For the same reason, my self-consciousness cannot place me outside of my life. Even in my most explicit forms of self-reflection, I cannot be detached. On the contrary, my self-consciousness only exists in and through the practical activity of sustaining my life, which means that there is no contemplative self to which I can withdraw. Even the project of retreating into passivity is still a project that requires my engagement—a project to which I have to hold myself—and by the same token a project that I can transform or call into question. This practical activity of leading my life is the minimal form of my self-consciousness and the condition of my spiritual freedom.
II
The distinction between natural and spiritual freedom proceeds from the secular notion of life that underlies all my arguments in this book. From a religious perspective, a life that ends in death is meaningless and without purpose. For life to have meaning and purpose, it must ultimately be grounded or absorbed in something that is infinite—something that will never die. My argument is, on the contrary, that any purpose of life depends on the prospect of death. This is not to say that death is the purpose of life. Death is not a purpose, not a completion or fulfillment of anything, but rather the irrevocable loss of life. The point, however, is that nothing can be at stake in life—that no purpose can matter—without running the risk of death. Life can matter only in light of death.
Our individual and collective efforts to sustain life bear witness to our relation to death. It is a central feature of our spiritual life that we remember the dead, just as it is a central feature of our spiritual life that we seek to be remembered after our death. This importance of memory—of recollection—is inseparable from the risk of forgetting. Our fidelity to past generations is animated by the sense that they live on only insofar as we sustain their memory, just as we will live on only insofar as future generations sustain the memory of us. This form of living on should not be conflated with a religious notion of eternal life. If we are compelled to keep the memory of the dead—if we make ourselves responsible for keeping them alive in us—it is because we recognize that they are dead. Likewise, if we are concerned that we will be remembered after we are gone, it is because we recognize that we will be dead. Without the prospect of death—without the prospect that our lives will be lost forever—there would be no purpose in maintaining either natural or spiritual life. Life cannot make sense as life without death. Only a finite life can make sense as a life. This is the argument that I will deepen in this chapter, in showing how finitude is the condition of possibility for both any form of natural life and any form of spiritual life.
The starting point for my argument is the concept of life as characterized by self-maintenance. A living being cannot simply exist but must sustain and reproduce itself through its own activity. The concept of self-maintenance underlies all definitions of living organisms and living systems as self-organizing. To be alive is necessarily to have a self-relation, and any self-relation consists in the activity of self-maintenance. Nonliving entities do not have any form of self-relation because they are not doing anything to maintain their own existence. A stone simply lies on the ground for an indefinite amount of time. Whether the stone is moved or broken has nothing to do with an activity of its own. This is the categorical distinction between the nonliving and the living. Entities that exist without the activity of self-maintenance are intelligible neither as living nor as dead but as nonliving. In contrast, an entity is intelligible as living if its existence depends on its own activity of maintaining itself. If the activity of self-maintenance ceases, the entity is no longer intelligible as living but as dead.
Philosophically considered, the concept of life must be distinguished from specific biological forms of life. To assume that life depends on specific forms of biology is question begging. We cannot define life merely by listing the traits we encounter in various species of life, since this begs the question of what makes it possible to identify these species as species of life in the first place. Current biological notions of life confirm the concept of life as self-maintenance, but they do not exhaust all possible forms of life. The concept of life is formal in the sense that it is not specific to a certain substance or substrate. We may be able to engineer forms of life that rely on an artificial substrate, and we may discover species of life (e.g., on other planets) that do not exhibit the carbon base of our currently known forms of life.
The philosophical question is what makes any life intelligible as a life. Identifying a material substance or a set of material properties is not by itself sufficient to make something intelligible as living. Rather, an entity is intelligible as living only insofar as it exhibits the purposive activity of self-maintenance. If E.T. lands in your living room, you can make sense of him as a living being, even though he is made of a material that you have never seen before. Likewise, if you land on another planet, whether the entities you encounter are living or not depends on the activity they exhibit rather than on the material of which they are made.
Which kinds of material substrates are compatible with living activity is an empirical question that cannot be settled in advance. The philosophical task is rather to deduce the necessary features of life from the formal characteristic of self-maintenance. What is at stake is the very idea of life—all the way from the most elementary forms of natural life to the most elevated forms of spiritual life.3
The first feature we can deduce is that life must be inherently finite. The purposive activity of self-maintenance presupposes that the life of the living being depends on the activity, which is to say that the living being would disintegrate and die if it were not maintaining itself. Without this prospect of death, the purpose of self-maintenance would be unintelligible. Living activity is intelligible only for someone or something that has to keep itself alive in relation to an immanent possibility of death. If life could not be lost, there would be no vital interest in the activity of self-maintenance.
The second feature we can deduce is that life must be dependent on a fragile material body. Life cannot be reduced to a specific material substrate, but it requires some form of material body that is in need of self-maintenance. The material body of a life must be fragile, in the sense that it must run the risk of disintegrating or ceasing to function. If the living being were not dependent on a fragile material body, there would be neither a subject nor an object of self-maintenance. To be alive is necessarily to be engaged in the activity of sustaining a material body that may cease to be animated.
The third feature we can deduce is that there must be an asymmetrical relation of dependence between the living and the nonliving. Any form of animation necessarily has a relation to the inanimate (the prospect of its own death), but the inverse argument does not hold. Inanimate matter does not need any form of animation in order to exist. While the living cannot exist without a relation to nonliving matter, nonliving matter can exist without any relation to the living. This is why it is intelligible that a material universe can exist before there are any living beings and why it is intelligible that a material universe can remain after all forms of life are extinguished. The very existence of life is a fragile and destructible phenomenon.
The concept of life as self-maintaining must therefore be distinguished from any idea of life as self-sufficient. The form of self-maintenance is not a form of sovereignty but a form of finitude. The reason a living being must maintain and reproduce itself is that it is not self-sufficient but susceptible to disintegration and death.
These features of the concept of life make any life intelligible as a life. To be alive is a formally distinctive way of being an entity, which is characterized by the self-maintaining activity of a fragile material being. The concept of life has two genera, which I call natural life and spiritual life. In keeping with the concept of life itself, the genera of life are defined not in terms of material substances or material properties but in terms of two different fo
rms of life-activities. The genera of natural and spiritual life are two formally distinctive ways of being a living being, which are characterized by natural and spiritual freedom respectively.4
The genus of natural life comprises all species that exhibit the traits of natural freedom. Any species that is engaged in the purposive activity of self-maintenance—while being unable to call into question the purpose of the activity itself—belongs to the genus of natural life. The genus of natural life thereby encompasses all known species of life except for human beings, all the way from plants to the most advanced primates. While these forms of life are vastly different, they all belong to the genus of natural life insofar as they remain within the bounds of natural freedom. Any forms of life that we would be able to engineer—and any forms of life that we would discover on other planets—would also formally belong to the genus of natural life, insofar as the life-activities of these species were restricted to a form of natural freedom.
The first trait of natural freedom is the activity of self-reproduction. Any form of natural life is acting for the sake of self-preservation or the preservation of the species and thereby exhibits a fundamental form of self-determination. The continuous reproduction of the individual organism across a lifetime, as well as its possible replication or procreation in the form of other individuals, are expressions of the natural freedom of self-determination. The capacity for self-determination can vary greatly among different species of natural life. There is a vast difference between a plant that can replicate merely by disseminating its seeds, or an insect that necessarily dies in the act of copulation, and an animal that can survive its own act of procreation to live on with its descendants. The latter has a greater capacity for self-determination, since it can care for its own progeny and recognize itself in a generational chain, rather than being immediately subsumed by the reproduction of the species. Yet all these forms of life remain within the bounds of natural freedom, insofar as they cannot call into question the purpose of procreation and cannot transform the given ends of generational life.
The second trait of natural freedom is the ability of a living being to bear a negative self-relation. When faced with adversity, a living being does not passively submit to what happens but engages in some form of active resistance in accordance with its own self-determination. Even in disease or other forms of internal rupture, a living being is not simply negated but maintains itself in the negative experience of suffering. A stone, by contrast, cannot suffer from anything, since it has no self-relation and no ability to bear the negative within itself. The latter ability is a minimal condition for the natural freedom of self-determination. The ability to bear a negative self-relation makes it possible for a living being to strive to be itself, even when the striving entails great difficulty and pain. Moreover, the striving to be itself is intrinsic to any form of life. A living being always has to continue striving, not because it is incomplete or necessarily lacking anything, but because it has to keep itself alive. There is no final goal or completion of life, since life can come to an end only in death. Even in its fullest actuality, a living being must continue to strive to be alive, since life is essentially a temporal activity. The relation to the negative cannot be eliminated, since a living being is subject to constant alteration and has to maintain itself as it changes across time. The relation to the negative is therefore internal to the living being itself and part of its positive constitution.5
The third trait of natural freedom is the relation to a surplus of time. The striving self-maintenance of a living being necessarily generates more lifetime than is required to secure the means of survival, so there is at least a minimal amount of “free time” for every living being. The capacity to engage with free time is of course something that varies greatly among different species of natural life. Even a simple plant generates free time in itself, since it does not necessarily have to devote all its time to absorbing the light, water, and other forms of nourishment that are needed for its sustenance. If you remove a plant from any form of nourishment, it can still survive for a period of time, which is why the plant is a source of surplus. A plant, however, does not have the capacity to use its free time for itself, insofar as there is no activity that is distinct from the activity of self-preservation in the life of plants. In contrast, animals that can play games, explore new aspects of their environment, or be absorbed in purring, have a capacity for self-enjoyment that is distinct from self-preservation.6 Through this capacity, they are able not only to generate free time in themselves but also to enjoy their free time for themselves. In the free time of self-enjoyment, animals exceed the realm of necessity that is defined by self-preservation and open the realm of freedom. Yet even animals with highly refined capacities for self-enjoyment remain within the bounds of natural freedom, insofar as they cannot ask themselves how they should spend their time and thereby cannot relate to their time as free.
III
The genus of spiritual life comprises all species that do have the capacity to ask themselves how they should spend their time. The only known species of spiritual life is human being, but in principle there is nothing that precludes the possibility of discovering or engineering other species of spiritual life. Whether other species of spiritual life in fact can be discovered or engineered is again an empirical question that is not within the purview of my argument. My aim is rather to establish the formal traits of spiritual freedom, which are required for any possible spiritual life and thereby define the genus.
The traits of spiritual freedom are higher forms of the traits of natural freedom. To avoid any form of supernaturalism, an account of the traits of spiritual freedom must render intelligible how they can have evolved from the traits of natural freedom, which in turn have emerged from nonliving matter. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the purposive structures of natural freedom are qualitatively transformed in spiritual freedom. By virtue of spiritual freedom, I am a person and not merely a living being.
The first trait of spiritual freedom is that the purposes of life are treated as normative rather than as natural. As a spiritual being, I am acting not simply for the sake of preserving my life or the life of my species but for the sake of who I take myself to be. Who I take myself to be is a practical identity because it requires that I keep faith with a commitment. For example, if I have a life-defining commitment to a political cause, I take my life to be worth living because I am a political activist. My practical identity gives me a standard of integrity (a norm) in relation to which I understand myself as succeeding or failing to be myself. Many inclinations that I may otherwise have acted upon will be ruled out because they are not compatible with the integrity of my life as a political activist. My practical identity makes certain things show up as worthwhile and important, while others appear as distractions or temptations. My practical identity informs both how I lead my life and how I respond to what happens in my life. What it means to have a certain practical identity—e.g., what it means to be a political activist—is not only up to me but depends on socially shared norms. I can transform the norms through my practice, but in doing so I am always answerable to others and held to account for myself. In light of my practical identity, I am not just subject to my desires and aspirations but the subject of my desires and aspirations. In living my life I am also leading my life.
The notion of practical identity was pioneered by the philosopher Christine Korsgaard in her groundbreaking work on agency. The notion of practical identity, however, is not by itself sufficient to account for the formal unity that is required for personhood and for leading a life. As Korsgaard herself points out with characteristic rigor, there is a “missing principle” in her account of agency.7 There must be a principle of unity—of coherence—that makes it possible for a person to have several practical identities and adjudicate conflicts between them. For example, the demands of my practical identity as a political activist may become inco
mpatible with my practical identity as a father and how I respond to the conflict is a question of which practical identity I prioritize.
The order of priority among a person’s practical identities is what I call her “existential identity.” A person’s existential identity consists in how she prioritizes her practical identities and responds to conflicts between their respective demands. My existential identity—what it means to be “Martin”—is not an additional practical identity, but the constitutive practical activity of striving to hold together an order of priority between my practical identities. In terms of Neurath’s boat, my practical identities are different planks and my existential identity is the boat that holds the planks together in a fragile form. To be someone and do something, I cannot merely have a number of practical identities. There must be a principle of unity—being Martin—that renders my practical identities intelligible as mine and gives them an order of priority in my life. Without a principle of unity, I could not even experience a conflict or a contradiction between two of my practical identities, since I would not be able to understand that both practical identities are mine.
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