Publish at October 04 2022 Updated October 04 2022
"The mutual love of mother and child ultimately decides the new status of the child, transcending biological parasitism into affective symbiosis."
Edgar Morin
The Western mind slices the world thinly, reputedly from then on graspable and intelligible. It very often favors the complicated over the complex. The result is well-oiled, mechanical thoughts, out of the living. This thought, often qualified as Cartesian in memory of one of its most famous defenders, René Descartes, teaches us to untie ourselves from the world and to think as a subject distanced from its object of observation. This thought philosophically consecrates the idea of domination over the living carried by religion, in particular by the Jews and Christians invited to conquer the earth. Thus, in the book of Genesis 1.27 it is written
"God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth...."
A separation then creeps into people's minds between the one who dominates and the one who is dominated that will accompany hierarchical organization, colonialist thinking, and numerous wars.
With the notion of verticality (of up and down), of above and below, of heaven and earth, of heavenly paradise and subterranean hells, of good and evil, religion, especially Christian, offers its share of metaphors for vertical, sequential and binary reasoning. The "logic of the or" is gradually established. Things are thus true or false. There are no half measures.
For scholars it is a matter in a first movement of learning to discern and then in a second to recreate links or (re)perceive flows when the very tool of the worldview is a machine to fragment and requires an effort to put the pieces back together. In nature, however, the living is part of a continuum of interrelation. All phenomena are interdependent, interrelated and mutually coextensive. It is "the logic of the and" that prevails. The flows are constantly composed and untied. A thing is true one moment and false the next. This is also what science says, which proceeds by affirmation until proven otherwise.
Ecology is defined as "the science of the interdependencies between living beings resulting from the relationships they have with each other".
The relationships in living things are described as parasitism (one organism takes advantage of the other for its own benefit or even thrives at its expense), commensalism (the two organisms in relationship do not derive any observable benefit from the relationship), mutualism (the two organisms pool their resources), or symbiosis (emergent properties emerge, often intertwining organic materials).
The closest interdependencies are symbioses.
"Symbiosis is a term meaning "living together." It describes an ecological relationship between two organisms of different species that are in direct contact with each other."Futura Sciences
Symbiosis is also a way of life that increases the strength of entities by uniting them with others in more efficient units. Each stakeholder in the symbiosis contributes to form a symbiont.
The symbiont is therefore the addition of the heritage of the two united organisms. The symbiont allows to achieve performances that neither of the 2 partners would succeed alone.
At the end of the 19th century, the studies are raging about the union of lichens or algae. Butor 2019 describes symbiotic relationships between algae and fungi. After several weeks of growing together, algal cells are observed inside the fungal cells. Symbiosis occurs at the cell level itself. The conclusion posits that other such close associations are possible in nature for organisms in the same environments.
The opposite of symbiosis is the antibiosis "Any biological relationship in which, according to Vuillemin "one living being destroys another to ensure its own existence." An antibiotic that comes to destroy life participates in antibiosis.
Bacteria and humans get along well and live in reciprocal fate. All in all, it is 7 kilos of bacteria that move with the human we think we are.
Humans and animals live specific relationships of domestication, companionship and even reciprocal empathy, with the contemporary idea of sentient animals; the animal is much more than a beast.
Even though they can live independently of each other, and are therefore not fused, the bonds of complicity of human and animal, the mutual effects of one on the other in the emotional register are remarkable. Humans would enjoy the benefits of a symbiosis with their pets. Their frequentation would direct their behavior, in particular by lengthening their lifespan, their health and even their self-confidence. Dialogues without words open up to emotional listening.
In the history of dog domestication, the mutual services provided of security, protection, feeding, care have continued to deepen
Is it possible to observe symbioses in learning? Is this characteristic concept of the living transposable to human ideas? In any case research in the educational sciences evokes the living as a model.
Looking at the way primitive peoples coexist with nature and its prodigious gifts, it is possible that part of our inherited knowledge comes from this symbiotic link with nature.
Yet this knowledge of being symbiotic is disappearing from tribes such as the Bushmen, the Awas of Brazil, the African Mursis of the Great Rift, the reindeer-breeding Tsaatans of Mongolia, the Ladakhi Indian tribe, the Huaorani who defend themselves against gold diggers. All these tribes and their symbiotic know-how with the living are disappearing.
Some attribute to Pope Francis a societal inspiration of the know-how of Andean societies. In Quechua, this buen vivi is expressed as sumak kawsay, sumak meaning "fullness, sublime, magnificent" and kawsay "life or truly being." This phrase evokes a holistic worldview, in which "human beings are considered an integral part of nature."
In modern struggles proclaim "fertile disobedience," activists take refuge in the forests to protect them. They form themselves into new tribes and seek more connection if not symbiosis with nature.
A new philosophy would even take hold and presages an evolution from liberalism to symbiotism with human, just, benevolent and fraternal relationships. For those who think this is a utopia, would they have imagined that the racial segregation at work in the USA, India or other countries 50 years ago could disappear?
The "symbiotic economy," imagined by ecologist Isabelle Delannoy, would be an alternative to capitalism. It would involve generative learning emanating from the encounter between humans and their environments.
Sources
Futura sciences. Definition of symbiosis https://www.futura-sciences.com/planete/definitions/nature-symbiose-260/
Wikipedia Symbiosis https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiose
Cristol, D. (2019). Chapter 3. Learning a critical concept in management science? In: Soufyane Frimousse ed, Learning for performance (pp. 35-50). Caen: EMS Editions. https://doi.org/10.3917/ems.frim.2019.01.0035
Perru, O. (2006). The origins of symbiosis research circa 1868-1883. History of Science Review, 59, 5-27. https://doi.org/10.3917/rhs.591.0005
point on naturalists' research in the 1870s-1880s about symbiosis on lichens
CNRTL Antibiosis https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/antibiose
Butor, N. (2019). Algae-fungus, a novel symbiosis. For Science, 504-, 14-14. https://doi.org/10.3917/pls.504.0014
The Rising and the Plague https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/la-desobeissance-fertile-vivre-en-symbiose-avec-la-nature/
Buen Vivi Pope Francis' Dream Society https://www.cath.ch/newsf/buen-vivir-societe-revee-pape-francois/
Universal Mechanics From Liberalism to Symbiotism https://mecaniqueuniverselle.net/humanite/symbiose.php
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