"To be able to protect the biosphere, we must focus our activities on the image of living reality."
Andreas WEBER
Andreas WEBER (1967) is an outstanding German biologist, philosopher, biosemiotician and publicist. He studied marine biology and cultural studies and collaborated with the prominent theoretical biologist Vrancesco Varela in Paris. As an independent scientist, he explores a new understanding of life as meaning, or “biopoetics”, within science and art; he views the world as a living process of mutually transforming relationships, a world of subjectivity, inter-imagination and expression. Weber is the author of the books: Alles fühlt. Mensch, Natur und die Revolution der Lebenswissenschaften (Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2007); Matter and Desire. An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green, White River Junction 2017 / its Czech edition is currently being prepared by Malvern Publishing); Indigenialität (Nicolai, Berlin 2018), Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene (The MIT Press 2019). His books have been published in Czech: More Mud! children need nature (Malvern 2015) and Blobs and Mud (DharmaGaia 2015). Here we present an introductory discussion of Weber's key concept of "enlivenment" as a path to a sustainable world, as he describes it in his book ENLIVENMENT / Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics (Heinrich Bölln Stiftung 2013, pp. 14-17; translated and edited by J. Zemánek). See: www.autor-andreas-weber.de
The serious deficiency of our civilization with its many crises could lie in the fact that we deny the deep creative, poetic and expressive processes of the world that are constantly unfolding all around us, and that create a myriad of dynamic and interacting relationships. We have probably forgotten what it means to be alive. All sciences, whether natural, social or economic, try to understand the world as if it were a dead mechanical process that can be understood through statistical or cybernetic analysis. Since Descartes' groundbreaking revolution, dividing reality into a hidden subjective, strictly non-generalizable thinking thing on one side – our mind – and on the visible, malleable, measurable, yet dead extensive thing On the other hand – the material world – the greatest efforts of our species have focused on dividing reality and all its parts into discrete building blocks, into atoms and algorithms. This division is considered the most fruitful way to achieve human progress.
The rules of science, still as valid as they were in the 17th century when they were established, ask us to treat everything as if it were inanimate matter. The automatic application of Occam's razor has become a deadly weapon that turns every object of our interest into a set of inanimate building blocks. This tendency has cursed our civilization in the manner of that touch of King Midas that inverts reality. This mythical king was able to turn any object into gold with the touch of his hands, which ultimately led him to starve and die. All things that our civilization touches with the X-ray vision of its scientific method consequently lose their aliveness. Science has built a metaphysics of the inanimate in order to analyze the most remarkable aspect of our being in the world, namely our ability to be alive.
Enlightenment 2.0: "Revival"
The idea of “recovery” encapsulates what could help us understand the current planetary crisis. Recovery means, first and foremost, being able to make things, people, and ourselves live again – to be more fully alive, to become more alive. This idea directly concerns the “real life” of endangered species or ecosystems or people who are exposed to some kind of attack, but also the “inner life” of us representatives of the social species “homo economicus”, who constantly perform more or less necessary tasks and satisfy more or less of our needs in order to keep the huge machine we call “the economy” running.
With the concept of revival (Enlivenment) we have found a starting point with which to identify various overlooked areas of reality, hidden in the blind spot of modernist scientific thinking. It is no coincidence that this term is so similar to the name of its predecessor concept – “Enlightenment” (Enlightenment). With the rise of the Enlightenment – which in fact took many centuries – the basic assumptions of the modern age developed into their full dynamism: a/ the world is understandable on a rational basis; b/ people can change it because they can understand it; c/ we have not only the possibility but also the right and duty to change the world in order to improve our human conditions. With the Enlightenment, modern humanism was born, a way of thinking and being that incredibly improved human life and its conditions. However, the Enlightenment way of thinking – especially the rational and technocratic understanding of human activity – also has its dark side, as the critics of the “dialectic of enlightenment” Horkheimer and Adorno so brilliantly observed. (…)
The ideology of the Enlightenment brought not only freedom, but also the great totalitarian technocratic disasters of the 20th century. This tradition of thought is also responsible to some extent for the technocratic disasters of the current unsustainability of our planetary ecosystem. The main flaws of the Enlightenment approach (…) are its reliance on dualistic thinking, on rational discourse, and on the Newtonian subject-object division of reality. Therefore, the Enlightenment project practically does not use the concepts of life, feeling, experience, subjectivity, embodiment, and mediation. These concepts are essentially excluded from the Enlightenment worldview. (…)
The norms of the Enlightenment are not mysterious historical or philosophical matters, but rather deep structural principles within modern culture that have a powerful effect on how we perceive, think, and reason today. Our economies, legal systems, government policies, and much else are firmly built on the principles of the Enlightenment. There are good reasons why traditional economic and political thinking is not good enough to “solve” our sustainability crisis. They reflect deep flaws in our understanding of our own thinking (epistemology), our relationships (ontology), and our biological functioning.
The idea of animate is intended as a corrective. It seeks to broaden our view of what human beings are as embodied subjects. This view does not exclude the role of human rationality, but connects it to other modes of being, such as our psychological and metabolic relationships with the “more-than-human world,” in both its animate and inanimate aspects. Animate thus connects rationality with subjectivity and sentience. (…)
What is life and what role do we play in it?
When we use the concept of revival to reorient ourselves in the planetary crisis, we can begin to focus on a deficiency in our current thinking: an extraordinary loss of understanding of what life is. We might even say that we have forgotten what life means. We are unaware of our deepest reality as living beings. This inattention is a surprising fact, but it is a logical consequence of our rational culture. The “meaning of life” and the question of human meaning, human satisfaction, and human desires have long been neglected in biology, economics, and the humanities.
And yet the idea of “the meaning of life” embodies some simple everyday questions that lie at the heart of our human experience. It forces us to consider: What do I do for a living? What are my intrinsic needs as a living being? What relationships do we have or should we have with the natural order? How do we produce things for our immediate needs or for the market? How should we create, maintain, and earn our livelihood? My intention is therefore to shift the focus of our attention to a new question: What is life and what role do we play in it?
It was once considered the highest achievement of human knowledge and feeling to explore what life means, to consider the relationships that create and sustain it, and how to live life properly. Yet, to talk about these ancient and fundamental dimensions of life has been considered a retrograde relic from some obscure graveyard of intellectual history in the last century. Perhaps by excluding these conversations about life, about its meanings, dimensions, and the internal tensions between its agents and their relationships, we have lost an important point of reference for how we might act wisely and sustainably today. After all, who would deny that they are alive? And yet to have a conversation about the existential facts of life is considered somehow too prosaic or, conversely, mysterious.
If we are to rediscover reliable reference points for sustainable living and thereby find the wisdom to face the myriad crises of our time today, we must first seek a new explanation of the principles of the existence of living beings. This requires a careful reconsideration of how relationships in the biosphere are organized – and experienced. Are there fundamental rules for how organisms realize their existence? What makes ecological systems healthy? What enables the individual experience of a “fulfilled life”? How can the exchange of goods, services and meaning take place without degrading the system? (…)
Recovery is more than sustainability
If we look at the last thirty years of sustainability policy, we can observe a number of advances – the enforcement of environmental protection laws, the establishment of safe thresholds for toxic materials, the ban on fluorocarbons, etc. However, the fundamental contradiction remains – the fact that we are consuming the very biosphere of which we are a part and on which we depend. From this perspective, we have not yet been able to arrive at a more adequate solution to the issue of sustainability; we remain caught in their fundamental elemental contradictions.
The different understanding of sustainability that I will develop in this essay does not emphasize technical improvements or the proper management of scarce resources as a priority. Rather, it sees the most important stepping stone for changing our relationship with the living earth and with each other as the pursuit of “living a fuller life.” If we adopt this perspective, we begin to understand that something can only be sustainable if it is given more life—to me, to another participating human individual, to the broader cultural level of the ecosystem… It is critically important to discover the connection between our inner experience and the “outer” natural order.
To understand what “more life” means from a sustainability perspective and what might help us to put our species and the rest of nature on an equal footing, I propose that we consider “life as embodied existence” as a common denominator for all living organisms. Life is what we all share in common. And life is what we can all feel: the emotional experience of experiencing our needs and the necessity to satisfy them is a direct sign of how well we are aware (or, conversely, not aware) of our aliveness. The world is a place that is constantly trying to express its creative capacities through a constant interplay of meaningful relationships. In this scenario of “life as embodied existence,” human beings, as natural creatures, experience the forces and structures of nature just as other beings do.