Cítí, tedy je: Fascinace životem a revoluce v přírodních vědách

by Andreas Weber, Jana Krtková (translator)

Andreas Weber v této průkopnické práci ukazuje, že živé bytosti nejsou pouhé biologické stroje, ale stejně jako lidé jsou živými, tvůrčími subjekty poháněné smyslem a výrazem.
Navrhuje nový přístup - "poetickou ekologii" -, která náš druh úzce spojuje s každou bytostí a je základem celé škály lidských zkušeností. Tvrdí, že pocity a emoce zdaleka nejsou pro studium organismů zbytečné, ale že jsou samotným základem života. Rozkol mezi námi a přírodou je pravděpodobně hlavní příčinou většiny ekologických katastrof, které se kolem nás odehrávají. Dokud se nevyrovnáme s hloubkou našeho odcizení, nepochopíme, že to, co se děje přírodě, se děje i nám.
Práce ukazuje, že naše spojení s dynamickou sítí vzájemně propojených vztahů na Zemi je základem celé škály lidských zkušeností, dává vzniknout novému ekologickému étosu a ukazuje, že subjektivita a představivost jsou předpokladem biologické existence.
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Genres: Science, Nature, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Biology, Ecology, Psychology

Hardcover

First published February 25, 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

[Jan Höglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andreas Weber writes in Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science that the more technology allows us to study life, the stronger the evidence of life’s complexity and intelligence becomes. For two hundred years, biology made no major efforts to answer what life really is. Most biologists assumed organisms to be tiny machines. Today, this belief is shaken.

Organisms are not machines assembled from discrete pieces, but unities held together by feeling what is good or bad for them. 1) All living bodies are bodies of feeling. 2) The wish to live is visible in the living body of each being. 3) Only in the mirror of other life, in the eyes of the other, can we unlock the depths in ourselves.

Feeling and experience guide ecological functioning. Organisms are feeling, sentient systems that interpret their environments. Biology is discovering that even the simplest organisms act according to values. Every living being is connected to reality through the experience of being alive. It is what defines an organism.

The new biology currently finds itself in a situation comparable to that of physics hundred years ago. It views feeling as the primary explanation of all life processes. Feeling is the inner experience of meaning. The subjectivity of a living organism is an objective reality in its own right. Value and feeling are at the center of a scientific description of living organisms. This is radical and not, yet, readily understood.

We experience the world primarily with our senses and bodies. Our need to be connected, to be seen, to be loved, spring forth from our bodily existence We are part of a web of meaningful inter-penetrations of being. Without experiencing natural beauty and real connectedness to a living world, we end up lifeless and deformed.

Andreas Weber writes that the conceptual framework we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to it. We treat it cruelly because we believe it to be machinery. Centuries of humanitarian and ecological disasters lie behind us, and bigger ones lie ahead. How we understand life itself will decide our future.

Andreas Weber argues that we share a rich common ground with all other living beings. He writes about nature, not as an object, but as a subject of living experience. Feeling and value are crucial in the phenomenon of life. Weber has spent his life searching for life’s nameless “something”. Life literally creates itself. Organisms do anything to ensure their continued existence. The desire to live is primary. Everything that lives wants more life. The wish to live is visible. We are entangled with others.

Andreas Weber proposes that the that world is governed by poetic ecology. Matter forms mutually transformative bonds and relationships. It is creative without centralized control. Objects assemble themselves into more complex forms of their own volition. Poetic ecology restores humanness, without sacrificing the otherness of other beings. It connects deep human experiences with a scientific understanding of life. The world is vibrant with feeling.

Living beings are autonomous to a certain degree. They act as a whole and not as parts obeying external laws. There are no governing orders, only signs of meaning. All levels of biological existence have the ability to arrange matter into desired configurations. The body knows through acting on what is good. What matters most for all organisms is to act in a way that makes sense. Organisms continuously maintain themselves as a whole. They strive to regenerate, grow and maintain their boundaries against internal fluctuations and external disturbances.

Andreas Weber emphasizes that it is profoundly misleading to compare an organism to a machine. Machines do not bring forth themselves. They have no active interests. They do not resist being switched off. Organisms, on the other hand, struggle to perpetuate their own existence. To be alive means to maintain one’s own body, and to have an active self-interest in one’s own circumstances. A living being is deeply invested in preserving its particular form and in its freedom to act. Every organism chooses and decides. Organisms have to be free out of necessity.

Feeling is the common language of all living beings. It resides in the coherence of the body. The body reacts to the expression of another body because it feels its meaning and seeks to understand the consequences for its own coherence. Experience is mediated through feeling. In the depth of felt experience, everything is an integrated whole.

Our connection with other beings happen on a deep level. These deep principles cannot be verbalized. They can only be experienced. Andreas Weber writes that amidst our elaborate concepts lingers a gigantic blank spot. We underestimate and misjudge everything that cannot speak with words — until some decades ago, even children. We systematically deny what we can know, what we can experience through our bodies. Feeling comes before form. All organisms are connected in a meshwork of experiences which is existentially real.

Every experience has been a source of suspicion since the birth of modern science two hundred years ago. It goes back to Descartes’ idea that sensory experiences are not reliable from a scientific standpoint. And it is an example of our reliance on rational calculation, which makes today’s loss of life possible.

We are living in a biosphere whose depth and extension we cannot grasp, and which is continuously regenerating itself and us. The biosphere of our blue planet is one single interwoven system. With the plentitude of life disappearing, we lose a dimension which is beyond any calculation. All life is a meshwork, where everything depends on everything, and all move through the movement of all. The value of life is immeasurable because it is all there is. If the biosphere dies, we can no longer exist. At the end of all calculations, the value of life is infinitely high.

Living reality depends on a balance between autonomy and relatedness. Feeling alive, or enlivened, is a way to experience whether relationships are healthy or not. It is embedded in all life and is part of the relational structure of the world. By the experience of enlivenment we are able to evaluate the life-giving potential of any situation.

[Ashar Malik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I completely mistook this book. Originally I thought it would be more science centred but turns out it was more philosophical than anything else.

The book is still great. Given that the book is more philosophical than "science" based, there are bound to be things which will disagree with the reader's perceptions, as they did in my case. Nonetheless the book is a great read and presents an alternate interpretations and rationalises support for those alternate views. Good read. Definitely recommended.

[Domagoj Bodlaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetic discourse made it difficult for me to grasp all the ideas laid out in this book. But I found myself going with many of Weber's claims to the extent I understood them.
To a reader's delight, he effortlessly blends science, philosophy, and biography into coherent whole, much like Loren Eisely.
I hope to revisit this book one day.

[Adam84 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetická ekologie jako nevšední náhled Andrease Webera na přírodní procesy a vlastně i celou teorii života vůbec.

Osobně se nebráním tomu si občas poslechnout či přečíst názor, který se neshodne s vědeckým mainstreamem, zvlášť když autor - jako v tomto případě - předesílá, že neopouští oblast přírodních věd. Je to pro zvídavého čtenáře obohacující činnost, ale samo sebou to nese riziko šlápnutí vedle.

Subjektivita cítění je nejen základem Weberova přírodního světa, ale bohužel i základ jeho přístupu k psaní této knihy, jejíž velkou část tak tvoří poetické popisy jeho pobytu v přírodě, jež někdy působí až halucinačně.
A ono cítění předchází postulát "Touha žít", jež je vlastní každému organismu a zaručuje tak jeho sebeutváření. S tím nemám problém polemizovat. Jenže Weber skrze své nadšení z přírody, které nehodlá opustit ani na jediné straně své knihy, zabalí svou teorii do zbytečného balastu všemožných sentimentálních metafor, čímž se na hony vzdaluje všemu vědeckému a mne vzniká pocit dlouhého a opakujícího omílání stejného a to se mi prostě špatně čte.

Výsledná vize ústí v etice vzájemnosti, což zrovna nepřekvapí a podobnost s některými vizemi náboženskými je nasnadě.
Ale přesto, že mi tahle kniha čtenářsky nesedla, pozitivní vztah k přírodě a lásku k životu s autorem sdílím, na tom se mi nic nemění.

[Walt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a phenomenal synthesis of biology and philosophy into a new frame for our understanding of life and experience. As children we are all captivated by curiosity about everything we perceive. Our experiences are driven by and made of powerful emotions. Modern western science and philosophy tell us to ignore this emotional experience in favor of mechanistic objectivity. This book aims to reintroduce the living roots of our curiosities into deadened disciplines, and succeeds wonderfully. It takes recent findings in psychology, ecology, and evolutionary theory and transforms them into poetry. While I agree with David Abram in the forward that the book is too harsh on Charles Darwin the person, it otherwise provides a wonderful basis for critiquing western society and its perception of knowledge.
I would say this is essential reading for any student of biology or philosophy.

[Rebbecca Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an unexpected pleasure. Never read a book like this before, reading anything to do with Ecology. Now I’ve added several books to my reading lists.

This is a beautiful piece that reveals the truth in us all, we are all one…fabric, puzzle, grains of sand on a vast beach…regardless of how you say it we are all one.

Many times during my read the concepts of Edgar Cahn and the Core Economy as well as the concept of restorative justice kept surfacing in my mind parallel to the concepts introduced in this book.

Absolutely enjoyed reading this piece of art, including the extra time needed to grasp some of what is presented. This is a book I will read again and reference often.

[Peter Zomer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Copernican book. Review follows later.

[Kevin Elizabeth Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Permission

Thanks, gonna take my feelings out and about! About time too, I'm seriously post adolescent.
Really, you've opened me up.
Again, thanks!

[Kar]

I still think about aspects of this book every day.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book proposes nothing less than a new way of thinking about the earth and our place in it. Weber at one point terms it, "a new science of the heart" or in another book he uses the term "enlivenment". The basic premise stems from the idea that moving beings are alive, and to be alive implies freedom, choice, and the ability to feel. This aliveness includes living cells at one end and the entirety of earth's surface at the other. We are part of a living network, and that network is not about competition but symbiosis. As you can see, this book is an audacious endeavor, in which I for one, believe he largely succeeds.

Like another reviewer I had to have a colored pencil handy every reading in order to highlight important passages in the book. The ideas continue to jump off the page. However, the book is not perfect. The reading at some points is choppy. I've decided it's largely due to sentence structure and word choice. Perhaps it's related to the fact that this book was not originally written in English. In any event, if your like me and have felt as though our ideas about the earth and nature are incomplete then pick up this book and find a new way to see the earth that is abounding with life inside and outside of us.

[Shante' Zenith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much to explore in this lush book by German biologist Andreas Weber. This book is deepening and confirming my intuitions about the world in ridiculously synchronistic ways. Weber creates a discipline called “poetic ecology” that aligns completely with the way I have been exploring the poetic in theatre. I need more time with this book to give it an annotation—or an essay—or several essays, that can truly do justice to the way it has resonated with my being!!!

[Reesi Heigert · Rating 4 out of 5]

huvitav, uudne, aeg-ajalt liigselt romantikasse sukelduv... Interesting, fresh, controversial, at times too romantic..