## Metadata - Author: [[Andreas Weber]] - Full Title: Enlivenment - Category: #books ## Highlights - Enlivenment tries to supplement—not substitute—rational thinking and empirical observation (the core practices of the Enlightenment position) with the “empirical subjectivity” of living beings, and with the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences. - Enlivenment is not an arcane historical or philosophical matter but a set of deep principles ordering how we perceive, think, and act. If we can grasp enlivenment as a vision, we can begin to train ourselves to see differently and to approach political struggles and policy with a new perspective. The political consequences of adopting such an approach, which I call an “enlivened policy,” a “culture of life,” or even a “policy of life,” are far-reaching - Scientific progress—and all explanations of biological, mental, and social processes—is based on the smallest possible building blocks of matter and systems, and is gained by analyses that presume that evolution in nature is guided by principles of scarcity, competition, and selection of the fittest. To put it in provocative terms, one could say that rational thinking is an ideology that focuses on dead matter. Its premises have no way of comprehending the reality of lived experience. Should it be so surprising, then, that the survival of life on our planet has become the most urgent problem? - In a reality that is massively cocreated through a constant reweaving of relationships and the associated reciprocal transformation, conflicts are not only unavoidable, they are part and parcel of the way desire manifests itself.