Human Logic: Unlearning Anthropocentric Thinking

How do our thinking patterns contribute to environmental and social unrest?

Source: European Space Agency

Despite more people and organisations working on environmental issues than ever before, we appear to be taking one step forward, two steps back. An endless stream of eschatological warnings, from scientists and politicians alike, alert us that it may be too late. Lexical revisions are constantly employed to better convey this wicked problem in the hopes that a better contextualisation of the problem may generate more convincing and effective solutions. We have gone through global warming, greenhouse effect, climate change, climate crisis, ecological collapse, the ever-contested Anthropocene. None of these rebrands have quite stuck, and the perfect term to galvanise us all remains absent.

It may be that the reason why none of the terms employed to make sense of the multifaceted present we currently inhabit have stuck is because ours is a problem that transcends our fixed understandings of environment and our place in it. When we try to mould the world, with all its knotty complexity, into neat forms we can generate unintended consequences that have even more harmful effects than the problem we were trying to solve.

As the laws of thermodynamics dictate, the more order we create, the more opportunity for disorder, or entropy, we propagate. In chaos, lies a tendency toward the emergence of order and in order lies an infinite proclivity for chaos. This is why it is entirely possible to fix the ‘carbon problem’ and at the same time create a world that is still unliveable for billions of people, be it through experimental geo-engineering, with its little-known global impact, or through carbon sequestering monocultures that diminish biodiversity. 

Can we meet the force of this unravelling with a curious mind?

Our existing tools and thinking patterns continue to let us down. What we have deemed the ultimate problem, the climate crisis, is actually one ripple of a wider epistemological problem. Alongside this crisis we have multiple equally consequential ones, social injustice, skyrocketing extinction rates, inequitably distributed prosperity and harm, downward spiralling levels of wellness, and resource scarcity and depletion.

Whilst traditional narratives tell us that we must act urgently, we take the radical stance that taking urgent action without addressing our 2500-year-old thinking modalities may lead to us reproducing the very issues we are trying to resolve. In other words, before changing how we act on the world, we must reimagine how we think.

The Making of Modernity  

The making of modernity thrived on an assumption that the world and its forces should be overcome so that humans could achieve their potential. As we developed tools, farming practices, organised dwellings, architecture, cities, and complex cultures and systems, we moved beyond the need to comply with nature’s cycles and built a world that would behave according to human principles. Anything that was not human became a machine with predictable levers that could be managed according to human will.

This thinking pattern has spread across the world with such force that it seems as if our position in the world and our method for getting there was the most natural thing in the world, as if it were written in our DNA, but where on this star-studded planet has such concrete certainty ever been found?

What follows is a short story of how the development of human logic has contributed to our maladaptive relationship with the world.

As with much Western thinking, the roots can be traced back to around 2,500 years ago, with the emergence of the term ‘nature’. Between the Ancient Romans and the Greeks, the word began to encapsulate that which is devoid of human interference, with culture, that which related to human societies, being framed as its opposite. It wasn’t until Abrahamic religions cemented their hold on recent history, however, that the contours of Anthropocentric approaches to nature as we know it began to be sketched out.

The word Anthropocentrism derives etymologically from the Greek Anthropos (human) and Kenton (centre). When we speak of something being anthropocentric, we refer not to a natural law but to an orientation of values and behaviour. This is what helps us see that privileging the human as a supreme being above others was a construction.

Western theology added yet another level above nature and culture, that of spirit, which was ascribed to individual humans alone, giving them ethereal mastery over nature, culture, and the body. In this framing, mastery over nature therefore became not just an evolutionary trait but a divine order.

Out of this belief, that a supreme creator made humans in their image and that those humans are inferior to the creator but superior to everything else on earth, we adopted a fixed and well-defined starting point with which to address relations in the world. This locked a thinking pattern, fuelled by scientific rationality, that the world would behave in predictable ways. It is an understatement to say that this understanding is being challenged. 

Source: Eric Huybrechts

A Distinction Undone

Can we meet the force of this unravelling with a curious mind? Though our thinking patterns are entrenched, no version of human logic is a species trait, it can be culturally shifted. In fact, although Western modern models of thinking have had deep planetary consequences, they have never been total. Countless cultures across our world have lived with nature as a teacher, existing in symbiosis with its processes and laws.

By moving away from anthropocentric perspectives and embracing interconnected ways of understanding our environments, we can address not only the climate crisis but also the myriads of other intertwined crises we face.

Animism, the belief that nature, its objects, and natural systems are endowed with spirit, in much the same way humans are, has been a prominent belief in pre-modern and contemporary indigenous societies. This practice engenders a flatter hierarchy between humans and nature as both entities have agency and a responsibility to each other so rather than working in a dynamic of subject and object, the interaction becomes one of subject and subject which in turn troubles Western understandings of humans’ place in the natural order.  

Though animism has often been associated with ancient hunter-gatherer existence, it permeates numerous non-Western cultures and philosophies such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. In Japan, the Shinto faith influenced ecological movements towards harmonising the natural communities of plants, animals, and human ideals, driven by microbiologist Minakata Kumagusu and later cemented into Shinto-Animism, a technophilic belief that doesn’t distinguish between natural and artificial objects but denotes that human creations, from tools to robots, are all part of the spiritual universe.

By integrating humans into the wider spiritual and natural world, these philosophies endow humans with a responsibility to follow the natural harmonies that nature has crafted over billions of years. Indeed, thinking beyond this binary distinction has deeply liberatory and expansive consequences such as the philosophies of 16th century Neo-Confucian scholar Yi-I, known by his pen name Yi Yulgok, and 20th century Russian-Ukrainian philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky which contemplated the interconnectedness of human beings and systems as constructive parts of the wider cosmos.

Emerging contemporary movements continue to trouble the distinctions between human, natural, and artificial realms. Transhumanism is a philosophy that has forwarded the transformation of humanity through technology with the rise of AI, medicine, and bioengineering. While this movement unsettles historic binaries, its inheritances from unjust social models can have undesirable consequences. In response, the posthumanist movement challenges what it means to be human with a sensitivity to ecology, ethics, and the interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human.

This is to say that we are not completely devoid of the tools and allies we require to start thinking differently. Simon Herbert and Edward De Bono have challenged traditional methods of thinking and problem solving through their deconstruction of human cognition and contributions to design and lateral thinking. Likewise, the late philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist, Bruno Latour, advocated for the creation of a ‘Parliament of Things’ whereby non-humans, because of their agential force in the world, could be integrated into decision making processes with humans.

There are powerful threads we can pull on to reweave our relationship with the world, but doing so requires a fundamental rethinking of our place within it. By moving away from anthropocentric perspectives and embracing interconnected ways of understanding our environments, we can address not only the climate crisis but also the myriads of other intertwined crises we face. This shift calls for a reimagining of our values, behaviours, and the systems that sustain us.

We must learn from the non-human neighbours, cultures, and philosophies that have thrived in harmony with nature and adopt practices that enrich the intrinsic value of all life. After all, we have a responsibility to evolve in a way that does not impede the evolution of other species and cosmic systems. This transition from anthropocentrism to cosmocentrism carves the truest path to our biosynergistic evolution. 

Author: Dr Ehab Sayed | Editor: Marina Ionita