By ‘crisis of sensibility’ I mean an impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive, and understand of living beings, and the relations we can weave with them – a reduction in the range of affects, percepts, concepts and practices connecting us to them. We have a multitude of words, types of relationships and types of affects to describe relationships between humans, between collectives and between institutions, with technical objects or with works of art, but far fewer words for our relations to living beings. This impoverishment of the scope of our sensibility towards living beings, of the forms of attention and of the qualities of openness towards them, is both an effect and one of the causes of the ecological crisis we face.
A first symptom of this crisis of sensibility, perhaps the most spectacular, is expressed in the notion of the ‘extinction of the experience of nature’2 proposed by the writer and lepidopterist Robert Pyle: the disappearance of the daily relationships we can experience with living beings. One recent study shows that a North American child aged between four and ten years old is able to recognize and distinguish more than a thousand brand logos at a glance, but cannot identify the leaves of ten plants from his or her region.3 The ability to distinguish between the different forms and styles of existence of other living beings is overwhelmingly being redirected towards manufactured products, and this problem is compounded by a very low sensitivity to the beings that inhabit the Earth with us. To react to the extinction of experience, to the crisis of sensibility, is to enrich the range of what we can feel and understand of the multiplicity of living beings, and the relations we can weave with them.
There is a discreet but deep connection between the enormous contemporary disappearance of field birds, documented by scientific studies, and the ability of a human ear to make sense of urban bird song. When a Koyukon Native American hears the cry of a crow in Alaska, the sound works its way into him and, through the cluster of memories, simultaneously brings back to his mind the identity of the bird, the myths that tell of its customs, the common filiations between bird and human and their immemorial alliances in mythical time.4 There are crows everywhere in our cities, their calls reach our ears every day, and yet we hear nothing, because they have been turned into beasts in our imaginations: into ‘nature’. There is something sad about the fact that the ten different bird songs that we hear every day do not reach our brains other than as white noise, or at best evoke a bird’s name, empty of meaning – it’s like those ancient languages that no one speaks any more, and whose treasures are invisible.
The violence of our belief in ‘Nature’ is manifested in the fact that the songs of birds, crickets and locusts, songs in which we are immersed every summer as soon as we move away from the city centre, are experienced in the mythology of modern people as a restful silence. But, for whoever seeks to translate them, to release them from being just white noise, they comprise myriads of geopolitical messages, territorial negotiations, serenades of intimidation, games, collective pleasures, challenges laid down, wordless negotiations. The smallest flowery meadow is a caravanserai – cosmopolitan, multilingual, multispecies, and buzzing with activity. It’s a spaceship on the edge of the universe, where hundreds of different life forms meet and establish a modus vivendi, communicating through sound. On spring nights, we hear the laser songs of nightingales echoing through this spaceship, fighting without violence, competing in beauty to attract their female companions who have followed them in their migration and wander at night through the woods in search of their males; we are surprised by the barking of the deer, the guttural rumbling of intergalactic beasts, howling the despair of desire.
What we call the ‘countryside’ on a summer evening is the noisiest, most colourful souk, populated by many species, stirring with industrious energy; it’s a non-human Times Square on a Monday morning – and the moderns are crazy enough, their metaphysics is complacent enough, to see in it a resourceful silence, a cosmic solitude, a peaceful space. A place empty of real presences, and silent.
Leaving the city, then, does not mean moving away from noise and nuisance into a pastoral idyll; it isn’t a matter of going to live in the countryside, it’s about going to live in a minority. As soon as nature is denaturalized – no longer a continuous flat area, a one-room stage setting, a background against which human tribulations are played out – and as soon as living beings are translated back into beings and no longer seen as things, then the cosmopolitanism of many species becomes overwhelming, almost unbreathable, overwhelming for the mind: human beings have become a minority. This is healthy for the moderns, who have adopted the bad habit of transforming all their ‘others’ into minorities.
From a certain point of view, it is true that we have lost a certain sensibility: massive urbanization, i.e. the fact of not living on a daily basis in contact with many different life forms, has deprived us of the powers of tracking – and I mean tracking in a philosophically enriched sense, as sensibility and openness to the signs of other life forms. This art of reading has been lost: we ‘can’t see a thing’, and the challenge lies in reconstructing paths of sensibility, in order to start learning to see again. If we do not see anything in ‘nature’, it is not only because of our lack of ecological, ethological and evolutionary knowledge, but because we live in a cosmology in which there is supposedly nothing to see, in other words nothing to translate: no meaning to interpret.5 The whole philosophical issue ultimately lies in making it clear and obvious that there is indeed something to see, and rich meanings to translate, in the living environments that surround us. But we need merely take this one step further for the whole landscape to be recomposed. Hence the first text in this collection, which takes the reader on an expedition tracking a pack of wolves through the snows of the Vercors – something between an ethological thriller and an account of a first contact with alien life forms.
The idea of a ‘loss’ of sensibility is, however, ambiguous in its very formulation. The misunderstanding in this idea amounts to the fact that it seems to harbour something like a nostalgic primitivism, which is irrelevant in this case. Things weren’t necessarily better before, and it’s not about going back to ways of living naked in the woods. The point is to invent these ways of life.
Animals as intercessors
Another symptom of the crisis of sensibility, now almost invisible as we have so fully naturalized it, is evident in the category to which we confine animals. Apart from the question of the way we treat cattle (which are not the whole animal realm, nor even typical of it), the great invisible violence of our civilization towards animals is to have made them into figures for children: to be interested in animals isn’t serious, it’s sentimentality. It’s for ‘animal lovers’. It’s regressive. Our relationships with the nature of animals and the animal kingdom are infantilized, primitivized. It’s insulting to animals, and it’s insulting to children.
Our range of sensibility towards animals is reduced to something elastic and amorphous – an abstract and vague beauty, or an infantile figure, or an object of moral compassion. The ethnography of the relationship between humans and living beings among the Tuvans of the Far North, as described by Charles Stépanoff, or the Runa of the Amazon Basin as discussed by Eduardo Kohn, displays an infinitely richer, more plural, nuanced and intense multiplicity: in these environments, animals inhabit the dreams, imaginations, practices and philosophical systems of the natives.6
Our imagination for life forms