Why You Should be Haunted by Nature’s Physicality
Animism 2.0 and the grotesqueness of modern socialization
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that philosophy has neglected the topic of animism.
One explanation for this lack of interest is that “The modernist view (championed by the likes of Hume, Tylor, and Frazer) according to which animism is an unsophisticated, primitive, and superstitious belief was carried over wholesale into contemporary 20th-century analytic philosophy of religion.”
Modernism here is the old colonial, positivistic view of history, according to which later historical stages are superior to earlier ones. Monotheistic religions are supposedly more sophisticated than animism because those are the religions that accompany technologically developed societies in their marches down the path of secular progress.
But in my view, there’s another reason for the neglect, which is that the strangeness of animism implicitly hits close to home for anyone with a science-centered, naturalistic worldview.
Animistic social interaction
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, “Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world. The person or social group with an ‘animistic’ sensibility attributes sentience — or the quality of being ‘animated’ — to a wide range of beings in the world, such as the environment, other persons, animals, plants, spirits, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon.”
A Westerner steeped in the Christian mindset which takes belief to be crucial to religiosity will be quick to infer that the animist is a panpsychist, that she posits minds or personal spirits everywhere to account for all natural changes. As the latter article says, though, “At first glance, animism seems to conjure up a coherent and deliberate ideology of sorts, as it ends in an ‘ism’. But animism is really more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it.”
The IEP article agrees, in contrasting the modernist, quasi-Christian interpretation — which says that the animist projects mentality onto all natural phenomena to support a proto-scientific practice of magic — with this interactionist interpretation. Instead of an ideology, animism might be a ‘non-propositional, experiential state…The animist does not so much believe of the world that it contains spooky “nature spirits”; rather, she participates in a natural world, which is responsive and communicative. Animism is not a system to which animists relate, but rather it is immanent in their ways of relating.’
Indeed, this interactionist interpretation is supported by even the most sophisticated secularist’s tendency to resort to animistic outbursts in fits of anger, fear, or ecstasy. She’ll treat inanimate objects as though they were alive when circumstances overtake her self-conscious rationality and objectivity. She’ll drop a hammer on her toe and curse the hammer as though the tool deliberately betrayed her. In a foxhole in which she fears for her life, the atheist may start to pray as though the forces of nature were paying attention or cared about the outcome.
This suggests we all have an inherent, if not “primitive” tendency to socialize with anything. In Breaking the Spell, the philosopher Daniel Dennett shows how our capacity for pareidolia — for making sense of patterns by conforming them to our intuitive expectations, and thus for seeing things that aren’t there — accounts for the theistic aspect of religions.
Moreover, the contrast between emotionally free, intuitive, or carefree social interactions with nature, and the austere, “modern,” alienated engagement with the wilderness ties in with the sociological criticisms of our “disenchantment.” As the IEP article says, ‘it is our experience of the world around us which is diminished on the scientistic frame, and this disenchantment can be cured by taking up an animistic frame of experience. Martin Buber is another philosopher who stresses the fundamentally spiritual nature of what he calls the “I-Thou” aspect of experience (a subject-subject relation), which can be contrasted with the “I-It” aspect (a subject-object relation).’
Scientific objectification
Either way, we should distinguish between the real patterns and the animist’s interpretations of them. There’s the behaviour of natural things, their causal powers, cyclicality, and probable reactions, and then there’s the animist’s construal of that behaviour as being animated, as being full of anima, vital force, mentality, intelligence, purpose, and so on.
The real patterns are ambiguous in that they invite the animist’s socializations, but they’re also susceptible to the scientist’s objectifications and disenchantments. Whereas the animist credits natural phenomena more widely as having personalities and intentions that account for their causal potency, the scientist sees only neutered vitality. The animist perceives natural activity as resulting from underlying mental causes or at least she presumes as much in her respectful or resentful handling of natural processes. But the scientist posits only the likes of energy, force, inertia, and godless natural law.
What’s the difference between anima or personality, on the one hand, and energy on the other? “Energy” means the capacity for vigorous activity or the available power. It derives from the Greek, “energeia,” meaning activity, the accomplishing of work. The word “act” is from the Latin “actus,” meaning a doing, a performance or execution of a job. Technically, then, the talk of energy entails an animistic context, an anthropocentric analogy between deliberate human labours and nature’s mindless causality. The clouds don’t perform or execute rainfall, nor do they accomplish any such work. Those root meanings are all human-centered and they imply intentions.
Perhaps the implicit idea in physics is that inanimate objects have energy in that they have the capacity to facilitate the doing of work, meaning that we can exploit those capacities so that we can do some work. We can use rainfall to grow crops. More generally, though, the scientist’s theoretical talk of energy in nature is supposed to be divorced from such root meanings. What matters in scientific language isn’t the intuitive meanings of words, but the model’s tracking of natural quantities and patterns.
What matters in Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² isn’t energy’s subjective impression on us or even its potential to be coopted by our pragmatic projects; at least that’s not what directly matters. What interests the physicist, rather, is energy’s mathematical relationship to matter and to the speed of light. The scientist models a system’s structure, meaning the abstract relationship between certain types.
Thus, the scientist doesn’t refute animism so much as ignore the universe’s apparent or at least possible vitality.
Social domestication and enslavement
Here we see that scientists and modern folk generally have an antisocial relationship with the world. Just as animists may explicitly think of the rain or the moon as having personalities that carry out plans or at least socially relate to them as if they were so alive, we who objectify nature may consciously think of life and mind as being confined to organic bodies, or we may only interact with the rest of nature as though that were so.
The sociologist Max Weber called this “modern” shift in our experience the “disenchantment” of nature, meaning the breaking of its spell on us. It’s not as though we can reach into the depths of the rain, right down to the subatomic properties of water molecules, and confirm that there’s no life there to be found. We can’t even step outside our personal standpoint and inhabit the life of anyone else; at best, we can empathize and imagine what other living things are thinking or feeling. And what we can do is ignore the philosophical question and treat the universe as if we knew that these active, energetic systems and processes were only “objective,” as in lifeless.
Of course, scientific theories entail as much, too, since they explain intelligence as a product of natural evolution and as being dependent on genetic replication, naturally selected bodies, neural complexity, and so forth. If the rain were alive or were worthy of being treated as such, we’d have no scientific justification for that judgment. But modernity goes further in trusting the sufficiency of scientific explanations to support the one-sidedness of our exploitation of nature.
This objectification begins perhaps with the domestication of plants and livestock. Even animals we know are literally alive we enslave and use as tools or vehicles. Later in the history of civilized “progress,” scientists would experiment on animals, using them as disposable bait to aid in our understanding of natural mechanisms or in the development of our technologies. Most humans around the world, too, would eventually be enslaved, treated as nonpersons, sold for profit, and exploited for their manpower.
If we could objectify plants, animals, and even humans, obviously we could bracket the metaphysical and ethical questions of the ultimate source of nature’s creative power, evolved constructs, and cycles, and we could suspend our capacity for universal empathy. There’s what scientific models imply about nature’s lifeless physicality, and then there’s our social commitment to the sufficiency of those models. The latter is more like a rationalization of our vainglorious ambition to dominate each other and the planet.
Due to our creative capacity for metaphorical thinking, we readily treat one thing as though it were something else. Children do this naturally in their play, but adults likewise act out roles in most social engagements. Rarely do we say exactly and exhaustively what we think. We withhold our true feelings and perform our roles on cue, and to entertain ourselves we suspend our disbelief and treat words in a novel or pixels on a screen as representations of edifying or amusing events. We pretend the situation is like this whereas we know it’s literally like that.
That is, we distinguish between literal facts and intended or potential meanings. Literally, a novel is a bunch of squiggles on pages, but we’re trained to recognize those squiggles as having semantic content. Similarly, we know that crops, horses, pigs, cows, chickens, and human slaves are literally alive and capable of feeling pleasure and pain, but we’re trained to treat them as tools and as private property.
Animists, by contrast, were trained in their societies to regard nature as having rights due to the world’s apparent vitality and personal directedness.
Haunted by monstrous physicality
I’ve analyzed the scientific concept of “energy,” but the same points apply to so-called inertia, force, and natural laws. The modern assumption of this sheer physicality is based as much on social training and a leap of faith as on the logic and explanatory power of scientific models.
What exactly are physical energy, force, inertia, and lawfulness, according to the objective conception? What’s a natural system, process, or mechanism minus the animism or the Aristotelian, medieval teleology, or presumption of natural purposefulness? The answer is twofold.
First, there’s the artificiality or abstractness of the scientist’s languages and models that set aside philosophical and religious questions to secure our control over the objectified phenomena. A natural process like the heart’s circulation of blood becomes an adaptation due to natural selection, not work done by the heart’s will, because that’s what the biological theory says, and that theory helps us exploit nature.
Second, there’s what our antisocial behaviour indicates about our attitude towards nature. The forces of nature are no longer the strengths of gods, and natural laws aren’t a supernatural Creator’s dictates. Instead, we treat these regularities as exploitable opportunities. We act as though we know that animism is false or foolish because we prefer to be selfish, self-destructive masters. That’s what capitalism, democracy, technoscientific power, and modern art train us to be.
Note that I’m not suggesting animism or theism is as philosophically justified as naturalism or atheism. The philosophical justification of our beliefs and actions is another matter. All I’m saying here is that there’s a performative aspect of modern objectification.
We free ourselves from one spell only to enthrall us with another one. We ignore the strange realities of the natural order, of how there’s something rather than nothing, and of the universe’s manifest activity and creativity, only to captivate ourselves with exaggerations about our progress. We fantasize that we’re masters of the earth, just as slaveholders presumed they deserved to own slaves, and meat-eating consumers happily forget the suffering that industrial farm animals endure before they’re turned into our food.
The cosmos as our re-enchanted slave
Indeed, the animistic performance threatens to return in a scientific guise. Naturalistic atheism entails pantheism, in my view, and nature’s so-called brute physicality is necessarily monstrous, given the scientific description and our Faustian, quasi-satanic, or Wetiko-like social alignment towards the nonhuman extent of nature.
The trauma proceeds thusly: we presume we’re sophisticated because we’ve amassed so much knowledge and wealth. We take ourselves to have outgrown the animist’s childish imaginings and duped socializations with natural processes, understanding the latter to be impersonal and thus incapable of reciprocating our overtures. We objectify nature with artificial, counterintuitive descriptions and pragmatic models, and with egoistic cultures that rationalize all manner of human brutality.
The upshot is a dark epiphany: impersonal, godless nature reveals itself as monstrous pseudo-life, as a zombie-like self-creator and self-evolver, as mindless, viral pseudo-vitality, as raw power, forcefulness, systematicity, procession, mechanistic complexity, and so on. With every trace of causal regularity that we find, we assume that that entire natural order is replete not with the animist’s friendly or vengeful personhood, with gods or ancestral spirits and the like, but with ghastly states of living-death.
Eliminating the hypothesis of intelligence behind natural laws, for example, doesn’t do away with the palpability of nature’s order. The bruteness of those laws, the lack of any lawgiver or intelligent designer only turns the patterns into weird ghosts that haunt and alienate the modern world that knows as much. All this natural order must happen by itself. For billions of years, this planet has recycled water, circulating it from the seas through evaporation to the clouds, and through rainfall back to the seas, just as the fictional zombie monster gets up and walks, ultimately for no reassuring reason.
The natural laws that “govern” causality are inexplicable brute facts, given atheistic naturalism, just as the zombie shambles in its state of living death by magic. The godless universe isn’t shorn of magic, after all, because scientific objectification is simultaneously nature’s zombification.
The boasts about nature’s disenchantment are greatly exaggerated, as is the alleged irrelevance of animism. We can see, then, why philosophers of religion ignore animism. Modernists think of the world as consisting of an array of objective facts. But this objectification treats us inadvertently to Animism 2.0.
Nature is reenchanted by our ambitions. By construing nature as worthy of being only enslaved rather than befriended or despised, we turn the cosmos into a horrific mystery. We explain how each effect follows from its cause, but only by presupposing the validity of a self-sustaining, purely physical, ultimately mindless, and absurd domain.
The ancient animist relates to natural phenomena as friends, enemies, and family members. The modern quasi-animist relates to those phenomena as his or her captured or unruly slaves. Even if we don’t consciously think of physical events as being magically alive, we seek to conquer nature’s energies, forces, and patterns, to harness them for our exclusive benefit. We attempt to humanize the wilderness with artificial extensions of our minds. Disenchanted nature is reenchanted in so far as it’s zombified by our strategic objectifications and subjugations.
There are some convincing theories there that human intelligence evolved for social intelligence, not tool-making. Example: why do we have more expressive facial muscles than chimps?
Unfortunately this tends to make us a little psychotic. It is the "it is raining, and the universe is trying to tell me something by this" kind of mindset. Conspiracy theories abound, because of story bias, because it is cool to live in a movie and our social intelligence explicitly evolved to detect what Lex Luthor is plotting this day. If I am sympathetic to religion, it is because these natural tendencies need some kind of outlet. If we want to be sane about this world, being crazy about some otherworld can be an acceptable price to pay. Just compartmentalize.
I think this is what the people who considered animism primitive were thinking. Christianity explicitly wants to disenchant, see Augustine on superstition: there are no sacred rocks and trees, there is in fact nothing sacred in this world, except the very rare miracle. Everything sacred is banished to an otherworld. Of course it was a huge, truly huge step towards developing a rational, scientific worldview.
The Germanization of early medieval Christianity did some reenchanting, with relics and all, but then Protestantism ran a powerful disenchanting again. In the mind if the typical 18th century preacher, everything was strictly separated and things wore an explicit label, "divine", "science", "philosophy".