Andreas Weber (1) (1967–)

This is the second book I've read by Weber. He's sold me on biosemiotics and biopoetics.

Where as David Abram is a full-bore animist (including rocks, rivers, and air as sentient others), Weber is more restrained, only including life in his view of animism. That said, the living world is still quite broad.

The book's narrative structure is sometimes a bit fragmented. Each chapter interweaves personal stories (brushes with hypothermia, being at sea in a storm, implanting neural monitors in rabbits) with philosophical rhetoric. These examples sometimes feel grounding, and sometimes distracting.

The book begins with a reflection on the way that death gives meaning to life, and that connection with non-human entities gives value to human experience. I started seeing this image that time is an emergent phenomenon out of the experience of life. Non-living entities have no need for the concept of time, as they can't die. In short form, you could say that rocks can time travel (although Weber doesn't explore the concept in these pages).

I'm not sure I entirely understand the definition of biopoetics, but I can say that Weber's writing is absolutely beautiful at times in the way he paints the picture of enlivenment.

To touch on biosemiotics: all things express a gesture, and these gestures express meaning. The lilt of a bird song, the shimmering of aspen leaves in the breeze, the stare of a doe before she bolts—these are all gestures, and they all exude expression. To understand these gestures, all we need to do is to be participant with them and feel them within our own bodies. What do they evoke in us? This is all it takes to begin to enter a conversation with the more-than-human world.

I know I was just speaking about this in my last book review, but while reading this, I came across an article in the Guardian about interoception. Apparently emotions and our perception of our internal state (literally—like the way we feel our heartbeat, the feeling in our gut, etc.) are fundamentally linked. People with disabilities that limit interoception don't experience emotion (although they can still know they're "supposed" to feel a certain way. I bring this up because a lot of what Weber is getting at is the interplay between "inner" and "outer." Rupert Sheldrake has described a mechanism for synchronicity that he calls morphic fields, but in a way, Weber's theories are more elegant and intuitive. We learn about ourselves be learning about that which is outside ourselves, and vice versa. The two form a whole.

This is the first book I've read that gets that deeply into alternate theories of evolution (such as reticulate evolution). All the sudden, random mutation sounds absurd. This book is already six years old (and was based on material from fifteen years ago), so I'd be fascinated to learn what has happened in the field in the intervening decade.… (mehr)