Love + Death with Dr. Andreas Weber
About the Episode
In a spring meadow, life abounds. But, if you look closely enough—if you bow down just a bit closer—you’ll find countless deaths amidst all the teeming life. In any ecosystem, life is forever blossoming and also forever being consumed in order to serve other life. But how does this constant death connect to love, and can you ever have one without the other?
Dr. Andreas Weber believes that love and death are tied together “at the umbilical”—two sides to the creativity of life. In this conversation, we explore what it means for death to become “real” in our own bodies, why we’re in a century-long struggle to ignore death, and how this ignorance robs us of a deep, meaningful existence, filled with the love that lies behind it all.
Episode Details
About Andreas (he/him)
Dr. Andreas Weber is a Berlin-based book and magazine writer and independent scholar. He has degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris.
Andreas' work focuses on a reevaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to understand organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, Andreas holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimization machine, but rather as an ecosystem that transforms mutual sharing of matter and energy in a deepened meaning.
Andreas has contributed extensively to developing the concept of enlivenment in recent years, notably through his essay Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Berlin 2013; published in expanded and rewritten form as Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019). He has also put forth his ideas in several books and is contributing to major German magazines and journals, such as GEO, National Geographic, Die Zeit and Greenpeace Magazine. Weber teaches at Leuphana University and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. He is also part of the staff of und.Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability, Berlin, which is devoted to link the fields of art and culture with the field of sustainability, and to develop exemplary models of productive exchange; and was named the 2016 Jonathan Rowe Commons Fellow, Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes, CA, USA.
What We Discuss
How one of his books helped me fall back in love with the world a handful of years ago.
The first time we both remember death becoming real in our lives, not just conceptually, but somatically.
How our world is in a century-long struggle against death.
The physical experience of aliveness.
What biology has to say about purpose.
How you can’t just be concerned with your own aliveness at the expense of others and your community.
What fermentation and composting have to do with community and healthy ecosystems.
How Andreas is trying to make himself more edible.
How he’s leaning further into more animistic thinking.
The challenge of institutionalizing these ideas at scale. Or, how we might “organize” aliveness.
How Dr. Weber practices love in his life practically.
Sources Mentioned
Wendell Berry on Bookshop.org + Art of the Commonplace, in particular.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” essay appears in her book, Sister Outsider.
Find Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work here, and check out Braiding Sweetgrass, which I mentioned specifically.
Charles Eisenstein’s site is here, and you can check out his “Living in the Gift” course here.
Here’s Gary Snyder’s Etiquette of Freedom, which Dr. Weber mentioned.
Here’s the work of Asia Dorsey, the human/mermaid who taught me to ferment.
Find Matter & Desire and all of the other amazing books that Chelsea Green publishes here.
Artist, writer, musician, storyteller, teacher, and healer Martín Prechtel can be found here. His quote was, “Humans are here because the gods like the beauty we’re able to create.”
And, Tiokasin Ghosthorse is the name of Dr. Weber’s colleague, who he mentions wakes up every morning and addresses water.
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Credits
Audio engineering by the team at Upfire Digital.
All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.
Episode Transcript
Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!
