Andreas Weber pursues an ambitious goal with Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. He investigates the principles of reality that we experience and are part of through a science of the heart. It became clear to Weber that we need to completely rethink how we understand life and its significance. It also means that we have understood very little, or have forgotten very much, about life.
Andreas Weber describes being in the world as an erotic encounter. It’s an encounter of meaning through contact, and of being oneself through the significance of others. Weber sees ecology as a relational system, and love as an ecological process.
Andreas Weber writes that 1) to love, we must understand life; 2) to be able to love, we must be able to be alive; and 3) to allow oneself to be fully alive is to love oneself and the world, which is alive. We are currently neglecting this because our efforts to understand the world are directed away from the experience of being alive, from aliveness.
Life is the creative transition from controlled situations to openings that cannot be controlled. Being in tune with life lies between following principles and improvising. Every life-form is an unbroken chain of self-organization. The world is a symphony of relationships between participants that are changed by the interaction.
After two hundred years of trying to bring about Enlightenment, we have put the Earth in a position more precarious than it has been in for the past two hundred million years. It could be that the planet is not suffering from an environmental crisis, but from a shortage of our love. Love is the inside of aliveness.
Related posts:
Book Review: Enlivenment
Book Review: Biology of Wonder
Book Review: Biopoetics
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