The logic of value in Descola’s four ontologies: drawing implications for the future of humanity.

Abstract

The French anthropologist Philippe Descola, in his seminal 2005 work “Beyond Nature and Culture” has contributed to a profound rethinking of the relationship between humans and other beings in the world, by conducting a systematic comparison of the ontological assumptions underlying the cosmologies of hundreds of ethnic groups recorded in the ethnological literature. Through this comparative work, he constructed a typology of four basic types of ontologies, and uncovered their basic logic in terms of identity and difference, interiority and exteriority: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. Each of these ontologies involves a radically different relationship between humans and the world. Classical Chinese cosmology is a paradigmatic example of analogism, while the Western scientific worldview is a paradigmatic case of naturalism. Many contemporary cultures, such as China’s, have accumulated a sedimentation of different ontologies. In this presentation, I will explore the implications of Descola’s typology for an understanding of human values. Each ontology is associated with a specific type of anxiety, and a solution to the anxiety which becomes the core of a specific system of values: maintaining relationships in animism, harmonising a fractured world in analogism, and dominating an unknown world in naturalism. I will end by reflecting on how these ontologies and values can contribute to an emerging poly-ontological global civilisation.