## Metadata - Author: [[Andreas Weber]] - Full Title: Biology of Wonder - Category: #books ## Highlights - The mounting catastrophes, the accelerating losses of species and habitat, the discombobulation of long-established seasonal cycles as ocean currents go haywire — all these are consequences of modern humankind’s strange detachment from the rest of the animate earth. More precisely, they are a consequence of our species’ addiction to the countless technologies that regularly insert themselves between our bodies and the breathing land, short-circuiting the ancestral reciprocity between our senses and the sensuous terrain. ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=116)) - If we regard subjectivity as a capacity utterly necessary to the dynamic autonomy of any organism — whether an apple tree, a hummingbird, or a humpback whale — it follows that mind can no longer be construed as an entirely ineffable mystery. To recognize mindedness as nothing other than a body’s felt experience of its own dynamic autonomy as it dreams its way through the world is to realize that the mind is not an immaterial spiritual essence that could be housed, sequestered, or hidden away within that being’s body or brain. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=177)) - Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=255)) - More and more researchers agree: feeling and experience are not human add-ons to an otherwise meaningless biosphere. Rather, selves, meaning and imagination are the guiding principles of ecological functioning. ([Location 258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=258)) - In this book I describe a biology of the feeling self — a biology that has discovered subjective feeling as the fundamental moving force in all life, from the cellular level up to the complexity of the human organism. ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=265)) - I call this new viewpoint a “poetic ecology.” It is “poetic” because it regards feeling and expression as necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms — not as epiphenomena, or as bias of the human observer, or as the ghost in the machine, but as aspects of the reality of living beings we cannot do without. I call it an “ecology” because all life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=272)) - From this vantage point, we can perhaps start to sketch what the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has called a “second Enlightenment,” no longer putting the human apart from all other living beings. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=279)) - Biologists such as the evolutionary scientist Edward O. Wilson believe that mind and feeling have developed in a continuous coevolution with plants and animals — the “biophilia hypothesis.” ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=322)) - We do not experience the world primarily with our minds but with our senses and our bodies — and the consequence of this connection in the flesh is that we perceive the world not as a causal chain reaction but as a vast field of meaning. Human beings think in symbols and metaphors. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=326)) - If nature is the theater in which we experience feelings and develop our identities, then we must protect it because we otherwise would destroy our own selfhood. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=420)) - Biosemioticians like the Estonian Kalevi Kull, the Dane Jesper Hoffmeyer and the Italian Marcello Barbieri have introduced a particular version of relativity into biology. They no longer view DNA as a machine code to execute the binary orders of a genetic blueprint but rather as a musical score that the cell can orchestrate in many ways according to its momentary needs. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=602)) - An organism desires to be, to endure, to be something other than what it is. It hungers to unfold itself, to propagate itself, to enlarge itself, to suck in more of the precious stuff of life — that you can possess only when you are breathing. This hunger is life. The desire to live carries an organism like a wave carries a swimmer in the ocean. ([Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=631)) - In the animals our inwardness stands before us in an unknown shape. If we lose them, we do not just lose precious, fascinating creatures. We lose ourselves. We renounce something profound about our condition of being in the world. We forsake ways of being creative, ways of giving birth. Each species we lose today is the permanent loss of a manner of expression of a living cosmos. After it has gone, reality will never be able to express the same gesture. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=718)) - Kant even created the term “self-organization.” ([Location 786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=786)) - The traditional view of the world — and particularly the living world — holds that reality consists of immovable objects that need to be pushed by an external source to produce movement. This perspective is called causality. For every reaction, there is a cause; without a cause, there is no movement or reaction. Therefore, most scientists still see the world as a system of causal-mechanic interconnection. Causes trigger mechanical motion, like a key winding up a clock. ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=807)) - Poetic ecology, by contrast, proposes that the world is governed, along with causality, by another principle: the principle of self-motion. Objects in the world assemble themselves into larger, more complex forms of their own volition, which originates from within. The particles of matter have a tendency to form bonds and relationships among one another that are mutually transformative. Cosmic dust becomes stars, stars become galaxies, atoms join together into molecules, molecules self-organize into organisms. The principle of self-motion is characterized by the astounding fact that objects start to self-organize increasingly more complex assemblages and then, at some point, develop an active interest in this self-organization and by all means struggle to continue with it. Motion continues not from external causes only but rather from internal purposes: organisms want to live. They strive for a continued existence. We humans are happy to be one of these objects that care for themselves and thus are objects no longer, but subjects: things which have an interest in themselves. ([Location 810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=810)) - Note: Makes me think of McGilchrist. This is how the right brain sees the world. - Towards the end of his life, Karl-Ernst von Baer was something like the Alexander von Humboldt of the North. Along with his biological studies, he undertook vast expeditions throughout the Russian imperial lands in service to the tsars (Estonia was then part of the Russian Empire). Von Baer discovered the mammalian ovum, a major biological revolution at the time, and, like Darwin with his evolutionary theory, also founded a new discipline — developmental biology. This addressed everything evolutionary theory had left out. Von Baer was less interested in how different species came into being than in how the body of every individual evolved in the course of embryonic development. His approach was far less abstract than Darwin’s. For von Baer, nature itself formed a harmonious whole, the same interconnected whole as he observed in a single body, which is made up of diverse multitudes of cooperating cells and tissues. ([Location 852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=852)) - For Varela, the essence of biological world-making is a living cell, which continuously produces its own components, which are necessary to produce more of themselves. A living cell pursues self-creation. The cell is the physical realization of the principle of subjectivity — its manifestation in time and space, its real presence. ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1051)) - For Varela, the imperative of self-assertion must be accepted as the common denominator in the physics of life. Self-determination is real. It is an active pursuit. It is the defining moment of living things. For Varela, the machine model of life painfully misses the point: living beings are distinctive for being precisely what machines are not. Machines have no interest in maintaining an identity. ([Location 1078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1078)) - The fact that any living being’s metabolism is structurally open to the world requires the organism to be relentlessly creative. This openness bestows the organism with a fierce drive to invent itself anew in every moment — to produce an “imaginary surplus,” as Varela once put it. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1163)) - An organism’s capacity to live or die is less a question of its material composition than a question of the degree to which it can continue to sustain its motivational spark to self-create. A dead organism basically consists of the same matter as a living one, but this matter has come to rest and does not pursue any internal goals. ([Location 1167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1167)) - Health for an organism does not mean to be undisturbed but rather to be energetic enough to reimagine itself in the next instant. ([Location 1172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1172)) - On the surface, the bacterial cell’s behavior appears to be quite simple and automatic, which tempts an observer to compare a cell to a robot. But its simple and efficient behavior is possible only because an organism is capable of goal-oriented action and does not act like a robot. Robots would need an accurate map of the space they are acting in. It is this requirement that in truth turns out to be complicated. For the organism it is much simpler. It can satisfy its needs without a map because it acts out of self-concern. This mode of perception allows for orientation in any environment. There is no need for a map to direct behavior. A living being only needs desire and inner experience. Feeling is the most accurate way to relate to reality. It might even be the only way (if we regard objectivity as a collective fiction that disguises feeling). ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1199)) - Cognition researchers have observed that 98 percent of the nerve impulses generated within the brain and the spinal cord are not related to any processing of external stimuli. They are “talking among themselves.” And like the biomolecules in a cell, nerve impulses are totally distributed and not separated into distinct cognitive containers. ([Location 1524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1524)) - We therefore can see that the principles of an ecosystem are also at work in the body of a living being. As an organism is constituted by its cells, an ecosystem consists of relatively autonomous agents — its living beings — that are connected to each other in multilayered networks. An ecosystem can perform a kind of embodied cognition of its own. It, too, is a kind of organism. ([Location 1537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1537)) - In the same way as the genetic switches constitute the nervous system of a cell, living organisms are the nerve cells of an ecosystem. The oscillations of populations, the shifting frequencies of species and the changing beauty of a place can therefore be understood as a way of ecological cognition — the world seeing itself. In this sense, animals and plants, bacteria and fungi and all the rest of life are in a literal sense the thoughts of nature, as the Estonian embryologist Karl-Ernst von Baer called them. ([Location 1541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1541)) - Feeling is never invisible; it takes shape and manifests as form everywhere in nature. Nature can, therefore, be viewed as feeling unfurled, a living reality in front of us and amidst us. This unity of experience and expression has become the focus of a new research field, affective neurosciences. It claims that embodied emotions are the prerequisite to understanding mind. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1564)) - If living beings realize themselves as selves by regulating the flow of matter through their identities, according to some deeply felt needs, then the matter that comprises an organism must express this subjectivity. It must display feeling. It must enact inwardness. It must be inwardness crystallized. We could even say that by embodying feeling, form allows us to feel the traces of lived subjectivity in other living beings. ([Location 1642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1642)) - Feeling means self-concern — and we do know that sensation. Feeling means inwardness, and it is this dimension that we share with other sentient beings, if only to a very small degree. Certainly the inwardness of many life forms is not very similar to human self-awareness and emotions, and to our sense of success and loss, grief and triumph. We cannot know to what degree we share these emotions with other beings. But we do know that we share the same trembling for our existence, its future, its unfolding, its flourishing. ([Location 1651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1651)) - The hidden feeling of aliveness is inscribed within matter — sensitive, delicate and highly destructible matter. The desire for life relies on matter. In this way it pervades and saturates matter with living significance and only thereby makes it beautiful. Life’s subjectivity inescapably emerges into the visible, into the ecstasy of color and odor, of melody and touch. In this respect every living being is an open book, an individual looking glass through which the whole book of nature becomes readable. ([Location 1671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1671)) - On my long evening stroll along Estonia’s flowering coast, modern science’s success story of building on a renunciation of lived experience, of the world as it is, seemed to me like a lengthy and painful detour from what really matters. I realized that with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our “Siamese connection with all other beings,” as the novelist Herman Melville beautifully described our situation. We have tried to escape from ourselves. ([Location 1705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1705)) - In contrast to all animals, which carry the bulk of their crucial organs enfolded within their bodies, plants have unfurled their functions to the outside, so that everything becomes visible — their respiration in the transparent green veils of the leaves, the history of their growth in the rising cascades of branches and twigs and, most unashamedly, their unbridled sexuality in the overflowing ocean of blossoms, seeds and fruits. From an unemotional standpoint a plant is a single oversized sexual organ. ([Location 1786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1786)) - The insight hit me like a blow. If an organism’s feeling is revealed by its outside, then the whole of nature must be understood as one huge interior — a space of meaning, a topography of inwardness, which is experienced as an outside. The mystery lay before me, and it was unfathomable — and yet at the same time as accessible as bright sunshine. ([Location 1815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1815)) - Every event has a meaning for the living coherence of the body. Each contact with the world is an emotive act. Feeling begins with the expression of a body that appears as a mirror of what has been inflicted upon it. The feeling materializes regardless of whether the sentient being “knows” what is happening to it or not. ([Location 1908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1908)) - The principles of our body, which we share with all other organisms, form a universal translation device for the stirrings of life, for its aching traumas, for its happiness. Anyone who pretends not to be emotionally sucked in when another being shows its feeling, is dissociated from himself. Anyone who ignores the suffering of other beings who may not have the language, intelligence or personal consciousness that we do, not only despises those others but betrays himself. To deny the reality of suffering, he deceives his ego with the illusion that we humans are different. ([Location 1946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1946)) - Life itself is feeling. Consciousness is only intensified feeling, reflexivity becoming reflexive to itself, always mirroring the basic feeling of life. There is no subjectivity decoupled from the body. This is no longer an esoteric stance in biology; it has become the only view from which certain questions can be approached. For instance, only in accepting that the body is a feeling self can a famous quandary in brain research be resolved, the so-called Libet experiment. Neural researcher Benjamin Libet observed that if a subject raised his arm, the muscles started contracting some fractions of a second before the decision was “made” in the conscious part of the brain. This seems to prove that consciousness as a controlling force is bogus; it is simply a pleasant veneer on a basically deterministic machine. The Libet experiment has sparked a fierce debate that is still going on today. But the determinist interpretation of the experiment is based on the wrong assumption — namely, that the body is a machine. But if the body is recognized as the autonomous subject, then any kind of consciousness is the symbolic expression of that fact, an aspect and manifestation of the body. No wonder the conscious experience of this comes later. The basic autonomy of embodied selfhood has already exerted its freedom of choice. ([Location 1949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1949)) - If feeling can be regarded as the existential meaning of what happens to an embodied being, then consciousness is also such a symbolic mirror. It is a second-order mirror — clearer and more precise — but at the same time far more remote from what it signifies. ([Location 1966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1966)) - As we have seen in the last chapter, even a cell experiences value in a way that guides its sense of self-preservation. The value of sustaining one’s own embodied existence is, after all, the pacemaker of life. Feeling, which is the experience of this value, is the most fundamental level of reality for an organism. Feelings show how close any action comes to fulfilling that core value of all life, the value of continued existence. Feelings are a subject’s eyes. This subjective authority, this striving selfhood, produces feelings that direct the entire being; Panksepp calls it the core self. The status of the body is mirrored in the core self. The core self is where the meaning of bodily processes and their interaction with the environment are collected and interpreted. ([Location 1998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=1998)) - The universal language is an existential meaning conveyed through expressive form. And the form leading to that meaning can be expressed by any number of expressive means. It can be conveyed by the rhythm of nerve impulses, by the moving body itself, by the species composition of an ecosystem, by a statue sculpted in three-dimensional space, by a sequence of sounds, by the arrangement of black and white spaces, by the choice of a word following another word. For Panksepp, the communication of feelings works in just this manner. It is a kind of contagion through analogy. ([Location 2107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2107)) - Note: Thermodynamics of emotion - From this perspective, it sometimes seems that brain researchers studying the neural processes underlying consciousness are describing a gigantically magnified cell. And brain scientists indeed use some of the same metaphors Varela applied when he described the cellular life process in its simplest form as the “creation of an identity.”5 Rudrauf and Damasio also believe that the brain generally follows a pattern of “resistance against variability.” It attempts to maintain its complex self-referential state against external fluctuations. “The brain dynamics create a state of tension and concern which can be described objectively and which can be the foundation of subjective experiences,” Rudrauf and Damasio say.6 Constructing an identity is an organism’s strategy for self-preservation in the face of external stimuli that could destabilize the system. Such a concept is nothing less than the central idea of poetic ecology, in this case as applied to the brain. ([Location 2188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2188)) - The swooshing motion of the elements brings to mind the hissing of our blood when it is moving quickly and pounding in our ears. The wind’s frantic rush has the same symbolic form as the blood streaming through our body at a fast pace. The sensations of sounds, fluids and tactile experience are all linked through dramatic form, which is scale invariant across the different materials through which it expresses itself. This constancy of meaning moves through our diverse sensory channels as if they were one single ocean of coherent meaning. ([Location 2203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2203)) - We do not need to define ourselves any longer only as the animal that can think, as the animal rationale of Greek philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers, who made such a misguided virtue of standing far above and far away from what they presumed to be mindless animality. Poetic ecology permits us to understand ourselves as the animal in which nature’s feelings find a voice. We feel, as all nature does, but we can utter those feelings by translating them into words and gestures, which in turn make others feel. Man, therefore, is, above all, the animal poeticum, the poetic animal. ([Location 2216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2216)) - The American cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have been following the track of the symbolism of bodies for a quarter of a century. They have been able to prove that poetic expression is not the exception, reserved for over-sensitive souls and forgetful school teachers, but the norm. It is the benchmark of our rationality. ([Location 2262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2262)) - Lakoff and Johnson believe that we learn to understand most of these concepts in early childhood when sensual perceptions and motor performances are indistinguishable from the corresponding emotional experiences. The closeness of the father or any other functional caregiver is warm and provides satisfaction. Children experience both as a union. Only later, the authors hold, do we parse the experience and assign different aspects of it to different dimensions of reality, making it seemingly more rational. We forget that in the depth of experience, everything is an integrated whole and that we can only understand ourselves and our needs if we keep this connection in mind — and in the heart. ([Location 2282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2282)) - Humans can utter words that cut deeply, but we can also speak soothingly in nourishing phrases. Words and gestures can hurt, and they can heal. For this reason the discovery made by poetic ecology that signs and meanings create reality is not just a matter of creating nice poetry. It shows a power waiting to be discovered. ([Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2288)) - If we embrace a biology of living subjects, it is obvious that a placebo works just as any other drug — not as a causal lever pushing a button, but by conveying a meaning that is important for an ongoing life process. The drug and the healing gesture are not opposites; both are signs whose meaning triggers a process in the organism that leads to self-healing. The drug is not a lever that causes the organism to assume a different biological state, which then triggers a cascade of causal reactions. It is, rather, an image open to interpretation. Healing in this sense means the capacity to bring forth a sustainable autonomy of self again. It means to enable the body’s ecology to self-create itself. It seems probable that healing is brought about not just by drugs but mostly by the organism itself. Drugs support this self-healing power. Recovery means to restore the undisturbed flow that can assemble an organism’s matter from moment to moment into a new and stable identity. ([Location 2311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2311)) - meanders of time on the face of eternity. ([Location 2539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2539)) - Children are drawn to animals, like moths to a light. Why? Only a few authors have explored this. Amidst our elaborate concepts of early childhood development lingers a gigantic blank spot. Its presence is a consequence of the merciless underestimation and misjudgement of everything that cannot speak with words. ([Location 2597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=2597)) - All life forms in nature are bodies, and these bodies are all related to some aspects of our experience. We can be acquainted with all of our embodied emotions during childhood only if we can meet them in an externalized way in other beings which we love and which we care for. This is the grand role of animals in a child’s imaginary life. They are of enormous importance. ([Location 3048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3048)) - Plato claimed that the essence of generosity or the idea of facility existed there as the abstract epitome of its essence through which the real manifestations of the ideals became possible. But here Plato surely was wrong. The realm of ideas is not beyond, in an ideal world. It is here, in the forms of the animals. They are its guardians, ready for any self-sacrifice we ever demanded of them. ([Location 3070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3070)) - Animals are like us, and they are not like us at all. For this reason they help us mature and gain a distance from ourselves. In the company of an animal, be it as closely related as a chimp or as distant as a tadpole, we find something in ourselves, which is intimately known. But what is known is always entangled with total otherness. It always carries with it an abyss of newness, which is the prerequisite of all creation. ([Location 3096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3096)) - For our most aristocratic qualities are preserved in the animals — in the tiger’s tense calm, in the lion’s majesty, in the buffalo’s strength, in the uncanny shrewdness of the fox, in the farsightedness of the owl. All these are not emotional characteristics of particular species but gestures of life itself. They are aspects of our own possibilities, which we can only recognize in their most consummate way in animals. The whole existential spectrum of a flesh and blood existence, its exultation and its despair, lie contained in the animals and only in them. Animals convert the world inscape of our feelings into visible life. ([Location 3099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3099)) - Only those ecosystems are whole through whose grasslands and forests roam the lone top predators who have come into being over millions of years. A carnivore like Canis sinensis, therefore, is the intersection point of unfathomable complexity embracing not only its biological role but also its meaning in relation to all other beings of the whole system. We do not grasp this complexity, and we are unable to fully live up to it, but it holds and nourishes us with its products. ([Location 3123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3123)) - If feeling is a physical force and the expression of this feeling is a physical reality whose meaning motivates organisms to act, then we might understand living beings better if we imagine what is happening in the biosphere as, in a way, resembling artistic expression. This has another interesting consequence. Art then is no longer what separates humans from nature, but rather it is life’s voice fully in us. Its message is that beauty has no function. It is rather the essence of reality. ([Location 3150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3150)) - With their strict rule to take only functions seriously, to ignore every feeling and to view diverse features and behaviors solely as a means to attain the higher goal of survival, contemporary biologists have inverted the burden of proof even for the most blatant aesthetic phenomena. The more strangely beautiful a body feature is, the more deeply functional it must be. ([Location 3266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3266)) - Let us, therefore, together with these scientists, assume that the animal voice is an organ of expression. Their calls are utterances of a self, as minimally conscious as it may be, rather than tools for the task of out-competing others. Their voices are not proof of a consciousness tied to language but of a sensitive inwardness, which we also share as the core feeling of being alive. Melancholy and exultation — these experiences might be the minor and major keys in nature’s music. ([Location 3337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3337)) - Mainstream biology’s paradigms conceive the highest tenor as the most elite fighter, but many bird species are not melodic combatants but lone dreamers enveloping themselves in a veil of song. Individuals of species like the garden warbler chatter in a special species-specific low-voice melody only when they are alone and undisturbed. They are talking to themselves, delicate and melodious and totally free of utility. ([Location 3366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3366)) - Experiments have shown that the blackbird sings most beautifully when she is alone and not engaged in a vocal beauty competition with her neighbors. Her most mature sonatas sound close to summer when the mating season is long over. When the blackbird sings to demarcate his territory, however, he stitches his stanzas together in a hasty and superficial way as if he has lost all pleasure in singing. Thus the European city and garden bird’s song is at its worst at the very time when his song is most necessary according to biological dogma. ([Location 3369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3369)) - This most macabre melody demonstrates that our inner self, our human inwardness, does not speak differently than that of any creature. We hear in it, as in an acoustical mirror, the echo of our soul, which serves no biological goal but is rather an expression of being. This last desperate cry cannot serve survival anymore because it is uttered from beyond, even from beyond bodily pain because it marks the end of it. This most painful noise is surplus, pure expressiveness, and as such guarantor of truth. Voice, therefore, always arises as the lightest trace of feeling as the pitch of vulnerable desire and being that longs to be. ([Location 3385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3385)) - The touch of sound seizes us more strongly than does the image, which is always seen with some distance in front of us. Neurologists know that people who can hear but not see feel as if they are thrown into the midst of a roaring reality; on the other hand, deaf people, even when they can see perfectly, feel profoundly separate from the world, as if they are condemned to a life behind a wall of glass. ([Location 3397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3397)) - Our culture has clearly turned away from life. However we describe ourselves, we miss the center. We have lost the meaning that arises in the living body alone. We no longer know how to explain how this meaning captivates us, whether it meets us in the form of a serenade, a sonata, a jazz improvisation or a thrush’s call. This double blindness towards body and beauty is not accidental. Art and corporeality stand in an intimate connection and can only be understood together. They are related to each other like the picture a person has of herself refers to the picture another construes of this same person. Only the overlay of both brings together the whole. ([Location 3428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3428)) - An artistic symbol expresses the feeling of being alive that we cannot explain in all its depth and all its detail. Doing this, the work of art itself in the end is not totally explainable. To help us understand, it must remain a riddle. And it is in the utterance and gesture of music in particular that these dimensions meet. Voice is totally transparent and inscrutably enigmatic. ([Location 3448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3448)) - In the dynamics of music we grasp the character of a particular emotion with a precision similar to how we perceive the skeleton’s bone structure in an X-ray, except that this precision refers to emotional perception, not abstract rationality. A piece of music, therefore, does not express feelings but ideas of feelings, not happiness but the concept of happiness, although this concept is offered not in a rational sense but as understanding through participation. ([Location 3463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3463)) - Musical rhythms and cadences possibly echo — and, in turn, lead — the swelling and waning of organic processes. Melodic tensions such as expositions, developments, recapitulations, crescendos and codas, are analogous to the rising and waning of inwardness. This all happens at a depth and time before conscious human emotion has set in. Music objectifies embodied existence. It is a testing ground of the desire for intensified being. ([Location 3468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3468)) - Birdsong, then, is not music in our cultural sense but equally expressive of the logic underlying both. It contains, as does human music, the tonal translation of the principles of inwardness. ([Location 3473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3473)) - Messiaen’s works are an exploration of poetic space. He tries to transform tonal expressions from one embodied awareness to another, following the principle of scale invariance. For instance, he slows down the original tempo of the birds’ tunes considerably in order to make their vocalizations understandable to our acoustic perception. There is a miraculous quietness and serenity about these pieces. You can listen to them tirelessly, just as you can to the nightingale’s air. ([Location 3492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3492)) - Whoever regards nature as a survival machine, however, leaves the role of a lover, in whose eyes the beloved transmits the sense of her existence through the irresistible magic of her appearance. He takes the position of a pathologist instead. He does not believe his eyes and his other senses because he is looking for the mechanics behind the visible. He makes dissection the sole means in the search for the principle which joins the things together — only to realize that the leftovers do not reveal anything other than the principle according to which they have been disassembled: a mechanism. ([Location 3636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3636)) - In fact, Dawkins’ idea, that all experience — and all sensuous reality — is an illusion in service of something rather abstract, is a sort of reproduction of Descartes’ caution. Through Dawkins’ contention that only the genes are real and every feeling only illusion, we are exactly back to the evil demon the French philosopher warned against. This position is typical of the overwhelming attitude of suspicion against one’s own direct experience that has accompanied modernity. ([Location 3649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3649)) - Filip Jaroš, a Czech graduate student of biology, recently did a comparative survey of the adaptive value of coat colors of big feline predators like leopards, jaguars and tigers.5 The spotted and striped patterns are supposed to have an adaptive value in providing camouflage to their bearers, so that these can stalk prey more efficiently. But by careful comparison of dozens of experiments, which were supposed to prove this adaptionist idea, Jaroš found not a single one corroborating the functionalist assumption. Rather, it became clear that the coat color has no function at all. In fact, big cats with their conspicuous yellow ground color with highly contrasting black spots or stripes are not at all suited to fade into the environment structures of leaves, shadow spots or vertical grass blades (in the case of the tiger) as biologists had always thought. They are, instead, highly visible. Put an orange animal into a dull green setting, add black stripes and flashy white cheeks — and you get the most highly visible contrast in the landscape ever. ([Location 3712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3712)) - In fact, as biologist Geerat Vermeij has observed, the grand predators, often hailed as highly efficient killing machines, are not efficient at all. As warm-blooded animals they use up over 90 percent of the energy from food just to keep their body temperature at a constant level. ([Location 3729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3729)) - What seems most real to us from an experiential standpoint, from the scientific perspective becomes most suspicious. What we perceive inwards in all its absoluteness — our own joy, our own pain, a deep bond to a particular being, sincere commitment — for the objective gaze of science is nothing but the daydream of a survival machine. ([Location 3756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3756)) - Life is a spandrel in the building of reality, illustrating its stunning architecture and expressing its deepest ideas. It shows something that is more than the sum of the parts and more than any functional purpose aims at. This something is not part of any functionality. It corresponds to a gleeful yearning that was there in the beginning, and it becomes real by instilling an equal yearning in anyone who encounters it. ([Location 3799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3799)) - The most achieved works rather become expressive on their own account and display something the author only vaguely knew. The sole way to get closer to this something, which the artist sensed but did not wholly understand, is to create an echo symbolic of that feeling, which, however, is not a solution but rather a new complication. A good answer echoes the problem by transforming it into a new question. “A good question,” says the wilderness mentor Jon Young, “must be made into a quest.” ([Location 3805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3805)) - The Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann, therefore, was convinced that life’s final inner purpose was not to win and outcompete others but to be simply visible at all, to display itself by its endless distribution into innumerable individuals in order to show that something is. For Portmann, life was a tale-telling art for art’s sake happening on a cosmic scale: a giant play to allow for the expression and presentation of self. ([Location 3819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3819)) - The seemingly useless feature tells something about the underlying meshwork it is connected to. It is an elucidation, a commentary, a painting that displays a more concentrated content than a fleeting gaze could convey. Life enhances reality. It intensifies creation. And in this regard it is, paradoxically, the most useless features that tell the most about a potential that lies asleep in the depths of the living. ([Location 3832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3832)) - Is it not far more probable that in natural history everything is permitted that reveals itself to be doable at all and that is not in contradiction to the laws governing matter? Only the most absurd assemblies, like a fish without gills but with feathers, may really never be selected. Everything that is not a blunt contradiction of reality, however, can. ([Location 3840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3840)) - Let us invert the perspective to see more clearly. Instead of claiming that every present form has outcompeted all possible contenders, should we not say that it was not too outlandish to not be possible? Only too often life is not represented by the smallest common denominator but rather by the error in the biological reckoning. ([Location 3843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3843)) - Is not the seahorse, particularly, an expressive whim to be explained only through the possibility that in the end nothing really spoke against its construction? The creative biosphere simply was allowed to play with such a form in the protective garden of the sea’s lush grass meadows that formerly covered huge tracts of the coastal oceans. ([Location 3847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3847)) - Also here, “self-organization” is the key word for a process that does not know a specific direction but nonetheless always arrives at its destination. Physicists, chemists and biologists are starting to believe that the tendency of single processes to overlay, to mutually influence one another and to build up complex patterns is one of the basic principles of the universe. ([Location 3857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3857)) - All these forces provide for diversity — but they never obeyed any Darwinian selection. They are directionless, playful and inebriated by newness. It is possible that Darwinian selection could chose among several variants of self-organizing systems, but it was not able to govern their appearance. The way these reactions function has to do with the structural possibilities of reality. Their shape is not won on the battlefield. It comes as a gift. ([Location 3863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3863)) - Stuart Kauffman has translated the three laws and their wholesale anti-organic notion into a language that is easy to grasp: “1. You cannot win the game. 2. You cannot break even. 3. You cannot quit the game.” ([Location 3886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3886)) - Stuart Kauffman even proposes a Fourth Law, which he half-earnestly states as, “The game becomes more and more complicated and new rules are emerging constantly.” ([Location 3904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3904)) - Some researchers even think that the organisms are catalyzers to speed up the journey to total thermodynamic equilibrium and peaceful entropy. The complexity that living beings build up is a fertilizer for decay. Organisms could be thought of as tiny swirls or eddies that through their complication of pure physics work towards a smoother balance of energy in the universe. ([Location 3909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3909)) - In nature the situation, which inspired Herbert Spencer to coin his famous verdict of the “survival of the fittest” that Darwin quickly incorporated into the formulation of his evolutionary theory, does not exist in this blunt form. What Spencer described was rather pretty much the everyday reality in Victorian England. It did not define nature, but a historical moment in human society. The atrocious excess of poor, ill-fed, uneducated workers dying like flies from unsanitary living conditions and the dramatic scarcity of the most important resources of food, housing and hope are not typical of nature. Nature cannot not be grasped as being solely “red in tooth and claw.” The struggle for survival, which biologists see in nature, takes place in human society in the first place. ([Location 3941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3941)) - From an evolutionary standpoint, it is chance events that nearly exclusively lead to the creation of new species. It is not pitiless competition among species and individuals within a species that generates a new strand in the web, but the peaceful separation of one breeding line from another that engenders evolutionary change. High competition, in contrast, allows less newness. It causes the ubiquitous repetition of the same. ([Location 3947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3947)) - The idea of niche always makes us think of some already arranged, tiny and highly efficient room waiting for its inhabitant to arrive. But in ecosystems there is only opportunity and imagination, not a choice of fixed jobs. ([Location 3988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=3988)) - The open ocean is a particularly perfect example of systems that cannot be disjoined into stage and actors. In the empty space of the sea the only available surfaces are the bodies of other beings. Therefore, animals settling here do not push away others from their space but rather attract them as a nightly lantern attracts swarms of moths. ([Location 4005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4005)) - Certain crustaceans can only feed on specific algae. When these perish, their hunters disappear. In the oceans, therefore, a struggle for life takes place in which it is only possible to win or lose together. It nearly seems as if hunter and hunted were different facets of one and the same structure, mirroring one another, imagining one another. Only when researchers start to rupture the web of life in order to isolate one species and to concentrate on its traits alone does the species start to acquire the traits of predator or prey, egoist or compliant victim. But in reality there is only the whole, through which these characters emerge in a fluent and changing way, as aspects of one being, not as individual roles. Therefore, we must accept that if we miss even one of the silver threads from which the web of life is composed, we lose a part of our own freedom. ([Location 4022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4022)) - Note: Thermodynamics of Emotion - Why are city kids still mesmerized in the face of lobster, a fish, a dog or a lion? Why, if not because of the fact that animal experience pervades their souls, because the grace, the sheer pleasure in existing that other beings express, is an illustration of their own options for being, inwardness having become form, an inside in an outside, and only graspable as such. ([Location 4031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4031)) - Until a few years ago, the number of creatures in the ocean was supposed to be endless. They were simply there, always, and in an incredible abundance. Fish and squid and whales seemed to appear from nowhere like a nameless gift. Nature offered itself with the boundlessness of a miracle. Today, however, the oceans are so heavily overfished that not only are their inhabitants about to disappear, but the idea of gratuitous plenitude itself is vanishing. For to know what real abundance means, we need a reference in the world. To know what the gift of life means we need it to be given to us. ([Location 4247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4247)) - The global oceans have an average depth of almost two miles. Everywhere they are shot through with organisms. The seas contain 99 percent of the habitable space of the earth — and this space belongs to the plankton. ([Location 4385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4385)) - The right scale to study plankton is one microliter, says the biologist Farooq Azam, who works at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.1 One microliter is a thousandth of a milliliter. In such a tiny volume, Azam claims, one huge single-celled algae can share its life in symbiosis with thousands of bacteria. These feed on the sugar the algae excretes and in exchange shed phosphate and nitrate, which the algae use. This tiny ecosystem is a closed loop that only needs carbon dioxide and light. Seen from a different angle, the whole ecological circle in a water droplet seems like a particular version of a single cellular unit. It is a closed ecosystem, a stepping stone between cells and biotopes. ([Location 4411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4411)) - Some 250 of our 30,000 genes probably derived directly from bacteria. But this number pales with regard to the role viruses play in making up our genetic identity: at least one fifth of our genes are of viral origin. They stem from pathogens that have inserted themselves into our DNA and thus have converted from parasites to parts of the organism. Ten percent of the dry weight of the human body is bacterial body mass. The number of microbe cells in our bodies surpasses the amount of our “own” body cells tenfold, and the number of microbe genes is 100 times as high as our own.4 And all this diversity is “us” in some respects. ([Location 4462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4462)) - Mutuality already characterizes metabolism, the ground zero of biological existence, as we have seen in Chapter 3. Metabolism is a process by which an individual transforms that which it is not into itself. It is a process by which world becomes self, and by which self, in its existential expressiveness, becomes the symbol of the world. Can we conceive a more intimate connection of self and other? ([Location 4520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4520)) - Mutuality, therefore, is the principle of the individual body as well as the law governing the interplay of all bodies. And it is the key to understanding reality. ([Location 4530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4530)) - All living processes are tissue and swarm. If you look carefully, what you consider to be your “self” emerges as part of this existential connective tissue. If we could for some minutes expose a photographic plate to the movements of the planktonic crustaceans in the turquoise beam of the lamp, then the tracks of the tiny animals would resemble growth paths with which plant roots interlace the soil. ([Location 4537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4537)) - If we accept the idea of ourselves-as-many, and if we keep in mind the fact that these many selves are inside as well as outside our bodies, then no form of nature-culture or mind-body dualism makes sense anymore. For me this outcome is a promising step forward. But I know that many might take it as a defeat. If a clear self is not to be fenced off, do we not plunge into a bottomless abyss? Is not everything illusion? ([Location 4563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4563)) - Francisco Varela, the co-inventor of autopoiesis, calls an organism a “meshwork of selfless selves.” For Varela, the organism is without bottom, without a final core. He imagined it rather as a spiral, whose rim is built by the different layers of actors: cells, organs, the body. But in the middle of the vortex, which a living being causes amidst the ever-changing flux and flow of matter, there is nothing. For Varela, therefore, the “actual self” is nothing that an exact biological science could ever find — just as it did not grasp its essence when it declared the “genetic identity” to be such a center. ([Location 4568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4568)) - The biological subject, this self-reinforcing ripple on the surface of matter, then, is nothing different than the whole. But it is this whole in the sharpest focus imaginable. Every being is a burning glass, through which all currents, all options of being, can be set ablaze. It is a glowing ember that can kindle sensation, which as a silent yearning may sleep in all matter. ([Location 4586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4586)) - The immune system does not even clearly delineate which substances belong to the body and which don’t. What is outside of the immune self depends on the pragmatics of the moment. What generally is referred to as the immune self — that which the immune system recognizes and defends as self against intrusion from the outside — is not a closed box but rather a way of relating. ([Location 4621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4621)) - The immune system is mostly occupied with its own organization, not with defending against intruders. It exists by embracing and caressing self, not by killing it as other. The immune self, we can say, is a mode of self-experience. ([Location 4627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4627)) - Because all organisms have evolved together in a vast symbiosis of forms, any feature is a hint to another being in the distance, which stays behind the others like a silent shadow. ([Location 4644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4644)) - The innovative potential lying dormant in the idea of reticulate evolution might only be comparable to Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, which in the 18th century became the basis for all modern attempts to order the multitude of life forms. Linnaeus was also a revolutionary. He helped put biologists on the track of evolution, as his system introduced the idea that different species are naturally related to one another and have not each been created independently by a watchmaker god. ([Location 4846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4846)) - So why then the maggot and the hornet? The caterpillar and the butterfly? The Pluteus and the variety of starfish and sea urchins? The ubiquitous Trochophora? In the light of reticulate evolution a complicated developmental path is never chosen for reasons of a perfect adaptation. It rather is a useful accident. It is a chance event that follows from nature’s obsession to produce novelty at any price and then to play with it. This means that metamorphosis is a particularly strong case of the reuse of already functional principles. ([Location 4850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4850)) - Preserving nature means to remain healthy in a healthy environment. “Healthy,” however, does not translate into whole and undamaged but rather into the freedom required to carry out necessary embodied imagination. This poetic imagination is a requirement of a healthy system. It is, if present, something that has a healing effect because it instills aliveness. Aliveness means to be able to creatively participate in the ongoing imaginative processes in an ecosystem. Historically, the rules for such a mutual participation and interpenetration have been developed through the commons, where humans co-creatively interact with nature in order to allow all participants to flourish. An environmental ethics, therefore, must be a set of commoning rules for ecosystems. ([Location 4937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=4937)) - To exacerbate things, an additional dilemma makes arguing for an organism-centered ecological ethics particularly difficult. This is the general functional undertone of our worldview created by evolutionary theory and neoliberal thinking. The presence of this functionalist bias is often invisible because it is absorbed in the way our culture perceives reality. Evolutionary success, as it is conceived by biologists, does have a moral: an organism needs to be efficient, to outcompete others, to behave like a well-functioning, thoughtless machine with the purpose of propagating its own genes. In this ambiance, it is nearly impossible to devise an ethical theory extending to organisms that escapes the functionalist notions of evolutionary optimization. If biological traits have an overarching selection value (the “currency” ecological relations are mediated with in much biological thinking), it is difficult to see how they can also have an intrinsic value. ([Location 5178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5178)) - Creating double-binds means to deny reality and to force others, even if they see things correctly, into the same denial. This could easily be said about the way industrial civilization relates to the biosphere to which it belongs. We, therefore, are in dire straits. There is no conventional scientific argument that can support the intrinsic value of natural beings. Our choices are no-win. Either we rely on a rational set of values stemming from identifying other beings as resources and, therefore, are prone to neglect and destroy nature. Or we follow our intuition that there is something deeply important about the presence of other beings and, therefore, we are forced to preserve it. But we then leave the terrain of mainstream scientific discourse, which denies value to anything that is not human and rational, and risk being insulted as dreamers and oddballs. ([Location 5198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5198)) - We lack an argument that can serve as a bridge between the world of scientific observation and the realm of subjective value. Only this can be the stepping stone for a comprehensive environmental ethics. The crucial requirement for this type of ethics is that it must show how organisms produce value and how they act according to meaning. If we can argue for the value that arises from biological world-making and needs fulfillment to continue embodied experience, we can create a basic set of existential morals. These can formulate an “ethics of the flesh,” an ethics of the body-in-connection. This would be independent of human perspective and its limitations. ([Location 5205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5205)) - We need an ethics for irrational subjects. We need an ethics for an incomplete creation. We need an ethics that is imperfect from the beginning, provisional, an ongoing tinkering work itself, and which, for exactly these reasons, can be applied to our lives in a living world. Ethical judgment is not adequate for an embodied subject whose mere biological life process excludes the achievement of perfection but is about negotiating the best compromise between individuality and the whole. The goal of an ethics, which is truly beneficial for life, cannot be control but must be healing. ([Location 5266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5266)) - If we look at what organisms continually do — inferring what ought to be for them in order to be in the future — we can see, however, that living beings constantly commit the naturalistic fallacy. They continuously infer what has to be done from their momentary being. The body is the paradigm of what is and what ought to be. An organism’s body has needs because it is made in a specific way. Through being what it is, a body has needs that tell it what ought to be done. As the world is incarnate and real only in the dispersed bodies of sentient beings, “is” and “ought” always intermingle. ([Location 5313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5313)) - Organisms represent matter in a specific arrangement whose particular feature is that it desires to persist over time. Their essence lies in what ought to be done in order to exist in the next moment. An organism is defined by its desire to be. ([Location 5318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5318)) - The mainstream view holds that living beings are machine-like agents pursuing their egoistic success through competition. Therefore, so the (albeit hidden) conclusion goes, egoistic pursuit of success and competition are the way the world works and the way we ought to behave in order to cope. The inference from “is” to “ought”, while being prohibited for thinkers who try to understand organisms beyond mechanical thinking, has become the ethical root-metaphor structuring our thought without us even realizing it. ([Location 5330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5330)) - The leading question for an ecological ethics, therefore, cannot be focused on the behavior of a moral subject alone. It needs to encompass all subjects and the whole they are bound together in. Therefore, the problem could be formulated as this: what is needed in order to allow that an embodied subject is able to unfold itself in interbeing with others and in order to let the others thrive through the well-being of the embodied subject? ([Location 5381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5381)) - our developmental goal as the union between freedom and relatedness. This union, however, is nothing that can be achieved. It is a contradiction in itself and, therefore, always means negotiation, a solution that is not exhaustive but rather a momentary compromise. ([Location 5456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5456)) - Nothing in nature is subject to monopoly; everything is open source. The quintessence of the organic realm is not the selfish gene but the source code of genetic information lying open to all. As there is no property in nature, there is no waste. All waste byproducts are food. Every individual at death offers itself as a gift to be feasted upon by others, in the same way it has received its existence by the gift of sunlight. ([Location 5478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5478)) - In the ecological commons a multitude of different individuals and diverse species stand in various relations with one another — competition and cooperation, partnership and predation, productivity and destruction. All these relations, however, follow one higher law: over the long run only behavior that allows for productivity of the whole ecosystem and that does not interrupt its self-production is amplified. The individual can realize itself only if the whole can realize itself. Ecological freedom obeys this form of necessity. The deeper the connections in the system become, the more creative niches it will afford for its individual members. ([Location 5482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5482)) - In any existence that commits itself to the commons, the task we must face is to realize the well-being of the individual while not risking a decrease of the surrounding and encompassing whole. If nature actually is a commons, it follows that the only possible way to formulate a working ecological ethics — which inserts the human right in the middle of nature and at the same time allows for freedom of self-expression and technological invention — will be as an ecology of the commons. The self-realization of Homo sapiens can be best achieved in a system of common goods because such a culture (and thus any household or market system) is the species-specific realization of our own particular embodiment of being alive within a common system of other living subjects. The commons philosopher and activist David Bollier claims accordingly: “We need to recover a world in which we all receive gifts and we all have duties.” ([Location 5537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5537)) - Emotional experience is not alien to the conception of an ecological commons but central to it. In an ethics of mutual ecological transformation, feeling is a central part. As inwardness is the necessary way bodies experience themselves, feeling is also a crucial component of an ecological ethics. It is not an add-on that might be tolerated; it is inextricably linked to the reality of ecological functioning. If a living being participates in the exchange processes of an ecosystem, it also gets emotionally involved. This emotional dimension is how living beings experience the relevance of their connections, the meaning of how others reciprocate and how the whole setting acts on their self-productive process. To be connected, to be in metabolism, is always an existential engagement, and this echoes as feeling. Feeling is, so to speak, the core self of a commons ethic. It symbolizes how well the mutual realization of individuality and the whole are achieved. ([Location 5562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5562)) - Indian geographer Neera Singh has shown the extent to which this emotive power encourages commoners to act and provides subjective rewards for their action. She demonstrates that villagers in rural India not only make resources more productive through their commoning with forests. They also satisfy emotional needs and “transform their individual and collective subjectivities.”7 They are engaging in an active poetics of relating in which the human affect and the material world commune with each other and alter one another, in which inwardness is expressed through living bodies and material objects always have a symbolic and felt aspect. Participating in a commons of this kind for a human means to fully realize her ecological potential and to experience this realization through the feeling of living a full life. Again, as I pointed out in Chapter 9, this constellation is known by a common term: we call it love. ([Location 5569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5569)) - Our capability as living beings to inwardly experience the existential meaning of outward relationships gives us a means of emotional ethical evaluation. We always automatically assess the degree to which an ecosystem, or any relational structure we are involved with, is able to grant us the freedom to be and to be in connection. This evaluation is part of the process of living and hence of relating. Inwardly, this is the feeling of being alive, the experienced aliveness. Feeling alive or “enlivened” is, therefore, an immediate way to experience whether a set of relationships is healthy or not. We feel what J.M. Coetzee described as joy, as the experience of full… ([Location 5578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5578)) - Therefore, “where there is much life, there is the potential for great beauty,” as the American environmental philosopher Sandra Lubarsky observes. Beauty “is not a quality — blue or shiny or well-proportioned or a composite of these — overlaid on a substance. It is not owned by the world of art or fashion or cosmetics…. It is embedded in life, part of the dynamic, relational structure of the world created by the concert of living beings. And it is what we name those relational structures that encourage freshness and zest so that life can continue to make life.… ([Location 5585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5585)) - Any aesthetic experience of nature thus is to some degree an ethical assessment. Ugliness, on the other hand, has a certain degree of toxicity. The functional desert of contemporary agricultural landscapes with its few species leaves us uninterested, whereas the Mediterranean dry slope with its rose bushes and bluebirds makes our hearts soften. Rainforest and coral reefs fascinate us, the endless pine steppes of an industrial forest less so. Probably ecologists confronted with the task of assessing the diversity of an ecosystem could renounce complicated sampling methods and simply trust what they see, smell and hear. In the world of living beings the beautiful system most often is the diverse system, and the diverse system is the good system because life imagines itself as the greatest possible plenitude. Still, the beauty of natural systems never appears in the radiant… ([Location 5592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5592)) - Neera M. Singh, “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India,” Geoforum, 47, (2013), 189–198. ([Location 5858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5858)) - Andreas Weber, “Reality as Commons: A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene,” in Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, eds., Amherst: Levellers Press, 2015. ([Location 5860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019M8J9N4&location=5860))