Analogisme
At Philippe Descola’s, analogism is one of the four ways of identifying existents—the 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, astrology, the theory of signatures: a universe where everything echoes everything.
J’entends par là un mode d’identification qui fractionne l’ensemble des existants en une multiplicité d’essences, de formes et de substances séparées par de faibles écarts, parfois ordonnées dans une échelle graduée, de sorte qu’il devient possible de recomposer le système des contrastes initiaux en un dense réseau d’analogies reliant les propriétés intrinsèques des entités distinguées.
The word says what it does: ana-logos, the relation, the proportion that sets two terms side by side. Descola makes it the name of the fourth ontology, the “logical complement” of totemism in his table of ways to identify existents. The game remains the same—resemblances and differences between myself and others on the planes of interiority and physicality—but analogism is the box where nothing resembles anything else: different interiorities, different physicalities. A generalized discontinuity, each being held as an irreducible singularity.
Hence the operation of thought that characterizes it. “A world saturated with singularities is nearly inconceivable and, in any case, deeply inhospitable”: it must therefore be made habitable. The initial atomism calls for its remedy—a “vast movement of recomposition” through which correspondences and analogies weave “tirelessly” between fragments. This is the universe of correlations between microcosm and macrocosm, of Chinese geomancy and divination, of the idea that social disorders trigger heavenly catastrophes, of the doctrine of signatures that reads in a plant’s shape the remedy for the organ it mimics. The pursuit of happiness or the causes of misfortune rests on a web of inferred resemblances, hunted with a “mania all the more vigorous” as their effects on life are deemed crucial.
Descola’s analogism ≠ totemism: both are symmetrical but inverse schemes. Totemism starts from a double continuity—shared interiorities, shared physicalities—while analogism begins with a double series of differences it exhausts itself to connect. And analogism ≠ modern naturalism: the latter reduces all diversity to a single nature, a universal matter governed by laws; analogism, by contrast, multiplies essences endlessly and unites them only through the never-closed network of resemblances. Where the modern unifies, the analogist correlates.