Archive for May 13, 2016

Andreas Weber

“There is no objective reality that could have an effect on an organism, or which organisms (or humans) could be able to perceive as it is. What reaches the organism is something, a stimulus, an encounter , a push which gathers meaning only in the light of the organism’s needs.  Living beings only react to what is important to their existence to continue, regardless of what this really is. Or, perhaps more accurately, what really exists is something which grows together with the ways organisms imagine their relationships with the remainder of the world. They are not predetermined by compulsive physical laws of an external environment but rather by their own inner urges to realize themselves as a feeling body, as a center of experience and concern.

Every being in this manner becomes a sort of creative epicentre of its own world.  It imagines its reality by feeling what is meaningful for it to thrive. An organism interprets any influence  –  whether through the genes or the environment – in the light of its desire to preserve itself.” Page 51.

Here Weber is explaining ideas from Kalevi Kull, a native Estonian and founder of a movement called “biosemiotics”, which is the theory of nature as a sphere of meaning  and experience.  This sounds to me like a partial description of a living planetary organism. Also, “A sphere of meaning and experience” may share meaning with a philosophy of existential phenomenology as expressed by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is certainly not physicalism.