Conviviality: our primary connectedness to living beings

Fuchs, Thomas Article — Published Version Conviviality: our primary connectedness to living beings Mind & Society Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Fuchs, Thomas (2025) : Conviviality: our primary connectedness to living beings, Mind & Society, ISSN 1860-1839, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Vol. 24, Iss. 1, pp. 51-67, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-024-00315-8 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/323480 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Vol.:(0123456789) Mind & Society (2025) 24:51–67 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-024-00315-8 Conviviality: our primary connectedness toliving beings ThomasFuchs1 Received: 7 August 2024 / Accepted: 20 December 2024 / Published online: 3 February 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract In the ecological discourse on nature and the environment, the natural side of humans, which we experience as our own corporeality, plays hardly any role. To address this deficiency, the paper proposes the concept of conviviality. It refers to a primary connection with the living environment, conveyed through our own sense of aliveness and embodiment. The concept encompasses three interconnected aspects: 1) An epistemological aspect, according to which we can only recognize other living beings as such and distinguish them from inanimate things through the experience of our shared bodily existence; 2) A natural-philosophical and ecological aspect, which relates to the fundamental interdependence of all living beings and the interpenetration of life and the environment; 3) An ethical aspect, where our kinship and connection with living beings form the basis for an attitude of care and commitment towards them. The three aspects are based on the same fundamental structure, namely the interdependence of the living, both in subjective, phenomenal terms, and in objective, ecological terms. At the same time, they are grounded in our corporeality, which points to the relational nature of our existence, our life in relationships and in ecological contexts. In this way, the fundamental kinship of our lived bodies with living nature becomes the basis for an ecological ethic. Keywords Conviviality· Embodiment· Interdependence of life· Ecology· Environmental ethics * Thomas Fuchs [email protected]g.de 1 Clinic ofGeneral Psychiatry, University Hospital Heidelberg, Voss-Str. 4, 69115Heidelberg, Germany 52 T.Fuchs In man’s relations with animals, with flowers, with the objects of creation, there is a great system of morality as yet scarcely perceived, but destined to be more and more observed and to become the corollary and complement to human morals. Victor Hugo (1895: 250). 1 Introduction The relationship between humans and other animals is characterized by a fundamental ambivalence: on the one hand, humans have always felt a deep closeness and kinship to other creatures, which, since the beginning of hominization,has led them to seek contact and coexistence with animals. Yetin the course of civilization, humans have increasingly distanced themselves from animals, to the point of creating an anthropocentric ontology in which they regarded themselves as the “measure of all things”, the “pinnacle of creation”, and celebrated the overcoming of their animal nature as a triumph of reason. In early human history, the feeling of kinship manifested itself in, e.g., totemism, in which a tribe identified with a particular plant or animal, and later, with the transition to sedentarization, in close coexistence with grazing and domestic animals. This feeling is still evident today in children’s special affinity with animals, which appear humanized in fairy tales and which, from early on, they turn into their pets. By contrasts, since the beginning of modernity, Western culture has increasingly viewedhumans in opposition to living nature. The dualism of body and mind, nature and culture, affect and reason left the living no independent status; in modern natural science, living beings only appeared under a mechanical aspect. As Descartes attributed an immortal, rational soul onlyto humans, he famously considered animals to be soulless automatons whose expression of pain was amere mechanical reaction; Cartesians subsequently used this justification to carry out large-scale vivisection without anesthesia. Since industrialization, coexistence with animals has been increasingly replaced by mechanized food production, which reached its peak in industrial agriculture and factory farming. In the course of the ecological crisis, a change in our relationship to nature and other living beings now seems to be taking place. Current trends in both the life sciences and the humanities are converging in moving away from logos and autonomy as distinguishing features of the “rationalanimal”; instead, the physis, i.e. the bodily nature and affectivity that humans share with other living beings, is gaining significance. In 1984, the biologist Edward Wilson published his “biophilia” hypothesis, according to which humans feel an evolutionary, inborn affinity “for other forms of life, an affiliation evoked, according to circumstances, by pleasure, or a sense of security, or awe, or even fascination blended with revulsion” (Wilson 1984, p. 360). Moreover, in embodied and enactive cognition, the life-mind continuity thesis has become well known, primarily attributed to Hans Jonas (1966) and later taken up by Thompson (2007) and Di Paolo (2009), among others. According to this thesis, even the highest cognitive abilities of living beings are fundamentally characterized by principles that are already found in 53 Conviviality: our primary connectedness toliving beings the behavior of the simplest life forms. In the enactivist view, all levels of living beings share the capacity for “sense-making”, which is already found in unicellular organisms. This also brings the kinship between humans and other living things increasingly into focus. The aim of the following reflections is to examine this kinship more closely from a phenomenological, ecological and ethical perspective. They are based on the assumption that it is above all our own felt and lived corporeality that connects us with other living beings. For as corporeal beings, we are fundamentally subject to the same processes of birth, growth, respiration, nutrition, drive, ageing and death as they are. When we observe a group of cheetahs in the steppe or a herd of reindeer in the Arctic tundra, we see life in an environment in which it has made its home and sustains itself, a world that provides it with space, light, air and food. But we also see life in a world in which it struggles to survive. We feel how it braces itself against the wind, warms itself against the cold, nourishes itself in the wasteland. We see and feel life in its fragility, exposure, precariousness and danger. We perceive all of this as such because we ourselves are alive, and because we live with these creatures on earth, in a commonality and in a community of the living, which I refer to as conviviality. The term comes from the Latin convivere, i.e. to live together; its familiar meaning, namely sociality and cheerful togetherness, derives from the Latin convivium, originally referring to a banquet. Ivan Illich (1973) gave the term a socio-critical meaning, to designate forms of living together in solidarity as opposed to the confinement of individuals to industrial productivity. However, I use the term in a widersense, namely to describe the primary affinity and kinship that we feel with living beings in general, due to shared bodily structures, life processes and life interests.1 Conviviality in this sense has three major aspects, which I will examine in what follows: 1. The first aspect is an epistemological one and was formulated paradigmaticallyby Hans Jonas: “Life can be known only by life” (Jonas 1966: 91). This is fundamental for our relationship to living nature: the question of what life is cannot be separated from the experience of what it is like to be a living being, and we ourselves have this experience as living, embodied beings. The biological, i.e. scientific study and research of the living can neither fully explain nor replace this experience. Conviviality in this sense means that only as fellow creatures, from the experience of our shared bodily existence, do we recognize other living beings in their selfhood and distinguish them from inanimate things. 2. The second aspect is one of natural philosophy and ecology: conviviality can give us insight into what characterizes life and its processes, and how living things are connected to each other and to their environment. We share with other living beings not only the elementary conditions of life mentioned above. We share with them a relationship to the environment that is determined by metabolism, exchange, embedding and niche formation, i.e., by a reciprocity and coupling that 1 I already used the term in this sense in my paper “Understanding Sophia? On human interaction with artificial agents (Fuchs 2024a, b), specifically to show that AI systems and robots are in principle not part of the community of life with which we sharesentience and experience. 54 T.Fuchs does not allow us to think of living beings without relationality. And finally, we are connected to other living beings, plants and animals through mutual dependencies, give and take, living from food, i.e. living from other life. Conviviality describes this ecological embedding and interconnectedness of all living which makes up a comprehensive community. 3. The third aspect is an ethical one. The insight that we recognize other living beings primarily because of our kinship with them, and that we are indissolubly connected with them through reciprocal relationships—these insights can become the basis for a commitment through which we also realize the interconnectedness with all life as our responsibility. If the basis of our relationship to living nature is a participatory, compassionate recognition, then this also leads to an attitude of care and commitment towards that nature; an attitude in which our own experience of corporeality and aliveness becomes the basis of an ecological ethic. To date, the ecologically motivated discourse on nature does not address the nature of humans, insofar as we, qua body, are nature ourselves. Whenconviviality is understood asas “intercorporeality”, however, our embodiment can establish an ecological ethic that overcomes the separation of human culture and physical nature. For as embodied beings, we ourselves are part of a nature that can then no longer be understood as just “extended matter” and exploited at will.2 Thus the key contribution of the concept of conviviality lies in its integration of the three aspects it encompasses: the participatory concept of recognizing the living is directly related to its ontological interdependence and interconnectedness, which in turn forms the basis for the ethical responsiveness we experience when we become aware of this interconnectedness. All three aspects are grounded in our bodily experience of living-with, which also means suffering-with—i.e. our conviviality with the living. In the following, I will take a closer look at these three aspects. 2 Conviviality: perceiving life According to the prevailing view of neo-Darwinian biology, as found in Richard Dawkins (1986, 1989), Dennis Bray (2009) and others, organisms are ultimately machines driven by algorithms and programs, and life is nothing other than information processing.3 Our own experience of life is quite different, namely that of a 2 With a somewhat similar aim, Donna Haraway has used the term sympoiesis (= making together) to describe the interdependent processes of creating shared environments and associations between animals, humans, groups and communities. “Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company” (Haraway 2016, 58). However, I do not share her aim of completely dissolving the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and non-physical, not least because responsibility for the earth can only be assumed by human beings, not by any other species. Moreover, sympoiesis does not refer to the epistemological aspect of perceiving life, which I include in conviviality. 3 “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions […]. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” (Dawkins 1986: 112) – See also Grafen & Ridley (2006). 55 Conviviality: our primary connectedness toliving beings spontaneous, self-acting vitality, a bodily dynamic that moves us, an elemental drive and striving. It is the experience of our bodily nature as something that precedes our conscious cognition and action; something that emerges of its own accord, stirring and becoming sensible; from which we first become aware of ourselves, and to which we owe our existence. Hans Jonas combined this experience with an epistemological argument that is directed against the reductionism of the biosciences. No biologist could locate and research the phenomenon of life if he did not always already know from his self-experience as a living being what life is: namely, selfhood, self-expression, self-movement, being-after-something, in drive, striving and purposefulness—in one word: life as subjectivity. The German physician Viktor von Weizsäcker also referred to this inescapable starting point for any science of the living: In order to research the living, you have to participate in life. One can attempt to derive the living from the non-living, but this endeavor has so far failed. One can also strive to deny one’s own life in science, but this is a self-deception. We find life as living things ... science began with the awakening of questions in the midst of life (von Weizsäcker 1986: v). Jonas encapsulates this up with the phrase already mentioned: “Life can be known only by life” (Jonas 1966: 91). Suppose we were to look at an organism from the perspective of a disembodied and purely analytical, mathematical mind –say, a mathematician-God. Would we then be able to recognize the interiority and purposefulness of the organism? From a disembodied, analytical standpoint, the organism would be dissolved into a collection of objective physical–chemical events, and all characteristics of an interiority, a “self-related autonomous entity would, in the end, ultimately appear as purely phenomenal, that is, fictitious” (ibid.: 78). As bodily beings, however, we are able to say what no disembodied onlooker would have a cause for saying: that the mathematical God in his homogeneous analytical view misses the decisive point—the point of life itself: its being self-centered individuality, being for itself and in contraposition to all the rest of the world, with an essential boundary dividing ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (ibid.: 79) For Jonas, life is never pure externality, but indispensable subjectivity, and only because we ourselves are living beings, through the “witnessing” of our own body, do we have access to the living and are able to perceive it as such. So what does this witnessing of our body, our experience of living embodiment, consist of? Embodiment has many dimensions and aspects; however, at its core, it can be regarded as the elementary feeling of being alive (Thompson and Varela 2001, Thompson 2007: 161f.; Fuchs 2012). This experience consists of two components, which I would like to call vitality or sentience on the one hand and conation on the other. 56 T.Fuchs 1. Vitality or sentience refers to a continuous bodily background experience that can be described as a pre-reflective self-awareness or also as a core affective state, with the hedonic poles of well-being and discomfort, pleasure and displeasure.4 It initially corresponds to a vague feeling of bodily existence or sentience, but when it spreads to the current life situation as a whole, it merges into the phenomena of mood, attunement or existential feelings (Ratcliffe 2008). 2. Conation (from the Latin conatus = impulse, urge, striving) refers to an elementary energetic momentum that manifests itself in drive, impulse, urge, and desire, and which represents the fundamental driving force for the directed movement of the living being. Here, too, we find a polarity, namely the energetic poles of activation and deactivation, vigor and fatigue. The continuous basis of experience, namely the fundamental self-affection of life, thus consists of the polarities of pleasure-displeasure on the one hand and activationdeactivation on the other, and we feel both in our lived body.5 This is exactly what we also perceive in other living beings: their sentience—pleasure, displeasure, pain—as well as their striving, their pursuit of goals—be it a cat chasing a mouse or an amoeba moving forward with its pseudopodia, groping towardsfood and incorporating it. “(…) there is always the purposiveness of organism as such and its concern in living” (Jonas 1966: 90). But only a being that is concerned about itself can perceive this urge, this striving for self-preservation. Albert Schweitzer expressed this in his famous sentence: “ I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live” (Schweitzer 1998: 156). Conviviality in this epistemic sense therefore means that we recognize the living in a sympathetic way: as feeling and striving like ourselves. This results from a commonality of expression: the living shows itself in its bodily appearance – as striving, fleeing, seeking protection, attracting, deterring, flaunting, attacking, etc. It was again Jonas who emphasized this primary expressivity of the living: It is part of the intuitive beholding of life by life and thus begins with the accomplishments of animal perception, which is attuned to the accomplishments of animal expression. […] Among the objects of perception, neutrally classed as ‘things,’ living things as living are paramount. Their perception involves emotional discrimination – as prey, foe, fellow member of the species, sexual partner, as familiar or unfamiliar, noteworthy or negligible, harmless, threatening, or undetermined – and is thus anything but neutral. It includes an 5 This conception of the feeling of life also corresponds in some respects to the circumplex model of affectivity developed by Russell (1980, 2003), consisting of the two polarities mentioned above. According to Russell, they jointly characterize the “core affect” as the variable but continuous basis of experience, namely “as a simple, nonreflective feeling that is an integral blend of hedonic (pleasure–displeasure) and arousal (sleepy–activated) values” (Russell 2003: 147). 4 The concept has a long history, dating back at least to the French philosopher Maine de Biran (1766– 1824), who named it “sentiment de l’existence” (feeling of existence) and described it as “a vague and dark feeling attached to any animal or organic life” (Maine de Biran 1995: 125; own transl.); for a history of the concept, see also Heller-Roazen (2007). More recently, theneuroscientists Damasio (1999) and Panksepp (1998) have described the core affective experience as “the feeling of life itself, the sense of being” (Damasio 1995: 150), brought about by the homeodynamic interaction of subcortical brain centers with the inner state of the body. 57 Conviviality: our primary connectedness toliving beings instinctive familiarity […] with the living behavior to which response is to be made. The basis of this familiarity is the community of animal nature, and in the case of intra-specific relations, the community of the species. […] Animal life is expressive, even eager for expression. It displays itself; it has its sign codes, its language; it communicates itself. (Jonas 1971: 508f.). This expressivity does not require the assumption of an inner world or a hidden psychological state that manifests itself only indirectly in external signs. Rather, the expression itself is the holistic appearance of the living being in its very feeling and striving. This results in an ontology of the expressivity of all living things on earth, in which the human being participates, a sphere of expression in which it is embedded (Fischer 2020: 19). This epistemology of life is in obvious contrast to the modern concept of knowledge that guides the natural sciences: here, the subject of knowledge has nothing to do with its object. For Bacon or Descartes, knowledge of nature means keeping away from it, not being affected by it, not mixing with it. However, there is another, participatory way of knowing, namely through co-enactment, bodily resonance and sympathy: when we hear a song, we sing along with it inwardly; figures that we see are simultaneously felt in kinesthetic impressionsof movement, and the purposeful movement of an animal towards an object is also co-perceived in our own body.6 Here, too, only a being that is itself intent on something can perceive this movement directed towards goals. Cognition through sympathy and bodily resonance thus means a participation in what is recognized, and this participation presupposes a kinship between the recognizer and the recognized: What animals are, what plants are, is in principle not alien to us, because we know it from the inside. For Hans Jonas, the anthropomorphism of this knowledge is not a disadvantage but precisely the prerequisite for recognizing and perceiving living things in their selfhood. Of course, this participatory knowledge does not indicate how far we can extend the assumption of sentience and drive to increasingly simple living beings. When a bacterium moves towards food and away from harmful substances in chemotaxis (Wadhams and Armitage 2004), it shows a rudimentary form of discriminating, directed relationship to the environment. It gives these substances meaning for its survival, thus displaying what enactivism calls sense-making, a central characteristic of living systems. If one observes how similarly unicellular amoebae use their foot-like cell extensions to feel their way over obstacles, withdraw again and thereby explore their surroundings, one can bodily co-experience this simplest form of environmental perception. But can the bacterium and the amoeba also experience their assignments of meaning as pleasant or unpleasant, with different hedonic valence? Opinions on this differ. On the one hand, the view of biopsychism, which ascribes sentience to all living beings and thus ultimately to plantstoo, is becoming 6 In primates, the mirror neuron system provides a neuronal component for this (Gallese 2002; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008). As is well known, these neurons are activated both when we ourselves perform a goal-directed action, such as reaching for an apple, and when we perceive the same action in another conspecific or primate. It is very likely that this neural basis of bodily mimesis extends to mammals in general (Panksepp 2011, Panksepp & Panksepp 2013), though research on this ishitherto sparse. In any case, there is an immediate perception of directed movement in living beings that is not based on a separate attribution of goals or on the assumption of an inner intention. 58 T.Fuchs increasingly popular (Calvo 2017; Calvo et al. 2021; Reber et al. 2020). On the other hand, representatives of zoopsychism want to attribute sentience onlyto higher animals. They generally refer to the nervous system or the brain and its integrative capacity as the decisive prerequisite for sentience and even more for self-awareness (Draguhn etal. 2021; Ginsburg and Jablonka 2021). Still, it remains questionable whether this property only applies to mammals, birds or reptiles, or whether it can also be extended to invertebrates, which have a nerve network instead of a central brain. Sentience seems to be agradational phenomenon (Godfrey-Smith 2016). Yet the current state of comparative consciousness research suggests that there is no uniform scale on which species can simply be classified as more or less conscious. Rather, each species in question seems to have its own distinctive profile of consciousness, which results from the differentiation of perception, temporal integration, self-awareness, and other components (Birch etal. 2020). The evidence for and against bioand zoopsychism is so far inconclusive, as Thompson (2022) summarized in a recent paper. I will not explore this difficult question in detail here, but I would like to make a mediating suggestion. Even if we cannot say for sure whether amoebae or bacteria feel something or not, we can always understand life from our self-awareness minus consciousness, i.e. in a “privative way”. This does not result in a purely external view of the living, as if it were a merely physical system, because consciousness is preceded by sentience. We can, for example, feel a slight headache or hunger before we become consciously aware of them. And when we do become fully aware, we realize that we were already hungry before, without being able to say what that hunger actually was like—similarly to how we sometimes only notice a latent, repetitive sound once it stops and silence sets in. An experience only becomes fully conscious when it reaches a certain degree of intensity or contrast. Nevertheless, it was already our experience beforehand. So, there can be a feeling or striving that is not yet conscious, but is nevertheless not simply physiological or subpersonal.7 The decisive factor which connects us with all lower animals is the enactment of life that has and shows those tendencies whether they become conscious in varying degrees or not. In the case of plants, too, we speak of young “shoots” (in German Triebe = urges) that push out of the earth towards the light, just as we feel the urges of life within ourselves. It is simply that the purposeful processes in plants take place on a much slower time scale than animal movements.8 Thus, the will to live, as Schweitzer 7 ThusI do not agree with Damasio’s view of emotion as a subpersonal, purely physiological process (Damasio 1999), nor with LeDoux’s contrary assumption that emotions are cognitive, conscious constructions in the prefrontal cortex that only exist in humans (LeDoux 2020). Rather, emotions are feelings that also occur in animals in varying degrees of pre-conscious experience. 8 The convivial perception of plants can therefore be deepened by observing their development and movements in time-lapse recordings (see e.g. Stark 2008). Here they are shown in constant, purposeful movement as they grow, spread their roots, reach for light and nutrients, evade predators, etc. Particularly impressive are time-lapse recordings of bean tendrils “searching” for a branch through continuous twisting movements until they encounter resistance and then entwine themselves around it. On a microlevel, these movements can be traced back to a complex mechanism of water-filled compartments within the plant stalk. On a macro-level, however, it is obvious that these mechanics serve a movement that is adequately described as a searching movement, namely from the point of view of the tendril as a growing living being, without having to attribute a “psychological striving” to the plant. 65 Conviviality: our primary connectedness toliving beings can also care for other living beings in an empathic sense (Fischer 2020). The oftendisputed special position of human beings in relation to all other plants and animals, including other primates, is realized precisely through this attitude of concern and responsibility. Thus, on the one hand, the anthropocentric humanism of the past, viewing man as the “pinnacle of creation” and associated with the unlimited exploitation of the earth, is certainly no longer tenable today. At the same time, it would be wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to consider humanism obsolete, as posthumanists do. Because responsibility for the development of the earth can only be assumed by that being which alone in the world is capable of freedom and selfdetermination, and that is the human being. A humanism of embodiment and conviviality would give this responsibility a new foundation that is better equipped against anthropocentrism. Thus, an ecological redefinition of our relationship to the earthly environment can succeed if our embodiment and aliveness are at its center— this means, our conviviality with the natural world. Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Data availability I do not analyze or generate any datasets, because this work takes a theoretical approach. Declarations Conflict of interest There are no conflicts of interest. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/. References Birch J, Schnell AK, Clayton NS (2020) Dimensions of animal consciousness. Trends Cogn Sci 24:789–801 Bray D (2009) Wetware: a computer in every living cell. Yale University Press, New Haven Calvo P (2017) What is it like to be a plant? J Conscious Stud 24:205–227 Calvo P, Baluška F, Trewavas A (2021) Integrated information as a possible basis for plant consciousness. Biochem Biophys Res Commun 564:158–165 Candiotto L (2024) The problem of sentience. Phenomenol Cognit Sci. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s1109702409994-7 Cavell S (1969) Knowing and acknowledging. Must we mean what we say? 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