How Do We Know Non-Human Others? OOO, Anthropomorphism, and the Stanislavski's System

The article is dedicated to the search for ways of knowing non-human entities (non-human living beings, things, technologies) within the context of the contemporary philosophical non-human turn. The author proceeds from the problem: how can we speak of non-humans without turning them into a semblance of humans? The basis for the answer is provided by Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) – a school of thought in post-continental philosophy proposed by Graham Harman and developed in the works of his followers (T. Morton, I. Bogost et al.), which insists on breaking the correlation between the object and human thought about it. According to OOO, real objects are fundamentally withdrawn from direct access, and therefore their cognition requires indirect approaches. One such approach becomes aesthetic perception, understood as a performative act – a theatricality of cognition, in Harman's terms. Drawing an analogy with Stanislavski's system, the author describes this cognition as "performing the role" of a non-human other. This process is examined through the lens of Brian Massumi's concept of play as a "zone of indiscernibility" and Graham Harman's notion of "allure." Anthropomorphism – the traditional attribution of human characteristics to the non-human – plays an important role in this process, becoming one variant of aesthetic cognition. Relying on the ideas of Jane Bennett, the author demonstrates that anthropomorphism, as an aesthetic and playful practice, is not a cognitive error or a form of anthropocentrism. This approach can have practical applications in issues such as the rights of nature (cases in New Zealand, Ecuador, and Colombia), where anthropomorphic rhetoric is used to include non-human natural objects within the legal framework. Thus, the article proposes an aesthetic-performative model of cognition that overcomes the limitations of anthropocentrism and correlationism. This approach not only opens up new epistemological possibilities but also has important implications for ecological ethics and law, fostering more responsible and equitable relationships between humans and the non-human world.