What is Life? (3.1)
life as bios
The soul is a breath of living spirit, that with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life. Just so, the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.1
—Saint Hildegaard von Bingen
In the last pieces, we explored various approaches to understanding life and concluded that they generally misapprehend their subject by mistaking the quantitative signature of life for life itself. In fact, it is likely that the only reason it strikes us as even remotely plausible to explain life through the methods of quantitative science is because we already know what life is. Hence, we draw on an immediate and intuitive familiarity of life to recognize its signature in non-living media in the same way that one can understand a footprint by relating it to its agent cause. Conversely, it is incoherent to attempt to reduce the agent cause to its effect whether in respect to a footprint, a thermodynamic signature, or anything else.
Plainly stated, we know what life is both because we perceive it, and also because we are it. Thus, we experience life directly. We live it ourselves and relate to it, and through it, in other beings. If we really had to begin our explanation of life from non-living physical and chemical processes, we would never arrive at our end because we could never even begin. We skip over this inevitable explanatory gulf by unconsciously interpolating our immediate knowledge of life from outside of the physicalistic or materialistic explanation we are proposing. Perhaps the most famous proponent of physicalism in our age, the late scientist Stephen Hawking, hints at the explanatory gap of his own method when he asks, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”2 Regrettably, the moment this question is posed, Hawking proceeds to set about explaining it away. In this case, Hawking proposed that, in fact, nothing was needed to breathe fire into the equations:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.3
Of course, it is hardly an explanation to declare that none is needed. The original question vis-à-vis the origin and definition of life, therefore, remains just as open in light of the scientific account as that in respect to that of Creation per se.
on the nature of definition
In the spirit of beginning to explore this question, it may be helpful to consider what we have in mind with the term “definition.” Specifically, we can imagine the instance of defining “yellow.” A common technical definition of yellow would explain yellow according to its correlative wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum, which is roughly 570 nm. In this case, however, it is not difficult to see that the latter describes the medium by which yellow is conveyed to one’s eye, but discloses nothing of the nature of yellow itself. If a scale reveals 1kg to be the weight of a block of rock salt, it does not follow that the nature of the block of rock salt is 1kg. Rather, 1kg is the manner in which the object must appear in a medium, viz., matter, or to an instrument (i.e. a scale) that can register only its weight. The question of whether “yellow” can possibly be abstracted from yellowness (i.e. the quality of yellow) belies its seriousness. No one who had never experienced yellow would have any more insight into it after he learned of its correlative wavelength than before in the same way that the weight of something alone would not convey the nature of the thing that possess that weight. It follows then that yellow is irreducible to anything not yellow. If someone were to insist that a definition according to its correlative wavelength were indeed sufficient to capture the meaning of “yellow,” then we could only conclude that she was meaning something other than the color with that word. Because it is our wish to avoid such an error in respect to the current enterprise, we must ensure that we maintain a fidelity to the phenomenon in question. Our task is to contemplate life and allow its definition to grow organically from our consideration.
In this manner, we will undertake our inquiry in a living manner—in the spirit of life itself—since to grow organically is, in the first instance, an essential characteristic of living beings. In contrast, a stone does not grow. Instead it is increased through aggregation in virtue of extrinsic forces. Sedimentation or volcanism, for instance, are ways that the Earth can generate rocks. The Earth grows and this generates rocks. An artefact, similarly, depends on the imposition of a form by means of an external agent, who must further administer this form through the application of a formative force. One may imagine Michelangelo chiseling away at his block of marble in Renaissance Rome, or Jakob Böhme sewing leather soles onto a pair of boots in Görlitz. In a similar manner, a mechanism also requires an external force to assemble it from its component parts.
introducing immanent causation
The approach we employ to understand these non-living things is evidently insufficient for our general purpose of understanding life. As one may turn a glove inside-out, so we would have to reverse our ordinary technological manner of thinking if are to have any hope of comprehending life. It is clear that in an organism, the formative principle no longer appears as an imposition from without, but rather constitutes an essential aspect of the organism as such. Thus, whereas external forces cause the formation of a rock, a sunflower causes itself to form directly it is provided with the necessary conditions from without. In the first instance, causation is transitive but in the second instance it is reflexive, which is to say, it acts upon itself. We will call this phenomenon “immanent causation” because the causation is intrinsic to the entity itself. In this manner, we have hit upon an essential aspect of life.
We can continue our exploration by considering whether it is possible to refine our notion of immanent causation to account for the diverse forms of life. We are fortunate to inherit the legacy of great thinkers of the past, since the results of their investigations lend us an advantage of vision—if
we see more things and more distant things than did they, [it is] not because our sight is keener nor because we are taller than they, but because they lift us up and add their giant stature to our height….We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants4
Aristotle, or il maestro di color che sanno,5 as Dante referred to him, helpfully delineated various degrees of life, which he called psyche. Thus, one of his most famous treatises is called Peri Psychēs (Περὶ Ψυχῆς). It is most commonly known by its Latin title, De Anima, which means “On the Soul.” Aristotle uses the word “soul” to the mean “the principle of life,” which is the same principle we meant to indicate by the term “immanent causation.” Aristotle distinguishes several gradients of soul-life, from vegetative, to sensitive, to appetitive, to locomotive, to rational. Each of these dimensions of life depends on the ones that precede it in the manner that the blossom of flower depends on everything green that came before it. We will presently examine these dimensions of psyche in more detail. In this piece, we will attempt to understand the first gradient of life and leave the following ones for future pieces.
the threptikon, which is, the “the vegetative power” or plant soul
The threptikon, which is often translated as “vegetative power,” but which might also be called the “plant soul,” “nourishing soul,” or “formative soul,” is the most fundamental dimension of psyche. Thus, the threptikon is the sine qua non for life. It designates the first degree of immanent causation in which the organism works upon itself to generate, build, maintain, and reproduce its form or body. The threptikon is the active power of life without which a plant would wither. It may be clear by now that it is beyond the scope of physical science to study this power. Such an assertion may surprise some readers who might suppose life to be exactly the subject of physiology and biology as disciplines of study: biology, after all is nominally “the account of life,” while physiology is “the account of nature.” More careful consideration, however, will reveal that biology and physiology study the products of life as manifest in the medium of matter. As argued above, the signature of life in matter is not the same thing as life as such. This dichotomy is isomorphic to the scale the registered the rock-salt in the medium of weight. The nature of the sciences and their relation to life is a straightforward consequence of the explicit spirit of the natural sciences from their very inception. Francis Bacon, for example, famously set forth the method of natural science in 1605 in the Advancement of Learning:
[Natural science] doth make inquiry, and take consideration of the same natures: but how? Only as to the material and efficient causes of them, and not as to the forms [and final causes]…Matter rather than forms should be the object of our attention, its configuration and changes of configuration, and simple action, and laws of action or motion, for forms are figments of the human mind, unless you call those laws of action forms.6
Bacon refers to the Aristotelian schema of four causes: efficient, material, formal, and final. In the terms that we have assumed for this particular investigation, Aristotle’s material cause presents causes that are extrinsic to the nature of a being, while formal and final causes are immanent to this nature. Efficient causality is immanent to a living being and extrinsic to a mineral or artefact. By “nature,” we mean “essence,” and by “essence” we mean that which makes a given being that being that it is. In other words, the nature of a thing could not be changed and the thing remain what it is. The material out of which that thing is fashioned or constitutes itself, however, could be substituted with other matter and the thing could retain its identity. Theseus’ ship, for instance, remains Theseus’ ship even after its hull is replaced with new planks.7 Living creatures, as a rule, constitute “dissipative structures” that “cycle” through matter.8 As we noted above, the essence of life is to be its own formal and efficient cause. This is just what differentiates life from non-life. It is telling to observe that the efficient and material causes are to be the exclusive objects of natural science and that these are precisely the causes that fail to distinguish what is living from what is not. For this reason, we concluded above that even the “life sciences” are actually physical sciences since do not take life as their object, but only life’s image in material bodies and efficient processes.
J. W. von Goethe was keenly aware of the need to supplement the physical sciences with a study of life. Indeed this aspiration was a continual theme in Goethe’s biography. In a letter in 1770, for instance, Goethe wrote of a butterfly:
The poor creature trembles in the net, rubs off its most beautiful colours; and even if one captures it unharmed, it still lies there finally stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature; something else belongs to it, a main part, and in this case as in every other, a most major main part: its life …9
The same theme appears decades later in 1808 in the lines from Faust: Part I:
Who’ll know aught living and describe it well,
Seeks first the spirit to expel.
He then has the component parts in hand
But lacks, alas! the spirit’s bond.
Goethe went on to devote a great portion of his life to developing a scientific method that was suited to study life, and not life’s image in physics. His morphological studies of plants represented his most concerted endeavours in this field. Although not unknown, one might imagine Goethe’s scientific work would have exerted greater influence on subsequent generations. He himself held his scientific work in higher esteem than all of his poetic achievements combined,10 which is a significant statement from the man who is regarded as the Shakespeare of the German language. One obvious explanation for the lack of popularity of Goethe’s method is that it demands a far more energetic engagement with the world of experience than many are wont to give. The conventional scientific method’s ideal of objectivity often allows the scientist to study the phenomenon in question at an arm’s length, as it were. In this way, “objectivity” is invoked as a license for the scientist to maintain a bourgeois impersonality towards living nature. It can hardly be a surprise if one, from this condition, begins to imagine that the world could be reduced to an handful of abstract principles. The conventional scientific method is perfectly suited for disclosing the meaningless aspect of the world, like the statistical models of thermodynamics, or the blind evolutionary pressures of natural selection.11 A mistake would be to suppose that because physical science studies the aspect of nature that is without meaning, it follows that this is nature’s only aspect. Another mistake would be to suppose that the same method of science that was developed to study the meaningless aspect would be suited to study life. We only imagine life could be meaningless because we assume as a premise what is supposed to be demonstrated. Goethe strove to counteract this tendency in his work, seeking to allow phenomena to reveal their meaning, which is their being.
Goethe devoted his studies to the vegetative, nourishing, or formative soul, elaborating our understanding of what Aristotle called to threptikon. We could also understand this as the quality the makes an organism an organism instead of an aggregation of organic material. Cultures of all ages have recognized this force and investigated in according to their particular values. The Egyptians, for instance, called it ka,12 while in the Yogic tradition of Ancient India it was called alternatively the pranamaya-kosha or the linga-sharira.13 Paracelsus called it the “archeus.” Theosophical and anthroposophical teachings call it the etheric body or life body.14
In our continuing investigation of life, will generally follow Aristotle’s terminology, since it is not less scientific than other systems, and more so than many. It has the further advantage of being relatively unknown. This is an advantage because it may alleviate readers from the temptation to interpolate prior associations with the words, into their evaluations of the concepts that these words are meant to denote. We wish, as it were, to bear the wine of this question with new wineskins. In conclusion and in transition to a new subtopic of investigation, we can assert that the threptikon is foundational to life, but it does not exhaust life’s scope or nature. We conceived of the principle of “immanent causation” above as an essential aspect of life, and in this piece, we have attempted to consider this principle in respect to life as bios—“life of the body.” In pieces to come, we will attempt to investigate life as psyche—“life of the soul”—and life as zoē—“life in the spirit.”
von Bingen, Meditations of Hildegard von Bingen, edited by Gabriele Uhlein (Inner Traditions, 1983), 61.
Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 174.
Roberts, L. “Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe.” Telegraph. Posted on telegraph.co.uk September 2, 2010.
Newton later popularized this metaphor original with John of Salisbury, writing of Bernard of Chartres:
We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants; we see more things and more distant things than did they, not because our sight is keener nor because we are taller than they, but because they lift us up and add their giant stature to our height. Metalogicon, trans. Daniel McGarry (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1955), 167.
Plutarch, Theseus 23.1
The Athenians preserved the boat—a thirty-oared ship—on which Theseus sailed with his companions and came back safely until the time of Demetrius of Phalerus, changing out the older wood and replacing it with strong, new parts until the ship became a famous example to philosophers of the problem of growth. Some say that it remained the same ship, others claim it did not.
τὸ δὲ πλοῖον ἐν ᾧ μετὰ τῶν ἠϊθέων ἔπλευσε καὶ πάλιν ἐσώθη, τὴν τριακόντορον, ἄχρι τῶν Δημητρίου τοῦ Φαληρέως χρόνων διεφύλαττον οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, τὰ μὲν παλαιὰ τῶν ξύλων ὑφαιροῦντες, ἄλλα δὲ ἐμβάλλοντες ἰσχυρὰ καὶ συμπηγνύντες οὕτως ὥστε καὶ τοῖς: φιλοσόφοις εἰς τὸν αὐξόμενον λόγον ἀμφιδοξούμενον παράδειγμα τὸ πλοῖον εἶναι, τῶν μὲν ὡς τὸ αὐτό, τῶν δὲ ὡς οὐ τὸ αὐτὸ διαμένοι λεγόντων.
The term “dissipative structure” was coined by the physicist Ilya Prigogine. See this article for more background: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5008858.
Quoted in Steiner, Goethean Science (GA1), chapter II, translated by William Lindemann, Mercury Press, 1988. Originally published 1883.
As to what I have done as a poet… I take no pride in it… but that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colors – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.
Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, translated by John Oxenford (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 302.
Cf. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, (2006), 9:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all”
And Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (1995), 202-3.
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
For instance, on may read in the Book of the Dead:
Osiris, may he rest in peace, knows the names of your ka, the aspect of your soul that abides in the ground:
Nourishing ka,
ka of food,
lordly ka,
ka the ever-present helper,
ka which is a pair of kas begetting more kas,
healthy ka,
sparkling ka,
victorious ka,
ka the strong,
ka that strengthens the sun each day to rise from the world of the dead,
ka of shining resurrection,
powerful ka,
effective ka.
Cf. the Taittiriya Upanishad, circa 4th century
In German, Ätherleib, Ätherkörper or Lebensleib.