to restore naturalism to its place among the possible worlds, rather than to mistake it for the real itself.

What he helps us think

Faced with artificial intelligence, the tool is of rare acuity. Our debates — “does the machine really think? does it really have an interiority?” — play out entirely within naturalism: they assume there is only one correct answer to the question of who, in the world, possesses a mind. Descola does not settle this question; he displaces it. He shows that the very way we sort beings into those “endowed with interiority” and those that are “mere bodies” is an ontological gesture, not a self-evident fact.

This is precisely the sidestep that this site seeks to make thinkable: before asking whether an AI is “really” intelligent, to ask from which division of the world the question is being posed — and whether other divisions might not make our relations to beings, human and non-human alike, more just and more liveable.