anthropomorphism

anthropomorphism, the interpretation of nonhuman things or events in terms of human characteristics, as when one senses malice in a computer or hears human voices in the wind. Derived from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and morphe (“form”), the term was first used to refer to the attribution of human physical or mental features to deities. By the mid-19th century, however, it had acquired the second, broader meaning of a phenomenon occurring not only in religion but in all areas of human thought and action, including daily life, the arts, and even sciences. Anthropomorphism may occur consciously or unconsciously. Most scholars since the time of the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) have agreed that the tendency to anthropomorphize hinders the understanding of the world, but it is deep-seated and persistent.

People in all cultures have attributed human characteristics to deities, often including jealousy, pride, and love. Even deities with an animal form, or with no physical form at all, are thought to understand prayer and other symbolic communication. The earliest known commentator on anthropomorphism, the Greek poet and religious thinker Xenophanes (c. 560–c. 478 bce), criticized the tendency to conceive of the gods in human terms, and later theologians have sought to reduce anthropomorphism in religion. Most contemporary theologians, however, concede that anthropomorphism cannot be eliminated without eliminating religion itself, because objects of religious devotion must have features to which humans can relate. For example, language, widely considered a human characteristic, must also be present in deities if humans are to pray to them.

Nonreligious anthropomorphism also appears worldwide. People throughout history have reported seeing human features in landforms, clouds, and trees. Artists everywhere have depicted natural phenomena such as the Sun and Moon as having faces and gender. In literature and graphic art, such depiction often is called personification, especially when the subject is an abstraction, such as Death or Liberty. Anthropomorphism in science is widely criticized but not uncommon. For example, the discoverers of the pulsar first mistook its regular radio signals for messages from space, and Charles Darwin (1809–82), the English naturalist who devised the theory of evolution, described Nature as constantly seeking to improve her creatures.

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religious symbolism and iconography: Anthropomorphic motifs

Traditional explanations of why people anthropomorphize may be divided into two sorts. One view, held by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) among others, is that it is done for an intellectual reason: in order to explain an unfamiliar and mysterious world by using the model that humans know best, namely themselves. This account has merit, but it fails to explain why humans anthropomorphize familiar objects, such as pets and household utensils, or why humans spontaneously see faces in random patterns. The second explanation, given by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and others, is that people anthropomorphize for an emotional reason: to make a hostile or indifferent world seem more familiar and therefore less threatening. This also has merit, but it fails to explain why people anthropomorphize in ways that frighten them, as when they hear a door slammed by the wind and think it is an intruder.

A third and more general explanation is that anthropomorphism results from the uncertainty of perception and from the practical need to discern humans, human messages, and human traces in a chronically ambiguous world. Because every sensation may have any of various causes, perception (and with it cognition) is an interpretation and thus a choice among possibilities. As the historian and psychologist of art Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) put it, perception is betting. Those bets that potentially yield the most important information are the most valuable, and the most important information usually concerns other humans. Thus, humans are predisposed to perceive shapes, sounds, and other things and events in terms of human form or action, both in unconscious thought and in the conscious thought to which it gives rise.

Abstraction and pattern recognition, including analogy and metaphor, are fundamental to much of human thought. They enable humans to perceive (among other things) elements of human form or behaviour even where humans do not see the whole, as when they see the image of the “man in the Moon.” What humans see is also shaped by context, including culture, so that, for example, people in some parts of the world see a “woman in the Moon” instead.

When an interpretation of something as human or humanlike is replaced by an interpretation of it as nonhuman, the earlier interpretation can be understood as anthropomorphism. For example, humans may first see a threatening figure in an alley but later realize that the “figure” is a garbage can. Under any of the three explanations discussed above, anthropomorphism can be described as a category of interpretations retrospectively seen as mistaken.

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