Andreas Weber on Aliveness and Interdependence

Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

Rejecting the standard neoDarwinist account of life as mechanical and objectifying, theoretical biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber insists that science must study the subjective aliveness of organisms. While living beings certainly compete to survive, they also participate in symbiotic, relational webs of many other beings, each endowed with fierce creative agency. Weber argues that life itself amounts to a commons because living beings, working in distributed, bottom-up ways, are all struggling to co-evolve constructively with others and expand the fecundity of the whole system.