Andreas Weber: The ecological dimension of love (ep395)
“There’s also an ecological dimension to love, which is realizing yourself in a way that makes the self-realization of others flourish. That’s love on an ecological level.”
Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and writer, whose work focuses on re-evaluating our understanding of the living and dying. Andreas proposes understanding organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere, as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, he holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimization machine, but rather as an ecosystem that transforms the mutual sharing of matter and energy into deeper meaning.
Reflecting on his former education in biology and marine science, Andreas enriches a discourse on the limitations of objectivity under a strictly scientific lens. Through a “both-and” perspective, Andreas walks us through what he calls “poetic ecology,” as he navigates the nuance of ecological Eros of tapping into the aliveness of being. This aliveness, he proposes, emerges from a sense of desire, which within a Western worldview tends to exclude more-than-human relationships. However, by respectfully acknowledging other worldviews of dividuality, rather than just individuality, Andreas signals the attention given to our inner experiences of Eros that inevitably enhance the aliveness of the whole.
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About the guest:
Andreas Weber is a Berlin based book and magazine writer and independent scholar, whose books include Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, The Biology of Wonder; Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science, and Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology. He has degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris. Andreas has contributed extensively to developing the concept of enlivenment in recent years, notably through his essay ‘Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics’ (Berlin 2013, published in expanded and rewritten form as Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019).
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by RVBY MY DEAR
Episode-inspired artwork by Nano Février.
Dive deeper:
Learn more about the work of philosopher Hans Jonas, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, and writer and philosopher Bayo Akomolafe
Braiding Sweetgrass, a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Expand your lenses:
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andreas Weber: I think what I'm doing is somehow to explore and to understand an attitude or an experience [..] I was conscious somehow. So I very much had this vivid experience of my own aliveness, but also of the aliveness of the world around me- plants and animals, but actually everything. It's an experience which somehow, as I didn't know otherwise, it was normal.
But then in higher education it started to look less normal, as if nothing was actually related to this experience. And it somehow it didn't even have an own right of existence as everything was scientific and rational and empirical and similar logic. So I was somehow desperate to understand how the world approached me and to understand this in terms I could communicate about this and I didn't find it. I mean, I found it later with some others and thinkers and teachers, but I didn't find it in the sort of mainstream world I was growing into. And so I somehow needed to focus on it on my own. So that's that's what I've been doing. I was just stubbornly refusing to become somebody else.
Kamea Chayne: Your book, The Biology of Wonder, proposes that "Feelings and emotions, far from being superfluous to the study of organisms, are the very foundation of life."
This may seem provocative to the scientific method, which prides itself on how its value of objectivity is what helps to guide people reliably and without bias to best understand how the world works. As a marine biologist and scientist yourself, what questions or limitations did you find with the underlying worldviews of biology, which led you to develop what you call a poetic ecology—demonstrating that subjectivity and imagination are the prerequisites of biological existence?
Andreas Weber: Thanks for thinking of the little summaries you put in. These questions are really nice to hear, as if you'd asked me directly I'd struggle to put it this concise. Well, actually, what you describe is in a concrete way is what I was hinting to in the other question, like how did I come to what I'm doing, what I've been doing ever since? Because, well, the shortcut is I somehow took some time before deciding a subject matter to study.
I settled on biology because I was interested in life as I had already imagined. And then it also happened like this. It was the opposite of life. It was understanding something very dead and very soulless and experienceless.
And with the whole force of a very well-developed science with foundations in the natural sciences proper, it was somewhat overwhelming to keep this flame alive. That was the experience, that aliveness is about something more than just how biological machines work.
But this is what you learn if you do biology, if you do natural sciences, which is you learn a lot and it's very helpful. But if you want to understand what is the experience of being alive, then it doesn't really help you. So I had to find mentors who were on the same quest, and I was lucky to find two thinkers.
One was already dead. I only found his books. He was the Jewish German philosopher Hans Jonas, who had emigrated to the US and worked as a professor of philosophy in New York State.
And then there was Francisco Varela, who became my teacher. He was a biologist and a cognitive researcher, but also a philosopher and also a Buddhist. And the work of those two, and then particularly the work of Francisco Varela with whom I worked together, was actually an attempt to understand scientifically and what is going on in living cells, that we can describe them as subjects, as you could even say persons, as selves, as selves with an interest, with experience, and who understand the world according to meaning, to value, to feelings. So everything we know from ourselves. Those people try to understand this from biology, from what is happening in the cell.
So this was a project I really embraced, and I embarked on, and I contributed to and, because then I had the link between this experience, and that also other beings have this experience, share this experience, communicate this experience to me, to each other, and a scientific approach to explain this. I'd say in the 20 years I was a student, it has happened a lot in biology and philosophy of biology, which is in favor of this view that living beings are actually subjects, sentient beings, with an inner experience like we have.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate this 'yes, and' approach that you seem to have taken, which is, of course, that the scientific lens teaches us a lot about the world. And at the same time, there are other lenses and curiosities that that lens might not allow us to actually see.
Andreas Weber: Thanks for mirroring back that to me. I don't say that what science finds is wrong. It's only one perspective. Science tends to inflate this perspective onto everything telling that, okay, this is everything that there is. So I was really lucky to have a great biological education, and I enjoyed this, particularly the knowledge of other beings, other species, the hands-on stuff and then specialized in marine biology, so I also enjoyed being with all these fantastic, beautiful marine animals and plants and the sea and the ocean and all this, or the aliveness going on there.
I'd never say [science] is wrong. I only say that the focus is on only one aspect, and it's never on the aspect of, what has this actually to do with me as a sentient being, as somebody who makes sense, who sees beauty, who experiences meaning, who experiences other beings, is as poetic as full of symbolic attraction. All these things. This is always bracketed out of sciences, natural sciences, but this is important. It's crucial.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I want to talk more about the implications of these worldviews. So in Enlivenment, you write, "The central feature of our crisis-ridden civilization is that mainstream thinking takes reality for something It is not. We think it is dead, that we can treat it by means of mechanical rationality, but it is alive."
This reminds me of my conversation with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, which inspired me to see our 'systemic crisis' in a different way, which is that perhaps the ways that we attempt to systematize and agential and living world which refuses to be fixed or framed as part of the crisis itself.
So to these points, I think about the idea that we cannot address crises using the same mindset that created them. And I question the mechanical rationality that still underpins our most hyped solutions to things like climate change, which disproportionately fixate on chemistry or at best biochemistry, fail to see the possibility of those measurements as just being symbolic and symptomatic of the deeper hurt and wounds and pains and relational breakdowns many people and more than human communities have felt and experienced. And yeah, I'm just curious about what bubbles up for you with these.
Andreas Weber: Well, it's lovely. You also took to Bayo, who's a friend, and I'm a true admirer of his brilliance and of his work. And I know that he really suggests not to go for solutions, but to sit with life as it happens to you, as it happens to you in connection to others. I think that's actually that is what is needed. Let me just tell about my way to get there.
I would say then that which we can call a crisis, well, we are heading into the next crisis, which is the European summer, which would be hotter than the last one, and that one was already deadly hot. So we are clearly in a crisis. At least one crisis is the crisis of climate heating, climate disruption. And I would say actually, that the true crisis is a crisis of our mindset, of the global Western mindset, that is actually in crisis.
These are the disasters we live through, the consequences of the crises of this mindset. And the mindset is the idea that Western rational humans are a stand above or aside, a world of mute things. I'd say that's the quickest summary of the idea of- well, it's more than the idea of enlightenment. It's the rational idea of how the world is functioning, which has been developed in the West, is that some humans, with their rational capacity, stand in distance to everything else, which is only governed by physical laws. So you can say this mindset is actually it's an embodiment of narcissism. And thus the narcissist only sees himself as true subject and everyone else is just metaphor for his or her plans. So this is the classical narcissistic perspective, and it is, as all narcissistic perspectives are completely wrong, as we are together, we are truly together with a multitude of other desiring, striving and living subjects.
If you treat a community of beings as dead matter, you will destroy it and you will do incredible damage and inflict incredible hurt. You'll ultimately also destroy yourself.
I would say this is what has been happening, and this is what is still happening because the mainstream idea has not changed. The mainstream idea that you find in politics and in technology and administration, even in big parts of academia and the education system, is still the idea that the so-called human mind is standing apart from a dead world. And it's ruinous, as we know.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And part of this crisis is also how we, or a lot of people in the dominant culture have limited our sense of self. As an alternative, your work really invites us to expand how we understand the self. And you talk about this self through other in a way that goes beyond simply recognizing that there are different levels of selfhood. For example, from maybe the microscopic and cellular level, to our contained or not so contained bodies, to the communities that our bodies make up, and then also to our planetary bodies and beyond.
I would love for you to expand on what you mean when you say that "There is only one immutable truth. No being is purely individual. Nothing comprises only itself. Each lifeform is less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe."
Andreas Weber:
The idea of self or individual for me is rather important as it is, on one hand, something which is real in the sense of our experience of it, and not only ours, but also the experience of all these innumerable other biological selves, which are not humans.
On the other hand, self is only a transitory and fleeting state, and it's only possible because there is a continuous transformation of selves into others, which is actually a way to describe the ecosphere as this giving rise to cells which then transform into other selves. We are part of this.
So we have, on the one hand, the reality of selves to a much higher degree in the biosphere, in the world, in reality, than we thought before. Because before, we thought it's only the human rational self which is real, and the rest is something we don't know, and it's somehow material and neutral and it has no interest. The world is full of these selves. On the other hand, all these selves can only exist because they exist together and they exist through one another.
So you see, the self is broken, but it's broken in a way that it needs the other. There's a huge process of co-creation and co-construction, which is also visible in the ecosphere. You can see that the ecosystem is as a sort of distributed, self-made of a multitude of individual subjects, continuously building up themselves and then melting into one another again.
So self is real in the sense of the locus of experience, of emotions, of meaning, of the understanding of being alive. And on the other hand, it is not something absolute, autonomous, or sovereign which could be put into a polar opposition to the rest of the world because it is only a sort of expression of the ongoing breathing relationships within this world.
It's very important to see these two aspects, and it's important to see that one, these two aspects need one another. And you can't pull out one of them or you can't just bank on one of them as our culture before normally did. So one idea was that the individual is some subtle absolute and it's only human and it stands against the world. And then that idea was actually self is an illusion, it's just a huge process, it's just completely distributed. And though it is, it has these both of these aspects which makes the experience of life only possible and which makes the experience of life also interesting, which we know.
We know that we cannot exist in solitude, in isolation. We know that individuals are actually dividuals, which is a lovely language spoken by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern.
We are always dividing and divided and sharing and shared. We are dividuals; we cannot be just an individual.
But on the other hand, this dividual-ness is also an experience in its own right. I am a pole of this world who experiences the world from a unique perspective, from a unique point of concern and of meaning, from something very irreducible and very profound and very non-material. And that's the other side of the picture.
So we need to accommodate these both things, which are somehow in a paradoxical relationship, and that makes it very difficult for our traditional understanding to somehow integrate these things. On the other hand, if we look into other cultures, they have no problem to do this. So I'm particularly concerned with traditional cultures at the moment, with what we call animistic cultures. They have etiquettes to address this two-foldness, or if we look into eastern cosmologies, Indian or Asian spirituality, Buddhist, Hindu, mystic spirituality. We found this two-foldedness really at the ground of the experience of reality. So it's there, it's only a Western thing, and that's a big problem.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I'm very drawn to this paradoxical way of thinking as this 'all of the above' approach, and this is all just super fascinating to think about. I was just reading about how on average the cells in our bodies are renewed and replaced every 7 to 10 years with a type of white blood cell, maybe only lasting two days. The cells in the middle of our eyes lasting a lifetime, and even suggestions that our brain cells live beyond our lifetimes.
So with this and with the consideration of the exchanges that we're constantly making with other beings and how we're constantly taking in what we consume to become a part of ourselves while constantly giving parts of ourselves away to become parts of other beings. The configurations and the community makeup of our bodies are constantly changing, and also at the same time tethered to our more-than-human selves, which should make us question the rigid boundaries of our selfhood.
Though, like you just said, you really emphasize that we can't just simplify in the other direction, as in, the message isn't that with all of these spillovers, ultimately there is no individual self, which might be my human self which is meaningful to me. So with this said, what do you see as the significance of recognizing ourselves as I think more than interdependent and entangled, both of which could still suggest that we are separate beings which can't do without our broader webs of life, but perhaps seeing ourselves as something like intradependent or I don't know that there's another word that is more resonant for you.
Andreas Weber: Yeah, that's it's a that's a great question. And it's really touching on something I'm thinking about right? I need to write a paper about art and ritual and what is transmitted in art. So I really have to think about this invisible reality that we are part of, and we can somehow even pass on to others by it by means humans have.
So I'm thinking about this irreducible experience of being a center of concern, which nonetheless is only possible because of this hybridity and because of the fact that we can never delineate a clear sense and see a border of the self. Let me just say a couple of things on this. As I'm acknowledging the huge research in critical humanities on this, it's really taken off.
We are in the post-human studies age, and in the post-materialistic age. The nonhuman turn has taken place but still what I still see there is that there are key words like assemblage coming from the letters and multitudes coming from seeing. And so this distributedness, it's very often the foreground, the hybridity, but still this particular experience of being a subject in this hybridity is not yet addressed, because this particular experience is something which does not map on the way Western science is done.
You can go your way from understanding the subject as made up only by language games, which was happening in the seventies and eighties, and now you can understand it as some are lost in rhizomatic assemblages. But these are still somehow descriptions of something exterior and what is what you also need. At the same time, you need the dimension of the interior experience of what it means to be all this. You need to feed this. This is what Western science never wanted to do, because then you have an irreducible moment of experience, of subjectivity, of your personal story, and you have something which you cannot measure, which you cannot even discuss, you cannot even have a logical argument. But because it is your personal experience as a living being. Science doesn't really want to have this so far.
But to my eyes, this is just what makes the ground zero of living experience. So as I said before, in it's a paradoxical mixture of being totally distributed and rhizomatic and and dissembled and reassembling and self-composting around this strange center of living experience, which is the experience of me here in this. And we cannot get rid of any of these sides, and we somehow need to put these together. And so there's a lot of work ahead of us. As I already said, it would not be the first time to put this together because cultures did put this together and they lived in this paradoxical way of having several faces and being able to have several faces. And it worked very well. They were much less violent than our civilization is.
The call to accept this irreducible felt and experienced dimension is also a call to stop this terrible expansion of governing over every material you can get hold of.
Kamea Chayne: Right. Well, with all of this that I would really begin to question the whole idea of some objective reality and how meaningful that is, because what feels more real and what feels like should matter more is all of the subjective experiences of the agential beings and intrabeings and communities and ecosystems and biospheres with, as you say, desires and expressions and states of well-being shown in different ways. Because if our collective experience and feeling of aliveness and enrichment and loving and being loved aren't more important than the so-called objective measurements indicating the so-called advancement and welfare of society, then I'm afraid we really become disoriented and what we use to guide our decisions of making and remaking the world.
So you write, "If we put the lived truth that is shared with others at center stage, it provides a strong ethical mandate to intervene in our global system. Enlivenment not only suggest strategies of change, but shifts the perspectives under which any change is experienced. It offers an invitation to participate in life."
Perhaps the thought of using a philosophical shift to inform tangible strategies of change can feel abstract, and perhaps those used to using objective, quantifiable data to determine truths may be uncomfortable with the idea of using qualitative and subjective experiences to guide our paths forward. But I would love for you to share more about what all of this means to you.
Andreas Weber: Yeah, very interesting. There's a lot of points that you've raised.
The problem with the term objectivity, objective measurements, or just the adjective objective in our culture is that it's actually not about being objective but about a certain view of the world.
It's like when somebody tells you, hey, come on, be rational. And then he or she doesn't mean that you should be rational. He or she means adhere to the rules I have made. It's the same with objective. It actually means please sign the understanding that the world is built from things and that external laws govern the relation between these things. This is meant when they say objective, but it's only this. It's only the view of the world as being made of objects. This is the link to this word objective. But if you take it in its meaning of being of meaning relevant and binding for all, then I wouldn't say that we cannot have objectivity and or we cannot have something which is relevant and valid for all participants in this cosmos. We only need to untangle it from the link to things, and their mechanical or algorithmic relationships among them, and we need to see that validity has to do with the degree to what an act is contributing to shared aliveness.
There is a horizon of objectivity, but it is not the thing, as with the according mechanical laws, but it is the fecundity of something introduced in the nexus of life. Is this helpful or is this not helpful? Is this a contribution? Is this disruptive, locally disruptive or globally disruptive?
I would say that as being alive, we have a sensorium to understand this. So we have our inbuilt measuring devices for objectivity only that this objectivity is not about objects, it's about felt sharing of living relations. And I've called this, in the book you quoted, EnIivenment, I call this poetic objectivity, because it's fluid, it's meaningful, and it's about the understanding of connections and the consequences of connection, the metaphors of connections. So we have poetic objectivity, which is accessible, and that's the other term I use in that book, which is accessible through something which I call empirical subjectivity. Because this whole reality, this whole living reality is people by subjects. And these subjects are empirical reality because they're real, they exist. They strive for their lives. They communicate, they bond, they quarrel, they transform themselves into others.
We are all empirical subjects. And because we are all empirical subjects, the horizon of a common world is the world of shared lives.
And then we can very well say something about what makes sense in this world or what doesn't. So we have absolutely nothing left without any scale for making measurements, for orienting ourselves so only that these scales are never objective in the all-objective sense, which means that you can use them in any situation, regardless of who you apply them to. They're written in the books. They're codified in law that does not work in a living world. So they are always situated. You always have to look at with whom are you using them from which side. They are always contextual, they're always living, they're always distributed.
You always cannot be alone and judging. You have to be in a committee, you see. So in a way, the living system talks to itself about itself, but there is a direction of fecundity, of functioning, of this living system, of growing and flourishing, which is existing, which does exist, and which gives a set of precepts about how to behave. That is very important for me, and this is where my thinking really deviates from what is the non-human turn in humanites at the moment because there it is very much about the total freedom of inventing oneself in any way possible, which to me still tastes very much of Western isolation from the remainder of the living cosmos in which we actually exist.
Kamea Chayne: So objectivity could really be understood as biased towards one particular worldview. Not that it's wrong, again. I think we're more so entertaining this all-of-the-above perspective. But maybe the fact that this view has been made to be 'objective' reveals more about the cultural power dynamics at play. It reminds me of, in journalism, when independent media critics look at the illusion of journalistic neutrality as actually a tool of enforcing particular views and power dynamics.
Andreas Weber: Yeah. It's very similar. And I know this very well, as I've long worked as a feature writer and I know this dynamic, I felt this in my own body. Yeah, I know what you're telling me.
You're referring to using something which somehow has the flavor of being a neutral description of the right way to do it and to use it in your own favor, and to apply it in the way that your personal preference is somehow safeguarded. And then you're saying, well, that's not objective. You need to be objective. But actually, you mean you need to do it in my way? Yeah, that's how our culture enforces this mono view of objectivity as the idea of a world just made of things.
Kamea Chayne: Well, given this perspective shift of understanding our more than human bodies, I want to talk about what it means to love in this world in ways that nurture our collective experience of aliveness. On this front, you talk about the eros that we must learn to carry forth if we want to love. And you say, "Life is touch in a much deeper sense than just touching skin, colliding against foreign masses. It is touch as penetration of one by another. The existence of each one of us, plants, animal cells, I as a human being, depends solely on the mutual relatedness manifested in this exchange."
This beautifully summarizes a lot of the dynamics we were talking about earlier. And on this note, I would just be curious to hear you elaborate on the relationship between love and surrender, and even death and its various forms, and how they add to growing our aliveness.
Andreas Weber: Yeah, lovely quote. You need to tell me where you found that, as I start to not remember particular sentences from what I've written. And now I'm trying to get back there, to get back to that level. You've been using the word love before, that question before, and I've put it down here on my paper with a big square around it, because I also wanted to talk about that. So it's very important to know what we're talking about when we're talking about this. So let me try to approach this from this side of Eros, which also and takes much space in my thinking. And one of my books is called in subtitle, it's called An Erotic Ecology.
So what is Eros? It's a good question. And you could say Eros has to do with the tension between myself and what I am not yet, and which comes only from you, or which comes only from the other. Eros has to do with the relationship of being or becoming myself through that which is not me. And so there is an aspect of lack in Eros, an aspect of desire. So I yearn to become more than I am now, to be more alive, to grow, to explore sides which are in the dark right now. And I can do this only if I go out of myself, if I unbecome myself, if I enter into someone else, if I somehow other myself and get the gift of, um, of watching myself from a different perspective, from someone else, which is not necessarily human. I always also can that gift from the maple tree, which is outside of my window in the dark right now, and which, by the way, I heartily invite into our talk. There's also an erotic relationship between me and this maple tree because he has something about me which I don't have, which I don't know.
Human Eros is very much about this. The erotic tension is very much about losing myself in someone else and finding someone else in me. And this goes even to the level of bodily interactions as we see. So it means it has to do with breaking down the boundaries of self in order to enlarge these boundaries of self. And it can go horribly wrong If there isn't a flavor of this respect of somebody else's aliveness, then this goes wrong and this becomes toxic, as one says nowadays. It becomes domination and colonization. But if this goes well, on the one hand, it is growth and enlargement. And on the other hand, it means to be able to touch upon that inside of all of us, which is always foreign to our personal selves and, at the same time, the source from which these personal selves refilled, which is aliveness itself.
Eros is also the attempt to tap into aliveness as a pure substance which gives life.
The bliss which is related to Eros is the bliss that you feel when you meet aliveness in its core. As you know, we are all addicted to this. Unfortunately, in Western civilization, people can find this only in human love and human Eros, but it's actually only a tiny region where you can find this. And again, older cultures knew to cultivate this encounter of the larger ecological self in bliss through cultural practices, through ritualistic practices. So it became much bigger and it became much more ubiquitous. It was actually you could find this much easier. And I actually find this in the encounter with other non-human persons a lot, and it's a huge resource.
But I still wanted to talk about the term love, which again has to do with this paradoxical relation to your own unfolding, which goes always through the other. You always need to deviate through the other in order to get to yourself. To love is a process in which you consciously allow the other to deviate through you in order to fill up their aliveness. So it's a way of giving others their aliveness, allowing others to get their life through you, which you see is very close to my idea of Eros. And it's related, as we know, at least in human adult love, it's very much related to Eros.
There's also an ecological dimension to love, which is realizing yourself in a way that makes the self-realization of others flourish. That's love on an ecological level.
That's what's happening in ecosystems. That's just what ecosystems do. All beings self-realize in a way that maximizes the self-realization of all the other beings in an ecosystem. If you walk into a flowering meadow or into a dense forest or to a seashore, you see the embodiment of love in front of your eyes, through the pores of your skin, with all your senses. You can taste it on your lips. You can hear it in your ears. You feel it as a shiver on your the tiny hairs on your skin. It's participating in this mutual gift of aliveness.
And we feel this. I put this in air quotes because it's the way the West speaks about it. This is why people very often 'love nature.’ It's because they partake in this exchange of love and we understand that this is what is happening at the inner core of what is going on in this reality, only that our daily culture has completely estranged us from this. But again, not all cultures are like this. Many cultures have this very much present, and they hold it's precious and they give thanks, and they have rituals to reinforce this. So love is absolutely central, but love doesn't necessarily need to mean love only in human terms. It needs to have this structure of being interested in the aliveness of others. And then we see that it's actually a feature of reality.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And so death is very much a part of this love and giving. Well, first of all, of course, there is brutal death and death entailing a lot of suffering. And that doesn't really embody love in all the senses, in all the ways that it could. But a lot of times people conceptualize death as sort of the opposite of life. Farmer Rishi, in our past conversation, inspired me to see life as a constant and death, more so as on the flip side of birth and feeding into life. That dualism still focuses on the death of that particular not-so-substantive sense of self that we blurred the boundaries of earlier, which may be more material, but not really either, given the lifelong continuous reconfigurations, including deaths of the community makeup of our many universes since we were born. So I wonder if your explorations of self as other have changed how you view or define death and what that even refers to.
And then of course, different cultures and religions have different stories or sometimes taboos around death. And I want to honor all of that. But with you, I'm particularly interested in hearing more about your desire to make yourself more edible, because one could argue that we are all edible whether we want to be or not. You know, we're edible while we're alive and we will continue to be in death. So then, taking this train of curiosity, what does it mean to make ourselves more edible or maybe die well, in the most nourishing and delicious way possible when our time comes?
Andreas Weber: Well, I think you could say the same thing you just said without this qualifier, "When our time comes." You could say…
For every moment, make yourself edible in the most delicious way. This is the recipe for a good life.
I'll elaborate on that. Before, I want to say that I completely subscribe to and developed the same view of seeing life as overarching. And life is not the opposite of death. Death is part of life. And as you said, death is the other side of birth. So both are parts of this overarching thing, which is life or aliveness. And with every death that comes of birth and with every birth, there comes a death. So these are really two sides of the same thing, which is very important to see, because then death makes you feel a lot different if you see you cannot lose life. On the other side of death, there's a birth, then everything looks very different. And you're totally right. Again, we are edible and we will be eaten. I mean, we are edible, let's say, as long as we're not full of forever chemicals, then it becomes more difficult. So we cannot really avoid this, but we actually cannot avoid a living cosmos. And still a Western civilization tries to avoid a living cosmos and people who are part of Western civilization and also have learned to make them the least edible possible. And that makes them feel very desperate and depressed and burnt out. So being edible is one way to put what I've described before from different angles.
Being a living subject in this reality means that we can only exist if we continuously share that which is ours, which we are made from, with others. We allow others to eat us, and we also are eating others.
One very simple example is breath. In breath, we are actually making ourselves edible in every moment without being able to consent. Normally, you don't consent to your breath. You just breathe. So breath means that your body decomposes itself and loses CO2. That's the carbon in your out-breath—your flesh made mobile and going into the atmosphere, which should be called the commons of breath. And then a tree breathes your body in and builds their leaves from this.
You're already edible and the other way around, you take the apple from the tree and eat it, and you build your flesh from the apple flesh, from the tree's flesh. So also, the tree is edible. So this is what is happening on the level of ecosystem. You see this.
You could also say in a way, being edible is a way to organize love, because through your edibility, you grant life to the tree and through their edibility, the tree grants life to you.
It's a way in which love is organized in the circles of gift of the biosphere, which when we come to the world we don't really have a say in this. We actually never have a say in this. But we can behave very badly and we can behave very disrespectfully towards this beautiful organization of the world as the gift of mutual at edibility. We can behave like very reticent, stupid, uneducated, very young kids who refuse to understand the way one needs to behave in a society in which the gift is what makes continuity possible. And that's how Western civilization behaves. So we cannot change this, but we can somehow damage the process in this.
As you know, Western civilization has this cult of not thinking and not talking about death and avoiding the idea of death, finding that death is a scandal, and better not talk about it and better actually not think about it, because when it happens, then everything will be over and better. You have done your cruise because then you could consume as much as possible. So this is a little bit the caricature of the Western way to think about death.
So death, the Western way of thinking about death is without taking into account hat you are always a gift to others and you already before you die, you are a gift to others. And when you like die in your individual embodied individuality, you're still a gift to others. And it is also a birth into another form of individuality or another form of being part of this feeling, living subject, which is this cosmos, which is this world. So death is required, but death is not what the West thinks it is.
If the West thought differently about death, it would be easier to talk about the fact that giving away ourselves is required in order to keep the cosmos fecund, flourishing, a living place, a loving place.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. So many layers to this. I mean, with everything we talked about, I would even question whether death is on the opposite side of birth, because sometimes transformations and reconfigurations involve both at the same time. Not necessarily either or. Sometimes death just leads to more growth, and sometimes new reconfigurations of life can just involve different beings coming together to form a new community.
There are just so many lessons to be learned from observing more-than-human communities and how they play out. So I think sometimes there is often a romanticization of that, too. So I just I really resonated with seeing the anarchic and kind of ruleless, or constantly rules-remaking nature of what may otherwise be painted as, you know, beings living in harmony.
To this point, you write, "In incessantly renewing plenitude of life, the biosphere is no more truthfully symbiotic than it is fundamentally competitive. The world of biology is more like a wild playing field with anarchic elements where the rules of creative togetherness are constantly being renegotiated, where gang wars break out between little groups of coconspirators and schemers, but also where one finds acts of magnanimous sharing heroic dedication and dreamlike bliss."
This is all so nuanced, so all of the above and so fugitive in its meaning, but so real that I actually kind of worry that they may start to feel a little meaningless to those trying to sense make or maybe reform rules and systems or enforce new fixed structures in order to realize more alive futures. But I want to leave this closing to you and ask you, what do you think we can learn from this realization of how our world and its configuration in every sense of the word, is complex and its layers and dynamics and also constantly being remade? What can we ultimately take away from this?
Andreas Weber: I think what we can take away from this is much more confidence in our personal experience of being part of the world. Because you see, if the objective rules are so fluid and they are so dependent on the local situation and they are so context-dependent and they are dependent on who is actually playing with you, and this might shift with time, and then you are also changing through time, then it is very important to have some access to these relationships which are not based just on abstract knowledge of rules or a codified law or empirical observation.
We need to give much more attention to our experience of being on the inside of this and knowing from the inside about what is actually magnifying, enhancing the aliveness of the whole.
Or you could say we need to grow our intuitive approach to this world, to this reality, which is the most neglected human capacity probably in this globalized Western civilization. So we have an inside knowledge of what is serving life. So it has an abstract dimension to it, but it's something which we can all discover in our personal lives, to tap into this wisdom of being always present on the inside of that which is happening, which is not in knowledge, it's not something you can write down or you can construct an argument from. It's something that is somehow known, it's also not a feeling. It's something different. It's something more profound, it's something more global. It's something also more secure.
And we have this because we are part of this whole huge relational process, we're profoundly part of this. So we are inside of this, and we also have inside knowledge, and people have used this to a much higher degree, and everybody can use this to a much higher degree. And the first step of using this is to allow yourself to notice when you feel truly alive. So just to get connected to this possibility, to tap into this aliveness. So sometimes we really need to look for this, we really need to find this, because it's so buried under so many layers of thinking what one needs to be or what one needs to represent. If this is found, then we slowly start to be guided by this, to be guided by the feeling of what feels right for life. It's not even the feeling of what feels right for me.
It's also very complicated for Westerners to understand. This is different, but it comes if you allow yourself to go there, in a way, it's to become a little bit like a tree or like a northern goshawk or a toad in early spring. Tap into this power of knowing what is needed in order to be edible, which we have. And I'm toying with this, or I'm researching this, however you put it, I'm exploring this personally in my own life. And it is incredibly profound and incredibly enriching and as a whole continent, which we somehow have lost out of sight and I think which we share with all all the other beings who are much more capable of doing so. But we also can, and then we can come back into the center of this and find our connection to the center of this beautiful, this precious mandala we are part of.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Andreas Weber: Well, right now in the last years, I'd say it's Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, where she, in a very beautiful, poetic, gentle and absolutely groundbreaking way, brings back the ways of our native Potawatomi culture into our understanding of how to relate to other-than-human beings. And that's it's a book I'm teaching my students and I'm personally relating to. And it's just such a gift.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Andreas Weber: Well, two things. One thing is to stay with this dimension, this invisible dimension, this non-thinking dimension of being close to the center of life in silence. You could call it meditation. And then very related to that, actually not different. It's a sort of guided meditation with other-than-human beings just sitting with them. And that's also what I really do on a daily basis, just being with them and being together in this dimension of connectedness in life. And I'm even doing it right now because I know that I am in the presence of all these trees in front of my window. So it doesn't go away. It's always there.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And finally, what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Andreas Weber: Well, that's again, the way the traditional cultures, the animistic cultures are so beautifully constructing and molding the personhood of all other beings in the society of togetherness. And it's so incredibly inspiring, and it's so healing to see what humans can do if they really allow themselves to be on the same level or let's say, even to be in awe of the power of other-than-human species. I'm very grateful for this, the richness of cultural practices, of ways we can be if we allow ourselves to be. That something I'm very close to.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for all of these seeds of other ways of thinking and feeling and experiencing the world that you've shared with us here. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Andreas Weber: I know that life itself is unable to die. It is indestructible and can only give. Give beings, give form, let flowers bloom from that which is invisible, which seem to be nothing, but which is the ground of existence. And we can really trust that this will never change. This will always make life come back so that we can participate In letting life grow, because we don't need to have any fear that in staying with life, anything bad can happen to us. That's what I would say.
