Enlivenment
Enlivenment is the imagination of a potential human condition if we radically transform ourselves -- radically meaning to return to our root nature as beings that live full lives shared with all other forms of life.
The term enlivenment itself is encouraging, contrasted to the scorched Earth of nightmares. Andreas Weber proposed "enlivenment" as a possible alternative within the Anthropocene and Catherine Keller offered it as the seventh and most desirable of her scenarios.
The Anthropocene describes our current time, when human activities dominate Earth processes. It was proposed as an addition to Earth's geologic timeline, but in 2024 the proposal was rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), partially because the start date was ambiguous. However, even though the proposal was rejected, the IUGS wrote:
Despite its rejection as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale, Anthropocene will nevertheless continue to be used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system.
In his book Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene (The MIT Press, 2019) the biophilosopher Andreas Weber wrote that "The Anthropocene proposes a reconciliation of man and nature. But it will only favor life and lead humankind into a more peaceful way of treating the other if we stop regarding nature as being hopelessly under human control."
Unfortunately, the U.S. government that will take power in 2025 is likely to dismantle most if not all environmental regulations that have developed over the past 60 years. However, Weber's recommendations below are matters of spirit, not law. The human spirit is powerful. Perhaps it is not too late if we recognize the nature of the work that must be done.
...we need to grasp that we are ourselves nature, which is to say, we are aliveness—transient transformations in ongoing material and meaningful relationships. This process experiences itself emotionally and unfolds in a fertile way, producing ever more complex degrees of freedom, as well as dependency. This existential process of self-realization is imagination, which materially expresses itself.
In the vision of the world that I propose here, we human beings are always part and parcel of nature. But this nature is much more like ourselves than we might imagine: It is creative and pulsing with life in every cell. It is creating individual autonomy and freedom by its very constraints. Reality desires—and expresses this desire through the vulnerable bodies of beings.
I argue that the greatest obstacle to the vexing questions of sustainability (itself a very elastic term with multiple and conflicting meanings) is the fact that science, society, and politics have for the last two hundred years lost their interest in understanding actual lived and felt embodied existence—that of humans, but also that of other beings. Scientific progress—and all explanations of biological, mental, and social processes—is based on the smallest possible building blocks of matter and systems, and is gained by analyses that presume that evolution in nature is guided by principles of scarcity, competition, and selection of the fittest. To put it in provocative terms, one could say that rational thinking is an ideology that focuses on dead matter. Its premises have no way of comprehending the reality of lived experience. Should it be so surprising, then, that the survival of life on our planet has become the most urgent problem?
The position taken here will be called enlivenment, because its central thesis is that we have to reconsider “life” and “aliveness” as fundamental categories of thought and of practical actions. Enlivenment tries to supplement—not substitute—rational thinking and empirical observation (the core practices of the Enlightenment position) with the “empirical subjectivity” of living beings, and with the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences.
Weber's work is the epitome of spiritual but not religious.
More about Andreas Weber's work
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In her book Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances the process theologian Catherine Keller described seven potential scenarios for Homo sapiens as we move into our future. Those ranged from extinction to The Age of Enlivenment:
The seventh scenario shares much with the Cosmocalypse. But it suffers far less mass destruction in the transition. Civilization does not so much explode as twist into ecocivilization: a cosmopolitan legacy survives, almost recognizably, by transformation. We scrape by, ecosocially, in a kind of cloudy historical dialectic that vibrates within great waves of disorder and avoids the worst, but not without grotesque costs. Unregulated capitalism is dethroned through social insistence and ecological sanity; through greener, newer deals we keep the warming to 2(ish) degrees. Haunted by the failed white man enlightenments, we hold to an earth-toned enlivenment. With a modicum of social democracy (by whatever name) we get almost enough trees planted, the population curve curbed, nuclear war avoided, white supremacy broken.3 The web helps to evolve the reciprocities of local with global, urban with rural. We stumble along in the approximate direction of ecociv. As with the Cosmocalypse—or any mindful apocalypse—it is the radicality of shared crisis that tears open a depth of new and ancient solidarity. But in this scenario, an enlivenment that we sense even now awakens in enough of us soon enough that we avoid the six above versions of worse. Like a contagion of resurrection, there spreads a spirit of planetarity. Recognized by some as holy, by others as inspiration, it resists the old violence of civilizational hierarchy but revels in the complexities of difference. Between and beyond any religion, calling all species, the immanent spirit does not cease to renew its earth and atmosphere. New creation not ex nihilo but ex profundis—in a chaos now minded for its eye-opening apocalypses. I suspect most of us who are not denialists or nihilists press toward this modest and mixed, graciously down-to-earth outcome. And in imagining its chance we enliven our actuality.
Learn more about Catherine Keller's work.