Have you ever wanted to read a 21st-century version of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? Not a contemporary translation of the ancient Meditations, but an original and inspiring philosophical work that reflects a 21st-century understanding of the world?
That would be one way to describe philosopher/scientist Andreas Weber’s 2016 book Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Weber—originally a marine biologist who “converted” to philosophy after studying with renowned biophilosopher Francisco Varela—is also a poet and has coined the term biopoetics to explain how his work interprets the world. Personally, although I don’t agree exactly with everything he writes, I find his writing to be extremely interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking. I always look for books that can help me see the world in a new way, challenging my existing preconceptions and shifting my viewpoint in unexpected directions. This book more than fits the bill. In fact, I’m still figuring out how to incorporate it into my thinking. So while I’m thinking, I’d like to share some of this work with you, and maybe some of you can read it and offer your own viewpoint.
So, why am I making the bold suggestion that Matter and Desire is a modern-day Meditations? Well, let me start by saying that I’m not claiming this book (or its author) is exactly equivalent to the Meditations (or its author). There are significant differences. However, there are enough similarities in tone, subject matter, and approach to the world that I think a partial comparison is justified.
For one thing, although Weber is not explicitly writing in a virtue ethics or eudaimonist framework, this book strikes me as fitting well within the eudaimonist tradition—situating the living of a good life within the context of cosmic and human nature. He bases his ontological investigation and ethical claims on the natural, physical world, particularly the type of complexity theory propounded by Varela and his colleagues in the Santiago school. (Varela was also well known for pioneering the scientific study of Buddhist meditation and developing a secular Buddhist-scientific approach to cognition.) Weber is asking and answering the same questions Stoics have always asked and answered, and in very similar ways.
Both Marcus Aurelius and Andreas Weber reflect continually on the nature of things, from the smallest units of substance to the expansiveness of the cosmos, emphasizing the dynamics of change, flow, transformation, and relationships between physical entities. Both base their theories on a materialist understanding of matter, although of course there is a wide gulf between Marcus’s understanding of the universe and Weber’s. And both authors converge on the importance of love—love for the world, for other people, for children, for your own fate—while emphasizing living and loving in the present moment.
Obviously I can only offer a very brief overview of Matter and Desire here, so I’ve selected a few points that I think offer a promising way for 21st-century Stoics to think about the world. If you love reading about philosophy, I highly recommend that you read it for yourself (and please let me know your thoughts). The English translation by Rory Bradley is exquisite; Weber is on record as saying that he prefers Bradley’s version to his own German! However, I would say this book is not for the casual reader, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re really willing to dig into philosophical concepts. For those who are willing, you will be rewarded with some excellent writing on nature—both the natural world and the general nature of things—that might just inspire you to see the world differently.
Erotic Ecology
So what is this idea of “erotic ecology”? I hope no one will be disappointed to learn that it has mainly to do with physics and our experience of being in the world. As Weber puts it:
To understand love, we must understand life. To be able to love, as subjects with feeling bodies, we must be able to be alive. To be allowed to be fully alive is to be loved. To allow oneself to be fully enlivened is to love oneself—and at the same time, to love the creative world, which is principally and profoundly alive. This is the fundamental thesis of erotic ecology.
p. 5
Ecology—the web of interconnected relationships that form our external physical world and our inner emotional world—is related to life (or aliveness, as he frequently calls it), love, meaning, death, and everything else important in our universe. In a way that the ancient Stoics would have approved of, Weber recognizes both objective reality and our subjective experience of it as consisting of various bodies in relationship with one another. “Reality is physical and not abstract or ‘ultimately mind,’” he says, “because every instance of contact leaves behind irreversible traces that change all of the parties concerned” (p. 23).
Weber emphasizes that while the physical sciences have traditionally focused on the substance (and sometimes form) of independent objects or organisms, what really matters is the relationship between these independent objects or organisms: “the world is not an aggregation of things, but rather a symphony of relationships between many participants” (p. 29). Things do not exist in isolation but are part of a constant reciprocal exchange of matter and energy, which helps shape all parties to the exchange:
In this world of stones, of water molecules, of minerals that polish one another as they slowly wander down into the valleys, tugged along by gravity—in this world we discern the fundamental principles of erotic touch: Two sides always enter into relationship such that both come away changed. The river gravel is stone that water has transformed into a flowing form, and the swiftly cascading water is liquid that the stone has shattered and cracked. Only together do they reveal a meaning, only by altering one another do they become what they are—something much more than what they were before.
p. 21
Living things, in particular, through processes like metabolism and respiration, participate in a constant exchange of molecules with other entities. I especially like Weber’s description in this video of how breathing means we share atoms with the living things around us, whether that is other people or the trees outside our window. But the same is true even at the cellular level, or at the level of whole ecosystems:
The principles made apparent by biological research show us that life is, at nearly every level, a collective concern, a shared enterprise undertaken by a wide variety of beings that arrive at a stable, functional, and thereby beautiful ecosystem by somehow putting up with one another and reaching agreements.
p. 35
Humans, obviously, are just one part of this dynamic system and cannot be understood outside of it. Weber provides the example of our microbiome—the bacteria that in live in our digestive tract and on our skin—which contains more DNA material than our own bodies. We can’t exist without them, and yet for most of our history we didn’t know they were there. As he puts it, “We are literally, physically, a part of the landscape” (p. 39). Given our extreme dependence on other creatures, does it still make sense to say, along with Descartes, I think, therefore I am? It might be more accurate to say my microbiome exists, therefore I am. Or as Weber says, “This world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It comprises a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another” (p. 22).
If you’ve read the Meditations, you can probably think of multiple passages that vibe with these reflections. Here are just two:
I am composed of the formal and the material; and neither of these will perish into nothingness, just as neither arose from nothingness. Thus every part of me will be appointed by change to a new position as some part of the universe, and that again will be changed to form another part of the universe, and so on to infinity. It was through a similar process of change that I too came to exist and my parents before me, and so again to infinity in the other direction. (5.13)
All things are interwoven, and the bond that unites them is sacred, and hardly anything is alien to any other thing, for they have been ranged together and are jointly ordered to form a common universe. For there is one universe made up of all that is, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance and one law, and one reason common to all intelligent creatures, and one truth, if indeed there is one perfection for all creatures who are of the same stock and partake of the same reason. (7.9)
Of course, Weber’s take on matter is different from the ancient Stoics in many respects. The Stoics held that matter is animated by pneuma, a substance akin to a divine breath that flows through all of creation. In this system, pneuma was present at different degrees of tension in different objects and organisms, causing some to be alive (plants, animals) and some to be rational (humans), while others were not alive (rocks and soil).
In contrast, current complexity theory does not posit any kind of divine substance or vital force that enlivens organisms. Rather, life results from the emergence of new properties through certain fortuitous patterns of organization in inorganic material. The same atoms that form soil can also form humans. I find this theory so fascinating that I investigated further in another book, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. As they write,
Where is cellular life localized? Is there a particular reaction, a particular magical spot, where we can put a tag to say: here is life? There is an obvious and very important answer to this question: life is not localized; life is a global property, arising from the collective interactions of the molecular species in the cell… This is true not only for the simple cell, but for any other macroscopic form of life. Where is the life of an elephant, or of a given person, localized? Again, there is no localization; the life of any large mammal is the organized, integrated interaction of heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, arteries and veins. And each of these organs, which are connected in a network, can be seen in turn as a network of several different tissues and specialized organelles; and each tissue and each organelle is the networking of many different kinds of cells.
(loc. 3385)
Life, then, is an emergent property – a property that is not present in the parts and originates only when the parts are assembled together. Emergence, in the most classic interpretation, means in fact the arising of novel properties in an ensemble, novel in the sense that they are not present in the constituent parts… the fact that the parts compose the structure of a living cell, does not imply that the properties of life can be reduced to those of the single components. The properties of life are emergent properties which cannot be reduced to the properties of the components.
(loc. 3398-3414)
In other words, the special properties of certain atoms allow them to come together in certain ways to form certain substances, which further come together to form certain components of cells, which come together to form organisms. What characterizes life is not just the substance (although that is obviously important too) but the organization of parts, which enables the organism to maintain itself, reproduce, and do all the things a living organism does. As these systems thinkers—Weber, Varela, Capra, Luisi, and others—so forcefully emphasize, relationships matter.
Ecology, Aliveness, Love
What are the implications of this systemic view for us as humans? Clearly, we have to learn to see ourselves not as above or outside of nature, but as completely integrated into nature’s network:
In biology, every “I” has been enabled by a “we.” In such a system, every act of divestment amounts to an amputation. The “whole” is present as a constant and ineluctable part of the self. It is a part of its life processes—just as, conversely, thriving individuals are necessary for the establishment of a successfully integrated system.
p. 40
(Compare Marcus Aurelius, 5.8: “For the perfection of the whole suffers a mutilation if you cut off even the smallest particle from the coherence and continuity of its causes no less than of its parts; and you do this, so far as you can, whenever you are discontented, and in a certain sense, you destroy it.”)
Given how interconnected we are to the rest of the cosmos, humility is certainly called for on our part, as well as respect and care for all the elements of nature we touch. If we destroy our natural world, we destroy ourselves; if we love and take care of the natural world, we also love and care for ourselves.
Weber notes that in our mechanistic, exploitative age, we have lost our sense of aliveness—of living beside other beings as part of a beautiful, regenerative ecosystem, and of our own nature as creatures within this system. He calls it being edible: “Eating others and being eaten (which lies ahead for all of us) figure into the same living fabric, as processes necessary to maintaining the stability of the whole and allowing it to experience itself” (p. 35). Because we are alive, we are edible. This seems to me like a viewpoint the ancient Stoics would have been happy to adopt: undeniably true, but also somewhat shocking—a fact we shunt from our minds because it makes us uncomfortable. Maybe we should spend more time thinking about the fact that, like all living organisms, our bodies are destined to be consumed by others.
Ultimately, Weber equates this sense of aliveness to love—to the realization of our full potential as living things, and particularly as humans. While part of me thinks he’s pushing the word love to the brink of meaningless by expanding its definition so far, another part of me recognizes that this could be a useful way of framing love:
In this, love becomes a practice of realizing existence. This existence is always a matter of calling oneself forth, together with the other, and thereby constantly transforming both oneself and the other. We can understand reality as a network of relationships that are relentlessly reforming, thereby becoming a perceptual system in which “the whole” regularly reexperiences itself through the individuals that compose it.
p. 120
Interestingly, Weber was inspired to this view of aliveness by Erich Fromm’s work The Art of Loving, which we just examined in a previous post. There we touched on Fromm’s ideas concerning the generosity and joy that the truly loving person gives of herself, but we didn’t go into great detail. In building his case for love as an art and practice, Fromm says things like, “there is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized” (p. 93).
Weber really picks up on this idea of love as cultivating aliveness, of enabling an organism to joyfully “experience and express its own nature” (p. 135):
The role of a partner in a successful relationship is to increase our collective aliveness together with me, thereby increasing both his or her own, as well as mine. This is true of love, of friendship, and of parenting. It is also true of the connection with animals, with plants in my garden, with the biosphere as a whole. Every successful relationship is ecological: It productively integrates into the living network with the goal of supporting aliveness as such and aiding in its growth.
p. 115
In this way aliveness is not merely being alive, but fulfilling our telos as a tree, cat, human, or whatever we happen to be. And as rational humans, we have the added ability to help other creatures (and the world as a whole) fulfill their potential for beauty and aliveness. We also have the ability—the responsibility—to come to terms with our mortality. Weber Stoically notes that “Stubbornly insisting on life can result in the opposite. The frantic desire to ward off death can actually invite it. Conversely, if you wish for life you must be prepared to welcome death” (p. 60). By framing our lives as one small part of the cosmos, and seeing ourselves as returning our atoms to the cycle of life, we can embrace the inevitable death of everyone we love.
Concluding Thoughts
As I’ve tried to show here, Matter and Desire is quite a lyrical and metaphorical interpretation of some very heavy philosophical concepts. The poetry is intentional. Weber suggests that “the world can regularly be experienced as a poetics of aliveness” (p. 102):
Poetry—an expression that conceives the world verbally or artistically, but not through explanation—is the appropriate instrument for experiencing the erotic. Indeed, the erotic (in the broad meaning that I have offered in this book, as an embodied experience of being on the Earth) might be thought of as the bodily component of poetic experience.
p. 88
This work is, in fact, both poetic and scientific, which is probably why it reminds me so much of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts to himself. While truths that are beautifully expressed are no more true than truths which are clothed in unappealing language, they are certainly easier to understand, discuss, and remember. There is great value in presenting philosophy as beautifully as possible.
I’ve only been able to cover a few highlights in today’s post, but I would encourage you to check out some Weber’s work for yourself. Like me, you may not agree with everything he says, but you will definitely be impacted by the encounter.
It sounds like there is some overlap between this book and my 2014 book, "Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature's Intelligence," which I think you would like.
My book encompasses the poetic, but I think there is more philosophy, science, and history of ideas in it, and the last section of the book is about ecology and the way new biological insights have changed — or should have changed — our worldview.
There are some excepts from the book on the website: https://www.thesouloftheworld.com/
I absolutely love this, Brittany! Weber’s book would be an excellent read for the Science and Spirituality book club I belong to. And there’s so much just in your write up here that aligns with the poetry I’ve been writing the past few years.