Behind a pane of plate glass at the Barcelona Zoo, an albino gorilla presses an old rubber tire against his chest. His name is Copito de Nieve, Snowflake. He was captured in Equatorial Guinea in 1966, while still an infant, and died in 2003, the only known albino gorilla in existence. He fathered children who did not inherit his whiteness and did not outlive him. A few yards behind him a female sits inside a tire of her own as if it were an easy chair, sunning herself, delousing her baby. She uses the thing. He holds on to it.
The man at the glass is Mr. Palomar, the nervous protagonist of Italo Calvino’s last book, and what he believes he is watching is the birth of culture — a first daybreak in the long biological night. Robert Pogue Harrison takes this scene as the pivot of an essay on human intelligence, written as an afterword to Humanism in the Age of AI, edited by Ana Ilievska. His question is whether our intelligence is one variety of animal intelligence or something else altogether. Since there is no intermediary species between us and the other primates, he goes looking for an intermediary case in literature instead. The argument that follows turns on a reversal. Calvino, on Harrison’s reading, has put the source of language in the wrong place.
Two Doctrines That Outlived Humanism
Harrison opens with Zarathustra in the marketplace, telling the people that they made their way from worm to man, that much in them is still worm, that man is “more ape than any ape.” A century and a half of progress has not retired the line. The more power humanity accrues, the more of it goes into apelike uses: alpha conflicts between states, the persecution of the subaltern, the high-tech smashing of skulls in modern war. The law of self-overcoming, Harrison writes, is perverse. Only an ape who has become more than an ape can keep falling back into the worst forms of apedom while rising into a posthuman future on the wings of its machines.
Humanism, in its Christian and its secular versions alike, held that human beings are free from determination by instinct and capable of autonomous moral choice. Harrison asks whether that doctrine survives the great modern efforts to re-naturalize human nature — Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, scientism. Two counter-doctrines have taken its place, and they are philosophically at odds with each other. The first is biological continuity: there is no irreducible difference between humans and animals, since our prized faculties, language and intelligence and megalomania among them, can be shown to belong to other species too. Harrison notes what accompanies this conviction. Exactly when we have become the masters and possessors of nature, having ravaged the earth and terrorized every other living species, we insist on our kinship with the animal world. The second doctrine he calls the more insidious of the two: that human intelligence can be abstracted from our animal nature and recreated artificially, in a digital substrate of algorithms, data processing, and cybernetic feedback loops. The worm has become cyborg.
The Argument from the Cage
Mr. Palomar’s reading of the gorilla has serious philosophical company. Harrison cites Heidegger, for whom the animal is “poor in world” — absorbed by its immediate field of perception, captivated by its surroundings, able to behave within an environment but never to comport itself within a world. Bergson says something close to this in more elegant prose. Consciousness, for him, corresponds exactly to a living being’s power of choice; in the animal, invention is never more than a variation on the theme of routine. The gates of the prison close as soon as they are opened. In man alone, consciousness breaks the chain.
Harrison does not take this line. Freedom against captivation cannot mark the human difference, he says, if only because the great majority of human beings have lived out their lives in one cage or another — as subjugated wives, slaves, serfs, day laborers, courtiers. And the more he turns Calvino’s vignette over, the less it looks like a story about a gorilla at all. It is a story about Mr. Palomar, who finds in the albino’s whiteness a picture of his own frustration and confusion. The gorilla is for Palomar what the tire is for the gorilla: an inarticulate symbol, or a symbol of the inarticulate.
Does Snowflake in fact feel the wonder Palomar attributes to him? We will never know. We can only wonder — which is, for Harrison, the point. Wonder is ignorance that has become aware of itself. To know that you do not know is a form of irony, and that irony sits at the heart of the human condition. We sense that the world makes sense. We notice that it follows rules, we intimate some larger order around us, and we still cannot account for what any of it means, because meaning arises in the relation between ourselves and the world. It is not the world that is absurd but our relation to it.
The Reluctance to Grow Up
If speech does not begin in the anguish of a creature at the glass, where does it begin? Here a word does some work. The Latin infans is the negation of the participle of fari, to speak: the one who does not speak, the one not yet speaking. It names an age by an absence. Snowflake is speechless in exactly that literal sense, and Palomar imagines him on the verge of breaking into language, which invites us to see the gorilla as a figure of human infancy.
The comparison holds only so far. A human infant’s silence is charged with potential speech and will break soon enough; Snowflake’s will not, however long he lives. Harrison locates the difference in the extraordinary length of human childhood, an argument he set out at greater length in his book Juvenescence. Our prolonged fetal growth rates let our brains reach a size no other primate approaches. Our extended infancy and childhood stretch out the period of learning, which in turn deepens both intelligence and the capacity for socialization. A helpless child whose development is delayed comes to depend on education, cultural memory, and acquired skill rather than on instinct. Only a creature born into the support structures of a society can afford so long a youth. Our genius as a species, in his formulation, lies in our reluctance to grow up.
That genius shows itself first in storytelling, the commonest form of human sense-making. Harrison supposes the earliest stories were dramatic before they were verbal, carrying plot and character and emotion through ritual enactment, furs, feathers, painted masks, and the body’s mimetic powers; language entered later, the way spoken dialogue arrived after the pantomime and title cards of silent film. For the animistic myths of prehistory he turns to Vico, who traced them to two traits endemic to early childhood: an inability to think abstractly and a prodigious figurative imagination. Rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them. Vico’s imaginative metaphysics holds that man becomes all things by not understanding them — that when he does not understand, he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. The capacity to believe, to make believe, to suspend disbelief is neotenic, and we never lose it at any age.
So the reversal. Language does not arise from a need to escape but from a desire to enter, not from frowns of frustration but from a surplus of wonder. Snowflake is too old, too grown, too late — the springs of speech lie in the depths of infancy, and language is born not by overcoming speechlessness but by prolonging it. His tire has all the force of a primitive symbol, yet what it marks is a post-symbolic rather than a pre-symbolic condition. Palomar, weary and middle-aged, performs meanwhile the very imaginative metaphysics under discussion: he projects himself into an animal’s imagined desolation and cannot get the image out of his head.
The Infancy of the Machine
Harrison’s closing suspicion is that the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have an essential connection to the neotenic impulses of the people building it. AI is recapitulating our projective metaphysics in novel and uncanny forms; we are living through a new recourse of the course of nations that Vico described. In these early stages, AI becomes all things not by understanding them but by not understanding them. It makes things out of itself and turns itself into them — into automobiles and household appliances, into doctors, lawyers, artists, athletes, actors, factory workers, rockers, and even into idiosyncratic individuals like the author of the afterword. Vico’s sentence would serve as the epigraph to a philosophical anthropology of artificial intelligence.
AI, on this account, is itself in its infancy, about to cross a threshold into a superintelligence that will amount to a whole new language. Once it does, we will no longer understand the world it builds around us. That is when the albino gorilla stops being an image of what precedes us and becomes an image of what follows. Shut out of a tongue we fathered, kept at the glass, we too will have to find an old tire to hold on to in the enormous void of our posthuman hours.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. “On Human Intelligence.” In Humanism in the Age of AI: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Social Critique, edited by Ana Ilievska, 287–94. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2026.
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