You can sometimes get tired of the mega best sellers in which a few slogans denounce ‘western thinking’ as a planetary rapist and source of all Evil. That whole thinking would be materialistic, technological, capitalistic and – that too! – binary.
Usually it is opposed to ‘ancient ‘indigenous wisdom’ that can save us from a climate apocalypse, a contradiction that is as crude as it is marketable. Patent example of this trend is the popular science The Web of Meaning (2021) by Jeremy Lent, who serves the reader in bite-sized chunks of solutions from Eastern cuisine to mend the cosmic web that has so ugly tore the West asunder for centuries.
Technology journalist James Bridle also writes on the first pages of Ways of Being. Beyond Human Intelligence that we were expelled from ‘the Garden of Eden’ by – you write in – ‘greed and pride, Aristotle and Descartes, by the idea that people are exceptional and by Western, European philosophy’. An exhaustive treatise on that philosophy and the contributions of Descartes is omitted, but what the heck: calling ‘wrong’ names is enough.
Still, it would be a mistake to close this book right away. Because despite that lazy cliché at the beginning, Bridle has written a sympathetic, interesting and at times inspiring book about intelligence in what he calls ‘the more-than-human world’. Their argument (the author wants to go through life as non-binary) means that intelligence is a more varied and much broader phenomenon in living nature than we are used to thinking. Bridle discusses a series of examples from modern biology, computer science and other disciplines to show that all kinds of animals exhibit intelligent behavior (including criticism of the ‘mirror test’ used to test whether animals recognize themselves). But also plants and trees that supply each other with food in an emergency will come along. Just like intelligent octopuses and elephants, animal languages, rights of nature and non-binary computers. The Netherlands receives an honorable mention for the numerous animal corridors, a contribution to ‘the process of human healing’.
Many of those examples are already known, some even classical, but Bridle smoothly weaves them into a clear and well-written narrative. The moral is that intelligence should no longer be viewed from a human perspective, as something to be ‘tested’, but a broad capability of the ‘more-than-human world’ that we must learn to recognize. That comes close to ‘panpsychism’, the fringe-idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality; but fortunately Bridle only feels that speculative water with one toe in this book. It doesn’t need that to continue to fascinate, despite the false start.
James Bridle: Ways of Being. Beyond Human Intelligence. Allen Lane, 364 pp. euro 23.99
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 24, 2022