Bruno Latour, philosopher of ecology and one of the most influential French thinkers, dies

Hundreds of people, many of them students in their twenties, had gathered in the Great Amphitheater of the Sorbonne, the scene for centuries of master classes by scholars of all disciplines.

The statues of Descartes and Richelieu that flank the room sternly surveyed the scene.

On stage, the philosopher Bruno Latour spoke of the unstable ground on which contemporary humans move and of a world of multiple conflicts.

Of the war in Ukraine and the “climate wars”.

From the Greek tragedy.

Of Europe.

"We must turn to each other, with no king or tsar to appeal to," he said.

“There is no authority to turn to.

We're waiting".

It was last May 23, during a colloquium organized by the magazine

, and it was one of the last speeches by Latour, who died this weekend in Paris at the age of 75 after a long illness, according to family sources.

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Latour was living proof that, despite the fact that the times of Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida are beginning to be far away, and those of Sartre and Camus even more so, the intellectual in France continues to enjoy influence and respect, and can still stir up the debate public without falling into demagoguery or participating in television talk shows.

called him some time ago "the most famous French philosopher and also the most misunderstood."

The author of

(Taurus, in Spanish) and a wide body of work on disciplines ranging from science and technology to ecology, he was not an isolated philosopher in the ivory tower.

On the contrary.

Latour's lectures could draw crowds.

He organized exhibitions and participated in biennials of contemporary art.

He collaborated with theater authors and exposed his ideas in

interactive

He worked with scientists to develop his theories about this world in environmental stress.

As the essayist Frédéric Martel recalled in a 2021 article, he coined or helped spread concepts such as “zones to defend”, “modes of existence”, “actants”, “critical zone” or “actor-network theory”.

University students and politicians read it.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, explained a few months ago that, together with the German Peter Sloterdijk, Latour was his reference contemporary thinker.

This Sunday, after hearing the news of his death, he glossed on the social network Twitter: “Thinker of ecology, modernity or religion, Bruno Latour was a humanist and plural spirit, recognized throughout the world before being so in France.

His reflection, his writings, will continue to inspire us in new relationships with the world.

Recognition of the Nation”.

Penseur de l'écologie, de la modernité ou de la religion, Bruno Latour était un esprit humaniste et pluriel, reconnu dans le monde entier avant de l'être en France.

Sa reflection of him, ses écrits of him, continueront de nous inspirer de nouveaux rapports au monde.

Reconnaissance of the Nation.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 9, 2022

Latour had been born into a Burgundian gentry family, the makers of the Maison Louis Latour wine.

Being the youngest of the brothers and not dedicating himself to the business, he went to study in Paris, where he graduated in philosophy.

He later went to teach in the Ivory Coast.

There, as the journalist Nicolas Truong explains in

, it occurred to him to observe Western societies as ethnologists did in African societies.

Later, he would spend two years in California observing the day to day of a laboratory.

From the field work he developed his reflections on the facts and the truth, which would lead some to qualify him (inaccurately) as a “post-truth philosopher”.

“In order to maintain respect for the media, science, institutions, authority, there must be a shared world,” he said in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2019. “The facts must be supported, they do not live alone.

A fact is only a lamb in front of the wolves”.

During the interview, in his apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the philosopher recalled an enlightening moment for his work on the environment and the climate crisis.

He was traveling on a plane to Canada.

As he flew over the Baffin Sea, he watched the receding pack ice.

“When I was on the plane, I was no longer attending a show, but I was modifying the show since the CO2 emitted by the plane influences the ice sheet,” he explained.

“Before, this spectacle, that of the ice sheet seen from the plane, would have had a sublime character.

Now it's hard to feel like that.

If you are told that you are responsible for what you see, the feeling is different, it is a form of anguish”.

It is this anguish —this awareness that the human being modifies the thin layer of the planet where he lives— what defined the work of recent years: the instability of a world from which some want to flee —disregarding, like Trump or Bolsonaro, the change climate, or fleeing to Mars as some Silicon Valley billionaires plan – and in which others fall back on nationalism.

"And in the middle", continued Latour, "we are the unhappy ones who think that, at one time or another, we will have to land: reconcile the economy, law, identity with the real world on which we depend".

The pandemic and the lockdowns were for many of his followers a confirmation of his ideas about a complex and interrelated planet.

“We are experiencing a cosmological or cosmographic change that has the same importance as the great changes of the 16th century,” he told us during a telephone conversation during the year of the pandemic.

“Then the infinity of the world was discovered.

Now we are going from a world that we believed to be global and universal to a relocated world, in which we have to pay attention to every gesture, to every breath we give”.

And he predicted that a future awaited us in which we would go “from one crisis to another, from one confinement to another.”

Russia had not yet invaded the Ukraine and the war had not returned to Europe.

In the speech at the Sorbonne, last May, he defended Europeanism, one of the favorite themes of this leader of the ecological left, although he always kept his distance from politics.

“This is the moment”, he said, “that Europe, not conceived only as a Union, but Europe as soil, finally finds its people and the people finds its soil”.

And he concluded: "Europe can finally give itself the project, in the midst of dangers and because of them, of voluntarily forming a nation."