"Feeling is never invisible, it has shape and manifests itself as form everywhere in nature." We can therefore look at nature as a developed feeling, as a living reality before us and in our midst.”

Andreas Weber

Andreas Weber asks a radical and challenging question: Is it possible that our planet is not suffering primarily from a financial or even ecological crisis, but from a critical lack of love?

In this lecture, the author will connect a personal story with the latest biological philosophy and introduce a “poetic ecology” that offers a new approach to the biological sciences that returns man back to nature. Weber argues that to deconstruct the depth of our alienation from nature, it is necessary to recognize and accept that feelings and emotions are the very basis of life, intimately connecting our species to everything that surrounds us, and shows that subjectivity and imagination are prerequisites for biological existence.

Andreas Weber (born 1967) is a German biologist, philosopher, biosemiotician and writer who lives in Berlin. He studied marine biology and collaborated with the prominent theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris; after 2000 he also worked at the Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague. Weber focuses on reevaluating our understanding of life, asks the question of what life is and what role we play in it, and develops the idea of a new culture and politics of aliveness. According to Andreas, being alive and participating in aliveness is at its core an erotic process by which our self is constantly transformed and developed through contacts and relationships with others. Weber is the author of the books: Alles fühlt: Mensch, Natur and die Revolution der Lebenwissenschaften (2007), which was published in Czech last year under the title He feels, therefore he is (Malvern 2022); and Matter and Desire. An Erotic Ecology (2017), the Czech edition of which is currently being prepared by Malvern Publishing House. On April 12, 2013, Andreas Weber participated (together with David Abram, Shelley Sachs, Ivan M. Havel, etc.) in the seminar "Poetics of the Living World" at the Kampa Theatre in Prague, which was organized by the Pilgrim association together with the German thinkOya.

Admission

voluntary / recommended 200 CZK

Contacts

Pilgrim: 777 117 466 (Jiri Zemanek), 775 052 607 (Tomas Hruza)

Goethe Institute: 221 962 242 (Monika Loderová)