The German biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber is today coming up with a radically new understanding of life, which reconnects our human species with the more than human world of the biosphere. His concept of “poetic ecology” or “biopoetics” is based on the idea that the basis of life are feelings and emotions, that subjectivity and imagination are necessary prerequisites for biological functioning itself. For Weber, being alive, participating in liveliness, is at its core an erotic process by which our self is constantly transformed and developed through contact with others, it is a desire for ever greater life. In Andreas’s concept, love thus becomes the new basis of ontology, the very principle of reality. In this context, the philosopher raises the urgent question of whether our planet is not suffering today from a critical lack of love rather than from the consequences of a financial crisis or even an ecological crisis.
The revolution that Andreas Weber is bringing to biological thought and ecology appears to be as significant as the revolution that the theory of relativity brought to physics at the beginning of the 20th century. From the author's books: Alles fühlt. Mensch, Natur und die Revolution der Lebenswissenschaften (Berlin Verlag 2007); Matter and Desire. An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green 2017); Enlivenement: Towards a Poetics for the Anthropocene (The MIT Press 2019). Weber's 2017 essay "Being Nature" published here (see: www.humansandnature.org/being-nature) translated from English by Jiří Zemánek.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely you are, the world offers itself to your imagination, calling to you like wild geese, harsh and excited, and announcing again and again your place in the family of things.” — Mary OLIVER “Wild Geese”
One day in early May I found myself walking through the streets of a semi-industrial district of Berlin. I got off the train and crossed an ugly main road that was still busy at that hour of the evening. The sun was fading behind a pink-blue mist that heralded rain.
I entered a quieter street, lined on either side by tenements from the 1920s behind rows of slender hawthorns, and heard voices: a blackbird high on an eaves was spitting fragments of melody into the air. Its song was repeated on the surrounding roofs by other blackbirds. From one hawthorn a black-capped tit whistled its crescendo; and where the tenements opened onto a small park, a nightingale sang in a hedge, foamed with the white blossoms of the blooming honeysuckle.
The flowers were fragrant and filled the air with sweetness and tenderness, just as the nightingale nourished it with its voice, and the evening sun, hidden behind the light haze of the city, saturating the sky with light. Two teenage girls were walking in the park, enjoying the evening, which was alluring in every way. The air was scent, sound, the movement of limbs, and the opening of flowers, which was a call to become fully alive.
It reminded me of a night in Tuscany, Italy, a few years ago. The scents of blooming flowers gave way to the dance of countless drops of light: fireflies had come out to join in their mating rituals. In the gloom that spread over the poppies and sage, it was unclear whether the stars were falling to the ground or the earth was giving birth to sparks of light.
As I watched that sparkling scene, I realized that I felt the need to fall in love. That was my reaction to the Italian spring that surrounded me: the desire to love. The joy of spring is not a happiness that comes from something we have received or will receive. It is a joy that radiates from our energy and ability to participate in life. We experience it in the presence of other beings, in encounters with a more than human world. This joy inspires our desire to care for life. Such joy is sustained through acts of care and gifts of pleasure.
For me, this exchange of joy is the essence of our experience of what we usually call “nature.” To be in touch with nature is to be involved in an intense mutuality, a web of reciprocity, a stimulating connection with other lives. For a long time, our culture has paid little attention to the rituals and relationships that spring creates: the invisible connections that exist between people filled with fresh desire, ecstatic birds, and exploding flowers. And for almost as long, nature has simply been perceived as that which is not human, as that which is not intellect or language or culture. Nature has become that other, which we consider either better and more harmonious or, conversely, a dangerous Leviathan, ready to spread wild destruction around it.
In my experience, however, nature cannot be defined in this simple way. Nature is not distant from us, it is not something other, different from us. It is not just matter, it is not the material of birds and flowers, but matter as desire. Nature is the embodied desire for connection. The senses are instruments of this desire; they speak to our own desire to connect.
From this perspective, what we really experience when we connect with nature is the call of our higher self. In reality, we are never disconnected from nature, nor can we break free from connection with other beings. We are intertwined with all life, even in the midst of civilizational catastrophes. The higher self is the desire for aliveness that manifests itself in all of us. It includes a deep sensory knowledge of the rules according to which this aliveness can develop. The higher self is not an abstract concept that only moral philosophers or priests can initiate us into. On the contrary, the higher self is fully present to all our senses. We can touch it, hear it, taste it, we can feel it, because we are part of it.
I propose that we abandon the idea of nature as an essence or substance distinct from our own human essence. But I do not think of it as a set of relations either. Instead, I understand nature as something that is not yet present, as something that ceaselessly yearns to be realized through the bodies of living beings. These bodies convey the truly unfinished core of nature, its desire to realize itself through reciprocity.
When I talk about the higher self, I don’t mean a person or an inner voice of the superego (some messenger who tells me exactly what to do and who judges me for what I don’t do or don’t do well). The higher self doesn’t command. It calls. And it calls to us through the body. The basic natural state of being of the self is to be a body that needs to contact other bodies. Bodies have needs that they long to fulfill. They are full of feelings, and they express these feelings. This existentially meaningful expressive relationship between the self and the world is also the essence of ecological interactions. From the outside, you can think of nature as an ecosystem. From the inside, you can experience nature as a call to connection, as a challenge to nourish yourself with aliveness through communication with others. You can think of it as your own higher self.
We are in the midst of tragedy today. As the sixth mass extinction gathers momentum and the void explodes, we forget our higher selves. The higher self can never truly be lost, for it is woven into life, and we are all examples of life, every cell in each of us. But when we distance ourselves from the lives of others, we destroy the moments in which this call can remind us that our true need is not only to take what we need for our own great individual lives, but also to provide vitality to the whole.
What happens when there is no hawthorn nearby to call us with its fragrance? Nor any nightingale to awaken our hearts with its song? We neglect the needs of the higher self when we say “people” are here and “nature” is there. When we see ourselves as separate from nature and claim that the higher self is not human. But in truth, the higher self is what is most human in us.
The danger is that without a higher self, our true self becomes unclear and incomprehensible. The “empty self” is a term psychologists have given to the identities of people who are unable to give; who are only able to take what they need; who feel entitled to take; who blame their loved ones when things don’t go well; who are afraid to simply be; who simply behave according to the rules of our mainstream culture. The true self, in contrast, does not exercise dominion over life, but participates in the exchange that is living.
We can describe this exchange, this higher self, as our ability to blossom, to mature. Blossoming is not a moralistic law, it does not mean obedience to the unyielding love and strict judgment of a demanding creator god. Blossoming manifests our ability to create – to give – through unique forms, to be alive in diverse and interconnected ways. Wrapped in the scent of hawthorn, I realized, under the triumphant call of the blackbird, that blossoming is an elementary way of love.
Other beings do not love as we love. When we lose others, when we give them nothing, we will be loved less. If we continue to think that as beings we can stand apart, isolated from all other life, we will be loved less and in return we will love less ourselves. Our higher selves will yearn in vain, like a lover who has lost his beloved.