Biopoetics as Paradigm for Living Relationships

A deep look into biology reveals many findings that are contrary to the mechanical and Newtonian-style view of the biosphere, which unfortunately is still prevailing today. At a deep level of observation, however, the biosphere is no mechanical system. It is a set of interrelated embodied selves that can only come into being if they relate with others. Life is inherently not mechanical, but a cause of agency, embodiment and constant transformation. A mere cell already experiences meaning—otherwise, it would fail at making sense of its surroundings.

State-of-the-art biology is incorporating these findings and readjusting its concepts. It switches from strict causality to ‘weak causality,’ where the living system is an autonomous self that filters and decides which stimulus to obey. The eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson even calls for a Second Enlightenment. This is just what the Enlivenment idea can provide. In its core, it discovers for biology an inclusive knowledge that physical science has already been struggling with for more than a century: there is no absolute difference between the observer of a living being and this being itself. Observation is feeling-based, mirror-neuron- guided, and always also an exploration of self.

In short, the principles of a new, enlivened or poetic biology can be summed up as follows. A living being

1. self-produces itself and thereby
2. manifests its intentions to maintain itself and grow, evade disturbances and actively search for positive inputs such as food, shelter and presence of mates,
3. and shows behaviour that is constantly evaluating influences from the external (and also its own internal) world.

Therefore, we can say

4. that an organism acts out of concern and out of the experience of meaning.
5. An organism is an agent or a subject with an intentional point of view. Or, to put it more generally: We can call this way of meaning-guided worldmaking ‘feeling.’

But this description is not enough. Any living being, any living subject, is also always materially embodied. Therefore:

6. An organism shows or expresses the conditions under which the life process takes place. A living being transparently exhibits its conditions. We could call this basic condition of experience ‘conditio vitae’—the condition of life.
7. Conditio vitae is also the basic shared poetic condition because it shows in a non-textual and non-algorithmical manner the principles of living creativity, the basic laws of agency and embodiment, which are also manifest in ourselves as human beings. Every organism is an expression of the conditions of existence.

From these observations we can conclude

8. that every organism is to a certain degree autonomous. It creates its identity and uses matter for this creation. Living beings show a distinct autonomy concerning the necessities of metabolism and are not completely determined by external factors. Seen from this perspective, the history of nature is also the history of the evolution of embodied freedom.

A First-Person Science of Creative Relationships

A worldview that is based on a biological thinking that is inherently open to creativity, freedom and relatedness no longer lends itself to a mechanical naturalism. It turns our common thinking upside down. Some emerging principles of reality might be the following:

• Natural history should no longer be viewed as the unfolding of an organic machine, but rather as the natural history of freedom, autonomy and agency.
• Reality is alive. It is full of subjective experience and feeling. Subjective experience and feeling are the prerequisites of any rationality.
• The biosphere consists of a material and meaningful interrelation of selves.
• Embodied selves come into being only through others. The biosphere critically depends on cooperation and ‘interbeing.’
• The biosphere is not cooperative in a simple, straight-forward way, but paradoxically cooperative: Symbiotic relationships emerge out of antagonistic, incompatible processes: matter/form, genetic code/soma, individual ego/other.
• The individual can only exist if the whole exists and the whole can only exist if individuals are allowed to exist.
• The experience of being alive, of being in full life, of being joyful, is a fundamental component of reality: the desire for experience and to become one’s own full self is a general rule of ‘biological worldmaking,’ which consists of both interior/experiential and exterior/material construction of a self.
• Death is a reality. Death is inevitable and even necessary as the precondition for the individual’s striving to keep intact and to grow.
• The living process is open. Although there are general rules for maintaining embodied identity in interbeing, its form and way is entirely subject to situational solutions.
• There is no neutral, transhistorical information, no general scientific objectivity. There is only a common experiential level of understanding, interbeing and communion of a shared conditio vitae. New structures and levels of enlivenment can be made possible through enacted imagination.

From these observations it seems possible to augment the highly limited mainstream ecological worldview that prevails (nature viewed as an exterior pool of resources) with an interior or intentional aspect. To the scientific third-person perspective of objective reality that now prevails, we can add a first-person ecology. Conversely, the empirical objectivity that is so familiar to contemporary science must be enlarged by an empirical subjectivity—a shared condition of feeling and experience among all living beings. This participative aspect means that empirical subjectivity gains at the same time not discursive but poetic objectivity.