Anthropocentrism
Summary: The assumption that human beings are the central, most important, or privileged entity in the universe — and the philosophical, literary, and ethical challenges to that assumption.
Sources: raw/Dories-Identity-Reality-Anthropocentrism-Three-Body-Problem.md
Last updated: 2026-05-05
The critique
Cixin Liu’s essay “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature” names it directly: mainstream literature engages in “intense anthropocentric narcissism.” The universe is 13.8 billion years old; humanity has existed for a fraction of a percent of that time; yet literature focuses almost entirely on human relationships and human history. Liu argues that science fiction is uniquely positioned to correct this — to defamiliarize the human perspective and make the scale of the cosmos legible.
The critique cuts in several directions:
- Temporal: human history is a rounding error in cosmic time.
- Moral: the assumption that human suffering matters more than animal or plant suffering is arbitrary (speciesism, biocentrism).
- Epistemic: human perception and cognition cannot be the measure of all things if there are minds — biological or artificial — operating at different scales and speeds.
- Literary: the novel form itself is anthropocentric; its conventions (character, interiority, relationship) assume human protagonists matter in ways that complicate non-anthropocentric storytelling.
The spectrum from anthropocentrism to anti-anthropocentrism
Dories’s reading of The Three-Body Problem maps several positions:
Anthropocentrism: Humans are the center of value. Nature matters insofar as it serves human needs. The Cultural Revolution is bad because it destroys human culture; the trees fall because of what they represent to human history.
Environmentalism (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring): Humans are part of nature; human activities damage ecosystems; this is bad both for ecosystems and for humans. Still fundamentally anthropocentric — the framing is “bad for us.”
Animal rights / speciesism (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation): The capacity to suffer is the morally relevant criterion; species membership is as arbitrary as race. Equality of suffering, not equality of capability.
Biocentrism (Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature): All living things have inherent worth independent of their utility to humans. Humans are part of a community of life; no species is inherently superior.
Pan-Species Communism (Mike Evans in The Three-Body Problem): All species are equal; human civilization is inherently destructive; the only solution is to invite an external force to correct humanity.
Adventism (Evans’s endpoint): Humanity must be eliminated. The logic of anti-anthropocentrism taken to its conclusion becomes a form of misanthropy indistinguishable in practice from annihilation.
Liu’s argument: the progression from environmental concern to radicalism follows a consistent pattern — ideology + novum (alien contact, the countdown on the retinas, the death of a beloved ecosystem) = radicalization. And when anti-anthropocentric ideologies are fully popularized and acted upon, they can be more destructive than the anthropocentrism they oppose. The Trisolarans regard humans as “bugs.” The ETO members, having concluded that humanity is irredeemable, support their own extinction.
The novum as destabilizer
Darko Suvin’s term for the generative device of SF — the element so new that it forces a fundamental reassessment of reality. In The Three-Body Problem:
- Alien intelligence (the Trisolarans)
- Physical laws that are not invariant across space and time
- A countdown appearing on photographic film, then on the protagonist’s retinas
- Virtual reality that simulates an alien civilization
Each novum destabilizes the characters’ worldview and prepares them for the shift from anthropocentric to non-anthropocentric thinking. For Ye Wenjie and Evans, the novum does not cure their despair about humanity but gives it a direction.
Science fiction as the genre of defamiliarization
The capacity of SF to challenge anthropocentrism depends on what Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement” — presenting the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar in order to produce a different way of seeing. The alien is “a mirror to man just as the differing country is a mirror for his world” (Suvin) — but Liu pushes beyond this. The Trisolarans are not a mirror to humanity; they are genuinely alien in motive and scale, and the trilogy’s arc is to make that alienness legible as something other than a horror.
Anthropocentrism and Contact ethics in Banks
The Culture’s Contact/Special Circumstances raises the anthropocentrism question from a different angle. SC interventions in less-developed civilizations are justified by the argument that the Culture’s values (empiricism, humanism, egalitarianism) are genuinely better — but this is a form of anthropocentrism at civilizational scale. Norman’s analysis of Inversions (see norman-culture-utopian-processes) shows Banks threading the needle: Vossil introduces science without conquest, offering rather than imposing. The question — whether altruistic technoscience can ever be free of civilizational narcissism — is never fully resolved in the series.