Synthesis of the “Rethinking the human” workshops with Pierre Levy

Between September and October 2025, Pierre Lévy led three workshops for Revue 3.0 entitled "Repenser l’Humain" (description here), providing an opportunity for members to reflect on and discuss the concept of “human” and the status of humanism today.

1. In the first session on “Animal sentience” (recording here), Pierre Levy reviewed the objective links between humans and animals, and asked whether it is possible to define the essence of the human.
2. In the second session on “the symbolic order” (recording here), Pierre Levy presented his conception of the symbolic, technical, moral and social processes whose complexity is unique to human beings.
3. In the third session on “the thinking reed” (recording here), Pierre Levy synthesized the first two sessions, attempting to articulate the sensible and the intelligible, and opening onto the ethics of the one and the many.

Summary of Pierre Levy’s points

According to Pierre Lévy, conscious experience, emotions, imagination, perception of space and time, and communication all originate in the nervous system. This system forms the foundation from which human and animal life forms develop. However, it is important to distinguish animal communication from human language: animals primarily exchange signs (sound, olfactory, iconic) that allow them to interact without reaching the symbolic complexity of human language.

Among the forms of animal communication, stigmergy is an indirect form of communication, mediated by the shared environment, which serves as a collective memory and forms part of their “collective intelligence.” Pierre Lévy extends this idea to humans in the third workshop, referring to “symbolic stigmergy”: a very long-term memory, comparable to collective writing, involving the active integration of specific neural circuits.

In the second workshop, Pierre Levy emphasizes the continuity between animals and humans: everything that characterizes humanity is already present in embryonic form in the animal world. Symbolization (according to Pierre Levy: the ability to represent a concept through a sensory, auditory, or visual form) is one illustration of this. In humans, this symbolization is enriched by moral dimensions, giving rise to a more specifically “human” meaning. In his final workshop, Pierre Lévy presents culture as fundamentally collective: the “internalization” of culture as a global form allows us to integrate into society. It is also in this sense that there is no state of nature that precedes politics.

Discussions sparked by his contributions

Pierre Levy’s talks gave rise to a great deal of discussion and reflection. In particular, we raised the question of arbitrariness in establishing the boundaries, however blurred, between “human” and the rest. We also wondered about the “Aristotelian” approach to categorization taken by Pierre Levy in his “Philosophical Anthropology”. Doesn’t this kind of distinction create unnecessary exclusions? For Pierre Levy, we need to follow Socrates’ “know thyself” imperative: making a difference enables us to be reflexive. If, for Marcello Vitali-Rosati, every distinction comes with a symbolic hierarchy, Pierre Levy believes that his approach is not to make distinctions between human beings.