Ancient vs Modern Forms of Intelligence

Discussion

By Aboud Souffle Mattatyahu

"When the Jesuit missionaries arrived in North America, they did not merely encounter "savage" peoples; to their great surprise, they also encountered interlocutors capable of discussing, reasoning, and refuting. This is one of the merits of David Graeber and David Wengrow—in their monumental final work—to have brought back to light this forgotten scene: that of Europeans convinced that they alone embodied reason, discovering before them Native Americans perfectly capable of arguing rigorously about freedom, wealth, punishment, religion, or power. The surprise, at bottom, was not that these peoples thought, but that they thought otherwise, without thinking less.

Perhaps this is where our problem begins. We too often continue to oppose two regimes of intelligibility as if they belonged to two distinct humanities: on one side, reason—adult humanity, that of the logos, logically superior; on the other, myth—the irrational thought of a humanity that has remained in childhood. Yet Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us that "savage thought" is not the thought of savages, but a universal form of the human mind: a classificatory, structuring thought, attentive to sensible qualities, to gaps, correspondences, and transformations. Not a stammering of reason, but another way of grasping and accounting for the order of the world.

Between the different regimes of intelligibility, the difference is perhaps not first and foremost that between truth and falsehood, the real and the fictional, or the relationship to linear or cyclical time, but also a difference of metabolism. All thought feeds on the world, but not all feed on it in the same way. Their timescales vary. There are thoughts that dissect, isolate, measure, and reduce in order to extract stable and combinable elements; there are others that first absorb relationships, forms, correspondences, signatures, qualities, and rhythms. The former proceed by analytical cutting, the latter by analogical digestion. The former seek objects in the real; the latter perceive relations first. It is no longer a matter of opposing science to myth like the cooked to the raw, but of recognizing and distinguishing the different diets of the mind present within us—several ways of assimilating the world and making it a thinkable experience. In other words, a spiritually metabolizable experience.

Thus, there would exist several regimes of intelligibility, just as there exist several metabolic regimes. If cultures are not organisms in the strict sense, they are no less nourished by the real in a singular way. We are navigating here in the field of the symbolic. Did you know that our biological metabolism can function according to two regimes—either carbohydrate-based or lipid-based? In the latter case, we speak of a ketogenic diet, where the body transforms lipids into energy autonomously, without needing carbohydrates. The diet of our ancestors, in the absence of intensive agriculture, was far less rich in carbohydrates than that of civilized peoples. This ancestral metabolism is triggered automatically during a fast which, if prolonged, in turn triggers a process of autophagy—a process recently highlighted by Nobel laureate Yoshinori Ohsumi, who identified the genes controlling autophagy in the 1990s. In other words, an auto-digestion of the body feeding on itself, allowing cells to clean house and regenerate. Between the two metabolic regimes—carbohydrate-based or lipid-based—there is a narrow zone, that of metabolic flexibility, where the body alternates between the two and may eventually operate on both planes simultaneously. It will then be said to function optimally in terms of adaptation.

By structural homology, our "dual imaginary" would possess these two metabolisms—two regimes of intelligibility, ancestral and modern—each based on a certain relationship to time: the cyclical time of return to the same, and the linear time of evolution and progress toward the other; just as there would also exist a metabolic zone of hybrid regime that frees the full potential of the mind when it embraces these two times in a single movement. As our Jesuits may have discovered, savage thought is not devoid of rationality. It simply expresses itself according to a logical modality and a specific relationship to time. It lives in an interior time what the modern thinks in two exterior times.

No culture is reducible to irrationality; what the modern mentality judges irrational simply corresponds to a domain that escapes the grip of its own logic. Where modern rationality tends to extract from the real discrete, manipulable, comparable units, so-called savage thought operates more like a metabolism of relations; it thinks of itself as an integral part of a cosmic organism, so to speak, in which it lodges itself as if in a dream. From this point on, the decisive boundary no longer runs between rational and irrational thought, but between several ways of articulating and "consuming" the real. Western modernity has narrated itself as having emerged from myth; in reality, it has merely displaced its myths, formalizing them differently while covering them with a critical and technical varnish.

The logos did not replace the mythos. It deployed itself within it, while progressively forgetting this ancestral filiation. It is this forgetting that interests us here, in order to think politics differently. If geopolitics claims to explain the world through interests, resources, alliances, and power relations, it often leaves outside the field the ultimate narratives that give meaning to these forces. Yet historical actors never act in a symbolic void. They act within cosmologies, visions of time, figures of salvation and catastrophe. This is where what we might call theopolitics appears: not the archaic return of the religious into modern history, but the persistence of eschatological, mythical, and sacred schemas at the very heart of contemporary political rationality.

"We live in a formidable age" — Oscar Wilde.

"Formidable"—the word itself deserves our attention. From the Latin formidabilis ("fearsome, terrible"), derived from formido ("fear, terror, dread"), the formidable is above all that which inspires fear, that which strikes, that which terrifies. A formidable age is therefore first and foremost a terrible age. An age that forces us to think because it overflows and mixes the frameworks of thought it still claims to respect. An age where categories falter, where registers overlap, where the secular and the sacred find themselves mixed in an atmosphere of obscure clarity, of uncanny strangeness—that state where the intimate surges forth as foreign, unknown, absolute other, to the point of being frightening.

"The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear, and in this chiaroscuro, monsters emerge" — Gramsci is often quoted as saying, paraphrasing his original remarks:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, the most varied morbid phenomena appear."

One of the most disconcerting traits of the spirit of our time may lie in this: the more it presents itself as rational, the more it allows archaic forms—which it believed to have surpassed—to rise to its surface. The return of the repressed becomes pathological only from the moment it is systematically denied and projected onto the enemy of the hour. Contemporary history readily narrates itself in the cold language of interests, balances, resources, deterrence, and power relations. This language is not false. It is like a varnish of rationality full of networked cracks. Beneath the thin layer of calculation, something insists on showing itself. Beneath strategy, something dreams. Beneath governance, something prophesies.

We are thus made to believe that international politics falls within a strict geometry of powers. States pursue their interests—and therefore, those of the population; empires protect their zones of influence; elites rationally arbitrate between several options. Seen from above, the scene appears clear. This clarity is itself an effect of very tight framing. By adjusting the focal length of the lens, a semi-conscious underworld emerges in the background and may suggest an underlying structure. No human decision is made in a symbolic void, let us remember. Statesmen, officers, diplomats, ideologues, engineers, religious leaders, vision entrepreneurs—all act within a world already populated with images, narratives, figures, exemplary enemies, superior missions, and final promises. They move within collective imaginaries that often precede their own lucidity, often resembling a half-sleep. These imaginaries form, so to speak, the unconscious bath in which they swim in schools without really being aware of it, like a goldfish in its bowl.

This is where geopolitics encounters its limit. If it describes with precision the material conditions of history, its regime of intelligibility remains closed to the invisible scenarios in which these conditions take on meaning. It sees territories, armies, energy flows, alliances, and rivalries—but it remains deaf to the more ancient voices that speak through historical actors. Yet these voices exist and have never ceased to exist. Some of them even occasionally reach the podium of the UN General Assembly."

(translated by DeepSeek from the French: [1])