Feeling is the existential experience of being matter from the inside. Feeling entangles us with the whole, parallel to the entanglement between observer and observed described in modern physics. Understanding organisms as embodied feeling is the missing link to making sense of the weirdness of modern physics, particularly the fact that the ‘observer’ is always connected to the ‘objects’ described (so-called ‘entanglement’). In organisms, such entanglement is created through subjective experience—feeling. Feeling is entanglement experienced as inwardness, and as desire for more entanglement in order to unfold and live (Spinoza’s ‘Conatus’). Through inner experience organisms reveal that ‘observations’ are not made by ‘observers’ about ‘objects’, but actually are the inward aspect of the world’s involvement with itself. Every standpoint is an experience of the whole getting in touch with itself. This panpsychic view can help us understand the degree to which all of reality is profused with subjectivity, and how our own subjective experience is an experience which the whole makes about being itself. With this, we are able to formulate a ‘general theory of conativity’. This views the desire for mutual transformation and its accompanying creation of standpoints of meaning and concern as an irreducible feature of reality.

In this essay I will explore the possibility of an objective ecological ethics. To do this, I follow the embodied ethos of relationships: meaningful expression and mutual sharing occuring in living organisms and systems. Living beings on various levels of identity (cellular selves, individuals, and ecosystems) strive toward increased aliveness. They are self-healing, and generate meaningful relationships, all without the need or interference of human ethical thinking. Ecosystems tend toward complexity and organisms tend to avoid their own destruction. Both tendencies create “natural values” – values not extractable into abstraction, yet nonetheless fundamentally embodied in the actions of living beings and living systems. An ethics based on these principles (or insights) is inclusive in that it can be conceived as a sort of “poetic objectivity”. Here the ethically good is the increase in “aliveness”, which can be shared by other beings, and which is only possible as “being through the other”. Aliveness is ineffable and cannot be extracted analytically. Hence it is objective only in a poetic sense that can be shared through participation. An ethics of poetic objectivity leaves room to negotiate individual relationships and narratives while providing goodness as an encompassing context tuning into the degree of sharing and mutual inspiration to be more alive. The natural values generated by sharing transformative relationships produce the whole of nature as an “ethical commons”. Its principles can be instructive in reorganising human exchange on ethical and economical levels.