What is Life? It is a question that philosophers, theologians and scientists have been trying to define and answer for a long time. You might ask why should we care? Well to begin with, we are living beings, and that fact distinguishes us from most things in the Universe. Further still, we are among the few living beings in the Universe, so understanding the nature of life might be an important step toward understanding ourselves. And no, we are not talking about the meaning of life, the purpose of life or the philosophy of life. We are talking about the concept of life itself.
The Oxford Dictionary defines life as "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change preceding death or the existence of an individual human being, plant or animal". NASA's working definition of life states, "life is a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution." While there are a multitude of definitions for the questions about the meaning, purpose and philosophy of life, it remains a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms. This is difficult partly because life is a process, not a pure substance; especially "since life is such a ubiquitous and fundamental concept, the definitions of it are legion." as John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler espoused in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. The nature of this problem can be understood by comparing this semantic task to the ancient Hindu story of identifying an elephant by having each of six blind men touch only the tail, the trunk, or the leg; what answer a biologist might give can differ dramatically from the answer given by a theoretical physicist, a philosopher or a theologian.
Yet none of these issues stop us from trying to define life itself and understand its meaning, purpose and philosophy. The philosophical question of the definition of life has increasing practical importance in this age of science where almost all extra-terrestrial deep space probes (including Rosetta) seem to have 1 main fundamental purpose - to find, understand and explain life as we know it. While most of these efforts continue to take to biology, chemistry or physics; for the purposes of this blog post lets try to postulate a definition of life from a philosophical standpoint.
There have been three main philosophical approaches to the problem of defining life that remain relevant today; namely Aristotle's view of life as animation; Descartes's view of life as mechanism; and Kant's view of life as organization. To briefly summarize and contrast the 3: Aristotle viewed life as any body / object / thing that is animated as a result of its soul which cannot exist by itself and has little to do with individual identity. According to him, each living being / object / thing is different because it / he / she is composed of varying compounds of form and matter. That is, different bodies / objects / things are animated by the same set of capacities, by the same (kind of) soul for each kind of object / thing / body. The soul therefore differentiated a living from a non-living thing / being. Descartes argued that the human body works like a machine and it follows the laws of physics. The pieces of the human machine, he argued, are like clockwork mechanisms. The mind or soul, on the other hand, is a non-material entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of physics. He went on to say, "I think, therefore I am;" that is to say that life is the object / thing / body being aware of its own being. Kant argued that all living beings / things exist in a self-organized fashion due to an internal purposiveness that accounts for the specificity of the structure of an organized being. As such, in contrast to a mere machine; organized and self-organized beings have formative force rather than just motive force; because of their soul or their being self aware. Thus life according to Kant, is an object / thing / body that has the ability to self-organize and produce within a set of process laws actualized by an external agent.
In short, these theories tell us that life is either a soul in a being / a self-aware being / a being able to self-organize and fend to keep itself alive. At the risk of being labelled as somebody who is pretty dumb, but acting smart, i posit an alternative definition for life as a unison of some aspects of the above 3 theories and more. Life is an organic being with a soul, that is self-aware, has the ability to self-organize and fend to keep itself alive in order to find and accomplish its purpose for being alive - which is to keep all other organic life going in its own way. This purpose becomes prime to all that is living and without it life doesn't exist; further this purpose doesn't come from being itself because it would mean having the ability to change the reason for its being - something no life is capable of doing. If life has died it is because it has exhausted its purpose contributing to ongoing life. A plant for example exists in order for it to multiply itself, while also providing of its produce to animal and man alike. Further it dies when it has played its part in keeping itself and other life going on - by ensuring that other life has been sustained by it in the past and will continue to be sustained by its multiplied forms in the future. A man / woman is alive in order to reproduce and also live out their lives in an attempt to keep other lives going around them. This causal action makes for the cyclical nature of life. So, in essence the purpose of life is inherent to life itself. As such, any definition of life should encompass such purpose.
Therefore, i would define life as a caused self-aware being with a soul, that has the sure ability to self-organize, produce and fend to keep itself alive with the purpose of keeping all other organic life going on; in its own way or form. This would then limit bots or humanoids as being counted for life because they do not have a soul nor an ability to produce. On the other hand, a bacterial form on a distant planet is definitely life; also the unborn fetus in the womb is also definitely life because both fulfill each of the above criteria. Hence a life as a legacy is a life that given more to the rest of life around it. Robert Frost is known to have said, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." This truly is the essence of life - going on and hence i choose to characterize all life in this way as the on-going goings-on.
Though simplistic sounding, what do you think of the above as a philosophical definition of life?
Kant and the Unity of Reason By Angelica Nuzzo
