In a highly striking photograph by Andres Serrano entitled Cabeza de vaca, the profile of a calf with a neck stained by blood is presented on a marble pedestal, as if laid out on a butcher’s display, its eye turned to the side, fixed on the viewer.
The photograph embodies a modern—what I would call a naturalist—conception of the animal: far from bearing witness to a complicity with the humans who gaze at it, or delivering a judgment upon them, Cabeza de vaca’s eye dethrones the bovine’s alterity by pointing to a likeness with a human gaze. Rosa Bonheur does the same with the animals she paints. Whether cows, lions, or dogs, one cannot escape the interiority of a human-type that expresses itself in the eye that scrutinizes us. To paint their portrait, it was essential that they become analogous to what portraits of people—the man, the woman, the child—ordinarily depict. The triumph of naturalism, the painting of the soul once reserved for humans alone, now extends to animals, not to indicate what would make them similar to us—because naturalists generally still believe in a natural difference between human and non-human animals—but to remove their inscrutable otherness: if they reveal interiority in their gaze, it is not that they possess a mind like ours, but that their body is of the same nature as ours. Like us, they eat, drink and copulate; like us, they are exposed to rain, and they suffer from cold or heat; it is this shared mode of existence that their gaze communicates.
We could not be farther from Amazonian animism. If the forest’s animals all possess interiority, it does not show itself in their gaze but in discourse, that is, in the form least intuitive there is. For every kind of being—plant, animal, human, or spirit—embodies its interiority in a body that is its own, irreducible to the laws of biology, and thus in a life-space where its own dispositions can freely unfold, each feeding on or being fed by others. Alterity here is radical, except in the dream space where beings other than humans become persons because they present themselves to us as they imagine themselves to be, namely as humans. Not as beasts with a human gaze, but as humans with beasts’ manners. The danger of solipsism, the curse of distinct bodies, is then set aside since one can converse wholeheartedly with the animals we hunt or that hunt us and whose cunning one must, in daily life, imitate. No anthropomorphism here, no desire to render animals like humans, but a vigorous longing to rediscover, behind the difference of bodies that mythical spéciation established, a continuity now erased between once-common uses and what exchanges of words can fleetingly resurrect.
That said, there can also exist, within an animist regime, attachments between a human and an animal as animal. Across the Amazon, indeed, the young of game are adopted and treated like orphans. When a nursing mother is slain, the hunter will gather her offspring and entrust them to his wife, who will nurse them at her breast, or, if they are birds, feed them by mouth. Raised from a very young age, these animals acquire an ethological imprint, of the type described by Konrad Lorenz, and thus develop a deep attachment to the person who fed them. Amerindian houses in the Amazon are Noah’s Arks filled with very different species, driven to interact with one another in an almost playful mode within the domestic space where they are rarely hindered, yet they remain eternally orphans and children. Every precaution is taken to prevent their reproduction in captivity. They are therefore singularities. They are neither mistreated nor eaten after death if they are edible. Simply, they become part of the family, in the broad sense.
In that sense, they are pets, somewhat different from our domestic animals, because humans are never their owners since, by adoption, they have been removed from the control of the spirits known throughout the animist archipelago as “the masters of the game.” These spirits are seen as shepherds of the game, delivering to humans the animals on which they feed in exchange for respecting certain conditions. Notably not hunting to excess, not causing suffering to the game, compensating the animals killed with offerings, etc. Although temporarily removed from the control of the masters of the game, these tamed animals remain under their sway. That is why anyone who mistreats them or fails to respect the hunting ethic incurs the vengeance of the masters of the game, which can manifest in a very concrete form, such as a snake bite, for instance, or a drowning in a river.
Thus, it is a relationship to animals that is very different from ours, in which they are not anthropomorphized, i.e., transformed into quasi-humans—through the gaze we cast on them or by making them allegories in fables and tales; but paradoxically, one continually converses with them as if they were alter egos. Wittgenstein’s classic proposition, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” is, in this sense, a typical expression of naturalist thinking: the world of a lion is inaccessible to us who do not share it. Yet it loses its force in an animist regime, in which animals present themselves to us every night in dreams in human form to exchange in the language of humans who speak to them, a universal language across species and cultures, made so by being uttered in this suspended space between worlds that dream affords us to inhabit. When animals thus manifest themselves, they spell out their identity, explain who they are, to which species they belong, in order to forge or strengthen with the dreamer connections of all kinds, which are, of course, somewhat deceptive bonds, because these are animals we will hunt. A mutual understanding forms, based on sharing an interiority allotted to all living beings.
Just as there is no universal animality, there is no universal humanity, at least for an anthropologist. Each human collective crafts its own notion of humanity, grounded in how it defines what a human being is in relation to other beings in its surroundings, depending on the types of continuity and discontinuity humans discern among these beings and themselves. In the animist world, for example, there is little point in speaking of humanity in general, given that plants, animals, and spirits, though each equipped with its own species-specific body, are persons who conceive themselves as humans. Human and non-human collectives take the form of what I call species-tribes, that is, sorts of “societies” sharing institutions but defined by the sharing, within each of them, of particular physical dispositions that enable them to inhabit specific worlds. The various human species-tribes are therefore forms of humanity whose members possess a human body pre-determined by attributes perceived as “natural” and unique to each species, that is, adornments, ornaments, body paintings, tools, weapons, including language, a habitat, etc. These attributes, which we Moderns view as “cultural,” are perceived in animist mode as nearly biological means of acting in the world—just as a toucan has a large beak to pick fruit, or an anteater a tongue to capture ants. Every form of life has a nature of its own that enables it to affect the world it is predisposed to inhabit. The same goes for humans with bodies augmented by traits that differ according to the species-tribe to which they belong. There is therefore not one humanity, but different forms of humanoid life that transcend the cut we make between humans and other-than-humans.
Let us turn to another kind of collective. The collectives I have called analogists are founded on the idea that the world is composed of an infinity of disparate elements among which one must be able to weave correspondences through analogical thinking, hence the name I give them. They appear in our recent past, from the medieval era through the Renaissance and Antiquity, or in the Far East. They are socio-cosmic universes where “society” is infinitely inclusive, extending to the limits of the cosmos. A good illustration of the architecture of these worlds is the classical medieval metaphysical figure known as the great chain of being. This chain links all beings to one another, from the most perfect, God, to the humblest creatures, with micro-variations between each link. In a sense, Montaigne remained part of a world of this kind when, in the Apology of Raymond Sebond, he notes that all animals have faculties analogous to ours, but to a different degree, that they do not differ from us by nature, but by gradations of qualities along a continuous chain. Within this whole, humanity struggles to take shape. Of course, it exists; certain signs allow it to be distinguished from angels or animals, but it does not have a dominant form by which to define the rest of beings by exclusion. The humanity that characterizes us, we Moderns, took its stature with the Enlightenment philosophy, which we still carry and from which it is hard to extricate ourselves.
Regarding artificial intelligence, which really does not fall within my domain of expertise, it seems to me that it is the illustration of naturalism fully realized, in every sense. It is the inverse of animism: humans are the only beings in the world with interiority, but the existence of all, including humans, falls under the same set of natural laws. Yet the ontology of naturalism has always been haunted by a contradiction: the moral and cognitive exceptionalism attributed to humans does not fit with the fact that all elements of the world are subject to the same laws, that we are physical beings. Descartes explains this inconsistency by positing the existence of God: He decided to grant a soul to humans, so that cannot be debated. However, what is called the naturalist program, which has developed over the last few decades in philosophy and neuroscience, has tried to resolve this contradiction by conceiving consciousness as an emergent property of the neural system, a kind of quasi-illusion. Everything must be explainable by reference to biological processes. In a sense, artificial intelligence acts as an empirical verification of naturalism, in that the unique character of consciousness and human intellectual activity can now be imitated by a machine. There is therefore no longer any moral or cognitive singularity of humanity. Our exceptionalism makes sense only because we have been able to build these machines that imitate us.