Matt: Hi, Andreas. Good morning.
Andreas: Good morning. Sorry to keep you waiting.
Matt: That’s quite all right.
Andreas: I was late anyway, and then Zoom decided it needed to do a new install, like in the old Windows times.
Matt: Of course. Always another update.
Andreas: Exactly. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it always seems to happen when you’re already late and trying to get into a call, and you have no choice. I tried to skip it, but…
Matt: It’s quite all right. I’ve got nowhere to go.
Andreas: Well, you probably have other things to do as well. It’s late for you, right?
Matt: It’s evening, yes. About 11 p.m. This is my second podcast today, but it’s appropriate. I was talking with my friend Timothy Jackson earlier, who’s also a biologist, and we were discussing Francisco Varela and a paper by Ezequiel Di Paolo.
Andreas: Yes, yes.
Matt: It’s titled “F/Acts: Ways of Enactive Worldmaking,” and it’s about enactive ontology, or what an ontology for enactivism might look like. So I’m all primed and ready to talk to you.
Andreas: Very good. Very good. I see you’re already in the thick of it, in the middle of it.
Matt: Yes, exactly. In the middle of it. Well, thanks for taking the time.
Andreas: I’m glad to.
Matt: I think we spoke at an event on Varela’s work a few years ago. I don’t know if you remember that.
Andreas: I remember, yes. That’s true. It was one of the events around the 20-year anniversary of his death, so that must have been 2022.
Matt: Yes, 2022.
Andreas: I’m just back from Paris, where I also met his wife, Amy Varela. We still have an ongoing friendship, so I was freshly immersed in those times, in his thinking. And of course his work is still very much the foundation of my biological ideas, what I received from my wonderful, revered teacher, Francisco.
Matt: Yes. I’d love to talk with you about that, and just allow our minds to meet a bit. I admire your work, and I’m excited to explore some ideas with you. I don’t have a tightly worked-out agenda, but I have some questions and areas we might explore.
As you know, I’m not a biologist, I’m a philosopher, and you’re also a philosopher as well as a biologist. I tend to do a lot of speculative thinking and metaphysics, and sometimes that gets very abstract. A lot of my scholarship is on Alfred North Whitehead, and he’s notoriously abstract, even though it’s almost as if he’s trying to marshal abstraction in defense of concreteness, which is either a fool’s errand or a very important task for a metaphysician to undertake.
Andreas: I like how you say this.
Matt: You’re also a poet, I would say, and you take poetry seriously, not just as an extra flourish, but as something essential to life as such, perhaps even essential to reality.
So maybe we could start with why you not only studied biology, but studied it in the way you did: immediately taking a semiotic approach and understanding biology as inseparable from what we think of as the expression of meaning as human beings. Somehow life is already expressing meaning.
Andreas: Yes. In hindsight it all looks very smart, what I did. But when I started, it was not so clear. I began with an undergraduate course in biology and then added philosophy, and then I ended up with a degree which, according to the German rules at that time, truly is both: I have a degree in philosophy and in biology.
Then I did my doctoral thesis, which again was both. Technically it is a philosophical degree, but I worked with Francisco Varela, who is a biologist and who also had his cognitive research lab besides his theory. So again, it was both.
But it was also, in a way, out of despair. I had this intuition that this world, this reality, and me in this reality, as this reality, are always somehow experiencing/expressing the core, the center, the foundations of reality. So reality is poetic through and through. Poetic in the sense that what is real shines through everything, even through what might not at first glance seem central or deep or foundational.
I had this sort of metaphysical-poetic passion, and I wanted to map that onto my university studies. It was very painful because it didn’t work at first. Perhaps you have had a similar experience: I felt I had to restrict myself to academic language.
I was searching. At first I tried to become “only” a philosopher, and then I realized that this whole embodied dimension, the poetic dimension, was somehow denied. At least that is how I experienced it. Maybe I could have searched deeper, and later I discovered more, but at the time it seemed that way.
So I started biology out of despair. I remember sitting under a blossoming cherry tree in the Botanical Garden here in Berlin in the spring of 1990, thinking, “What can I do?” And there was this cherry tree, and I said, “Okay, let’s study biology.” So you see, there is always this very experiential dimension which was central to what I was doing.
You could also say, in a more animistic way, that the cherry tree mentored me into doing this. My ancestor, the cherry tree, somehow told me. One could put it like this. I might put it like this nowadays.
Matt: That reminds me of one of the more poetic comments that Whitehead makes in his book Symbolism. He says that usually we think words symbolize things in the world: the word “tree” symbolizes a tree out there in the forest. But he says that for poets it is the reverse: they go out for a walk in the woods so that the trees might symbolize the words to them.
Andreas: That’s great.
Matt: It sounds like that’s what happened to you.
Andreas: Yes. That’s really great. I was actually looking forward to this conversation because I’m so under-read in Whitehead, although I know he might provide another door, or even the door, to what I am trying to look at. I’m not completely ignorant of him, but still under-read, probably also because of the abstractness you mentioned, which is also a way of reaching the more concrete.
Since we’re talking a bit about signs and symbols and meaning and semiotics: when I was growing into academic studies, into my education, there was this foundational wrong idea that there is only the layer of signs and there is nothing beneath. There is only language, or only semiotics. There is not something that is on this side of the sign.
When you tell that tree story and quote Whitehead, it’s a reversal: there is the tree, which makes the poet search for a sign. So the sign is not first, life is first, as something whole, as one, you might even say.
Matt: Yes. It’s easy to think of language as getting between us and the world. But I think the invitation of a poetic ontology is to see language more as a way of strumming the strings of perception in a different way, to manifest different aspects of the world. We are not just trying to represent something accurately; we are participating in the vibration of the world and bringing forth a new constellation of patterns.
Andreas: Yes. So in some way language is not ontologically different from the rest of the world. We are world somehow making world reverberate.
Matt: Yes. I remember when I first started studying philosophy, I got very into Wittgenstein. I went through his early work, the Tractatus, which perhaps was misunderstood, but it makes it seem like language is a kind of cage, and we just need to shut up and stop tricking ourselves.
His thought obviously develops beyond that, but it took me a while to stop seeing language as something trying to picture the world, and instead see it as participating in the world.
Andreas: I like this very much. I’m also under-read in Wittgenstein, because starting with the Tractatus there was this misunderstanding of what he was actually trying to get at, and that is what was then taught at university. So there was a shallowing-out of what he was really trying to do, which is something mystical in a way, but that had no place. So I shied away from that.
Later Wittgenstein I can work with much more. And I very much like what you said about giving language this equal footing with what there is.
It reminds me of somebody I like very much who is not a philosopher by profession, he is technically a poet: Gary Snyder, the nature writer and poet. He is living on your side of the Earth. I think he is still alive; he must be very old now. On your western side of the Earth.
Matt: Yes, the western part of the body of the turtle.
Andreas: Exactly. He has written a short text where he really tries to show that if we start to detach language from world, we create a painful and artificial separation between ourselves and the world which is not real. If language is world, then world is also language, or world is meaning.
Then the tree comes much closer to you, because it is not ontologically different. It is a way for reality to be and to tell about this being, to know about this being and to tell about this being. Not necessarily in the particular subgroup of human-created words, but still with the same basic transparency of what there is for what there is, and therefore also for me.
Matt: Sometimes I just like to sit and listen to the wind through the leaves of the trees. There is something profoundly meaningful about it, but we can’t really ask, “What does it mean?” The only answer might be an even stronger gust of wind through the leaves.
With human language, because we have so many words, we can somehow miss the point. We endlessly ask, “What does it mean?” like a child asking “Why? Why? Why?” That is in fact how we enter language, by realizing it is circular. But it is a beautiful circularity.
Of course we can make profound sense. I wouldn’t study philosophy unless I thought these little scribbles on the page somehow convey profound insight into the nature of reality. But at some point, language is not so different from the wind blowing through the leaves.
Andreas: Yes. And then you notice the little scribbles, at least when you print them out or write by hand, and you’re writing them on what once was the leaves, because you are writing on what was once a tree. So it’s still very close to the wind going through the leaves.
When you say we can’t pin down the meaning of the wind going through the trees, it depends on the mindset with which we want to do this. If we approach it with a scientific mindset and try to fixate it, then of course it cannot be done, and that leads to the attitude that there is nothing there, it’s just noise, just wind going through the tree, not relevant.
But the poet, when their heart is stirred, will desire to echo that stirring with expression. So there is meaning, only that you cannot give it an empirically objective definition.
In one of my books, I suggested we need a perspective of “poetic objectivity,” which is based on empirical subjectivity. We know about the wind going through the leaves because it is how a body relates to bodies, or how one dimension of the huge body that reality is relates to itself.
This is something we know because we are this. We have this foundational knowledge which is not object-knowledge, but knowledge through participation, based on our being the same as the tree is, as everything is.
I think this should receive more attention, because it is true knowledge, only it is not scientific in the sense of writing a law about an object you observe.
Matt: Yes, it is at least as objective as what a scientific model of the tree might teach us.
Andreas: Yes, yes, it is objective. Absolutely. It’s just that this kind of objectivity has gone out of fashion.
Matt: Would you describe it as the poet feeling the tree, and through a process of mimesis identifying with the limbs and feeling like the tree? Maybe it is not just similarity, but a deep analogy: we recognize ourselves as living beings, we resonate with the interiority of the tree, and we partake in a little taste of the subjectivity of the tree.
That analogy, which we are able to feel, can generate wonderful poetry, but I think it is more real and more in touch with concrete existence than an abstract model that allows us to predict and control the tree at a molecular level yet does not put us in touch with the life of the tree.
Andreas: Yes. It actually puts us out of touch, and that is very saddening for those who create these abstract models.
Biologists, mainstream biologists, basically create these abstract models, and it is pretty frustrating. I know how frustrating it is, because I took that education, I did the courses, and I know from others that many people who study biology at the undergraduate level do so initially because they are deeply fascinated by other living beings, and then that fascination somehow fades away.
To return to what you said about analogy and symbolism: I really agree. Another being is a symbol, but not a symbol created by arbitrary choice. It is an existential symbol, because we know the meaning of what happens to this being from ourselves, because fundamentally we are the same.
I would even go further and say, paradoxically, that it is an experience we have with ourselves, only that it is still outside of ourselves. So it is something we truly know because it happens to us.
In the end, it comes down to the experience that there is no separation between individuals at the deepest level. Individuality is a layer that can be peeled away, and then your existence is the existence of the world. I would go that far. The tree reminds you of that. The whispering in the leaves is, at a deep level, not only something you can feel in your body because you are tree-like or lifelike, but it tells you that the tenderness of the wind whispering in the leaves is the tenderness of the world whispering through you.
This is why such experiences are so deeply peace-giving, why people go into nature. They understand something foundational about themselves.
Biologically, you can even map this empirically in the nervous system. You have mirror systems in your brain, mirror neurons, which recreate in you the feeling of what happens to another body you observe. If somebody falls, your brain recreates something of that experience in yourself. This is a profound basis for empathy.
It does not only work with human bodies; it also works with other living bodies. If someone harms a plant, something in your brain, in your inner experience, feels this, whether you want it or not. Only sociopaths seem able to deactivate this. So it can be deactivated, but in general there is this necessary shared experience you cannot really run away from.
I find this profoundly fascinating.
And as we talk about trees, I’m looking at the trees in front of my window here. They are absolutely part of this conversation, and I invite them with a lot of gratitude to sit with us.
Matt: It’s dark here, so there are trees out there, but I cannot see them right now. I do have one right in front of my nose, though. My little succulent is my mic stand.
Andreas: Wonderful.
Matt: One concern that a skeptical, scientifically minded person might raise about this conversation is that we’re being anthropocentric and projecting our feelings onto the world. But what is the human being anyway?
It seems that what makes our species unique is that we have no idea what we are supposed to be doing. We don’t belong to ourselves in that sense. We are very much outside of ourselves.
Other animals pretty much know what they are supposed to be doing. They don’t have existential crises, unless they are locked in zoos. Then they get depressed and really don’t know what they are doing there. Otherwise they seem to know what they are doing. Humans, by contrast, easily lose track of what we’re supposed to be doing here.
There is something about our “essence” that is an essence of essencelessness. We’re not sure what we are. That is both a curse and our potential. If we could step more fully into this poetic mode of being, we could function as a kind of mirror for the universe, for the Earth, for life. Not a mirror in the sense of passively representing it, but as a microcosm.
That might sound anthropocentric, but I think the human being does have a unique role to play. It’s not just that we are in the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism is the problem. The problem is our very limited view of ourselves as just an apex predator, just another animal that is good at taking control of our environment and anthropomorphizing it, turning the Earth into a playground for the wealthy and a field for resource extraction.
Instead, we could recognize the human being as a microcosm that is here to be the poet of life. That’s a different kind of anthropocentrism.
What do you think? What is the human being supposed to be doing here?
Andreas: First, I very much like this old perspective of the human being as microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. When I say “old perspective,” I mean it is something older cultures shared. It has already existed.
That means it is not impossible to know what we are here for. It is just that at the moment, in the dominant technological civilization (I take this phrase from my daughter, who is a philosophy student, by the way; my example couldn’t put her off), we are supposed not to know, and many truly don’t know. That is a great suffering, not to know. It is being lost.
But I would say this being lost and remaining lost is not a feature of humans as such; it is a feature of this culture.
What is a feature of humans, and here I really agree with you, is that we have to choose our preferences. We are decentralized, that is how I would put it. You had another nice way of saying this that I cannot quote directly now. This decentralized condition is very special. It makes humans necessary learners.
We need to find something, or invent or create something, not in the sense of technique, but in the sense of poise, that our fellow kin already have. So there is a deficit, and of course this deficit is also a boon. It is very interesting that it is both.
This lack, this blank space, is also the opening for the gift of life. So that is what we need to do.
One big gift is the gift of realizing that everything is about the gift of life, and to express this. That is the direct poetic activity. But there is also the very concrete gift of life, which means humans have to care for the functioning of ecological life.
In many indigenous cultures, the role ascribed to humans is precisely this: to see to the functioning of life. These cultures are all somewhat different, but they all share the idea that humans are the younger siblings of the other beings. We have to learn from them, and we are here to keep life in balance. Humans are servants of life.
You can build a culture around this, a culture of serving life. That means we must invent this culture, because from our blankness we do not already know it, but we can invent it, and then we are free to invent what is necessary.
Schiller says that necessity and freedom together are beauty. So we need to create necessity-in-freedom and freedom-in-necessity, and that is beauty. Then we have a poetic culture which is a life-giving culture.
I can see this in older cultures, not in perfection, because if you are a lifelong learner with a lack, you cannot be perfect. You will always make mistakes, but that is part of it.
You can also see what happens when we forget that our role is to give life and not to take life. Then we ruin a lot of life, as we are doing now, until we are starkly reminded of our true job.
I can see this beginning to happen. We will be reminded that it does not work the way we are doing it. What we had will be taken away because we did not use it wisely to enhance fecundity, but used it to enrich ourselves, or some of us. It will be taken away, and we will have to be much more modest. Some of us, at least. Maybe not you and me; we will see.
Matt: I appreciate the way you point to the founding gesture at the base of cultural life: either we see ourselves as in service to the rest of life and are humble, or we approach the Earth with hubris and think we are here to master it, that we are not servants but in charge. That is basically the “source code” of modernity.
It’s complex, because you mentioned Schiller and the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction. The modern project wanted this thing called freedom: political freedom, but also technological freedom from the sense of being enslaved to nature. We didn’t want to deal with plagues and floods, we wanted to control light and energy, to make the world do what we want, to free ourselves from a certain kind of bondage.
That technological, Promethean impulse, when it becomes the dominant impulse, destroys everything. It becomes the sorcerer’s apprentice who thinks it controls the powers it has unleashed, thinks it can control nature, but obviously cannot. There is a rude awakening in store, already upon us, even though the technological civilization shows no sign of slowing down.
Is there anything redeemable in that freedom? Is there a way not simply to see the modern project as a complete disaster, a failure, something we never should have undertaken?
Andreas: Yes, that’s a lovely and very welcome way of putting it. Of course, what we shouldn’t do, though there is a temptation to do so (and I may not be free of this temptation), is to look elsewhere or backwards and say, “Look how those people did it, this was so much better.” That is meaningless, because first, we cannot go back there; we are here where we are. Second, it tends to idealize the past by pulling out some aspects and ignoring what was dysfunctional.
I really agree that we should not deny our own roots in this dominant Western civilization. I have been brought up here, I have read through its literature. I was exasperated early on with the technological approach and became romantic, but it is senseless to de-identify completely from this.
“Saving” the occidental project, I think, might mean revisiting certain turns, looking at what was intended and what was actually done, by whom and for what reasons. Very often you find an enmeshment of the interest in enrichment of elites with the search for understanding.
You could say there is a continuous temptation of a kind of capitalist takeover, though it starts even before capitalism in the strict sense, at the time of Francis Bacon. There were powerful elites wanting to save themselves.
This is related to the fact that the search for freedom produced the illusion that we could find not only freedom from slavery, oppression, and gross unfairness, but also freedom from death. If you really think you might have a tool that frees you from death, your morals might bend because you want to save yourself.
That is the overreach, the naivety: to think we can change reality so radically that we step out of the circle of reality, which means to be born, to live, and then to dissolve again into everything, while also remaining at another level.
The Enlightenment idea of freedom, which led to political constructs like the United States, was very much about freedom from violent political domination, freedom from being treated as a colony. That was very real and legitimate. But then it overreached. People somehow came to imagine a mastery that would allow us to step out of the conditions of reality itself.
So I would absolutely preserve freedom, but I would ask what it really means. It cannot mean a freedom that allows you to step out of what is real. It cannot be total. It must always remain, in Schiller’s sense, a nexus between freedom and necessity. But then necessity cannot be the necessity of your king; it must be the necessity of the cosmos.
So yes, philosophers have a lot of discussions ahead.
Matt: We are good at discussions.
You mentioned the Occidental project and the United States. America was not only searching for freedom from monarchy and from economic exploitation, but it also had the frontier. All that land had been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, but because of disease vectors and then active genocide, the continent was more or less emptied, from the settler perspective.
That frontiersman mentality was the freedom to remake nature to serve human purposes. That project moved west over the course of a couple of centuries, reached the West Coast, and then Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs invented transhumanism and are trying literally to overcome death. The new frontier is death: can we overcome it?
Andreas: I would say that has been the frontier for a long time already: “How can we overcome death?”
Matt: True.
Andreas: It is an old question.
Matt: This whole techno-capitalist civilizational project is a very Faustian myth playing out. I think the transhumanists represent its last breath, running on the final fumes: they truly think we can overcome death, and anyone who denies it is a “deathist,” someone who worships mortality.
To me, this is the last gasp of the techno-capitalist civilizational project. It has arrived at the point where, instead of keeping this ambition just beneath the surface, it is now stated directly: “We’re going to use technology to live forever. We’ll colonize Mars, create an army of robot slaves, build everything, and then leave Earth because we have used it up.”
You can look back and see how this was implicit all along, but now it is simply said out loud. That is the horizon of the billionaires who have extracted all this wealth: all they can think of is living forever and colonizing another planet because this one, in their view, is done.
Andreas: It is very naive.
If we had a huge blackout here in Berlin that went on for seven days, say due to a terrorist attack, there would be no electricity. You would have no heating in winter, as people in Ukraine have experienced. Without electricity, you can immediately bury all your tech-bro dreams, because they only work with electricity.
If someone pulls the plug, it is over. So these dreams are incredibly illusory. They depend on something that requires huge amounts of care and activity to maintain. It is not something that is simply and self-generatingly part of reality. It is very shallow.
And we could also talk about the philosophical shallowness of their idea of life, conceived as software that can be run on a machine. That is also why the AI metaphor is so successful: the idea that the mind is software run on hardware or “wetware.” This is simply wrong. It is a naive, dualistic remnant of 16th-century thinking.
This kind of thinking allows the illusion that death can be overcome, because it separates something supposedly separable from something perishable. But it does not work like that.
Which brings me back to fragility. I think this techno-infrastructure will not be long-lived, because there will be situations in which electricity becomes much more patchy than now: crises, wars, violence. Then you cannot reliably electrify your life. You need a fire, a campfire, to survive.
Our advanced industrial civilization is totally fragile. If you imagine the next step of human evolution as electricity-based, it is very easy to shut it down. You cannot use such a fragile basis for an ultimate project. It is just a little bloom on the surface of reality which will disappear like frost on a window when the sun shines.
There is much more to say, including about the painful and paradoxical relationship between the romantic idea underlying the expansion of the US and the genocidal reality on the frontier. That would require a long discussion we cannot fully have here.
But one thing we can observe is the contrast with the cultures that were destroyed. They had a different idea of death: they did not see death as the end of what is essential. The essential never dies; it returns to its source. The spirit, or soul, or whatever term is used in indigenous languages, is seen as participating in the life-giving power of reality. That is our essence, as it is the essence of everything, and it cannot be destroyed.
This is also experiential. It cannot be taken from us. If what is truly essential cannot be taken from you, you do not need to be a dominator of others to save your little single life, because you do not have so much to lose.
The post-Christian fear in the West, by contrast, leads everyone to fight against everyone else to save this little life, which is in the end illusory, because we have the big life which cannot die. We have this richness and do not see it, and instead we destroy others to save this little poverty which is just a glimpse, just not what is truly essential.
Matt: I think understanding death as transition or transformation and not as an ending has profound significance for reorienting our whole culture and civilization.
Initially, in Christianity, there was an emphasis on one life: you are either saved or damned and go to heaven or hell. That later gets secularized. For those who no longer believe in an afterlife, there is still this one life, and when you die, the lights just go out, your brain decays, and you are gone, as if you never existed.
In both cases, this has consequences for the motivational structure of life and for how we behave, what kind of economy we build, and what we think is valuable.
A different ethics follows from the indigenous views of a cycle of life, or from something like reincarnation. Not in a New Age sense, but as a poetically objective understanding of evolution: something like reincarnation. We have all been here before, not as humans necessarily, and we will continue to be here after this body dies in some form.
There is a profound ecological ethics that follows from such a reincarnational view. I think it is profoundly important. People act as though the default reasonable view is that we just do not know what happens when we die. Well, yes, we don’t know in a detailed way, but I think we can know there is continuity.
If you are able to connect with these currents of life in the way we have been describing while you are alive in this body, that suggests some sort of continuity. The skin barrier and the body that house and filter our current kind of consciousness are not the end of the story, so far as that core of experience is concerned. That core was never born.
Andreas: Yes, it was never born and will never die. I really agree.
It makes all the difference whether you truly know this, that you were never born and will never die, or whether you think the lights will go out. This is not superficial. It is like the difference between people after a shipwreck having to swim, or having a comfortable lifeboat with food and drink. It is all the difference.
People in this civilization full of comforts are actually fighting for their lives. We are all fighting for our lives, and that is how we behave. Some manage to maintain generosity even in such a catastrophe setting, but many cannot; they just fight for their lives and legitimize it by saying, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, the strongest wins,” and so on.
If you do not have to fight for your life, if you know you will be carried by life all the time, then you can carry others. There is nothing you can really lose. You are always welcome.
So when I spoke of a life-giving culture, I meant you cannot create such a culture without remembering that our essence cannot be destroyed because our essence is life itself, or the experience of life itself.
This brings me back to the wind whispering through the leaves. When I said that what you experience is that you are the leaves through which the wind whispers and also the wind which whispers through the tree, what you get is an experience of your own immortality. It is not an abstract concept when we say, “We were never born and will never die.” It is an experience.
It is an experience everybody continuously has, but we usually do not focus our attention on it. We do not recognize these experiences. We think, “This is nice and beautiful,” but we do not see that we are realizing our own eternity or our own being as the life-giving world.
So it is not something you must merely decide to trust. It is actually an experience.
Other cultures centered around this understanding have created practices of experience that allow those who desire to deepen this experience to do so. These are the mystical traditions. They all culminate in experiencing your existence beyond your subjective identification, which still is your existence.
If you experience this, it is intoxicating because it opens everything. You realize, “I am not this limited model-thing; this is only one flavor of myself, my temporary flavor. There will be other flavors, and it will still be me, not me as my postal address or tax identification number, but the experiential me, the life-giving me.”
Matt: I think this view does not in any way diminish the preciousness of each unique life-form. It can actually enhance it.
There is a reason we have traditionally analogized spirit to wind. The word used to mean both “wind” and “spirit,” and also the divine. That wind flows through us. If we shift to spirit’s point of view for a second: what does spirit want? Spirit wants to be embodied. Spirit wants to be this particular being with this unique life, perspective, and sensory organization. Spirit wants to be a tree, or whatever organism, because of the unique aperture that opens onto reality.
So we have to see it both ways.
Andreas: Totally. That is what makes it complicated for traditional Western thinking: we need to see it both ways. Our traditional tendency would be to say, “Now we are on the level of spirit, so the body is secondary and should be overcome,” and then we end up again in abstraction.
It is difficult to hold that the individual and the One are the same, because that is not our habitual way of thinking. It can be experienced, but it is very difficult to translate into a logical argument, because it seems self-contradictory. As a logical argument, it collapses.
This brings to mind a wonderful example I often quote from Gregory Bateson. He talks about what he calls the logical inference done by life, which he calls “abduction.” He sets it against classical Aristotelian logic.
The classical example is:
- All men are mortal.
- Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
This is the exclusive logic of the West: predictable and also a bit sad.
Then he says there is another sequence:
- All men are mortal.
- Grass is mortal.
Conclusion: Man is grass.
I love this, because it shows what is actually going on in our understanding of the big “it” we are in. It is logic, but also a poem. It is Whitman-esque.
It is a poem because it is true and not true at the same time. Literally, I am not grass; I am human. But poetically, we understand by creating a paradox or contradiction. Men are grass in the sense that from a certain organic level of generality we are just bodies, and we are food and compost.
And experientially, “I am grass” means: the late evening sun in summer shining through the blades of grass in the forest moves me so deeply because I have this little Batesonian syllogism in my moral grass, as he calls it. Then I understand why it touches me so much.
Matt: That’s lovely.
Well, Andreas, I think we should bring this to a close. It’s getting late for me, and I don’t know how long you planned to talk.
Andreas: You have all my admiration. I am very much not an evening person. I used to be, but now I’m getting older. You still are, obviously. I would have switched off at 9 p.m.
Matt: I stayed up late for you, because I was very much looking forward to this, and it did not disappoint. I think this was a lovely conversation. I look forward to it being out in the world, and I’m glad we’ll get to connect later this year. Let’s stay in touch in the meantime.
Andreas: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me into this. It was very, very lovely.
Matt: Agreed. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day there in Berlin.
Andreas: Yes, it’s pretty cold. I’ll see you around. Bye-bye.
Matt: Good night.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?