The Path of Life
The question about life is inevitable. Our life is essentially what we are, what emerges within us at every moment. Our daily existence constantly leads us to think that our life is our circumstances, all the events that happen around us all the time. And in a certain way it is. Circumstances allow us or not to become what we are. And if they don’t allow it, we suffer. There is within us a desire to self-realize, to become all that we can be. This gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
Life then gives us internal satisfactions or very deep pains. This is the language of life. The language of life is then the language of feelings. There is a dissonance and a sense of internal strangeness when they try to explain these feelings to us rationally, mechanistically. Thus, for example, we are told that dopamine is the “happiness hormone”, and that it is stimulated when we do activities that we like, such as exercising, laughing, eating something we like, listening to music or meditating. All of these activities trigger what is called the “reward system”. Even more strange is that they try to teach us that this hormone dopamine is produced from the amino acid tyrosine, which is converted into L-DOPA by the enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase, and then converted into dopamine thanks to the enzyme aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase. There was a time when I myself found all this extremely interesting, and then my “reward system” was probably triggered. For a while, this path gave purpose and meaning to my life, because I believed I was getting closer to the cause, the root of my existential questions. However, after that while, which was quite long, I began to feel that all of that, rather than enriching and fulfilling my life, was emptying it of sense and meaning. Instead of getting closer to the knowledge of life, i.e. biology, I was getting further and further away. The language of reason, the study of the biochemical mechanisms of biological processes, is not the language that questions and has access to the secrets of life.
I remember from my childhood that desire to unravel the great mysteries of humanity. I remember asking myself those vital and existential questions that as adults seem childish to us, that is, vague and ethereal. What is the meaning of our existence? What is our life’s purpose? What is this largely chaotic world we call reality all about? Science, the scientific community, does not place much value on these kinds of questions. They are not scientific questions, that is, questions formulated following the Western orthodox modern scientific method. Where is the hypothesis? Where are the results? Where are the materials and methods? But above all things: show me the proof of what you are telling me. For modern science, truth must be verified and proven, which generally implies making an experimental intervention in nature. Modern science is the inquisitorial institution by nature. Following this path, science will never come to know life, because it seeks to extract its secrets by force, killing it. The first impulse of a modern scientist who wants to know what the life of a toad consists of is to dissect it.
But then, if life cannot be known by dissecting it, analyzing it, how can it be known? This question is doubly important because knowing how to know life will allow us at the same time to know what life is. Many thinkers throughout history have faced the dilemma of how to know and define a living being. Many of them encountered the futility and evanescence of dissecting a living being and being left empty-handed, feeling that what they were looking for had already vanished, had already disappeared. Aristotle was a notable student of living beings, a naturalist or biologist we would say today, who probably learned the art from his father who was a physician. His biological works preceded his philosophical works. Aristotle knew very well the morphology of most of the groups of animals that appear in zoology books today. However, Aristotle, when he had to define what an animal is, said the following: “[the psyche [ψυχή]] is like the principle [ἀρχή] of a living being [ζῷον]” (Aristotle, 402a6)[1]. What a strange way to define what a living being is? Is not a living being defined by its morphological and physical-chemical body composition? Did Aristotle not know how an animal was composed, what its parts were? Yes, he knew all this. Even so, what defined an animal for Aristotle was not its body, its composition, its parts and its morphology, but what defined it was its psyche. The Greek word ψυχή is a term that was later translated as anima in Latin and soul in English. Of course, this concept long predates the appearance of Christianity. An animal is then that which has an anima. In fact, all living beings have psyche, even plants. Psyche is then the distinctive characteristic of a living being and what differentiates it from the non-living. But what is this psyche that Aristotle talks so much about? He tells us: “the psyche [ψυχή] is a substance [οὐσία] in the sense of form [εἶδος] of a natural [φυσικός] body [σῶμα] that has life [ζωή] potentially [δύναμις]” (Aristotle, 412a19)[2]. With this definition, Aristotle is telling us many things. Firstly, he tells us that the psyche is a substance, by which he means that it is a form. If we add this definition to the previous one, we then have that the psyche is principle [ἀρχή] and form [εἶδος]. For Aristotelian philosophy, ἀρχή is that which gives rise to something, we could say its cause; while εἶδος is that which gives form to matter. In this manner, the psyche is the formal cause of a living being, that which gives it life-form. And the psyche is not only the principle of life (Ostachuk, 2016), but it is also potential life. This means that the psyche has within itself its own end, its own purpose, its τέλος. In this sense, the psyche is entelechy, ἐντελέχεια, that is, with the end within itself. The prototypical example of this, given by Aristotle himself, is the seed of a tree, which contains within itself all the information necessary for its complete formation. This is what today we would call a teleological process.
Another person who many years later returned to the Aristotelian question in some way was Hans Driesch. Driesch was a great developmental biologist. He studied with August Weismann and Ernst Haeckel. Perhaps his most famous experiments, and for which he would be remembered in posterity, were those carried out at the Zoological Station of Naples in 1891. The historical importance of these experiments is undoubted, and at that time they contradicted the results obtained by Wilhelm Roux in 1888. Driesch separated the first two blastomeres from a sea urchin egg. Unlike what Roux had obtained using frog eggs, that is, half of an organism, Driesch obtained a complete organism from each of these blastomeres from sea urchin eggs (Driesch, 1908, vol. 1, p.61). Specifically, these results refuted the segregationist theory of Roux and Weismann. However, its scope is much greater. Ultimately, what this experiment is pointing out is that there is a potential within each blastomere that is not lost after the first cell division and that allows the whole organism to be generated. This potential cannot be material. If so, it would be lost and disintegrate in the first cell division, as occurred during Roux’s experiment. But if this autonomous factor responsible for morphogenesis is not material, then what is it? This is where modern science reaches its limits, and the need to expand its boundaries appears: if it is not material, then it must be formal. Driesch called this potential form entelechy, a term coined by Aristotle which, as we saw, means with the end within itself. The potential nature of this entelechy is fully reflected in the very definition that Driesch gives to his new concept. For Driesch, morphogenesis is “manifoldness in space […] produced where no manifoldness was” (Driesch, 1908, vol. 1, p. 144). But where does this “manifoldness” come from? “[W]as there nothing “manifold” previous to morphogenesis?” (Driesch, 1908, vol. 1, p. 144). Obviously, there was nothing of an extensive nature, but there must necessarily have been something that would then be of an intensive nature. The entelechy, says Driesch, must then be an intensive manifoldness.
Life is then a project. More than what it is, it is what it can become, the internal capacities and faculties that it can develop externally. As a consequence, life is inseparable from sense. If life has a principle and an end, then it has direction and sense. Curiously, the word sense derives from the Latin word sensus, and this from the Proto-Indo-European root sent, which means both to head for, to go, to travel, and to feel. The same goes for the German version of the word sense, Sinn. It derives from the Proto-West-Germanic sinn, which means both sense-perception and way-direction, and from the same Proto-Indo-European root sent. The Proto-Germanic verb sinnaną means to feel, to sense direction, to think. Sense is then a path, traveling along a path and feeling-thinking that path. Life is essentially teleological, and without a purpose, without the question about sense, life loses its meaning. It becomes a vague random wandering or, worse still, an automatic deterministic mechanicism. Generally, the first leads to the second: total uncertainty leads to a desperate embrace of the most absolute certainty. As far as life is concerned, it has been completely lost sight of. One no longer has one’s own path to follow, but rather travels a path drawn and outlined by another. This is the ultimate danger that awaits us if we try to understand the phenomenon of life by reducing it to a mere mechanistic system governed by the inert laws of physics and mathematics: man himself would become a prisoner and slave of his own laws, that is, a slave of his own creation.
We must return to the path of life. The path of life is the path of existence, the path of good living. We must redirect our impulse and our desire to the search for better modes of existence, to modes of life that allow us to live healthily and in harmony with the nature of which we are a part. This is not at all simple in the current conditions, in our current mode of existence. This mode of existence constantly drags us and distances us from the path of life, from putting life at the center of our existence (Ostachuk, 2018). The current mode of existence is the capitalist mode of existence. The capitalist mode of existence is much more than an economic system. It is a system of organization of life: it is a system in which capital organizes life. It is a system in which life is at the service of capital. Not only this, capital uses and exploits life to continue on its path of vampirization and enslavement of life. Let us make this very clear: we are not talking about economy, we are talking about life, about modes of existence, about an area of knowledge that has no name. We could call it existentialism or vitalism, if these terms were not loaded with a connotation that the area we are defining does not have. An appropriate term might be Euzoology, since it means the science for a good life. It would be an area of experiential knowledge that would seek modes of existence compatible with life, healthy modes of life that allow man to develop his full potential and capabilities. A science that allows man to follow the path of life.
First, this science should revitalize and re-empower life, giving it back all the potential it contains. To do this, it is necessary to start perhaps with the most difficult thing. It is necessary to return the concept of freedom to the vital sphere, extracting it from the economic sphere. Today, markets are free and men are subjugated. We are not aware of the level of submission in which humanity currently finds itself. We are constantly told that there is no other option, that these are the rules of the game, that history has come to an end, that the only alternative is to adapt to survive. Let us say it all at once and loudly: the supposed freedom of the market leads us to a frenetic competition and struggle for existence, to the survival of the fittest. Natural selection is capital’s own macabre activity, which decides who lives and who dies in an imaginary context of scarcity (see, for example, Ostachuk, 2019). For all this, men must be free, not markets. Markets and the economy must adapt to man, and not man to the economy and the market. This is the first task, and the most difficult, because man has been educated from a very early age to obey, to comply with the rules, to adapt and get used to submission. So much so, that it is what is most natural to him: that things continue in the same way as until now. In this great factory that is modern civilization, man feels like only a cogwheel within an enormous bureaucratic and repressive machinery, which does not allow any piece to move from place to place. In this kind of current society, the phrase “he does what he wants” is a condemnatory phrase that leads to the exclusion and ostracism of those who dare to put it into practice. The mottos celebrated and awarded are “obey and you will succeed”, “adapt and success will be yours”. A successful servitude in a Brave new world.
A central research area for this new science for a good life, or Euzoology, is the study of life organizational forms. In a hyper-interactive and hyper-socialized world like ours, it seems imperative to us to deeply study what modes of structural organization of life allow and guarantee a healthier mode of existence for the development of the capabilities and potentialities of all people. Clearly, not any organizational structure can guarantee this, that is, that all people can follow their path of life. There is a somewhat implicit and unexpressed belief that a greater organization, that is, a more elaborate and intricate organization, ensures a higher quality of life, generally resorting to explanations around performance and efficiency. For example, consider the Taylorian and Fordian organizational systems. For these systems, there is nothing more effective than the complete mechanization of work on an assembly line. This conception of organization reduces man to the limited function of a piece within a great machinery. This is the organizational form of modern science, and the way it conceives living beings. Perhaps, other life organizational forms are required for the liberation and revitalization of the human potentialities, forms that allow to put life at the center of our existence (Ostachuk, 2024).
We can see how all these seemingly disparate and unconnected issues we are discussing are closely related. We can now see more clearly how the question about life inevitably leads us to the question about modes of existence and life forms. We can see how the mechanicist method of modern science leads to the self-submission of man, and how understanding the teleological sense of life leads to thinking about the modes of existence for a good life. The sense of life is the search for the favorable conditions for the development of a healthy and full life. This is the path of life.
References
Aristotle (1931). De anima. In: Ross, W.D. (Ed.). The works of Aristotle. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Driesch, H. (1908). The science and philosophy of the organism. Vol. 1. London: Adam and Charles Black.
Ostachuk, A. (2016). The principle of life: from Aristotelian psyche to Drieschian entelechy. Ludus Vitalis. 24(45): 37-59. [In Spanish]
Ostachuk, A. (2018). Life: the center of our existence. Ludus Vitalis. 26(50): 257-260. [In Spanish] [English version]
Ostachuk, A. (2019). The ideological matrix of science: natural selection and immunity as case studies. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. 15(1): 182-213.
Ostachuk, A. (2024). Power to the people: a network analysis of dystopian and eutopian life organizational forms. Buenos Aires: Evolutio Press.
[1] Smith’s translation in Ross’s edition is as follows: “the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life” (Aristotle, 1931, 402a6).
[2] Smith’s translation in Ross’s edition is as follows: “the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it” (Aristotle, 1931, 412a19).