In Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology (2016) the German biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber argues that the living world is not a machine but a web of feeling subjects. Every organism, by making and keeping itself, meets its world as good or bad for its own life, so feeling and meaning are where life begins, and from this he calls for a ‘poetic objectivity’ that knows other beings through felt connection. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his sense of a world alive with inwardness and his call to become animal, plant and stone, and holds that the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer are conscious in their own right.
Who is Andreas Weber? #
A German biologist, philosopher and writer, born in Hamburg in 1967, who studied biology and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Hamburg and Paris and took his doctorate in 2003 with a thesis on a semiotic theory of the living, the study of life through signs and meaning. He has worked as a journalist for German magazines and papers, and lives in Berlin and Italy.1 Besides Biopoetics he has written, for general readers, The Biology of Wonder (2016), Matter and Desire (2017) and Enlivenment (2019). Biopoetics is the most academic of these, published by Springer in its series on biosemiotics.1 See What is biosemiotics?
What is the book’s main argument? #
That reality, and the living world in particular, is alive in a fuller sense than modern science allows. It is not only a surface of physical processes, but is “constantly revealing meaning and inwardness”, and the relations between living beings that express this inwardness are poetic.2 Weber builds the case from biology. Organisms make themselves and their own boundary, as the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela described, and anything that makes itself has something at stake, its own continued life. So an organism never meets the world neutrally. Things are good or bad for it, nourishing or threatening, and that felt concern is the root of meaning. Nature, on this account, is a network of interacting selves, each with an interest in its own existence.3 See What is autopoiesis, and what does it say about what is alive?
Feeling, then, is not a late extra added to complicated brains. For Weber subjectivity belongs to the body, and since the bodies of all species are deeply alike and related through a shared natural history, subjectivity is not private. It is “what binds us together”.4 Among his opening propositions are that the biosphere is a material and meaningful web of selves, that embodied selves come to be only through others, and that the individual can only exist if the whole exists, and the whole only if individuals are allowed to exist.2
What does Weber make of symbiosis and the individual? #
That the individual is far less separate than it looks. Symbiosis, in his reading of the biologist Lynn Margulis, runs much deeper than was once thought. The complex cell itself probably arose from the fusion of several bacteria, every organism depends on its symbionts, and a single organism resembles a whole ecosystem more than a single solid subject.5 In a later chapter he describes nature as mutuality in aliveness, identity through mutuality and mutuality through identities that keep transforming one another.6 See What did Lynn Margulis teach about symbiosis and the porous individual?
What is poetic objectivity? #
Weber’s name for a way of knowing other beings through felt connection. He contrasts two kinds of objectivity. The objectivity of separation, which still rules, imagines a fixed reality known from outside, to which living machines more or less efficiently adapt. The objectivity of connection is the kind organisms already live by, always finding their way through relations that shape both partners, and humans know it from the inside, because they are organisms too. It is objective, in his view, because it is about bodies and the ways they meet, and poetic because it expresses each participant through the others.7
From this he proposes a first-person science in which a careful, felt connection with another living being counts as a real observation, and our own aliveness is an instrument of knowing, alongside observation and reasoning. Nature writing is one of his examples. Other beings are needed to know ourselves at all: “Only in the eyes of another being can we ourselves become a living being.” And to become fully human, he writes, “We have to become animal to truly feel what it means to be human, we have to become plant, we have to become stone.”8
Do scientists accept this? #
Not widely, and Weber expects the objection himself. He anticipates that many will say poetic objectivity stretches the definition of science to breaking point, since science has rested on measurement, repeatability and the testing of claims. His reply is that a broader method is needed, one that can take account of the inner side of living things, with experiential methods working together with observation and reasoning, not replacing them.9 A related complaint is heard in the wider argument about whether brainless organisms can be said to think or feel: the zoologist Alex Kacelnik warns that applying words like ‘cognition’ to such beings “hollows out the word itself”.10
How does Weber’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the aliveness of the world and the call to become other beings. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, in ways unlike ours.11 Weber’s call to become animal, plant and stone has a close counterpart in shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer, the journey practice of experiencing becoming something else. Its aim is not to imagine what being Tree is like but to be Tree, and it gives an understanding that is not intellectual but felt, a knowing from the inside out, along with a sense of connection to the being shapeshifted into.12 Weber’s objectivity of connection, knowing another through felt contact, describes something very like this knowing from the inside. See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
His opening propositions also meet the teaching on the self. The more someone journeys and experiences being things like Otter, Oak Tree, Ocean or Obsidian, the more they find they are part of Human, part of Animal and part of a much bigger whole, a great Tribe of all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer; there is no one, single ‘I’.13 Weber’s selves that come to be only through others, and his individual and whole that each need the other, are a biologist’s version of a similar picture.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On two points. The first is where aliveness begins. In the main, Weber places the line at life, though he softens it in places. The self-making of organisms is probably, in his words, “the true boundary that separates the organic realm from pure matter”.14 He writes that we must become stone, but in his account a stone is a partner in the poetic world, not a feeling self. Therapeutic Shamanism draws no such line. All physical things are Stone People, and the Stone People are themselves conscious and alive, in a way so very different from us that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all.15 Weber also calls ‘animism’ a “wrong, but characteristic” term for the old cosmologies teeming with life, without saying in the book why he thinks it wrong.16 See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?
The second is how felt knowing is held. Weber claims his poetic knowing as a kind of objectivity. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps two kinds of truth side by side. Shamanic journeys are mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, metaphorically true, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, literally true. They are full of symbolic meanings and are the realm of meanings, relationships and insights, not a way of finding out facts, and a lot of harm has come from taking mythos as literal truth.17 Both accounts take felt knowing seriously; they differ on whether to call it objective. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
