Concept
Anthropomorphism
Overview
Anthropomorphism is the ascribing of human personality, appearance, conduct, cognition, or other attributes to non-human entities, often including non-human animals. In fiction and folklore, it is specifically the endowing of non-human characters with human-like behaviors, speech, facial expressions, etc.; common examples include intelligent talking animals, talking trees, anthropomorphized food, and sentient toys.
As a general human tendency, anthropomorphism is considered innate to human psychology. Personification, which usually refers to a literary device, is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to non-animal organisms, inanimate objects, or abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces like weather or the seasons. Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for the thesis that the knowledge of God and of truth must be immediate, or intuitive. At an earlier period all sort of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they are termed, were banished from God, as being finite and therefore unworthy of the infinite; and in this way God had been reduced to a tolerably blank being. But in those days the thought-forms were in general not…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Anthropomorphism is; names Anthropomorphism.
While this anthropomorphic tendency, or rather necessity, is manifested by themselves with sufficient grossness--a grossness that is offensive to those more advanced--Christians are indignant at the still grosser manifestations of it seen among uncivilized men. Certainly, such conceptions as those of some Polynesians, who believe that their gods feed on the souls of the dead, or as those of the Greeks, who ascribed…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
The chapter “XIII. THE USE OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM.” is titled for Anthropomorphism.
For if, from a practical point of view, the hypothesis of a Supreme and All-sufficient Being is to maintain its validity without opposition, it must be of the highest importance to define this conception in a correct and rigorous manner—as the transcendental conception of a necessary being, to eliminate all phenomenal elements (anthropomorphism in its most extended signification), and at the same time to overflow…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
Names Anthropomorphism twice.
Philosophers who discussed Anthropomorphism
Related ideas
- French language
- God in Christianity
- Folklore
- Francis Bacon
- George Orwell
- Hindus
- Hesiod
- Ancient Greek
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Para Brahman
- Netflix
- American English
- Fiction
- Hatred
- The Guardian
- Maimonides
- Xenophanes
- Bhagavad Gita
- Greek mythology
- Fantasy
- Panchatantra
- Myth
- HarperCollins
- Works and Days
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Animism.