“Community of subjects”: nature as living, receptive and communicative

Tuesday, August 8 – Wednesday, August 9

In the Anthropocene, our scientific understanding of life is changing rapidly. While in past centuries science considered humans to be the only actors in an otherwise mute and objective universe (including other species), the ecological crisis of the current epoch reveals the profound interconnectedness of humans with all processes of the biosphere, both material and psychological. Humans are part of a living planet, and life on Earth is much more similar to our own experience than we thought even a decade ago.

Against this backdrop, biologist, philosopher and internationally renowned author Andreas Weber will present his work on understanding life as a shared, distributed and felt process in a series of lectures and workshops that will take place over the two days of the seminar. The latest biological insights, based on cognitive research, biosemiotics, but also on a wide range of studies of individual species of fungi, plants and animals, show that we can now understand life as a process of embodied subjectivity, as the creation of individual attitudes, feelings and intentions through the interconnected bodies of organisms.

The “secret life” of not only plants but all living beings lies in creating a perspective of the self through intense interconnection and co-creation. In this image, we can gain a new understanding of ecology as a commons and as a shared process of understanding and experiencing.

Tuesday, August 8

from 9:00 to 11:30

An organism like me

45 min. lecture, 30 min. group “holding” process, break, question and answer hour

Bees can be euphoric or depressed. Ants play. Spiders dream, probably in the same way that humans do. Forest trees help young saplings with food, even across species boundaries. Bacterial cells also act from the perspective of their own selves – and so do the tens of billions of cells in our bodies. Biologists increasingly understand living beings as agents, as subjects acting from the perspective of their own selves and in their own interests – as much more like humans than we have previously imagined. This introductory lecture elaborates on the biological, behavioral, and cognitive foundations of viewing life as a shared subjectivity.

from 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Tell me who I am

Two hours of science workshop as part of the trip

The subjective nature of non-human beings can be experienced. This experience is actually what fuels our human “love of nature,” even though it is often not well understood. Many gardeners and nature lovers know how to practically connect with other beings, but they have no system for doing so. In this workshop, we will expand the experience of mindfulness of other beings from the low-threshold “forest bathing” approach to deeper interaction with living others.

from 19:00 to 21:30

Ecosystems as processes of mutual care

45 min. lecture, 30 min. meditation, 30 min. group “holding” process, short break, 30 min. questions and answers

Life means the self-formation of a feeling identity in a constantly changing body. The self-position – something we know intimately as the center of our life experience and the feeling of being alive – remains identical (or rather, it is recalibrated again and again as the renewal of one continuous lifeline), but the basic body is not at all stable. On the level of its material composition, it is on the one hand in contingent decomposition and on the other hand constantly being recreated. Bodies compost into other bodies. Life is a distributed process. Other beings are necessary for the self, the self is constantly dissolving through its breath and giving birth to other existences. From this perspective, we can examine the life process as a compulsory care – life is organized in such a way that it opens niches for further life. Life is a process of giving life, it is a gift that must be given so that one’s own existence can continue. From this we can deduce the foundations of an ecological distributed ethics in which humans as living beings must participate.

Wednesday, August 9

from 9:00 to 10:45

The light in the eyes of the wolf

45 min lecture, 30 min group “holding” process, 30 min questions and answers

Why the love of nature? Why the deep fascination with other species, with specific nonhuman individuals? What draws people to the world beyond the human world, as evidenced by hundreds of thousands of years of ritual and artistic practice centered around other animals? Even though humans are now actively participating in the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, they are also the only species that can be said to always seek the proximity of other species. Homo sapiens could be renamed to Homo biophilos. Engaging in processes of community, ecological care, sharing breath, and creating our own identity with the depths of other beings shapes our human psyche. We are “wild” inside – we can only truly understand ourselves when we relate to life in the bodies of other beings. About nature and its dimension as a soul.

from 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Afternoon trip with workshop

from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

"The rights of nature"" and natural communities

45 min lecture, 30 min group “holding” process, break, 30 min questions and answers.

To assess the “natural rights” movement that has been gaining momentum in recent years, it is promising to look at cultures that have never had a problem granting rights to nature, seeing the human species and other non-human species on an equal footing and living in an egalitarian “society of being.” Traditional “animistic” societies are not anthropocentric but biocentric, in which all beings serve life according to rules encoded in ancestral commandments on how to live rightly. While in contemporary Western cultures, rights in relation to nature are thought of in the Roman sense of law as certain property rights, that is, as property that people can own, in traditional societies nature is understood as something that exists outside of ownership. These cultures consider reality as a commons, a free-flowing resource that nourishes all and must be nourished by all. Interestingly, if we look at the process of distributed life that forms an ecosystem and even the entire biosphere, we can also find processes of common sharing within it. This talk will address the rights of nature from the perspective of embodied common ownership (commons).

---

Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and nature writer. He focuses on re-evaluating our understanding of life. He proposes viewing all organisms – and treating them – as subjects, and thus the biosphere as a meaning-making poetic reality. Andreas teaches at the University of the Arts Berlin and Bard College Berlin. He is a visiting professor at UNISG in Pollenzo, Italy. He contributes to major German newspapers and magazines. He has published more than a dozen books, most recently in English Enlivenment. A Poetics for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2019) and Sharing Life. The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (Boell Foundation, 2020). In Czech He feels, therefore he is (Malvern, 2022).

Andreas Weber's lecture and workshop series was supported by with a grant from the Czech-German Future Fund.

Contacts for further information

• Jiri Zemanek, sarvanga@centrum.cz, 777 117 466
• Alena Malikova, alena.malikova@bioinstitut.cz, 604 905 611
• Tomas Hruza, tomashruza@gmail.com, 775 052 607