Enlivenment. Eine Kultur des Lebens: Versuch einer Poetik für das Anthropozän

by Andreas Weber

»Enlivenment« ist der Versuch einer grundsätzlich neuen Sichtweise auf das Zusammenspiel von Natur, Mensch und Ökonomie. Ziel dieses Essays ist ein neues Verständnis der vielfältigen ökonomischen, ökologischen und sozialen Krisen, mit denen wir uns konfrontiert sehen. Dabei geht Andreas Weber von der Tatsache aus, dass der Mensch heute die Natur zwar zutiefst erfasst und beeinfl usst, aber zugleich selbst von Natur und dem »Wilden« durchdrungen ist und von ihm bestimmt wird. Im Sinne der Aufklärung implementiert er daher in den philosophischen Diskurs die Kategorie der »Lebendigkeit« als fundamentale Kategorie des Denkens. Nur wenn man lernt, nicht von »Kontrolle« zu sprechen, sondern von »Teilhabe«, sobald man vom Verhältnis Mensch/Natur spricht, ist der Boden für eine neue Ökonomie und eine wirkungsvolle Form der Krisenbewältigung geschaffen.

Genres: Philosophy, Ecology, Nonfiction, Theory, Nature, Poetry, Research

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Andreas Weber is a Berlin-based philosopher, biologist, and writer. He holds degrees in marine biology and cultural studies, and has collaborated with brain researcher and philosopher Francisco Varela. His books in English include: Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (2013); The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016); and Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology (2016). Weber regularly contributes to major newspapers and magazines, such as National Geographic, GEO, and Die Zeit, and has won a number of awards for his writing. He teaches philosophy at Leuphana University, Lüneburg and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. Weber has two children, fifteen and seventeen. He lives in Berlin and Italy.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andreas Weber might have been a poet. But he turned out as a scientist and philosopher. So he writes scholarly books that try to explain how a poet experiences the world, as a cosmos. Or, as he phrases it, as a commons, "a common household of matter, desire, and imagination—an economy of metabolic and poetic transformations."

With this statement he foregrounds a particular ontology, a particular way of looking at the basic patterns and structures underpinning the world. He calls that Enlivenment. Today that worldview is fringe. Perhaps only poets and survivor indigenous peoples know what he is talking about. Or rather, poets and members of indigenous communities may be able to articulate this worldview and to translate it into rules that govern coexistence, but we all, living human beings, know it. Because every entity alive shares in a fundamental dimension of existence, namely "aliveness, the desire to connect through touch and body in order to create fertile communities of mutual flourishing, the members of which experience their identities as selves." The actual experience of membership in this commons, the feeling of relationship with other members and with the world constitutes the unique feeling of being alive.

We have trouble recognising that feeling because Enlivenment has been smothered by centuries of Enlightenment thinking, trailing capitalism and neo-Darwinist biology in its wake. This reductionist worldview has made us forget what life is, means, feels like. It has led to 'an enclosure of consciousness'. The result, as we are increasingly aware of, is a catastrophic cul-de-sac. Faced with an overshoot of our bio-geochemical planetary boundaries we continue to run in circles. Evangelising about sustainability doesn't seem to make a dent. The reason is that our dominant worldview has led us to entertain a wrong, dualist conception of sustainability. It is us who are going to steward the world out there. Weber positions enlivenment as a way of coming back to our senses and embracing a notion of sustainability that enhances aliveness.

Enlivenment plays out at different levels. Ontologically it means a fundamental shift away from a dualist worldview that pits humans against the rest of the cosmos. We acknowledge the entanglement of everything with everything. We go beyond mere acknowledgment by inserting ourselves into the creative matrix of life and allowing ourselves to experience it from the inside.

Phenomenologically, therefore, enlivenment comes down to "getting things, people, and oneself to live again—to be more full of life, to become more alive."

Epistemologically enlivenment wants to supplement rational thinking and empirical observation with the lived perspective of meaningful first-person experience. Technè needs to make way for poiesis. An expanded concept of science embraces “being alive” as a generative category of thought in critical thinking. A deeper empirical subjectivity gives way to poetic objectivity. "We are because we are with-others. As subjects-together we can negotiate a fertile perspective toward aliveness. This is the true objectivity life is capable of."

Ethically enlivenment invites us to live through a "freedom-in-necessity" within a shared biosphere of material, feeling, goal-oriented bodies.

Economically enlivenment dismisses a societal ordering and productive metabolism that rely on scarcity, competition, property, efficiency and growth. Instead it advocates a coexistence, based on fertility and mutual exchange, that brings transformational processes in alignment with natural conditions. "We should look at natural processes as the expression of the natural history of freedom and accordingly align our own actions with them."

Spiritually enlivenment invites us to live the paradoxes that are inherent in life: objectivity in experience, freedom in necessity, indeterminacy in the certainty of fertility, meaning because of death.

Weber's enlivenment biology and physics revolve around the entwinement of matter and desire:

"Life has needs, because it is matter that desires to conserve a specific sense of inwardness. The world is matter, and this matter is always working toward a sentient body that is trying to blossom."

These ideas may remind us of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, and, going back further, to Spinoza's 'natura naturans', to the German medieval mystics and early Christian Gnosticism. Although Weber positions enlivenment as a Romanticism 2.0, a deep historical perspective on this line of thinking is lacking from this book. The author has a more keen eye for recent developments in biology, physics, ecopsychology and economics (commons theory) that signal our willingness to reframe the phenomenon of living. Weber also points (rather anecdotally) to various forms of contemporary commoning.

I am not going to pass judgement on this book. I feel it says something important. I also feel it can be read like a poem.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

~~174th climate book~~

Andrea Weber has a bone to pick with the Anthropocene. Not that terrible things aren't happening and humans aren't responsible (they are and we are), but its insistence that humans are now controlling nature, which still places us outside of and above the rest of the world. This is nonsense, he argues; we are in it and of it as much as anything else is, and our modern predicament is a result of this separation -- what Timothy Morton calls the Severing. It deadens us. It governs what kinds of thoughts and feelings we are able to have, what kinds of relationships we can have with other people and the world, what kinds of experiences count and can be admitted as reasonable and true.

Weber never put it this way, but the belief we are all born with that relationships with animals and nature are possible and real, and that everything has feelings and is important, which we are then educated out of to become rational adults -- he argues that children have the right of it. We are trained in a kind of dissociation in order to participate in the mutilation of the world, taught that only our own feelings and thoughts and needs count and that everything else is there for us. And look where that's got us. Weber's argument is that the anthropocene is a continuation of that concept rather than a refutation of it, and so it and the solutions it proposes won't work.

What is needed involves making feelings and needs the centre of society and economy (for ourselves and other species), recognizing what he calls "poetic objectivity" which is, so far as I can tell, how we learn about ourselves through our relationships with others and how we learn about others through our own experiences, making metaphor the engine of growth and relatedness. Enlivenment (proposed in contrast to the Enlightenment) means recognizing that what we all have in common is being alive, and that an economics and society that does not prioritize aliveness will (and is) kill(ing) us.

His language is not what I would have chosen, not being a professional philosopher myself, but his thinking is in line with my own on many counts after my own decades of work and reflection on how we got into this mess and how we get out of it. I still have to show up in a workplace on Monday based very much on techne where I will need to come up with a program based on evidence for how to reduce emissions a.nd adapt to climate change, and I'm struggling with how to incorporate these ideas in a pragmatic sense, but I greatly enjoyed reading the book.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful read, provocative and inviting thinking, working hard to synthesize a philosophy that will follow the hard realities of the failures of reason alone to meet our needs and the planet's. Rather than fall into a postmodern despair or a narcissistic greed, Weber speaks of "commoning" as a pathway to understanding again the role of subjectivity as a factual phenomenon in all living experience, a kind of Romanticism 2.0. Whether or not we are ready to adopt such a strategy of culture-building, however, depends on a bit more than the mere single paragraph of cautionary possibilities to enlivenment, or the very very limited examples of this complex approach in action. Nevertheless, he isn't wrong to decry our too-quick dismissal of 19th century philosophy due to industrial prosperity and our fears of anti-democratic movement. Capitalism, an extension of Enlightenment dualism, has not merited our continued absolutist devotion.

[Lethe · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you speak both english and german do not read the german (original) version, the translation is more in-depth, as it was translated and extended by the author

[Walt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andreas Weber has already shown an important step forward in the structure of science with The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science. Now he shows how such an attitude towards knowledge and life might allow us to restructure the human presence on Earth before we find our societies lost and dead. This book contains an excellent analysis of the rise of capitalist economics and neo-Darwinian concepts of evolution and how both have supported each other in creating humanity's modern alienation from our world. An economics of the commons is proposed as an alternative, together with many examples of how people are already forming life-giving and creative communities.

[Sharon Woodhouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weber is a key thinker in the world of new biology and this little manifesto is a bold and beautiful introduction to his ideas, summed up as Enlivenment. His philosophy is grounded in such things as the importance of the felt, lived, embodied subjectivity of all living things as an objective reality; that as such, meaning and interpretation are important for all living things (thus, ideas like biopoetics and biosemiotics); that subjectivity is all inter-subjectivity, relationship, and a participation in the commons of the ecosphere; and that a reductionistic, mechanistic science needs to be enlivened to account for these new understandings.

[Paige Bounds · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book. Overall, it was a bit difficult to read, and the topics were very dense, so I had to take it in small chunks over the course of the year, but everything Weber discussed was well-written and well-thought out. This gives me a rejuvenated love for the world and for life. This work was deeply philosophical and interdisciplinary, so there's a wide variety of topics that people can enjoy reading about.

[Petra De Graaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my interdisciplinary collaborative spark project.

How to really be alive and connect

Essence for this book and these times is the citation of Lech Walesa
‘Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly revelatory and magnificent. What more is there to say?

[Joanna Forde · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not find there to be any remarkably new insights, but I did enjoy the call to living poetically and engaging in the world as a part of it rather than in control of it.

[Robin Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tien sterren!

[Frank Pajunen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully expressed and solidly practical thought for our age. Will be pondering.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Presents some interesting ideas then doesn't give examples so overall it feels incomplete. Although he did say he wasnt trying to prove his ideas with this book, i wanted a bit more to clarify.

[Peter Zomer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was driving back to Holland from a vacation in Italy when I heard the author being interviewed on the German radio, on a Sunday evening at 6 p.m. It was a revelation. Back home, I downloaded the interview from the WDR site, and ordered three of his books. The thinnest of these was this one. It has only 140 pages or so, but contains a lot of what he said during the interview: why contemporary philosophy is often so off the mark and needs alternatives that give answer to central questions of the Anthropocene, be it climate change or re-connecting with what remains important in life and gets pushed down by our way of living, etc. The first few chapters were revisiting essential coordinates of classical Western philosophy; the great thing is that Weber declares this philosophy 'dead' (indeed, a postpostmodern alternative to 'Gott ist tot'), or better: shows how its postulates imply 'death', and he does this unbelievably eloquently. I was continuously smiling, or even laughing out loud, while reading it, the author is really 'frech' as the Germans call it and it is such a relief to read, finally, something like this. The wonderful thing is that Weber not only offers something that is fundamentally critical, but he also develops a well-wrought alternative that reflects 'life' and its ecological character as a full-central thing, thus shaping a new philosophy for the Antropocene. As a biologist, he knows about how to do that; as a philosopher, he knows how to extend that, conceptually as well as practically. He has much to say about society and sees it in a thoroughly original new light.
Andreas Weber is the German Timothy Morton, but then better. I look forward to reading his other books 'Alles fuehlt' and 'Lebendigkeit: Eine erotische Oekologie'. It is strange that this guy isn't world famous yet.

[sabine · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75/5, with the 0.25 stars taken off for weber's deeply irritating affection for the stereotype of the noble savage.

i took so many pictures of quotes (library copy) and will try to add some to this review later, but for now, let me just say that i was hooked from the very start, before the page numbers even commence. he writes, "it is with alessandra weber that i explore how it feels 'being' the ecology. i am grateful for sharing on a daily basis how the leaves unfold and the opening buds crackle, and that commoning ultimately is a process of love." in these two sentences, weber's version of standard note to spouse/long-term partner in a book's acknowledgments, he basically reveals the structure of the book. enlivement is a love poem disguised as a philosophical essay disguised as a biology text, or maybe permute those forms. this book changed how i see (excuse the alliteration) poetics, politics, people, and our planet; it made me think and (maybe in weber's eyes more importantly) feel.

okay, fine, i'll give him the 0.25 stars back. good job andreas.