Vinciane Despret: “To combat species decline, we need passions of joy”

Interview by Agnès Bardon (UNESCO) for The UNESCO Courier

 

For centuries, the Western philosophical tradition has promoted the superiority of humans over animals. When did this view begin to change? 

French philosophy is dominated by a view that animals have no soul and by the idea of human exceptionalism. This view has largely determined our behaviour towards animals, whether it is the way we eat them, imprison them or constrain them.  It is reflected in the very structure of language. When we talk about animals, we tend to use syntactic constructions that make them passive beings. We say that they are determined, that they are acted upon by their hormones, their impulses, by biological or ecological factors. In his book Melodie: A memoir of love and longing, the Japanese-born author Akira Mizubayashi wonders what words he should use to talk about his dog when he speaks in the language of Descartes, which was forged against animals. 

The behaviourist tradition has had the effect of mechanizing animals. This is particularly evident in experiments with rats. When we study learning in this animal, we are not trying to determine its specific skills but to produce a typically human type of learning. A rat released into a maze demonstrates the memory of a pupil memorising a lesson, because it is not allowed to use its own methods – leaving scents in certain places – to find its way around. The mechanization of animals in behaviourism has had important consequences, because its methods can turn an intelligent animal into a clockwork toy if we only get it to press levers.

It was not until the early 1990s that this vision of the animal machine began to be questioned, thanks in particular to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his book The Animal that Therefore I Am, he stigmatizes the lack of curiosity shown by philosophy towards animals. He denounces what he calls “interested ignorance”, which has led philosophers to write about animals without really trying to get to know them. Without this ignorance, our relationships with them would have been very different. 

Your work on animals, which is now widely recognized, was initially greeted with some scepticism. How do you explain this mistrust in the scientific community?  

Animals are problematic subjects for the humanities. The French anthropologist Albert Piette has shown that the study of religion and the study of animals, however far apart these subjects may be, present the same difficulties for those who study them. If you take seriously the fact that God exists, you are doing theology. If you are not interested in God but in his representation, you are doing sociology. The study of animals poses a similar problem: either you talk about animals as such and your work is science – zoology or veterinary science for example – or you consider their symbolic dimension from a social or cultural perspective. Some of my work has been received with suspicion because I wanted to work in the field of philosophy, but on real animals and not on their representation. It is worth noting that it has most often been women who have explored problematic subjects because they had little taste for lofty subjects, such as the question of animality or religion. Being marginalized themselves, to an extent, they had more room for manoeuvre. 

Recent discoveries have revealed that animals have abilities that we would never have expected. What consequences might these discoveries have? 

It is more interesting to consider animals as having agency because it allows us to enter a different conceptual framework, leaving room for intentionality. The observed phenomena can then give rise to new interpretations.  If you see animals as beings driven solely by the need to survive and reproduce, you miss out on a whole range of social and cognitive skills that they employ. 

This is even more the case because many forms of animal behaviour are extremely discreet. For example, I had the opportunity to observe the Arabian Babbler (Argya squamiceps), a bird that lives in the desert. If one of them – male or female – decides to mate with another, the group must not know about it because as a rule only the alpha male and female reproduce. To achieve this, the Babbler has to use a very elaborate strategy, which consists of taking a small piece of straw and pointing it very slightly in the direction of the potential partner so that a dialogue can take place between them. But this relationship will escape you completely if you can’t imagine that birds are capable of such behaviour. 

The great British primatologist Thelma Rowell, who has transformed our understanding of baboons, questioned our interest in apes and their cognitive abilities. She asked herself the following question: is it because they are our closest cousins that we have asked monkeys interesting questions and sought to highlight their intelligence? Conversely, sheep are generally thought to be stupid, but perhaps that’s just because we haven’t tried to investigate their intelligence. Good scientists advance by formulating several hypotheses.  

In your latest book, Autobiography of an Octopus, you take the route of fiction by imagining that wombats, spiders and octopuses send us coded messages. Is fiction a way for you to push your thinking further? 

I associate fiction with play. But play is what frees things from their being. My pen can become a sword, my dog a horse, a piece of paper a plane. In fiction, it becomes possible to free oneself from certain constraints of reality and to make them act differently, to emancipate the possibilities that were swarming under the surface and that we did not see. 

Fiction also allows us to take things further and explore situations that have not yet occurred. Only twenty years ago, scientists totally rejected the idea of animal culture on the grounds that it could only be a human reality. Today, with hindsight, we wonder how we could have been so stupid. 

Similarly, no one believed in the possibility of semantic and syntactic use of language in birds. We thought that they used emotional onomatopoeia and ruled out the possibility that there could be words for one predator or another. Language could only be human. Here again, we could laugh at our ignorance. 

Fiction is a way for me to imagine what we will be laughing about in fifty years’ time. Through these science fiction stories about the wombat and the octopus I have tried to give these animals a little more intentionality. This may not be the direction in which science will go, but it is in any case a way of opening up possibilities. It is also a way of anticipating the laughter that our current lack of knowledge will provoke, not to escape it but to say that we are aware that one day someone will laugh at our current mistakes. 

Year after year, scientific reports provide a gloomy chronicle of the decline of life on Earth. Why are we still so insensitive to the disappearance of species? 

It is extremely useful to talk about extinctions in terms of numbers. Extinctions need to be documented – this is a precondition for raising the alarm about what is happening, but it is not enough, because the figures do not move us. This is a fact. We are not affected in our bodies by these disappearances because we are so urbanized that we no longer have much contact with the living world. For example, we realized a few years ago that the windscreens of our cars were no longer covered with insects, but we didn’t understand what that meant. We didn’t make the connection with other phenomena. 

Emotions are what the new ecological class lacks, according to the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. Historically, the left has relied on the emotions of emancipation, justice, and progress, which have all been vectors of mobilisation. The right has also been able to cultivate emotions linked to the ideas of values and grandeur. But what are the emotions of the ecological class, the class that has to fight against the Anthropocene? 

A number of researchers are now working to answer this question. The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, for example, has coined the concept of solastalgia to describe the pain of no longer recognising the place where one has lived because it has been too damaged. It is a powerful emotion. Art historian Estelle Zhong and philosopher Baptiste Morizot are young French researchers exploring how emotional toolkits help us attune to the state of the world. The difficulty is that we have to go beyond gloomy passions, which are paralysing, and be able to identify joyful passions too. 

In her book Hope in the Dark, American writer Rebecca Solnit encourages us to remember past struggles to avoid becoming discouraged. We tend to forget that many victories have been achieved through struggle. Rekindling the memory of these struggles is also a source of joyful passions.