Ontology, Conviviality and Symbiosis Or: Are There Gifts of Nature?

Abstract

The starting point of this chapter’s contribution is the thesis that in the Anthropocene, it has become problematic for sociology to concentrate solely on human societies. The ontological separation of nature and society on which sociology is based upon has to be overcome, though taking into account the differences between life and matter. Abiotic entities have no capacity for subjectivity, intentions, feelings or symbolic communication—in contrast to the domain of agency of life. Based on this, a generalized theory of gifts, concepts of conviviality as well as interspecies cooperation (symbiosis) are to be advanced, which will lead sociology in new directions. The aim is to develop a multi-species theory of gift, which makes it possible to understand what it means to recognize non-human beings as givers, in the sense of alliances between human and non-human beings. Sociologically, symbiosis is therefore the term used to describe a cooperative coexistence across species. Symbiosis forms a subcategory of conviviality as a minimal form of a succeeding sociality, which in turn is based on gift relationships.

The article first appeared in German under the title Ontologie, Konvivialität und Symbiose oder: Gibt es Gaben der Natur? In the journal Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie 9 (2): 198–216. https://doi.org/10.17879/zts-2020-4224.

Introduction

Sociology faces particular challenges arising from the current prominence of the concept of symbiosis in biology and the life sciences. Throughout its history, sociology has often borrowed from the terminology of biology and, for example, conceived social differentiation as the division of labor between organs within an organism¹ or transferred the concept of autopoiesis to communication and social systems.² What changes will be necessary in sociological theory if biology increasingly places cross-species cooperation and the transcendence of the concept of competing individuals at the center of its analyses?

Furthermore, with anthropogenic global warming, the radical loss of biodiversity and the discussion about the concept of the Anthropocene, we are experiencing how heavily society depends on non-human factors such as the Earth system with its animal and plant world, so that it has become problematic for sociology to focus solely on human societies. In the following, I will develop a generalized theory of the gift, concepts of conviviality as well as cross-species cooperation (symbiosis), in order both to respond to these diagnoses of crisis and to make it possible to take sociology in new directions.

The Anthropocene is considered a new geochronological terrestrial epoch in which humans have become one of the most important factors influencing biological, geological and atmospheric processes on Earth.³ Harsh interventions into the natural world can be traced back to the Neolithic Age, but it is only with the establishment of capitalism and modern technology around 200 years ago that the emission of large amounts of CO₂ and thus the take-off to the Anthropocene begins. An accelerated release of greenhouse gases and dramatic increases in energy, water and fertilizer consumption have been observed since the second half of the twentieth century, and thus, the year 1950 is also considered by many observers to be the beginning of the Anthropocene.⁴ Furthermore, the Earth is currently losing around 100 species per day, and if the extinction of plants and animals is not halted, the Anthropocene will destroy around fifty percent of all existing species.⁵ There is currently talk of a sixth mass extinction.⁶

The social sciences have so far mostly contributed to these debates from a perspective critical of capitalism, emphasizing that it is not humanity as a whole, but mainly the West with its capitalist economic system that is responsible for reaching or exceeding planetary boundaries.⁷ This argument will not be pursued further here. Rather, what is decisive is what the Anthropocene debate can mean for the social and cultural sciences at the level of social theory. In the meantime, more and more voices are urging us to rethink the world and to re-figure many outdated categories.⁸ Thus, not only are the natural sciences currently becoming political, we are also observing how the social and cultural sciences are increasingly beginning to address the material foundations of society.⁹ In doing so, the challenge is a significant one. For example, Dipesh Chakrabraty has defended the view that the distinction between natural and human history has in fact collapsed.¹⁰ Humanity finds itself in a new time order in which everything that is “natural” is shaped by humans and yet lies beyond human experience and memory; the respective time horizons with regard to the past and the future are too great. The consequences of both global warming and the loss of species are in no way predictable in terms of time; they will span tens of thousands of years and go beyond our previous understanding of human historicity.¹¹

Sociology's understanding of nature, on the other hand, is based on the idea of a stable nature constituting a background against which human activities take place. This is no longer the case in the Anthropocene; the background becomes a volatile foreground with the currently observable consequence that nature is changing faster than societies in some respects. Clive Hamilton emphasizes that humans, as a geological force, have injected will into nature.¹² Therefore, the classical sociological view of human societies and cultures alone is insufficient: “any social scientist who analyses ‘human systems’ isolated from Earth system processes is stuck in a world of modernity, the world of epistemological break, that is no longer consistent with scientific understanding.”¹³ The social and cultural sciences have not yet risen to these challenges and are far from correctly assessing the scope of the Anthropocene for coexistence on Earth. Sheila Jasanoff summarizes these developments with regard to human societies as follows: “These are radical shifts, and we should not be surprised if it takes decades, even centuries, to accommodate to such a revolutionary reframing of human-nature relationships.”¹⁴

The challenge also touches on ontological questions about the subject matter of sociology. Until now, culturalist or social constructivist perspectives have dominated and a subject-object dichotomy has led sociology to a large extent, which cannot ask and answer important questions. Put another way: the typical view of sociology is that people have different ideas about the reality of nature, but the “actual reality” of nature is left to the natural sciences. An alternative position to this (as found so far mainly in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS)) is that different realities are enacted through different practices. In the first case, typical of sociology as a discipline, one asks epistemological questions and assumes that there is one nature but many cultures, i.e., perspectives on nature. This is the model of modern Western naturalism.¹⁵ If one follows the second, more radical approach, one deals with ontological questions and there is then not only one world, but several enacted worlds.¹⁶

The Nature-Culture Divide

In his influential analysis of naturalism, Philippe Descola assumes a stable ontological difference between subject and object, culture and nature, which has existed in the West for a long time.¹⁷ In doing so, he highlights that the West is profoundly shaped by the controversy between materialism and mentalism. On the one hand, one tries to show that everything can be traced back naturalistically to material processes (this is the view of the natural sciences, parts of psychology and philosophy). On the other hand, one advocates a sign-theoretical idealism, which assumes that we can only access the world through signs and language. Thus, constructivist approaches emphasize that nature only becomes recognizable when it is interpreted culturally.

The idea of a mechanical nature was already emerging in the seventeenth century. But nature as an autonomous ontological realm to be researched by science and available for exploitation did not yet have a collective counterpart as that time.¹⁸ It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the idea emerged that human collectives differ from one another through customs, languages, religions and mentalities, that is, through what we have since called “culture”. At the time of the founding of the subject of sociology, an awareness of the great multiplicity and variability of cultural traditions and cultural patterns emerged.¹⁹ From now on, “culture” no longer occurs only in the singular. Through this separation of humans and non-humans, Western naturalism constituted nature as a space that, on the one hand, is regarded as a technical field of experimentation and an inexhaustible deposit of resources and, on the other hand, fell to a large extent outside the subject area of cultural and social sciences.

Years ago, the anthropologist Tim Ingold excellently described and analyzed the standard ontological model of cultural and social sciences based on naturalism.²⁰ The Cree, indigenous hunters in north-eastern Canada, say that caribou are easy to hunt because they present themselves to them. If you spot a caribou, it looks at the hunter and hesitates for a moment until it takes flight. The moment of hesitation is the ideal moment for a shot. So, in their understanding, the Cree do not take caribou, they preserve them. Ethologically and sociologically trained observers would respond to this by saying that, on the one hand, the Cree blame the caribou themselves for their deaths and thereby exonerate themselves morally. On the other hand, they argue that the behavior of the caribou can be explained by evolutionary biology. They claim that the hesitation in the face of an enemy arose evolutionary-biologically from the interaction with the wolf as a hunter and in this context also makes sense. Natural science and cultural studies perspectives complement each other here. Natural science is able to indicate how the behavior of animals is to be interpreted, while cultural studies explain how cultures view natural phenomena differently. Firstly, a distinction is made between culture and (natural) nature, whereby nature and culture are ultimately held together by universal and abstract reason (following Kant and Hegel). In the second step, a distinction is again made in the field of culture between, on the one hand, different cultures and, on the other (“modern” vs. “traditional”), socially constructed, diverse conceptions of nature, which, insofar as they do not follow the scientific concept of nature, can be rationally reconstructed but are epistemologically false. In this way, the descriptions of animistic or other “traditionalist” forms of life cannot compete at all with Western ontology, since the latter always already assigns the appropriate place to “cultures” and their “socially constructed natures.” (Fig. 14.1).

Fig. 14.1

Based on Ingold (2011): 15, 41

Ingold counters this naturalistic model of Western science with an ecological approach that does not start from the model of the non-involved observer, but from a strong connection between organism and environment. In such a model, one cannot see the organism independently of an environment, but only as a common totality. In this totality, the Cree hunter in interaction with the caribou is affected by it in a certain way, which cannot be caught up by a naturalistic worldview. It is not a matter of competing worldviews, but rather, “apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making view of the world but of taking up a view in it.”²¹

Against Mono-Naturalism

Sociology has largely followed the standard ontological model explained above. Admittedly, there have been some significant contributions in the history of sociology on the question of how societal relations of nature should be reflected sociologically; one need only think of Marx,²² Beck²³ and Luhmann.²⁴ But most influential grand theories—such as those of Weber, Durkheim, Habermas, Bourdieu or Foucault—have not placed any particular emphasis on the mediation of society and nature.²⁵ They analyze human societies that are clearly set apart from the stable background of nature.

Science and Technology Studies and especially the work of Bruno Latour are an exception. As is well known, he advocates the thesis of a modern purification work that led to a strict separation between objects of nature and the world of the social on the level of scientific discourse, but these worlds are factually and practically intimately interwoven.²⁶ According to this view, the separation of nature and society, as it exists in the self-image of modernity, never took place in this way. For Latour, our reality is only constituted through the coupling of people with natural and, above all, technical things. All hybrid beings have a certain agency and are based on the intermingling of culture and nature. For Latour, moderns do not do what they say and do not say what they do. Through the prevailing mindset of separating nature and culture, moderns cannot see how every change in nature changes the social order as well. He states that for every state of nature there is a corresponding state of society. In fact, we have been living in a post-nature age for a long time, even if we rarely acknowledge this in our worldview.²⁷

Politically, Latour draws some far-reaching conclusions from this. In his book Facing Gaia (2017), he argues that defending Gaia requires alliances with aspects of the Earth: the rainforests, the oceans, biodiversity in biodiversity hotspots, soils, etc.²⁸ Populations that depend on these components of Gaia should ally with them and defend—via establishing new geo-social classes²⁹—their livelihoods against the disruptive and placeless forces of global capitalism. Since the non-humans cannot speak for themselves in the same way as humans, the non-human living beings and ecosystems would need to be represented politically. The forests, the air and the oceans would therefore need spokespersons.

In terms of social theory, Latour does not pre-decide which classes of actors exist. There is no separation per se between human actors and non-human passive means or objects as in other social theories. Only in the linking of principally equivalent actants to form actor networks do actions emerge. No distinction is made between object and subject or actor, and everything can be an actor according to Latour. This has clear advantages, which Graham Harman points out: “The flat ontology of ANT allows it to avoid the modern dualist ontology in which all finite beings are implausibly divided between (a) people and (b) everything else.”³⁰

Nevertheless, one must be able to distinguish between different entities: “any theory worth its salt needs to shed light on the difference between humans, nonhumans, natural entities, cultural entities, technologies, flowers, mammals, and so forth.”³¹ Latour has introduced the distinction between lines of force and lines of descent in his book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2018), which roughly corresponds to the distinction between inanimate entities and living beings.³² But this distinction is not yet sufficiently precise for the purposes pursued here. Latour's relational ontology shows a proximity to posthumanist positions that largely level the differences between matter, life and conscious life. Karen Barad, for example, has also attributed agency to inanimate matter.³³ However, such positions can overlook relevant differences and lead to theoretical dead ends. For abiotic entities have no capacities for subjectivity, intentions, feelings or sign-like communication. Hornborg therefore sensibly proposes to distinguish between living and non-living actants with the means of semiotics.³⁴ Only in this way can normative questions about responsibility toward other living beings or their moral intrinsic value be addressed.³⁵ Moreover, this makes it understandable how solidarity can arise across the boundaries of species.

People are familiar with this experiential dimension of life from many different contexts, including in their dealings with nature. In everyday life, nature is not only experienced as a resource, a thing or a mechanism. Nature is experienced and felt holistically, and the experience of nature as a counterpart has accompanied Western modernity from the beginning. It is most pronounced in romantic movements.³⁶ Only this form of experience has not entered the mainstream of scientific experience and description of the world. In contrast, we find this strand in everyday perception, in aesthetic experiences, in art theory, in nature aesthetics or in variants of ecological thinking.³⁷

Thus, moderns live in two worlds: on the one hand, people fall back on formal, scientifically gained knowledge; on the other hand, people constantly have practical experiences that are by no means always congruent with scientific knowledge.³⁸ Of course, scientific knowledge has also changed everyday experiences: knowledge about photosynthesis changes our view of plants; astronomical knowledge changes our view of the stars; we only know about dinosaurs or climate change because of scientific knowledge. Experiences from the life worlds that are not congruent with scientific knowledge, however, lead an epistemic shadowy existence in the modern age. Since they resemble the world perception of non-moderns, these experiences remain marginal and precarious in official discourses. Scientific methods have largely excluded the immediate holistic experience of everyday life, rejecting and epistemically marginalizing it for its ostensible subjectivity, romanticism and backwardness.³⁹

Nevertheless, this dimension cannot be erased from the history of Western cosmology—people feel connected not only to each other, but also to nature, in a holistic sense. Science can also contribute to this understanding of connectedness⁴⁰: knowledge of the complexity of ecological interconnectedness, for example of the mutual dependencies of living beings within an ecosystem, can lead in everyday life to leave naturalistic ontology behind for good reasons and to assume a practical connectedness of human and non-human beings. Science and technology in particular are currently providing more and more evidence for the interconnectedness of all beings on this planet.

Animal Agency and Symbioses

Modernity is initially characterized by a reduction of animal life to the instinctively mechanical; for many decades, animals were denied any agency. In global capitalism, animals are also systematically exploited. They serve as mere material—as food, suppliers of raw materials for the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries, for scientific experiments. The factory farming of the twentieth century did its part to passivize animals, modern ethology became a complexity-reducing laboratory science, and behaviorism was only interested in the simplest stimulus–response schemes and conditioning. Intentionality, subjectivity, freedom of action, sophistication, culture, morality and resistance were all relegated to the realm of anecdotes of animal lovers, breeders, farmers and trainers.⁴¹ It is only in recent years that counter-movements have been found—including in the realm of science itself. Human-Animal Studies have contributed significantly to the revision of this image in the social sciences. Here, animal agency has been examined more closely and, above all, the relationships of animals have been examined, from which agency can arise on the one hand, or in which the animals are passivated in animal husbandry and experimentation.⁴² Thus, both cooperative behavior and resistant behavior can be observed in domestic and farm animals, and studies also show autonomous actions.⁴³

This view is now supported by large parts of biology. It is becoming increasingly clear that traditional biology has moved too far down a technicist and reductionist path that overlooks or even negates the liveliness, meaningfulness and subjectivity of nature. The behavioral biologist Norbert Sachser speaks of a revolution in the image of animals during recent years.⁴⁴ Emotions, communication, learning, intelligence and individuality of animals are assessed quite differently today than they were a few decades ago, and Sachser emphasizes that two dogmas of behavioral biology have had to be shelved, namely that animals cannot think and that nothing can be known about their emotions.

In the meantime, the literature on the revision of our scientific view of nature is almost impossible to survey. The biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, for example, pursues an alternative ecology and biopoetics and believes that matter itself is creative, and that it follows a principle of abundance and produces subjectivity from itself.⁴⁵ Weber also draws on Lynn Margulis and the symbiosis concept, among others. The concept of autopoiesis introduced by the biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana also already refers to similar processes of autonomous self-organization. Living beings are not machines, but produce themselves, develop a form of autonomy and build their identity themselves. It has even been shown that plants exhibit intelligent behavior.⁴⁶

Furthermore, the research of biosemiotics could be mentioned here. This theory of the meaning-making of nature is interested in the semiotic processes within and between living beings. This breaks with simple cause-effect considerations and interprets life as a semiotic process. Following Charles Sanders Peirce, one can say that all forms of life are based on semiotic processes.⁴⁷ While human communication makes extensive use of symbolic signs, plant and animal exchange takes place more on the levels of iconic and indexical sign relations.⁴⁸ On these levels, it is then also possible in principle to enter into a sign-like exchange with plants and animals. Multi-species relations as well as a sociology of shared life would have the following basis: “it is appropriate to consider nonhuman organisms as selves and biotic life as a sign process, albeit one that is often highly embodied and nonsymbolic.”⁴⁹

In biology, a new perspective or even caesura has prevailed in recent years: symbiosis, cross-species cooperation, no longer appears as an exception but as the rule.⁵⁰ Both microbial organisms and ecosystem networks seem to be structured as symbiotic collectives. Research can be based on the groundbreaking work of the biologist Lynn Margulis, who found out many years ago that in the course of evolution, higher cells did not arise through competition, but through the symbiosis of simpler proto-forms. While Margulis was initially considered an outsider, research on symbioses among plants and animals is now booming. Today, it is common knowledge: no forest exists without the symbiosis of tree roots and fungi.⁵¹ But zoology has also shown that “animals are composites of many species living, developing and evolving together.”⁵² Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber go so far as to question older ideas of biological individuality with the concept of symbiosis. This also puts the evolutionary concept of individual selection in crisis. For if there is little anatomical, embryological, physiological, immunological, genetic and evolutionary support for a post-Darwinian concept of individuality, one can also no longer assume the selection of entities that exist independently of each other. They therefore conclude: “For animals, as well as plants, there have never been individuals. This new paradigm for biology […] seeks new relationships among the different living entities on Earth. We are all lichens.”⁵³

Historically, however, there is disagreement in biology about what exactly is meant by symbiosis. Originally (in the late nineteenth century), the term was used to describe a continuum from mutualism (all partners benefit from the symbiosis), through commensalism (one partner benefits without harming the other), to parasitism (one benefits, the other is harmed).⁵⁴ In the course of the twentieth century, the definition in biology narrowed and only mutualism was referred to as symbiosis. Currently, there is an increasing plea for a broader understanding in order to take a closer look at the diverse exchange processes in their directions and with their possible unequal effects for the symbionts involved. In this article, however, we will follow the more everyday way of speaking, which largely equates symbiosis with mutualism. A distinction must then be made between commensalism and parasitism.

Andreas Weber concludes that every exchange between living beings (whether between cells or between bird parents and chicks) involves three aspects: first, material substances are transferred; second, meanings are exchanged in the process; and third, subjectivities become intertwined in the exchange.⁵⁵ Life does not simply take place, it is also experienced and felt. A living being makes primary experiences of good and bad. Living beings are evaluative systems in this sense: they distinguish between what is and what should be. In doing so, they form worlds: “It's not about knowing that there is a world. It's about getting on with stuff, going about your doggy, or spidery, or whaley business.”⁵⁶ World-making is part of life, animals are not “world-poor” (as Heidegger states), but all organisms shape their ecological living environment. Organisms change the world of other organisms, e.g., bacteria produced Earth’s oxygen atmosphere and plants contribute to its preservation. Such world-creating endeavors can overlap and provide space for more than one species. Humans, too, are involved in these cross-species world-making processes, notes anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.⁵⁷ Worlds form intersections, overlap or overlap, and are partially shared. The fundamental impossibility of an understanding between very different ways of life based on different practices is too quickly asserted because no effort is made to build common practices.

This is also the focus of the new research area of multi-species studies.⁵⁸ This involves ethnographic immersion in the life worlds of alien species—be they frogs, fungi, microorganisms or farm animals. In these studies, researchers not only try to “objectively” reconstruct the exchange processes between different living beings, but also try to understand the associated interests, meanings and affects, at least to some extent, and to write dense descriptions of them—in the first person, as it were. What experiences do other living beings have, what is significant for them? Of course, it is clear that one can never feel like a tree. But the accusation of anthropocentrism is not appropriate toward these studies. For the alternative would be a kind of mechano-centrism, namely the assumption that other living beings do not live in a world of meaning and signification.

Weber interprets these cross-border processes of life as the flowing back and forth of gifts. Living systems are usually in a state of dynamic equilibrium, which can also be seen as a state of reciprocity, based on the triad of giving, taking and reciprocating. The objection that one is engaging in an inappropriate anthropocentrism here is obvious. But in my opinion, anthropocentrism is instead overcome in favor of a continuity of human and non-human life. What is to be criticized is a widespread mechano-centrism that is based on an ontological dualism and follows the assumption that other living beings are, as it were, silent and do not live in a world of meaning and signification. Like Sachser,⁵⁹ Danowski and Viveiros de Castro therefore argue for the anthropomorphic principle that animals are like us: a kind of pan-psychic generalization is the basic operation here to align the world with human beings.⁶⁰

Donna Haraway also criticizes the biological conception that there are individuals and their contexts. Instead, she speaks of collective processes of “sympoiesis” (“going along with”), which she also takes as a critique of the concept of autopoiesis since nothing is truly and merely self-organizing.⁶¹ She also turns sensitivity to other forms of life into the ethical. Haraway calls for us to rethink our kinship relations. A multi-species ethic calls not only for behaving morally toward alien humans, but also toward non-human species. Not only are humans on the run worldwide, but many other non-human living beings are also displaced or wiped out. She argues for new associations of living beings that transcend conventional biological, cultural and political boundaries. At the same time, however, Haraway makes clear that any affirmative reference to life can also entail destruction and death. Saving the lives of certain species is sometimes only possible if other species are pushed back. Killing, however, should then not be generally understood as ontological fate, but in the course of a bio- and thanato-politics it is about developing a greater sensitivity focusing on intolerable forms of destruction and killing.⁶²

Theory of the Gift or Taking Care

It has now become clear that there is no longer any nature outside of human influence and access. The separation of culture and nature—if it ever made sense—must now be finally abandoned. Nature must be understood sociologically differently, but human societies must also be viewed differently. I would now like to link the above with a theory of the gift,⁶³ which is intended to link the previous considerations with a different model of action and order and to transcend the previous boundaries of sociology.

Following Marcel Mauss’ central text on the gift and the French MAUSS (“Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales”), we will now consider an interactionist theory of the gift that conceives of human relations and relations between humans and non-human actors differently from most sociological theory. Alain Caillé has worked out that central dimensions of human action cannot be explained in either utilitarian or normative terms, but rather in terms of the theory of the gift.⁶⁴ Thus, the gift is neither based on mere self-interest, nor can it be reduced to people doing what norms demand of them. In gifts, there is a surplus of spontaneity, unconditionality, freedom and commitment that cannot be attributed to self-interest or normative commitment. Gifts that show a moment of voluntariness and unconditionality do not have to be as closely linked to reciprocity as sociological theory generally assumes.⁶⁵ Wherever there is no record of the exchange that has taken place, we are dealing with forms of giving, trust, public spirit, devotion and love that can be decoupled in specific ways from specific expectations of reciprocity and, above all, from exchange. It is not the liberal ideal of the autonomous individual free from interdependence that underlies gift relationships, but a web of relationships of interdependence that leads to giving and taking as needs and abilities suggest. Gifts thus contain moments of surplus and unconditionality, which are constitutive for the production of sociality. Thus, beneath the social lie non-equivalences and asymmetries. For giving is not traceable to the exchange of equivalent values.

All previous cultures—with the exception of modernity—have understood their relationship to non-human nature as a gift relationship: one takes from lakes, mountains, forests, farm animals and wild animals, and one also gives something back to them. How can such a gift relationship be re-established under modern conditions? For the maxim of modernity, as is well known, is: “thou shalt not regress.”⁶⁶ Very quickly, one is accused of being romantic and pre- or anti-modern. The moderns certainly cannot and do not want to enter into a pre-modern world of imagination. But without a certain re-enchantment of the world, a common life will not be won. Moreover, it is true that the modern lifeworld is by no means as disenchanted as has been assumed in the social sciences since Max Weber.⁶⁷

Caillé, Chanial and Flipo point out that a partnership with nature would require that we (re)attribute subjectivity to it.⁶⁸ Now, as we saw above, contemporary biology is doing just that. So, based on scientific knowledge, one can try to revive or recreate an enlightened animism. Caillé, Chanial and Flipo call this project a methodological animism. For we do not first have to ascribe consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality and a will to cooperate to all living beings in a scientifically proven and validated way. It is enough to consider the non-human beings methodologically as quasi-subjects. That is, we treat the other living beings as if they had subjectivity—regardless of whether it can really be “proven” scientifically. This leads us to recognize non-human beings as givers, to connect with them ontologically in a completely different way and, as it were, to enchant them again. It is not just about other perspectives, but other realities that are practically anchored. To enter into gift relationships in this context means to form an alliance, to establish the alliance between human and non-human beings anew again and again. In Andreas Weber's words, material substances as well as meanings are exchanged, and in this exchange, subjectivities become intertwined and intermingled in the form of new alliances.

This alliance has an agonistic side, just like the gift relationship between people. Gifts are able to create alliances, but they always contain moments of conflict and opposition. The gift relationship with nature is never purely harmonious; nature can also refuse, take relentlessly or give bad things. Viewing nature in terms of a gift relationship therefore in no way implies a purely conflict-free or romantically transfigured understanding of the relationship. And of course, it is not a matter of giving back the equivalent of what nature has given. What should this consist of? Rather, it is about recognizing the intrinsic value of non-human living beings and ecological processes, and renewing the covenant through the act of reciprocation. In the act of reciprocation, nature is recognized as a partner and no longer just a passive source of resources.

I therefore advocate looking animistically at nature from a sociological perspective (and not just from an everyday world perspective), thus opening up sociology to important phenomena and in this way also contributing to making existing multi-species interactions⁶⁹ and the associated loyalties and sympathies visible. Sociology is not bound to follow the standard ontological model (see above) and to cultivate a traditional scientific view of nature. In my opinion, the methodological animism toward animate nature that is anchored in the lifeworld is an adequate non-dualistic ontology that can also serve as a starting point for sociological theory building.

In symbiosis with non-human creatures, new interspecies life forms emerge. Farmers who have not completely surrendered to factory farming with its passivation and ontological reduction of animals describe their relationship with cows and pigs as characterized by reciprocity⁷⁰—reciprocity in the give and take of care, labor and emotions. Porcher emphasizes that societies consist de facto of humans and domesticated animals.⁷¹ Since the Neolithic Age, it has been true that animals perform work for humans and that animals maintain a special relationship with farmers (and vice versa): they live in the mode of “becoming with,” and they cannot be described as stand-alone entities that only relate to each other in a second step. Their symbiotic cooperations change them mutually. And this presupposes trust and a willingness to cooperate on the part of the animals as well: “An animal that does not want to cooperate cannot be constrained to do so.”⁷²

Not all close symbioses between humans and their symbionts are noticed. Ecological awareness begins with an awareness of this gap and attempts to overcome it by noticing and acknowledging the interdependencies between life forms. As early as 1939, Robert Park noted that the interdependence between different forms of life has steadily increased as society has developed, and has never been greater than it is today.⁷³ Perceiving interdependencies is not just about having a different cognitive view of the world, it is about interacting and relating with other life—for example, in the mode of gift and care as “matters of care.”⁷⁴

Conclusion: Conviviality and Symbiosis

The theory of the gift has been transformed into a normative theory of successful coexistence in French convivialism.⁷⁵ The concept of conviviality indicates that people are above all social beings who are interdependent.⁷⁶ In this context, social relationships are seen not only as a means to an end, but above all as an end in themselves. Convivialism is a decidedly anti-utilitarian intellectual current that sees human beings as characterized less in their desire to take, but in their ability and need to give to others (quite agonistically) and to connect with each other.⁷⁷

Empirically, conviviality is currently being studied above all in the field of the everyday multiculturalism of non-elites. The available studies are interested in how people, for example in multi-ethnic neighborhoods, shape and organize their everyday life together.⁷⁸ It turns out that there are diverse practices of respectful interaction that originate in dispositions to give: “Conviviality is established in different routine practices of giving and taking, talking and sharing, exchanging news and goods and so on […]. The banal interactions across social and ethnic boundaries give a sense of togetherness.”⁷⁹ Conviviality can be defined as a minimal form of successful coexistence based on routine practices of give and take. Everyday interactions across ethnic boundaries, for example, create a sense of commonality and togetherness. Tensions and conflicts are not excluded here, on the contrary: they take place permanently and have to be negotiated and translated. Conviviality in this sense represents a form of minimal sociality and a minimal consensus, a competence of cross-cultural, everyday negotiation and cooperation.⁸⁰

Symbiosis in a sociological sense should now mean cooperative coexistence in a cross-species sense. Symbiosis is thus a subcategory of conviviality, which in turn is based on gift relationships. Conviviality thus also includes symbiotic relationships between humans and non-human living beings and is incorporated into a concept of a general ecology. Tim Ingold puts it this way: “Therefore relations among humans, which we are accustomed to calling ‘social’, are but a sub-set of ecological relations.”⁸¹

In the history of sociological thought, there are certainly isolated references to the idea of symbiosis. However, either the concept of symbiosis is restricted to coexistence within human societies,⁸² or the concept of symbiosis is used in a metaphorical sense. Wagner, for example, introduced the concept of symbiosis as an opening figure within the framework of Luhmann's systems and differentiation theory.⁸³ Clearly, however, his focus remains limited to (human) social systems. In this article, however, the concept of symbiosis is not limited to only human societies, but also includes biosocial collectives of human and non-human actors. In such symbioses, at least one of the subjects in relation to each other is fundamentally changed.⁸⁴

In this sense, farmers and their livestock are in symbiosis, or bees and beekeepers. Symbiosis as a sociological conception of interspecies gift relations refers to a cooperative relationship between animals and humans. In animal studies, a political turn can currently be identified that aims at the membership of animals in the political community, i.e., the citizenship status of animals.⁸⁵ According to Peter Niesen, all living beings that contribute to the flourishing of a society are entitled to this status. This is based on a simple normative principle: “those who contribute permanently should not go empty-handed.”⁸⁶ Here, Niesen emphasizes a principle of reciprocity that understands animal labor and products as contributions to the social cooperation context. Cooperation is formally determined by him, independent of the question of whether “a distinction can be made between intentional and unintentional, voluntary and forced contributions.”⁸⁷ Thus, above all, the exploitation of farm animals for food production also generates reciprocity obligations toward them. Niesen wants to grant the resulting citizenship status mainly to farm animals and domestic animals, since cultural successors and wild animals do not permanently and systematically cooperate with human society.⁸⁸

The questions of political theory cannot be pursued further here. However, in terms of a general sociology and ecology of such a cooperative context, it must be stated: viewed as a whole, it can be said that humanity is dependent on life (of plants and animals) and on planet Earth, that most animals and plants in the Anthropocene are also dependent on humans, but that at the same time the Earth as a whole is not dependent on us, but rather in the Anthropocene we can be regarded as the Earth's parasite.⁸⁹ We only take without giving nature enough in return.