Lexicon — viasophia

Acédie · ἀκηδία (akèdia) — Christian mystique · French Spiritual torpor and disgust that seizes the monk in the middle of the day, which monastic tradition calls "the noonday demon" after Psalm 90/91. Evagrius of Pontus ranks it among the eight evil thoughts and describes it as the heaviest: neither sensuality nor vainglory, but a revulsion toward the present hour and the place where one is. The Greek word *akèdia* literally means "absence of care," the inability to concern oneself with what should matter. Its surest sign is not rest but restlessness: disgust for the cell drives one to leave it.
Active Hope — Western philosophy · English In Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s work, hope stops being a prediction—*"it’ll all work out in the end"*—and becomes a practice. You don’t *have* it; you *do* it, like gardening or practicing tai chi. Three movements make it up: facing reality head-on, naming the direction you want to see unfold, taking a step toward it. It doesn’t require optimism—you can practice it even when you feel hopeless, because what guides it isn’t gauging the odds but intention. Hope becomes a verb.
adiar o fim do mundo · différer la fin du monde — Krenak · Portuguese Expression by the thinker Ailton Krenak (*A vida não é útil*, 2020; title of his book *Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo*, 2019): not to technologically delay an impending catastrophe, but to keep open the possibility of imagining another world. Krenak immediately turns it on its head: the end is not ahead of us—it has already happened—for the peoples of the Americas, the world already ended once, with the conquest. "Postponing the end of the world" thus does not mean prolonging the present order, which he rejects, but preventing the end of the capacity to dream of another world. What takes its place among the Krenak is dreaming practiced as an institution.
Advaita · अद्वैत (advaita) — Vedānta · Sanskrit Non-duality: literally "not-two." At the end of the search, the individual soul (*ātman*) and the absolute (*brahman*) are not two separate realities but one, beneath the apparent multiplicity. The word proceeds by negation: it does not say "one," it rejects "two." The diversity of the world is real as manifestation, not as a partition between separate substances.
Aeternitas · aeternitas — Western philosophy · Latin The classic definition of eternity, forged by Boethius in Book V: the complete and simultaneous possession of a life without succession, without beginning, middle, or end. It stands in contrast to temporal duration, which is never possessed in its entirety—the next day is still lacking when the previous one is already lost. Eternity is not a very long time: it is a mode of being where everything is held all at once. To be distinguished from Augustine’s *<em>distentio animi</em>*, time experienced as the stretching and scattering of the soul; and from mere infinite duration, for an endless succession remains a succession, not a simultaneous possession.
Afrotopia — Western philosophy · French At Felwine Sarr’s, *Afrotopia* is not a place but an active utopia: not the daydream of some future African paradise, but the work of identifying, in the continent’s present reality, the seeds of a possible future and nurturing them. It rejects the narrative of “catching up”—the idea that Africa must race to match the West’s economic and social model to close a gap. Sarr counters this with an Africa that draws on its own mythological, cultural, and spiritual resources to forge its own path. Neither nostalgia for a precolonial past nor mimicry of development: an act of faith in possibilities to be brought into being through thought and action.
Agencement — Western philosophy · French An assemblage is a heterogeneous set that brings together elements of different kinds—bodies, statements, affects, tools—to function as one. It unfolds along two axes: on one side, content and expression, distinct in reality yet reciprocally presupposing each other; on the other, territoriality, which stabilizes it, and lines of deterritorialization, which run through it and carry it toward something else. What constitutes it is not a fixed structure but a double movement, always underway.
Ahiṃsā · a-hiṃsā (pali identique) — Buddhism · Sanskrit Non-harm: to refrain from wounding and killing all that lives. The word joins the privative *a-* to *hiṃsā*, “the act of harming.” In the *Dhammapada*, this restraint does not stem from a received law—it arises from recognizing that every being trembles before violence and cherishes its life, as I do. An active restraint grounded in shared fear, not mere passivity.
ahupuaʻa · prononc. « a-hou-pou-A-a » (ʻokina = coup de glotte) — Kanaka ʻŌiwi · Hawaiian Hawaiian term (*ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi*): the major land division of ancient Hawaiʻi, stretching from the mountain to the sea and extending into the ocean. George Kanahele provides its etymology: the name comes from a stone cairn (*ahu*) placed at the boundary, topped with a pig (*puaʻa*) image. The *ahupuaʻa* is not merely an administrative division—it is the unit that ensures, within a single continuous territory, access to all resources—those of the uplands, the shoreline, and the sea—without the coast ever serving as a boundary.
Ainu Mosir · Ainu Mosir (mosir : terre, monde, pays) — Ainu · Ainu The name the Ainu give to their own land—Hokkaidō, the Kurils, Sakhalin—before the Japanese state renamed it *"Hokkaidō"* and turned it into a province to colonize. Shigeru Kayano, elder of Nibutani and the first Ainu elected to the Japanese Diet (1994), explains it himself in his memoir: *Ainu Mosir* means *"a peaceful land for humans."* The word *mosir* (land, world, country) is not exclusive to humans: in the divine chants (*yukar*), it also names the *kamuy mosir*, the *"land of the gods"* where the *kamuy* reside. Two neighboring worlds, a single word to name them both—linguistic trace of a cosmology where the gods are not above humans, but beside them.
Ajutap · awajún (tronc jívaro) ; Alto Marañón, Amazonie péruvienne — awajun · Awajun Among the Awajún of the Marañón River, the *ajutap* is an ancestor-being that grants the power to live. It has no fixed form: it appears as a land jaguar (*ikamñawa*), eagle, boa, or floating head (*bukea*), always in a violent wind, and speaks “like a human.” What it imparts is a *discurso*—a discourse that reveals to the receiver how their life will unfold. It is only obtained after a long ritual fast—*toé*, tobacco, and ayahuasca taken near a waterfall—for that is where the *ajutap* come to drink. The *ajutap* is neither a god to be prayed to nor the soul of the dead: it is an ancestral force that speaks and grants long life to those who know how to receive it.
Akinananti · akinananti — Shipibo-Konibo · Shipibo The Shipibo-Konibo word that artist Chonon Bensho and her husband Pedro Favaron gloss as: the work done together, with love and joy, which seeks no selfish ends but the good of all. It’s not a method for producing better as a group—the love and joy (the affect) and the common good (the end) aren’t added to the task; they *are* the task. The word assumes a world made of subjects in relation—“no one is in solitude”—not a stock of inert objects to be extracted.
Akrasia · ἀκρασία (akrasia) — Western philosophy · Greek Incontinence, the lack of self-mastery: the state of one who knows the good yet does the wrong, their resolve swept away by passion. The incontinent person has no settled thought in favor of their fault; they still struggle against themselves, then yield. Aristotle makes it the central problem of *Book VII*: how can one act against what one knows to be good? To be distinguished from *dissipation* (the debauched), who deliberately chooses evil by conviction and feels no conflict, and from vice pure and simple, which corrupts even judgment.
Aktēmosynè · ἀκτημοσύνη (aktēmosynē) — Christian mystique · Greek The *aktēmosynē* is voluntary non-possession—not the poverty one endures, but the destitution one chooses as discipline. The first of the desert asceticisms: to hold nothing as one’s own, so that nothing holds you. The monk uses it to lighten the heart and turn it unencumbered toward God.
aliento del Sol vivo · le souffle du Soleil vivant — Asháninka · Spanish The Asháninka specialist Eusebio Laos’s formulation—delivered in Spanish, the language in which he shared his worldview, not a word of Asháninka. It speaks of water not as a substance or a resource, but as the *breath* (aliento) of a living Sun: this breath, the Sun set spinning around the earth so that birds, beasts, and people might live, and the air is its spirit ("the spirit of water is air"). To breathe and to sweat—plants, animals, humans—is thus to share the same water-breath the Sun placed all around the world. Water is not one element among others: it is the exhalation of a star regarded as a person, lent to all that lives.
aloha ʻāina · prononc. « a-LO-ha AÏ-na » (ʻokina = coup de glotte) — Kanaka ʻŌiwi · Hawaiian Hawaiian expression (*ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi*): love of the land. But the word she loves, *ʻāina*, doesn’t mean “soil” or “territory.” It comes from *ʻai*, food and the act of eating, and, according to George Kanahele, translates as “that which nourishes.” To love the *ʻāina*, then, is not to cling to a landscape or claim ownership—it is to cherish what sustains you, what Hawaiians regard as a living ancestor: the land born of the union of *Papa* (Earth Mother) and *Wākea* (Sky Father), from whom they descend. Here, love carries with it a duty of care, *mālama*, “to care for with love.” *Aloha ʻāina* can be called “patriotism,” Kanahele notes—but a patriotism whose object is not a flag: it is the very land-that-nourishes, a relative not to be defiled.
Aluna · aluna jaba (kággaba) — Kogi (Kággaba) · Spanish Among the Kággaba (Kogi) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, *aluna* refers to the spiritual dimension of the world—often translated as "the mother-thought"—where every element of nature has its own spiritual master, its father and mother, with whom communication must be maintained. It is not a separate otherworld: it is the reverse side where what appears originates and takes order. The term surfaces in the public discourse of the Gonawindúa Tayrona Organization as "aluna jaba," the Mother in *aluna*, she who has left the history of each thing and its connections. Here, we adhere only to what the Kággaba themselves have made public: the closed knowledge of the *mamos* is not unearthed.
Amicitia · amicitia — Western philosophy · Latin For Cicero, *amicitia* is not a transaction of favors but the perfect harmony of two souls united by mutual affection, and its sole foundation is virtue: without it, no true friendship exists. It does not arise from our weakness—it does not fill a void—but from a natural inclination that recognizes integrity in another. Hence his phrase: a friend is "another self," and true friendship, because nature does not change, is eternal.
Amor Dei intellectualis — Western philosophy · Latin The "intellectual love of God" is the pinnacle of Spinoza’s *Ethics*. It arises from the third kind of knowledge—the intuition that grasps singular things *"under the species of eternity"*—as a joy accompanied by the idea of God taken as its cause. Not the love of an imagined present God, but that which follows from conceiving God as eternal. Eternal itself, it is the part by which the human mind participates in the infinite love with which God loves himself.
Amor fati — Western philosophy · Latin "Love of fate." In Nietzsche as read by Deleuze, *amor fati* is not submission to a fate one endures, but the affirmation of the necessary as one affirms a roll of the dice: chance is cast in a single gesture, and one loves the combination that falls because it is necessary. The chance thrown and the necessity of the outcome do not oppose each other—they form the Dionysian couple *chance-fate*. To love the fatal is to will the real, even in what was not chosen.
Amour de soi — Western philosophy · French At Rousseau’s, *amour de soi* is a natural sentiment, prior to any society, that drives every animal to look after its own preservation. It is neither good nor bad in itself: when guided in man by reason and tempered by pity, it gives rise to humanity and virtue. It belongs to the state of nature, where each person cares only for their own well-being without comparing themselves to others. It is the sound root of self-preservation, not to be confused with *amour-propre*, its counterpart corrupted by social life.
Amour-propre — Western philosophy · French At Rousseau’s, *amour-propre* is a relative, artificial sentiment born in society, which leads each individual to value themselves above all others. It arises from comparison: as soon as people live together, each measures themselves, seeks to be noticed, preferred, esteemed, and derives their own worth from the gaze of others. Absent in the state of nature, it is the hinge of the *Discours*: it is from this shift from *amour de soi* to *amour-propre* that moral inequality emerges, along with the host of evils people inflict on one another.
Anachoresis · ἀναχώρησις (anachôrêsis) — Stoicism · Greek The *anachōrēsis* is retreat—but in Marcus Aurelius, a retreat without place: the soul’s withdrawal into itself, wherever one may be. Instead of fleeing the court, the city, or the crowd, one retreats into the inner realm that no one can reach. This retreat is available at any moment and requires no movement.
Analogisme — Western philosophy · French At Philippe Descola’s, analogism is one of the four ways of identifying existents—one that posits different interiorities *and* different physicalities between humans and non-humans. The world there is first shattered into a myriad of singularities separated by slight gaps; this generalized fragmentation is then stitched back together by a dense web of correspondences and analogies, the resonances between microcosm and macrocosm. It is the ontology of Chinese divination, of astrology, of the *theory of signatures*: a universe where everything echoes everything.
Ānanda · आनन्द (ānanda) — Vedānta · Sanskrit In Vedānta, *ānanda* is bliss—not a feeling that befalls the being, but the very nature of being. The third term of *Satchidānanda* (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss), it names the essential delight existence takes in existing—of which pleasure, pain, and indifference are merely surface translations. For Sri Aurobindo, this joy of being is inalienable: veiled by the ego, never lost, it is the cause, the motive, and the object of cosmic existence.
Anattā · anattā (sct. anātman) — Buddhism · Pali The non-self: nothing in the aggregates that make up experience is a permanent and substantial self. The third of the three marks of existence, and a direct negation of the Brahmanic *ātman*. Fernand Hû renders it with a periphrasis: *« All forms are without substantial reality. »* What is denied is substance, not experience.
Anicca · anicca (sct. anitya) — Buddhism · Pali The impermanence: everything that is composed is born, transforms, and unravels. The first of the three marks of existence, it is not a thesis about the world but a fact to be penetrated—whoever is "well penetrated" by it, says the *Dhammapada*, is freed from suffering. Fernand Hû renders it with an adjective: aggregations are "transient."
Animisme — Western philosophy · French At Philippe Descola’s, animism isn’t some archaic belief that endows things with a soul, but one of the four ways of identifying existents—the one that assumes similar interiorities and different physicalities between humans and non-humans. The same spirit resides in distinct bodies: the bear, the tapir, the river have a soul like mine, but a body that gives them another point of view. It’s the inverse formula of modern naturalism, which unites us through matter and divides us through spirit.
Anthropotechnique · Anthropotechnik — Western philosophy · German Peter Sloterdijk’s concept: anthropotechniques are the methods of practice—mental and physical—through which humans work on themselves and shape who they are. Here, man emerges as a being of *Übung* (exercise), bound to an imperative that Sloterdijk reads in Rilke’s bust of Apollo: *“You must change your life.”* Religions, ethics, asceticism, sports—all systems of practice that, under different names, belong to this same self-making.
Apatheia · ἀπάθεια (apatheia) — Stoicism · Greek The Stoic *apatheia* is not the absence of feeling but the absence of disturbance: the state of the soul no longer shaken by passions because it has corrected the judgments from which they arise. The sage still perceives things, but no object wrests from him an assent he has not willed. This is not a cold nature, but a victory of reason over turmoil.
Aponia · ἀπονία (aponia) — Western philosophy · Greek In Epicurus, *aponia* is the absence of bodily pain—not an added pleasure, but a state where physical suffering has ceased. Together with *ataraxia*—the absence of disturbance in the soul—it forms the two facets of the highest good. The body at peace, the mind free of agitation: Epicurean pleasure asks for nothing more, and anything that claims to enhance it only displaces it.
Appamāda · appamāda (sanskrit apramāda) — Buddhism · Pali Vigilance or non-negligence. A fundamental quality of the mind in the Buddha’s teaching: not to let oneself drift, to keep attention present. According to tradition, this was the Buddha’s final word before his death.
Arútam · wampis (famille jívaro ; río Santiago, Amazonie péruvienne) — wampis · Wampis Among the Wampis of the Santiago River, the *arútam* is a powerful spirit—and the vision-strength it bestows. These spirits take a thousand forms (the sloth, the sparrowhawk, the condor, the jaguar, lightning, the boa) and wander everywhere, though they favor waterfalls. A man seeking "the vision" withdraws there to a shelter, fasts for days, abstains from women, and takes tobacco, *toé*, or ayahuasca *con bastante fe*, with great faith. He who believes in the *arútam* always finds the vision: it grants him a precise power—to live without trouble, to overpower an enemy with words alone, to avoid being killed. The *arútam* is not a hallucination; it is not a spectacle-vision: it is a force to be won and kept.
Assentatio · assentatio — Western philosophy · Latin Flattery by agreement: the vice of the one who always approves, says what you want to hear, and never holds an opinion contrary to yours. In *Laelius*, Cicero makes it the capital enemy of friendship—not because it lies about its object, but because it suppresses truth, the only ground where two souls can meet. The *assentator* is not first a liar: he is a man without a soul of his own, who adopts yours "at the slightest sign." Distinct from heavy-handed praise (*adulatio*), *assentatio* is more subtle and harder to unmask, for it disguises itself as sincere agreement.
Ataraxia · ἀταραξία (ataraxia) — Stoicism · Greek Ataraxia isn’t a calm one installs, but a disturbance one removes. For the Stoic, the soul is never agitated by things themselves—only by the opinions it holds about them. Remove the false judgment, and the agitation falls away on its own: nothing remains to be soothed. Tranquility is thus the default state of a reason that has ceased to judge poorly, not a conquest added to nature.
Ātman · आत्मन् (ātman) — Vedānta · Sanskrit In Vedānta, the Ātman is the pure Self—not the psychological "I" made of habits, opinions, and memories, but the absolute subject that observes them without dissolving into them. The fundamental principle of Advaita (non-dualism): *Ātman = Brahman*. What in each of us is identical to the total Reality is neither a spark nor a fragment—it is the same light, undivided.
Attention · προσοχή (prosochè) / sati / νῆψις (nēpsis) — Cross-cutting · French In Simone Weil’s view, attention is not an effort of concentration but its opposite: the suspension of thought, which makes itself available, empty, ready to receive the object. One does not seek, one waits; one does not grasp, one welcomes. At its highest degree—*"absolutely without mixture"*—it becomes prayer. Yet the same word encompasses opposing gestures across traditions: the vigilant tension of the Stoic, the bare presence of the Buddhist, the welcoming of the void in Weil.
Atterrir — Western philosophy · French At Bruno Latour’s, “landing” names a political gesture: renouncing the two poles that magnetized modernity—the *Global* (the infinite horizon of globalization) and the *Local* (the refuge-ground, the closed identity)—to turn toward a third attractor, the Terrestrial. The Terrestrial is not “nature” contemplated from afar: it is the thin zone where life is possible, peopled by agents that react to our actions. Navigating this landscape, and finding where one settles and with whom one agrees to cohabit—that is what *landing* means.
Autarkeia · αὐτάρκεια (autarkeia) — Western philosophy · Greek The Epicurean self-sufficiency is not the proud autonomy of one who does without others, but the art of needing only a little—just enough so that fortune can no longer lay hold. It is won by sifting desires: by distinguishing the needs that nature herself limits from the empty desires that have no end, the sage lowers the threshold of sufficiency until it is always within reach. Not a deprivation endured, but an independence achieved.
Autopoiesis · autopoïèse (grec auto- + poièsis) — Western philosophy · English A concept developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (*autopoiesis*, around 1972), from the Greek *auto-* (self) and *poièsis* (making, producing): “making itself.” It designates the defining feature of the living—not a substance, nor a list of parts, but a mode of organization. A living system is a network whose sole function is to produce and regenerate the components that, in turn, produce the network. It is closed upon its own organization: it does not manufacture an external object, it continuously manufactures itself. It is this looping—produced by its components, producer of those components—that sets the living apart from any mechanical assembly. *Autopoiesis* is the usual French calque.
Ayllu · aymara ; mot partagé avec le quechua — Aymara · Aymara An Aymara word from the Andean highlands (shared with Quechua), usually rendered as "community"—though the Aymara jurist Fernando Huanacuni Mamani finds this too narrow for what it carries. The *ayllu* is not the society of humans: it is the "unit and structure of life," the extended community where animals, insects, plants, mountains, air, water, the sun, ancestors, and "even what cannot be seen" all have their place, with humans holding just one thread among others. Its consequence is as much linguistic as political: in the *ayllu*, says Huanacuni, "there is no room for the term *resource*," for where everything lives, what exists are beings, not objects.
Ayni · ayni (aymara et quechua) — Aymara · Aymara Andean principle of reciprocity: what one receives calls for a gift in return, in the same moment or another. Fernando Huanacuni Mamani describes it as *"the energy that flows between all forms of existence"*—not merely an exchange between humans, but the stream of mutual aid linking the community, Mother Earth, and the cosmos. *Ayni* is the concrete grammar of Andean *living-well*: one does not accumulate, one gives back; every economic, legal, or agricultural relationship stems from it. Its figure is not the scales of a contract but the circulation that sustains the balance of the whole.

Poser de bonnes questions — Western philosophy · French The methodical gesture by which Vinciane Despret upends ethology: before asking what an animal can do, asking whether the question we’re posing is the right one. An answer doesn’t exist ready-made in the creature; it emerges—or doesn’t—depending on the setup designed to receive it. Poorly questioned, the animal seems stupid; well questioned, it becomes capable. The question, then, doesn’t describe the animal—it transforms it—and transforms the one who asks it as well.

Social acceleration — Western philosophy · French In Hartmut Rosa’s work, social acceleration isn’t the individual feeling of running out of time, but the structural logic of modern societies. A modern society only holds together by constantly increasing: it requires endless economic growth, technical acceleration, and cultural innovation just to maintain its balance. These three engines feed off one another in a loop, eventually dictating the pace of life—until the subject is severed from any living relationship with the world.

ʿIshq · عشق (ʿishq) — « ischc » chez Garcin de Tassy — Sufism · Arabic Arabic word for love at its burning degree: not affection nor inclination, but the passion that consumes. In Sufi vocabulary, *ʿishq* is the force that hurls the seeker out of themselves toward God, to the point of losing reason. ʿAṭṭār makes it the second of the seven valleys of the path: one enters it only by turning oneself into fire.