Andreas Weber is a Berlin-based philosopher, biologist, and writer. He holds degrees in marine biology and cultural studies, and has collaborated with brain researcher and philosopher Francisco Varela. His books in English include: Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (2013); The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016); and Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology (2016). Weber regularly contributes to major newspapers and magazines, such as National Geographic, GEO, and Die Zeit, and has won a number of awards for his writing. He teaches philosophy at Leuphana University, Lüneburg and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. Weber has two children, fifteen and seventeen. He lives in Berlin and Italy.
“The most powerful antidote to our pernicious culture of excessive
material consumption is the creation and nurturing of communities,
finding happiness in human relationships rather than seeking it in
material possessions. At the very heart of community, at all levels
of life, we find a fundamental impulse to establish connections.
The author of this beautifully written book identifies this
yearning for connections with the essence of love. In his
philosophical meditations, Andreas Weber deepens the recent
scientific advances toward a new systemic understanding of life by
investing them with a vital emotional dimension. While the
experience of being fully alive is, for him, an erotic experience,
it has also been recognized as the very essence of spirituality. An
important and inspiring book!”—Fritjof Capra, author of The Web of
Life; coauthor of The Systems View of Life
“Andreas Weber is an indispensable voice in ecological and
philosophical thought. With fearless probity and autobiographical
intimacy, Matter and Desire composes the symphonic grand design of
desire, relationships, the metaphysics of the body—and much more—as
page by page we experience Weber’s elegant subversion of all
convenient ways of looking at the natural world. This is a timeless
yet urgent, and splendid book.”—Howard Norman, author of I Hate To
Leave This Beautiful Place
“Andreas Weber offers us the best medicine I know for a culture
benumbed by dead-end pursuits. Pulsing with life, his work delivers
us from the centuries-long dichotomies between mind and matter that
have robbed us of vitality, joy, and true purpose. It brings
us home to the fertile reciprocities that link us with all forms
and levels of life; in so doing, it reflects and reinforces great
spiritual teachings of our planet.”—Joanna Macy, author of Coming
Back to Life
“A slow tidal wave of change is gathering force and will take us
beyond the mechanistic world of Newton toward one of becoming.
Andreas Weber’s Matter and Desire is a passionate evocation of
intermingled life surging. He writes with the poetry, care, and
insight that urges us forward.”—Stuart Kauffman, professor
emeritus, biochemistry and biophysics, University of Pennsylvania;
and MacArthur Fellow
“With a dazzling blend of biological rigor and poetic grace,
Andreas Weber explains the principles of erotic connection that lie
at the heart of life on Earth. It is a journey that transcends the
reductionist taxonomies of modern science and explains the
transformational role of desire, interdependence, and meaning in
the glorious unfolding of natural ecosystems—and in our own
lives. Be prepared for a bracing adventure!”—David Bollier,
author of Think Like a Commoner
“When Andreas Weber looks on a meadow, he sees ‘part of our body,
folded outward, ready to be strolled through.’ The ocean’s tides
are ‘the way the Earth perceives the moon,’ and gravitation is ‘the
Earth’s tender longing for us.’ With such graceful, lucid lines,
Weber invites us to see a world filled with delight and one
that yearns, as we do, for contact: the erotics of encounter. Part
scientific reflection, part philosophical reverie, part lyrical
benediction for the stones and swifts and plants and water ouzels
of his beloved Ligurian countryside, Matter and Desire is a deeply
felt book from a profoundly humane writer.”—Fred Bahnson, author of
Soil and Sacrament; director, Food, Health, and Ecological
Well-Being Program, Wake Forest University School of Divinity
“Every page of Weber’s deeply illuminating new book is a passionate
journey into the experience of being alive and in relationship. As
an emergent ‘erotic ecology,’ this book is urgently needed medicine
for a planet suffering from a shortage of love.”—David Lukas,
author of Language Making Nature
“Two hundred years ago, John Keats complained that modern science
would ‘unweave a rainbow.’ This visionary and poetic discourse by
Andreas Weber achieves the near-miraculous task of reweaving the
stunning beauty of the natural world back into the realm of
science. Transcending conventional barriers between categories of
Western thought, with a style reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Weber explores some profound implications
of modern biology and physics, presenting his vision of biology as
the erotic science with the recognition that to truly experience
love, we need to be fully connected to the creativity of
life.”—Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct
“To read this marvellous book is to enter a secret garden where
you’ll discover a natural world far more alive, sentient, and
meaningful than science has so far dared suppose. With luminous
prose Weber’s ‘erotic ecology’ charts a path into a new scientific
understanding in which atoms, organisms, and entire ecosystems
overflow with purpose, interiority, and psyche, lighting up your
life, helping you experience reality with freshness and depth of
vision. A masterpiece.”—Dr. Stephan Harding, author of Animate
Earth
“A stunning piece of writing, as existential as it is experiential,
Matter and Desire delves into the ‘science of the heart’ in
compelling prose that frequently dances on the edge of poetry. The
book provides vivid depictions of a big love: a near-mystical
practice of discovering who we are through the creative energies
that surround us and dwell within us. Andreas Weber ably guides his
readers on this relational journey, articulating ecological
intuitions that may have gone unnoticed yet were always on the tips
of our tongues. From the forces of desire within molecules to the
mistle thrush’s song vibrating in the evening air, Weber offers a
bold and convincing case for the physicality of feeling and the
‘biology of love.’ The result is a profound meditation that bravely
explores the subjectivity of a living biosphere and our particular
relations within it. If philosophy literally means the love of
wisdom, then in Matter and Desire, Weber presents the wisdom of
love, a reflective account of his intentional free-fall into the
embrace of matter.”—Gavin Van Horn, director, Cultures of
Conservation, Center for Humans and Nature
“If what Andreas says is anything to go by—that love permeates all
things so intrusively that the world can only be conceived in terms
of relationship—then holding this book in your hand is an
outrageous act of lovemaking, the breadth and depth of which you
will never know! This is a gasp of a book.”—Bayo Akomolafe, author
of These Wilds Beyond our Fences
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