Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics, is an essay by Andreas Weber,[notes 1] published by the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation.[notes 2] The following is the complete text of the essay.[notes 3] Additional resources for Enlivenment can be found in the P2P Wiki





Foreword

by Heike Löschmann, Heinrich-Böll-Foundation

This essay contributes to the most crucial quest of our times, which also lies at the heart of the work of the Heinrich Böll Foundation: How is it possible to provide a life of dignity for all human beings, to live in coexistence and respect with the natural world and accept the planetary limits?

From the margins of hegemonic discourse, this essay invites the reader to look at the world afresh. It challenges the familiar terms of conventional politics and policy and their underlying assumptions. Can we continue to solely rely on the Enlightenment heritage that our rational thinking and technological creations can "appropriate nature" and "unlock its secrets" to serve our needs? Is nature really nothing but a game of winners and losers, of efficiency and self-interest? The idea of "Enlivenment," as proposed here by Andreas Weber, challenges these assumptions as a blindness to the realities of living biological and ecological systems. Instead of the mainstream, dualist metaphysics that treats the world as "dead matter", Enlivenment sees a pluralist world of living beings constantly entangled with each other within a biosphere that must be understood as a continuous unfolding of diversity, freedom and experience.

As Weber explains, an ongoing paradigm shift in the life sciences is providing us with a new picture of Biology. It is moving away from a reductionist worldview that sees nature as a deterministic machine whose parts and processes can eventually be understood by rational, "outside" human observers, to an enlivened worldview that situates human beings deeply in a web of dynamic, living and unfolding creative relationships. Discarding a mechanical perspective of nature, science is beginning to see that the great, unexplored territory is the nature of life itself. Subjectivity, sentience, agency, expression, values and autonomy lie at the center of the biosphere. This conclusion is not a matter of mere opinion or speculation; it is increasingly being validated by empirical evidence. Biological sciences are undergoing a massive transformation that has been compared to the one that physics experienced in the 20th century as it came to grips with the peculiar realities of quantum physics and relativity.

Weber gives us a glimpse of the different scientific paradigm now coming into focus. He calls it "Enlivenment," because the new sciences are revealing organisms to be sentient, more-than-physical creatures that have subjective experiences and produce sense. Organisms embody meaning and express a "world-making" sensibility. Their subjectivity and feelings of being alive are not incidental to their evolutionary history, but central to it. Weber sees Enlivenment as an "upgrade," not a replacement, of the deficient categories of Enlightenment thought – a way to move beyond our modern metaphysics of "dead matter" and acknowledge the deeply creative, poetic and expressive processes embodied in all living organisms.

This growing recognition has profound implications for contemporary politics and public policy frameworks. Our obsolete, mono-cultural worldview is literally preventing us from understanding the deeper causes of our multiple crises. Drawing on metaphors from pre-Victorian Darwinian science and social norms, biology and economics have developed an integrated – but erroneous – "bioeconomic" narrative about how life, nature and policy work. This worldview also defines how "sustainability practices" shall be crafted and implemented globally. In the bioeconomic view, humans are regarded as ego-driven machines "playing the game of life," competing in an endless struggle to survive and triumph over others. We are all supposedly rational, utility-maximizing individuals – homo economicus. It is this story that we tell ourselves about the world and about our place in it, and that in turn shapes the world and limits our imagination of possible alternatives.

In fact, however, nature is not efficient, but rather highly "wasteful" in generating "free" excesses and a "surplus of meaning" – both of which are essential in sustaining ecosystems, biological diversity, and individual experience. There is no place in nature for exclusive ownership or artificial scarcity through property rights; ecosystems are in effect open-source regimes of natural abundance. Nature is not a zero-sum game, but an expansive, collaborative unfolding.

As human civilization tries to come to terms with climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other ecological challenges, it is imperative that the human economy begin to shed the myths of another century and begin to recognize the actual principles of the new meaning-centered biology and its functioning in natural ecosystems. We must scrutinize the dominant principles of "bioeconomics" and their inherent tendencies to "economize" life. These principles fail to acknowledge the scientific realities of life itself – that "life" and "aliveness" are fundamental categories of thought and that individual experience and meaning are significant realities of ecosystems that law, policy and institutions must recognize and foster.

A particularly exciting aspect of Weber’s thinking is his exploration of resilient enlivenment-based models around the world today. These are the self-organizing, living examples of the commons. The commons is all about enlivenment, and Weber explains why. Unlike markets focused on the production and distribution of goods and services, the commons engages people at the core of their "life-centers." This approach is the basis of a new sort of economy that honours people’s personal needs and intrinsic interests, enhancing their sense of aliveness and in the process, intensifying the aliveness of underlying ecosystems. The commons speaks to everyone’s need for meaning, participation, social connection and identity. It celebrates tradition and custom, and the sense of belonging and place, while fostering adaptation and innovation.

The idea of the commons is transformational, too, because it redefines ‘wealth’ as something much more than money. If human well-being is the goal, wealth must engage with the life-center of individuals. The commons can unleash decentralized energies and open up new possibilities for change in ways that "spreadsheet thinking" about an economy cannot. The commons provides the outlines of a new/old provisioning paradigm that is both enlivening to humans and ecologically creative.

Weber has done a great service here by presenting some of the latest scientific findings about biological reality; outlining the implications of a fully embodied culture for politics and policy; and showing how the commons movement can help fulfill the principles of enlivenment. He provides a compelling path for moving toward a new level of thinking and a powerful vision for a humane, ecologically responsible future. This vision shows that the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment, our individual freedom and rights, can and must be combined with those of the coming Enlivenment, the unfolding of the relational, co-creative power of embodied, autonomous beings.

The framework of Enlivenment that Weber outlines here is a promising beginning for all those who stand ready to search for real solutions to the challenges of our future. But it is only a beginning. It will require much thought and respectful encounters among proponents of different perspectives to explore and expand the paradigm of Enlivenment.

Introduction

This essay proposes a new perspective on the interplay of nature, humans and economy. It tries to develop a set of alternatives around some basic assumptions our current worldview is built upon. The position taken here will be called "Enlivenment,"[1] because its central thesis is that we have to reconsider "life" and "aliveness" as fundamental categories of thought. Enlivenment tries to supplement – not to 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.

I argue that the biggest obstacle to the vexing questions of sustainability (itself a very elastic term with multiple and conflicting meanings) is the fact that science, society and politics have for the last 200 years lost their interest in understanding actual, lived and felt human existence. Scientific progress – and all explanations of biological, mental and social processes – is based on the smallest possible building blocks of matter and systems. It advances through 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?

Based on new findings predominantly in biology and economics, I propose here a different view. I argue that lived experience, embodied meaning, material exchange and subjectivity are key factors that cannot be excluded from a scientific picture of the biosphere and its actors. A worldview that can explain the world only in the "third person," as if everything is finally a non-living thing, denies the existence of the very actors who set forth this view. It is a worldview that deliberately ignores the fact that we are subjective, feeling humans – members of an animal species whose living metabolisms are in constant material exchange with the world.

In the vision of the world that I propose here, we human beings are always part and parcel of nature. But this nature is much more like ourselves than we might imagine: It is creative and pulsing with life in every cell. It is creating individual autonomy and freedom by its very engagement with constraints. On an experiential level, as living creatures on this animate earth, we can understand or "feel" nature’s forces if only because we are made of them.

I propose here a new approach to understand our "sustainability dilemma" by urging that we embrace a new cultural orientation towards the open-ended, embodied, meaning-generating, paradoxical and inclusive processes of life. To some, this may sound as if I am proposing a new naturalism, the view that everything is composed of natural entities. But if so, it would be a naturalism of second order that takes into account that nature is not a meaning-free or neutral realm, but is rather a source of existential meaning that is continuously produced by relations between individuals, producing an unfolding history of freedom.

This essay is meant as a first step to probe the terrain. It tries to substitute the "bioeconomic principles" that are guiding so many of our economic, political, educational, and private decisions today, with new "principles of enlivenment". These are based on the observation that we are living in a biosphere, an unfolding process of natural freedom, and that as humans we are not only capable of directly experiencing this aliveness, but we also need to experience it ourselves. The experience of being alive is a basic human requirement that connects us to all living organisms and to "nature" (often misunderstood as something apart from us). Acknowledging this existential need is not only important for the future progress of the biological sciences; it is imperative to our future as a species on an endangered planet. Our inability to honor "being alive" as a rich, robust category of thought in economics, public policy and law means that we do not really understand how to build and maintain a sustainable, life-fostering, or enlivened, society.

Enlivenment is not an arcane historical or philosophical matter but a set of deep ordering principles for how we perceive, think and act. If we can grasp enlivenment as a vision, we can begin to train ourselves to see differently and approach political struggles and policy with a new perspective. The political consequences of adopting such an approach, which I call "policies of enlivenment," are far-reaching. Embracing a non-dualistic viewpoint allows for more inclusion and cooperation because there is no disjuncture between "rational theory" and social practice; the two are intertwined.

At the same time this perspective allows for a deeper acknowledgment of the unavoidable messiness of life – conflicts, bad timing, shortcomings, etc. – for which rules of negotiation and accommodation have to be cultivated. The freedom that the Enlightenment has sought to advance is the individual’s personal autonomy to be one’s own master. The freedom that the Enlivenment seeks to advance is our freedom as individuals and groups to be "alive-in-connectedness" – the freedom that comes only through aligning individual needs and interests with those of the larger community. Only this integrated freedom can provide the power to reconcile humanity with the natural world.

Enlivening the crisis: Looking beyond the current ideology of death

This essay tries to describe the contemporary situation on our planet from a new perspective. When I use the term "contemporary situation," I refer to the many familiar facets of our current multiple crises: environmental decline, biodiversity loss, climate change, North-South conflict, economic inequalities. But I am not referring only to the external or material aspects of these challenges, but also to their more or less hidden, subjective dimensions, which could be subsumed under the term "crisis of sense-making." To stress the importance of this focus, let me only note that unipolar depression was "ranked as the third leading cause of the global burden of disease in 2004 and is predicted to move into the first place by 2030," surpassing infectious and heart diseases, and cancer.[2]

I wish to propose that the multidimensional crises of the current global situation are best understood as a "crisis in global sense-making" that has several, and even contradictory, dimensions. Its aspects range from the threat to the global natural life-support systems from overfishing, deforestation, soil degradation, loss of species and abrupt climate shifts (among many other problems) to the degradation of human support systems for people’s social and psychological lives.

All these single factors cannot be seen in isolation from one another and treated separately. They are aspects of the same problem. The mainstream approach to our manifold dilemmas, however, is to sort out various problems in separate "silos" and then search for specific, single "solutions." This amounts to the only officially acceptable methodology in established institutions, whether they are educational institutions or public health systems, environmental organisations or international policy bodies. But an analytical approach that separates and externalizes problems to make them technically manageable is precisely why these troubles have arisen in the first place. We are caught in a deadlock.

Therefore, if we hope to make any serious progress, we should first ask what is blocking us. Is there a universal source from which most contemporary dilemmas arise? We should look for common denominators in our thinking or policies that may be responsible so that we can begin to name related problems – and begin to look for a new perspective to face reality. Then perhaps we can develop a new narrative that more accurately describes the world that we live in – and wish to live in.

Beyond the current metaphysics of dead matter

A profound flaw of our civilization, with its multiple crises, could lie in the fact that we deny the world’s deeply creative, poetic and expressive processes, all of them constantly unfolding and bringing forth a multitude of dynamic, interacting relationships. We might have forgotten what it means to be alive. All of the sciences, whether natural, social or economic, try to grasp the world as if it were a dead, mechanical process that could be understood through statistical or cybernetic analyses. Since Descartes’ groundbreaking revolution of separating reality into a hidden, subjective, strictly non-generalisable res cogitans on the one hand – our minds – and a visible malleable, calculable, but dead res extensa on the other – the material world – humankind’s most noble endeavours have focused on separating reality and all its parts into discrete building blocks – atoms and algorithms. This is seen as the most fruitful way to advance human progress.

The scientific rules that are still as valid today as when they were established in the 17th century, require us to treat everything as dead matter. The automatic application of Ockham’s razor has become a lethal weapon transforming every object of interest into an assemblage of non-animated building blocks.[3] This tendency has cursed our civilisation with a sort of King Midas touch in reverse. This mythical king transformed any object into gold by the touch of his hands, eventually causing him to starve to death. All things that our civilisation touches with the X-ray vision of the scientific method in effect loses their aliveness. Science has erected a metaphysics of the non-living to analyse the most remarkable aspect of our being in the world, namely our being alive.

Enlightenment 2.0: "Enlivenment"

The common focus that could help us understand the current planetary crisis lies in the idea of "Enlivenment." Enlivenment, in a first approach, means getting things, people and oneself to live again – to be more full of life, to become more alive. The idea is at once concerned with the "real life" of threatened species or ecosystems, or people under attack, and with the "inner life" of ourselves, representatives of the social species Homo economicus, who incessantly perform more or less necessary tasks and fulfill more or less real needs to maintain the huge machine we call "the economy."

With the term Enlivenment we have found a starting point from which to identify the various neglected areas of reality that are hidden in the blind spot of modernist, scientific thinking. It is not accidental that the term bears so much resemblance to the name of its predecessor concept, the Enlightenment. With the rise of the Enlightenment (which actually took many centuries), the basic assumptions lying at the ground of modern times came into their full dynamism: namely, that the world is understandable on rational grounds; that humans can change it (because we can understand it); and that we not only have the chance, but also the right and obligation to change it to improve the human condition. With the Enlightenment modern humanism was born, a way of thinking and being that has incredibly improved human life and living conditions. But Enlightenment habits of thought – especially the rational and technocratic understanding of human agency – also have a dark side, as famously observed by critics of the "dialectics of enlightenment."[4]

As Horkheimer and Adorno, and in their wake many others, argue, Enlightenment ideology brought about not only freedom, but also some of the great totalitarian-technocratic catastrophes of the 20th century. This tradition of thought is to some extent also responsible for the technocratic disasters of the current unsustainability of our planetary ecosystem. The main flaws of the Enlightenment approach – besides its presumption that reality is essentially transparent on its face and open to all – are its reliance on dualisms of thought, rational discourse, and the Newtonian subject-object split. Significantly, the Enlightenment project has no use for notions of life, sentience, experience, subjectivity, corporeal embodiment and agency. These concepts are in effect excluded from the Enlightenment view of the world.

I review this familiar history to stress that Enlightenment norms are not arcane historical or philosophical matters, but deep structural principles in modern culture that have a powerful effect in ordering how we perceive, think and act. Our economics, legal systems, government policies and much else are firmly based on Enlightenment principles. There are good reasons why conventional economic and political thought is unable to "solve" our sustainability crisis. It reflects profound errors of understanding about human thought (epistemology), relationships (ontology) and biological functioning.

The idea of Enlivenment is meant as a corrective. It seeks to expand our view of what human beings are as embodied subjects. This notion does not exclude the role of human rationality and agency, but it does connects them with other modes of being, such as our psychological and metabolic relationships with the "more-than-human" world, in both its animated and non-animated aspects.[5] Enlivenment links rationality with subjectivity and sentience.

It is quite possible that the grand political goals the Enlightenment inaugurated 250 years ago, which in many areas of the world are still far from being realized, can only be achieved through a shift to the idea of Enlivenment. It just might be possible, for example, that achieving a broader social inclusion in the polity of a state will require a deep "existential recognition" of all citizens in a state, particularly ethnic minorities. By this, I mean that universal emancipation may require a deeper understanding of the "aliveness" of a person in order to recognize and accept his or her needs. Therefore, the Enlightenment might be waiting for "an upgrade" to version 2.0 if it is to make good on its stated claims. This version shall be called Enlivenment.

What is life, and what role do we play in it?

By using the term Enlivenment to reorient ourselves to the planetary crisis, we can begin to focus on a singular deficiency in contemporary thought: a lack of understanding of what life is. We might even say we have forgotten what life means. We are unaware of our most profound reality as living beings. This absentmindedness is an astonishing fact – but it is also a logical outcome of our rational culture. The "meaning of life" and questions about human purpose, satisfactions and aspirations have long been ignored in biology, in economics and the humanities.

And yet, this notion of "meaning of life" embodies some simple, everyday questions that stand at the center of human experience. It demands that we consider: What do we live for? What are our inner needs as living creatures? What relationships do we have, or should we have, to the natural order? How do we produce things for our immediate needs or the market? How must we create, maintain and earn our livelihoods? My proposal is to shift focus to a new question: What is life, and what role do we play in it?

It was once considered the highest exercise of human cognition and sentience to explore what life means, to debate which relationships create and maintain it, and to ask how to live it. But for at least the past century, talk about these ancient, crucial dimensions of life has been treated as the dusty relics of some obscure graveyard of intellectual history. It may well be that by excluding such talk about life, its meanings, its dimensions and the inner tensions between living agents and their relationships, we have lost the most important reference point to act in a wise and sustainable manner. After all, who would deny that s/he is alive? And yet the existential realities of living are treated as somehow too prosaic or arcane to discuss.

If we are to recover reliable references points for sustainable living, and so find the wisdom to confront the manifold crises of our time, I will argue in the sections below that we must first look for a fresh account of the principles of existence of living beings. This requires that we carefully reconsider how relationships in the biosphere are organised – and experienced. Are there basic rules how organisms realize their existence? What makes ecological systems sound? What makes the individual experience of a "full life" possible? How is exchange of goods, services and meaning possible without degrading the system? In the following sections, I will work through such questions with the goal of formulating a "policy of Enlivenment".

These are complicated fields – and rather down-to-earth questions at the same time. Hence we should not be afraid of getting too general. Generations of "experts" in different scientific specialties have given in to such fear and refused to address the mysteries of lived existence. The heritage left by such safe, narrow-gauged thinking has been devastating.

I propose to follow a rather pragmatic focus: First, we have to diagnose why we have an aversion to thinking or talking about life. Then, it is important to consider how a contemporary account of life could be imagined without falling back into essentialist thinking, but rather to open genuinely new windows of thought. Finally, we should try to understand what recent scientific findings reveal about the unfolding of life’s processes – and how this could lead to a new approach that overcomes dualist mode of thinking, our reflexive mental habit of separating resources and natural agents, reason and the physical world, human life and animate nature, and physical bodies and human meaning.

Enlivenment is more than sustainability

If we look back to the last thirty years of sustainability politics, we can observe a lot of progress – the enactment of laws to protect nature, the setting of safety thresholds for toxic materials, the ban on fluorocarbons, and so on. But the basic contradiction remains, that we consume the very biosphere that we are a part of and that we depend upon. From this perspective, we have not been able to come closer to solving the sustainability question; we remain trapped in its underlying, fundamental contradictions.

The different view of sustainability I will develop in this essay, therefore, does not emphasize technical improvement or sound treatment of scarce resources as a priority. Rather, it sees in the goal of "leading a fuller life" the most important stepping stone toward changing our relationships with the animate earth and among ourselves. If we adopt this perspective, we will begin to see that something is sustainable if it enables more life – for myself, for other human individuals involved, for the ecosystem, on a broader cultural level. It is crucial to rediscover the linkage between our inner experience and the "external" natural order.

To understand what "more life" means from the standpoint of a sustainability position, and to help us put human species and the rest of nature on the same plane, I propose that we regard "life as embodied beings" as a common denominator for all living organisms. Life is what we all share. And life is what we all can feel: The emotional experience of feeling our needs and having them satisfied is a direct sign of how well we realize (or fail to realize) our aliveness. The world is a place that is constantly seeking to express its creative powers through a continuous interplay of meaningful relationships. In this scenario of "life as embodied beings," human beings, as natural creatures, experience the forces and structures of nature as much as other beings. But we humans have our species-specific way of dealing with the openness of nature and the unfolding natural history of freedom – namely, symbolic culture.[6]

If we treat sustainability as that what makes us vibrant with perspectives of personal growth and development, it gives us an entirely new (and more accurate) field of vision for understanding the challenges we must meet. Or, as Cunningham expressed it: Nobody will be very impressed if you answer the question "How is your marriage?" with "Oh, it’s sustainable." But everyone would turn his or her head if you replied: "Well, it’s energizing. It makes me feel alive."[7]

The Green New Deal as Anthropocenic Economics

The idea behind Enlivenment differs from popular, faddish proposals to design a "green economy" or campaign for a "green new deal."[8] In these proposals, the dualist opposition between human culture and nature and its resources is not even addressed, let alone resolved. If anything, these policy approaches intensify dualist tensions by trying to increase technological efficiency and the objectification of nature.

In this essay, I shall not criticize the "green economy" approach on the basis of its incapacity or inability to incite real change. In truth, this is difficult to judge. Critics point to the "rebound-effect" (or Jevons Paradox), in which increased efficiencies from "green innovation" may decrease the resources used in a given market, but they also free up that money to spend on other things, resulting in massive net increases in economic growth and resource usage. We can see this effect at work in the increased carbon dioxide production caused by "efficient" information technologies and the Internet.

All proposed "efficiency revolutions" invariably point to nature itself as the supreme model of efficiency. But this model is wrong. Nature is not efficient, as I will discuss below. It is only to a huge extent edible or usable. Living beings are one interrelated, embodied whole, of which humans comprise only a fractional portion. The real flaw of the efficiency approach to sustainability is that nature is still seen as something "outside" that can be used for human means. But nature is not outside of us. It is inside of us – and we are inside of it.

There is a threshold limit for any increase in efficiency, and that limit is the natural imperfection of embodied being – or as the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem calls it, the "necessary imperfection of every creation." Humans as natural beings will always suffer from deficiencies: They are mortal and full of contradictions – as every organism is. Higher efficiency is not capable of improving upon that. Efficiency as a solution therefore amounts to a "category error" in thinking.

The Enlivenment approach differs from the green economy approach in another key respect: Whereas green economics remain committed to the idea of material "growth" as the best way to improve the conditions of life, Enlivenment approaches recognize that nature does not grow in absolute terms. The "GDP of the biosphere" (if one may be so absurd) has remained constant for a very long time. Nature’s ecology is a steady-state economy. The only factor of nature that grows is the immaterial dimension, which could be called depth of experience: the diversity of natural forms and the variety of ways to experience aliveness.

There is another perspective to the global sustainability question that is widely discussed today: The "Anthropocene hypothesis." The idea is that we are now living in the "Anthropocene" era, a distinct geological epoch in which human culture has largely overtaken the biogeochemical realities of households; humans can now dominate and control matter, energy streams and the distribution and existence of biological species. Here, the difference between man and nature is claimed to be resolved – but not by recognizing that all living beings and living systems are subject to the same natural dynamics and creative principles (as the Enlivenment idea tries to propose), but by declaring that humans can assert mastery over the whole of inanimate and living nature on earth.

The Anthropocene position shares with the green economy idea the underlying anthropocentric assumption – that we can (or even must) start from a uniquely human standpoint to come to terms with the problems of sustainability. Both regard Darwinistic theories and free-market ideology as the inexorable premises of economic life (a paradigm of thinking that I will discuss in the next chapter). Another difference between both anthropocentric approaches and the Enlivenment approach is their stance towards perfectability. Anthropocenes are strictly utopians in believing that perfect schemes can be achieved; the biocentrism of Enlivenment perspective recognizes, as a matter of theory, the unavoidable messes, shortcomings and efficiency drains that are an inescapable part of biological and human reality, which no cultural or technological improvements can eliminate. (For a more in-depth discussion, see First-Person-Science: Towards a Culture of Poetic Objectivity)

Science becomes reconnected with life

The refusal to study aliveness as a scientific phenomenon, however, is weakening. Today many scientific disciplines that have historically resisted a worldview that could open up space for the primordial human experience of embodied feeling, have begun to search for a way out. Independent of each other, such disciplines as biology, psychology, physics and even economics are rediscovering the phenomenon of the living.

Biology in particular is discovering that sentience and felt expression in organisms are not just epiphenomena but rather the way living beings exist in the first place. Scientists like the Harvard embryologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, the Copenhagen and Tartu-based theoretical biologists Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull, and science theoretician Elizabeth Fox Keller, are starting to acknowledge that meaning and expressiveness are deeply rooted in the heart of nature. Such eminent biological and systems thinkers as Lynn Margulis, Francisco Varela, Alicia Juarrero, Stuart Kauffman and Gregory Bateson have opened up a picture in which organisms are no longer seen as machines competing with other machines, but rather as a natural phenomenon that "creates" and develops itself in a material way while continuously making and expressing experiences. Being alive, these researchers wish to show, is not a case of cause-and-effect alone, but also a complicated interplay of embodied interest and hence feelings. Brain researchers like Antonio Damasio recently have shown that emotions, not abstract cognition, are the stuff of the mind.[9]

If we consider all these changes in contemporary biology, a completely different picture of the living world necessarily emerges. We are starting to see that humans do not exist at the exterior or edge of "nature," but are deeply interwoven into the material, mental and emotional exchange processes that all of the more-than-human world participates in. This is leading biological sciences to a major paradigm change of the sort that physics experienced a century ago. The physical sciences have for a long time been able to show that the separation of an observer (subject) and an observed phenomenon (object) is an artifact of causal-mechanic, linear thought. For quantum physics, there is no locality or temporal chronology. Rather, any event can be connected to any other. The physicist David Bohm has called this the "implicate order" of the cosmos. This view not only calls into question locality and chronology, it blurs the separation of physical and psychological reality. We exist in a space-time that is a continuum of "insides" (meanings) and "outsides" (bodies).

Research into the commons paradigm has demonstrated that any economic activity at its base is not just an exchange of objects and money; it is a rich set of ongoing flows and relationships. So, too, with human relationships with natural ecosystems: humans are constantly engaged in ecological exchanges of gifts that not only distribute material goods and services, but also engender a sense of belonging and commitment, and hence feeling and meaning. Seen from this viewpoint, economic exchange cannot meaningfully distinguish between agents and resources as wholly independent entities; they are both entangled with each other. In the same way, land and its inhabitants cannot be wholly separated, they are mutually dependent. In any given habitat, ecological exchange brings with it reciprocal flows of matter, energy and existential relatedness ("natural gifts").[10]

Finally, in their practice artists are discovering that creative processes are able to change perception. Imagination can bring about productive change in oneself and in the world. Echopsychology is able to prove that only by experiencing other beings in a more-than-human-world can we grasp and develop our deepest qualities as human beings[11]. The new picture of reality that the arts and sciences promise is one of a deeply sentient and meaningful universe. It is poetic – productive of new life forms and ever-new embodied experiences. It is expressive of all the subjective experiences that individuals make. It is a universe where human subjects are no longer separated from other organisms but rather form a meshwork of existential relationships – a quite real "web of life". This "flesh of the world", as the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty called it, is possibly best understood as a creative play of overcoming unsolvable paradoxes from moment to moment, no matter the realm – ecology, culture, economics or the arts.[12]

Seen from this perspective, any policy to foster sustainability acquires a new scope and new metrics of success. Sustainability can be successful only if it enhances the aliveness of human agents, and of nature and society. Thus, it could be enriching to develop more deliberate "policies of enlivenment" – not as a matter of natural laws dictating the order of human society, but as a strategy to honour the manifold embodied needs of sentient individuals in a more-than-human world.

A new narrative of living relationships

It is necessary to explore a new narrative for what life is, for what it is to be alive, for what living systems do, and what their goals are. We need to explore how values are created by the realisation of the living, and how we, as living beings in a living biosphere, can adapt the production needed for our livelihoods to that reality, the only reality we have. Even though this narrative will encompass different areas and disciplines, life is the binding dimension for all of them. As a living being, the human organism integrates and connects diverse fields of existential experience, metabolic exchange and social relationships.

The narrative that I propose is by no means an objectivist account, however – a mechanics or a cybernetics of reality. It will be objective in the sense that poetics is objective: transmitting shared feelings by working in the open dimension of continuous imagination, which is the field of life itself. The narrative of the living that I wish to unfold here will thus strive for "poetic objectivity" or "poetic precision." This is the most appropriate way to describe the living world with its endless unfolding of existential relationships and meanings.

Nature, in the enlivening perspective, is not a causal-mechanic object but a relational network between subjects who have individual interests to stay alive, grow and unfold. Enlivenment means to push biological thinking beyond the objectivist paradigm in which it is now imprisoned, and to emulate the shift that physics made 100 years ago when it moved beyond Newtonian thinking. To end the Newtonian approach to the biosphere, other organsims, ourselves as embodied beings and the whole of ecological and economical exchange processes, will mean to acknowledge that we, as human observers, are as alive and expressive as the other organisms and ecosystems that we are observing. Such a biology is emphatically non-reductionist. Its main goal is to understand how freedom can arise and yet be anchored in a material, living world.

My argument here is in line with evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson’s recent cultural turn – in which he distanced himself from Richard Dawkins’ "selfish gene" position – in stating that we need a "second Enlightenment."[13] If natural processes inevitably yield subjectivity, meaning and feeling, our science, and our science-based policy and economy, must take these lived dimensions into account. What is needed is an "Enlivenment" as a "second Enlightenment" – a new stage of cultural evolution that can safeguard our scientific (and democratic) ideals of common access to knowledge and the powers connected with it – while at the same time validating personal experience that is felt and subjective: the defining essence of embodied experience. The Enlivenment that I envision includes other animate beings, which, after all, share the same capacities for embodied experiences and "worldmaking."

Enlivenment therefore is not just another naturalist account to describe ourselves and our world that can then automatically dictate specific policies or economic solutions. The reflection I propose is indeed naturalist – but it offers a "wild naturalism" in the sense of David Abram, a naturalism that is based on the idea of nature as an unfolding process of ever-growing freedom and creativity paradoxically linked to material and embodied processes. The biosphere is alive in the sense that it does not only obey the rules of deterministic or stochastic interactions of particles, molecules, atoms, fields and waves. The biosphere is also very much about producing agency, expression, and meaning.

Bioeconomics: the hidden megascience

In this section I want to explore on a more specific level why we living beings have mostly forgotten or marginalized the notion of life. To do this, I wish to draw attention to the astonishing interconnections and mutual support between the two guiding metaphysics of our culture. These are (Neo-)Darwinism, with its big idea of biological optimization, in which functional adaptations supposedly create biodiversity, and (Neo-)Liberalism, with its concept of economic efficiency, supposedly creating wealth and equal distribution.

For more than 150 years, both assumptions have become intertwined streams of one coherent pattern of thought that forms the basic matrix of our official understanding of reality. The premises of neo-Darwinism and neoliberalism constitute the tacit, taken-for-granted understanding of "how the world works". Inside its deep and compact logical structure, the two currents of biological and economic optimization theory are so mutually reinforcing and normative that respectable thoughts considers them beyond question.[14]

It is not by chance that "eco-nomy" and "eco-logy" are nearly identical terms. Both build on the metaphor of housekeeping and the provisioning of existential goods and services (the Greek word "oikos" means "house", "householding" or "family"). Both concepts have a particular and related manner of treating the organisation of this existential supply. Both start from the idea that keeping a house – or making a living, for that matter – is a theater of competition and contest whose object is an ever-more-optimal efficiency. In the neoDarwinian, neoliberal narrative, the household is not, however, a place where feeling agents pursue their individual good. The householding process is strangely conceived of as completely subject-less. Its logic does not need to take account of the actual presence of agents. Indeed, it does not need to take life into account at all.

The process is subject-less and self-organised in the sense that eternal, external laws (that of selection and that of economic survival) punish or reward the behaviour of atomistic black boxes called "Homo economicus" – economic man – or in a more modern telling, the "selfish gene". To yield results in this framework of thinking, neither contemporary economics nor "eco-sciences" need to consider actual, lived experience. The framework has excluded life in the existential, experiential sense. We might therefore say that the prevailing "bioeconomic megascience," the deep metaphysics of our age, is a science of non-living.

The metaphysics of eco-efficiency mirror 19th century social reality

Both Darwinism and Liberalism were born in pre-Victorian England at about the same time. Their theoretical premises explicitly and implicitly refer to the social conditions and practices of a country undergoing the wrenching disruptions of industrialization. At that time there existed a rigidly stratified society without any structured system of social care and cooperation.

Through their intellectual proximity to each other, Darwinian evolutionary theory and Adam Smith’s free-market theories became a sort of "political economy of nature". While Charles Darwin was struggling with an explanation for the diversity of living nature, political economist Thomas Robert Malthus proposed an idea that became a pivotal point in the development of evolutionary theory and hence for the still-valid understanding of biology as result of evolution-by-optimization.

Malthus was obsessed by the idea of scarcity as a driving force of social change. There will never be enough resources to feed a population that steadily multiplies, he argued, and a struggle for dominance must necessarily take place in which the weakest will lose. Charles Darwin adopted this piece of socio-economic theory, drawn from Malthus’ observations of Victorian industrial society, and applied it to his comprehensive theory of natural change and development. Interestingly, even the more empirical-biological part of Darwin’s theory dealing with "selection" was not based on observations of long-term natural change. It was based on the experiences and practices of Victorian breeders (Darwin himself raised pigeons and orchids).

The resulting discipline, evolutionary biology, is a more accurate reflection of pre-Victorian social practices than of natural reality. In the wake of this metaphorical takeover, such concepts as "struggle for existence," "competition," and "fitness" – which were central justifications of the political status quo in (pre-)Victorian England – tacitly became centerpieces of our own self-understanding as embodied and social beings. And they still are – especially in those parts of the world that even now resemble pre-Victorian England. Biological, technological, and social progress, so the argument goes, is brought forth by the sum of individual egos striving to out-compete each other. In perennial rivalry, fit species (powerful corporations) exploit niches (markets) and multiply their survival rate (profit margins), whereas weaker (less efficient) ones go extinct (bankrupt). This metaphysics of economics and nature, however, is far more revealing about our society’s opinion about itself than it is an objective account of the biological world.

This reciprocal borrowing of metaphors between the disciplines did not only transform biology. It also mirrored back onto economics, which came to see itself more and more as a "hard" natural science. It deliberately derived its models from biology and physics, culminating in the formulation of the mathematical concept of Homo economicus. If you study the liberal classics, which are widely taught in universities, the textbooks still invoke 19th-century economists who mingle concepts from the natural sciences with economic theory. William Jevons was the British economist and logician who postulated that economics describes the "laws of the heart", and Léon Walras was the French economist who claimed that "economic equilibrium" follows deterministic laws imported from physics.[15]

The resulting picture – the individual as a machine-like egoist always seeking to maximize his utility – has become the implicit but all-influencing model of human values and behaviour. Its shadow is cast over a whole generation of psychological and game-theoretical approaches to economics. For its part, evolutionary biology has also taken inspiration from economic models. The idea of the "selfish gene," for example, is not much more than the metaphor of Homo economicus extended to biochemistry.

It should not be surprising in the least that biology and economics have come to function as two branches of one and the same science. Each works with the same structural assumptions and equivalent perspectives in their respective fields of inquiry. And they both exclude the sphere of living beings and lived experience from their description of reality. The great danger of this closed, totalistic pattern of thinking is its capacity to obscure reality and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we are convinced that we have to describe reality as non-living, and treat it accordingly, life and living processes become highly problematic fields of thought and action. They become inscrutable if not suspect.

This is our predicament today. If our formal systems of thought about the biosphere see it as nonliving, this will inevitably engender a lack of concern toward life and to a loss of species and a gross indifference to experience. How many times have the Wall Street Journal or The Economist sneered at the vulnerability of the snail darter and other endangered species threatened by development projects? If we conceive of human beings as Homo economicus, as non-sentient automatons whose behaviours can be described by algorithms, sentience will be ignored if not forbidden and felt experience will be seen as irrelevant. This is exactly what is happening.

By contrast, to see reality as a living process would literally change everything. This is the challenge of Enlivenment as a "transcendent paradigm." Its insistence that our policies focus on living experience provides the deepest possible ethical leverage for intervening in our global system.[16] Of course, this approach is moot in today’s political culture. But political change must start with our imagining of a different reality. Only by imagining a different world have people ever been able to change the current one.

How dualism encloses the freedom of embodied individuality

We can call this alliance between biology and economics an "economic ideology of nature," or "bioeconomics." Today it reigns supreme over our understanding of human culture and world. It defines our embodied dimension (Homo sapiens as a gene-governed survival machine) as well as our social identity (Homo economicus as an egoistic maximizer of utility). The idea of universal competition unifies the two realms, the natural and the socio-economic. It validates the notion of rivalry and predatory self-interest as inexorable facts of life. You have to eliminate as many competitors as possible and take the biggest piece of cake for yourself. The economic ideology of nature amounts to a license to steal life from others. In truth, the roots of this thinking precede pre-Victorianism. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously viewed the world as a "war of all against all," and his times also saw the forcible enclosure of the commons – the private theft of nature’s abundant supplies, which had previously been open in principle to everyone.

This unfolding of modern economic thinking with its endless focus on competition developed in tandem with dualism – the metaphysical division of the world into "brute matter" to be exploited and "human culture" permanently casts human livelihood in a problematic – or even "absurd" – relationship to the rest of the universe.

It is noteworthy that liberal economists openly acknowledge the inadequacy of their worldview even as they cling obsessively to it. John Maynard Keynes, for example, clearly criticized the standard framework of economic thinking as perverting life’s most noble attitudes. "For at least another hundred years, we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still", Keynes claimed.[17] He had a point: Our cultural tradition can only be described as a bond with the devil. But to deny the character of reality never has been a good strategy for resolving a problem.

How nature’s inefficiencies result in enlivened ecosystems

What are the most prominent flaws of our bioeconomic view? What can we say about the validity of the common assumptions of the bioeconomic paradigm? Most if not all of them ignore the fact that we are living subjects in a living world constituted by subjective, creative agents. The orthodox assumptions of bioeconomics already violate the state of the art research in the physical sciences that show that no relationships between subjects and objects are possible if you clearly separate the observer and observed. But what observations in ecology – the natural household – could also push a shift toward an economic Enlivenment?

The prevailing biological view of the organic world – and the picture of man within it – is changing. New research is shifting the paradigm from the Darwinistic idea of a battlefield between antagonistic survival-machines to that of a complex interplay among various agents with conflicting and symbiotic goals and meanings. In the new biological paradigm, the organism is starting to be seen as a subject that interprets external stimuli and genetic influences rather than being causally governed by them. An organism negotiates the terms of its existence with others under conditions of limited competition and "weak causality." This shift in the axioms of "biological liberalism" is opening up a new picture of the organic world as one in which freedom evolves and organisms, including humans, play an active, constructive role in imagining and building new futures. The natural world as it actually works refutes many axioms of the bioeconomic worldview:

Efficiency: The biosphere is not efficient. Warm-blooded animals consume over 97 percent of their energy only to maintain their metabolism. Photosynthesis achieves a ridiculously low efficiency rate of 7 percent. Fish, amphibians and insects have to lay millions of eggs only to allow for the survival of very few offspring. Instead of being efficient, nature is highly redundant. It compensates for possible loss through incredible "wastefulness." Natural processes are not parsimonious but rather rely on generosity and waste. The biosphere itself is based on a "donation," the foundation of all biological work – solar energy – which falls as a gift from heaven. Growth: The biosphere does not grow. The quantity of biomass does not increase. The throughput of matter does not expand; nature is running a steady-state economy – that is, an economy where all relevant factors remain constant in relation to one another. Also, the number of species does not necessarily increase; it rises in some epochs and falls in others. The only dimension that really grows is the diversity of experiences: ways of feeling, modes of expression, variations of appearance, novelties of patterns and forms. Therefore, nature does not gain mass or weight, but rather depth. Competition: It has never been possible to prove that a new species arose from competition for a resource alone. Species are rather born by chance: they develop through unexpected mutations and the isolation of a group from the remainder of the population through new symbioses and cooperations (the process by which our body cells arose from bacterial predecessors cooperating in intracellular symbiosis, for example). Competition alone – for example, for a limited nutrient or ecological niche – causes biological monotony: the dominance of relatively few species over an ecosystem. Scarcity: Resources in nature are not scarce. Where they become so, they do not lead to a creative diversification, but to an impoverishment of diversity and freedom. The basic energetic resource of nature, sunlight, exists in abundance. A second crucial resource – the number of ecological relationships and new niches – has no upper limit. A high number of species and a variety of relations among them do not lead to sharper competition and dominance of a "fitter" species, but rather to richer permutations of relationships among species and thus to an increase in freedom, which is at the same time also an increase of mutual dependencies. The more that is "wasted" – and thus consumed by other species –, the bigger the common wealth becomes. Life has the tendency to transform all available resources into a meshwork of bodies. In old ecosystems where solar energy is constant, as in tropical rainforests and high oceans, this brings forth more niches and thus a greater overall diversity. The result is an increase of symbioses and reduced competition. Scarcity of resources, experienced as the temporal lack of specific nutrients, leads to less diversity and the dominance of few species, as for example in temperate coastal mudflats. Property: There is no notion of property in the biosphere. An individual does not even possess his own body. Its substance changes permanently and continuously as it is replaced by oxygen, CO 2 , and other inputs of energy and matter. But it is not only the physical dimension of the self that is literally made possible through communion with other elements, it is the symbolic as well: language is brought forth by the community of speakers who use it, and in the process, creates self-awareness and identity. Habits in a species are acquired by sharing them. In any of these dimensions the wildness of the natural world is necessary for the individual to develop its innermost identity. This world has become, and not been made by any particular individual, nor can it be exclusively possessed. Individuality in both its physical and social and symbolic senses, can only emerge through a biologically shared and culturally communicated commons.

In the next section we will analyse how these observations are being corroborated by biological science, giving rise to a new, emergent paradigm that is transforming a science of natural objects to a narrative of natural subjects.