Ways of Being Alive. Baptiste Morizot
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acting as guides or bears acting as mentors, nor by nourishing forests, insects, or the pre-human ancestors who have carried us this far. Opening up a space to imagine new places for them in our imaginations – for example in the form of rituals without mysticism – is the purpose of the second text in this collection. Animals are not worthy simply of childish or moral attention: they are cohabitants of the Earth, with whom we share an ascent, the enigma of being alive, and the responsibility for living decent lives together. The mystery of being a body, a body that interprets and lives its life, is shared by all living beings: it’s the universal vital condition, and it is this which should summon up the most powerful sense of belonging. The animal is thus a privileged intercessor with the original enigma, that of our way of being alive: it displays an irreducible otherness, and at the same time it is close enough to us for countless parallels and convergences to make their presence felt, with mammals, birds and octopuses, and even insects. These are the creatures who make it possible to reconstruct paths of sensibility to living beings in general, precisely because of their borderline position, their intimate otherness towards us. They allow us to sense, in small steps, our affiliations to plants and bacteria, which lie further back in our common genealogy: relatives so foreign that it is less easy to feel alive in the same way as they do. It requires the equivalent of ferrymen or smugglers: animals are intercessors with this kind of power.
And yet we inherit a conception of the world that has downgraded the animal; this is clearly visible in our language, which crystallizes our mental reflexes. All those expressions – ‘to treat someone like an animal’, ‘they behaved like mere animals’ – the whole ladder of contempt, the whole vertical metaphor of the overcoming of an inferior animal nature within us, can be found even in the most everyday corners of our ethics, of our self-representation. It’s incredible. And yet these expressions rest on a metaphysical misunderstanding. Hence the third text in this collection, which tracks our inner animal nature through the history of a Western morality that enjoins us to tame our wild impulses.
These complicated relationships with animal life partly originate in the stranglehold of a dualist philosophical anthropology, which runs from Judeo-Christianity to Freudianism. This Western conception thinks of animal nature as an interior bestiality that humans must overcome in order to ‘civilize’ themselves or, on the contrary, as a purer primal nature from which they replenish themselves, thereby finding a more authentic wildness, freed from social norms. These two imaginaries seem opposed, while nothing could be less true: the latter is merely the reverse of the former, constructed as a symmetrical and opposite reaction. However, we know that reactive creations simply perpetuate the Weltanschauung of the enemy that is forcing us to react: in this case, the hierarchical dualism that contrasts humans with animals.
Such dualisms always claim to map the totality of the possible, whereas they are never more than the obverse and the reverse of the same coin, and everything outside that coin is obscured, denied, forbidden to thought itself.
What this demands of us is quite mind-blowing. The outside of each term of a dualism is never its opposite term; it is the outside of the dualism itself. Leaving behind all that is Civilized is not to throw oneself into the Wild, any more than leaving Progress implies giving in to Collapse: it means leaving the opposition between the two. It means breaking open the world thought of as their binary and undivided reign. It means entering a world that is not organized, structured, rendered fully intelligible on the basis of these categories. The challenge is to cut like the blade of a sword between the two blocks of dualisms, to emerge on the other side of the world they claim to enclose, and see what lies behind. It’s an art of dodging: we have to fly like a butterfly to avoid being captured by the twin monoliths of Nature and Culture, falling from the Charybdis that is Man with a capital M into the Scylla of the Homogenized Animal, the cult of wild nature as opposed to the cult of the necessary improvement of nature when it needs repair work. We must dance between the ropes, dodging the dualism of animal nature as both inferior bestiality and as superior purity. We must open up a hitherto unexplored space: that of worlds to be invented once we have passed to the other side. We must glimpse them, show them: take a deep breath of fresh air.
In my opinion, then, these two formulations of the problem of the relationship between human and animal nature are false and toxic: animals are not more bestial than us, nor are they freer. They do not embody unbridled and ferocious wildness (this is the animal tamers’ myth), nor do they embody some purer innocence (this is its reactive reverse side). They are not superior to human beings in authenticity or inferior in elevation: what they mainly embody is other ways of being alive.
It is the ‘other’ that is essential. It expresses a whole quiet logic of difference against a background of common ascent. It’s a quiet grammatical revolution that’s happening – the revolution that sees the addition of one little word flourishing in all those everyday sentences: ‘human beings and animals’, ‘the difference from animals’, ‘what an animal does not have’ …
The one little word is ‘other’. ‘The differences between humans and other animals.’ ‘What that other animal doesn’t have.’ ‘What humans have in common with other animals.’
Imagine all the possible sentences and add the word other. A very small adjective, so elegant in its cartographic reconfiguration of the world: it alone reframes both a logic of difference and a common belonging. It traces bridges and open borders between the beings encountered in experience. Nobody will lose anything in the process. It certainly does not allow us to make any in-depth progress when it comes to similarities and differences. It simply makes it possible to naturalize an adequate logic, to avoid a gross error in biological taxonomy, to incorporate (as a civilization) a mental map with far-reaching political repercussions, and to internalize (as individuals) one more quiet truth, one that will join the roundness of the Earth, heliocentrism, evolutionism, the toxicity of neoliberalism, and the idea that democracy is the worst political model … except for all the others.
If we extend this argument, we can in my opinion defend the idea that there is a political effect in the transformation of our relationship with the animal nature of human beings. Our relationship with the animal within us is correlated with our relationship with the living world outside of us. Changing one changes the other. Perhaps this is a psychosocial key to Western modernity, this inability to feel alive, to love ourselves as living beings. If we can accept our identity as living beings, reconnect with our animal nature conceived neither as a primality to be overcome, nor as a purer form of wildness, but as a rich heritage to be welcomed and modulated, we can accept our common destiny with the rest of living beings. If we can accept that humans are not driven by the need for spiritual domination over their animal nature, but by being able to live intelligently with the forces of the living beings within us, we can change our fundamental relationship with the forces of the living world outside of us. This would entail, for example, no longer postulating that ‘Nature’ is deficient and needs to be improved through rational organization, but regaining confidence in the dynamics of living beings – confidence in those ecological and evolutionary dynamics with which we must negotiate different forms of modus vivendi, in part to influence them, and sometimes to modulate them for our needs, but within the horizon of a cohabitation attentive to the ‘adjusted consideration’7 we need to show towards the other life forms that inhabit the Earth with us.
The point is to see the countless forms of animal nature and our countless relationships to them on cultural and political levels as an adult topic. Animal nature is a big question: the enigma of being a human grows clearer, more liveable, and more alive, in the light of the countless animal life forms that face us as enigmas. And the quintessential political enigma of living together in a world of otherness finds other implications, and other resources, in those life forms.
The ecological crisis as a crisis of political attention
But it is clear that openness and sensibility towards living beings, these arts of attention in their own right, are often relegated to the status of bourgeois, aesthetic, or conservative issues by those who campaign for other possible worlds. They are in fact powerfully political matters.