Martin Albert Persch - The Universal Animal: Reason as the active principle of human nature
Since the second half of the 20th century, structuralism has been the dominant theoretical tendency in Amazonian Studies, although since the 1990s, this dominance of the French anthropological school has been exercised by theories that call themselves “post-structuralist”, with Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro at the head of this movement. This paper will focus on Descola’s gnoseological proposal, for whom the preponderant theme (as for Lévi-Strauss) are the classificatory and cosmological systems, the (misnamed) “ontologies”, which constitute the reality inhabited by the different peoples of the world, and which are analysed in his work with astonishing disregard for ecological variables and the productive and reproductive dynamics of the groups that profess these “ontologies”. Descola seeks to decipher the “mental processes that have always interested philosophers since Plato” (Descola, 2016:20). If we recapitulate Descola’s works with a certain conceptual rigor, we quickly perceive that they do not offer “even the possibility of formulating with exactitude a special philosophical problem already perceived by Plato: the problem of the objectivity of the universal” (Ilyenkov, 2021:162).
The present work aims to reconstruct the logic of cultural diversity in terms of the concrete interaction of each human collective with the forces of the environment, i.e. what Ilyenkov had called “vital activity”. But it is not only the expositions of Dialectics of the Ideal and Dialectical Logic, in which he defines the “ideal” as a specific relationship between a thinking and non-thinking body, that will enable us to clarify the concept of “culture”, which has often been treated in anthropology in an abstract and ambiguous way. While Ilyenkov has nothing immediately to say about the Amazon and the people who inhabit it, it is the claim of this work that the concept of the “idea” and that of “activity” he polished in his works will enable us to better understand not only Amazonian, but all cultures, because they help us integrate them in a universal human project. It is in this sense that also the reflections of the Cosmology of Spirit will help us to reconstruct the universal logic of the objectification of the environment, namely, the form of vitality of our species, which is of particular relevance when constructing emancipatory and intercultural politics.
Martin Albert Persch, was born in 1985 in Saarbrücken, Germany. Anthropologist specialized in Economic and Amazonian Anthropology, with higher studies in Education and Neurosciences and a Master’s Degree in Education with a mention in Informatics and Educational Technology at the San Martín de Porres University of Peru. Since 2011 he has been collaborating with the indigenous organisation Central Asháninka del Río Ene (CARE) as head of the Education area, also cooperating with different indigenous and social organizations of the Central Amazon of Peru, and teaching in various educational experiences in the Peruvian Amazon, such as the political training school EGIDA of the national indigenous organization AIDESEP. He has published the following books: Bakunin Decolonial: Emancipación Epistemológica o Teoría Heterodoxa (Terra sem Amo, 2020); Las Deudas de Graeber; Antropología, Economía y Anarquismo (Iliu Yawar, 2021); Evald Iliénkov; Cosmismo y Comunismo (Editorial Horizonte y Gato Viejo, 2021).