LIFE

In consideration of the ethical uses of science and technology the phenomenon of life, especially human life, has repeatedly played significant roles in both progressive and conservative arguments. In modern philosophy notions of life have also made repeated appearances, from Thomas Hobbes's claim that the fundamental aim of politics is to replace the insecurity of life in the state of nature with a more secure life by means, in part, of technology, to Friedrich Nietzsche's appeal to a life ideal that transcends concerns of personal security. Contemporary debates about the limits of biomedical interventions in terms of whether or not human life begins at conception and feminist criticisms of cultural tendencies to disembody life thus reflect and advance long-standing concerns. Indeed, at the beginning of philosophy in Europe, one of Socrates's fundamental theses was that "The unexamined life [bios] is not worth living for humans" (Apology 38a); and as a manifestation of his divinity, the Christian scriptures record Jesus's claim to being "the way, the truth, and the life [zoe]" (John 14:6).

Life Sciences

Science has from its earliest forms distinguished two fundamental realms in nature: the nonliving and the living. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) was among the first systematic investigators of nature and for centuries provided an authoritative orientation that took its bearings from the living. For Aristotle, living entities reveal the workings of nature better than the nonliving; life provides the key to explain the nonliving—in contrast to modern natural science, which seeks an explanation of life in terms of nonlife. Certainly life more clearly displays the dynamism and purposefulness that Aristotle sees as central to reality as a whole. Purposefulness, final causation, and teleology conceptualize that by which entities seek natural states or places proper to their kind. The acorn matures in order to become an oak tree because that is its inner nature; the oak tree maintains its state through metabolism because this inner nature has been achieved. Living things have an internal principle of motion and rest, which can be grasped by reason, whereas the non-living are moved by external forces, the rationality of which is more difficult to comprehend.

For modern natural science, however, it is the external forces moving nonliving entities that are most readily calculable, thus giving rise to physics in a new sense. René Descartes (1596–1650), for instance, proposed that animals are simply complex machines, and that all life functions (except human thinking) could be explained in terms of mechanical interactions. From the beginning, however, the adequacy of this view has been contested, and the reduction of life to physics and chemistry challenged. The vitalism of Hans Driesch (1867–1941) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who argued that life involved some nonphysical element or is governed by special principles, was but one of the more pronounced examples.

Traditional explanations for the variety of life—namely, that either species are eternal or divinely created—and how organisms change over time had long been scrutinized before Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published On the Origin of Species. It was Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, however, that produced the first comprehensive account of the changing diversity of life that appeared to go beyond simple mechanism without rejecting it. Fused with the model of biological inheritance developed by Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), the synthesis of evolution by natural selection operating on the gene became the cornerstone of modern biology.

In the early 1940s the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) proposed that genes functioned by means of a "molecular code-script" present in chromosomes. This pointed toward the idea of molecular biology. A decade later, in 1953, James D. Watson (b. 1928) and Francis Crick (1916–2004) discovered the double-helix molecular structure of DNA. Analyses of DNA eventually elucidated the connection between genetic information and the traits of living organisms, which describes the transcription and translation of genetic information into proteins.

Redefining Life

Difficulties nevertheless remain for developing a post-Aristotelian definition of life as a biological phenomenon. One common approach has been to consider an entity living if it exhibits the following characteristics at least once during its existence: growth, metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Yet in some sense fire meets all these criteria. Moreover, some entities are not clearly either living or nonliving. Chief among these are viruses, which contain protein and nucleic acid molecules that make up living cells but require the assistance of those cells to replicate. In response, life can be further described as cellular and homeostatic—even though this would continue to classify viruses as anomalous.

Systems theorists such as Ilya Prigogine, Fritjof Capra, and Francisco Varela, however, have preferred to define life as a complex, autopoeitic (self-creating), dissipative feedback system. This conception gave rise to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, which conceives of the entire biosphere as living insofar as it maintains conditions favorable to its continued existence.

What about the possibility of human-made, artificial life? This term can refer to a number of different research programs. Genetic engineering (and even animal breeding) creates forms of life that might not otherwise occur in nature. For Christopher G. Langton computer programs that model life processes by means of complex algorithms constitute artificial life or "a-life." Some theorists go even further to argue that beyond modeling, life is a process that can be abstracted away from any particular medium and need not necessarily depend on carbon-based chemical solutions.

Precisely when human life begins, whether at conception or some point further along in embryonic development, is also a highly contested issue. The premodern view that human life begins at the "quickening"—that is, when a woman experiences the first movements of a new child in her womb—has been altered by the very biological science that often proposes to treat embryos as no different than many other rudimentary organisms.

Life Philosophies

All such modern definitions have difficulty accounting for life as having any intrinsic ethical significance. The purposelessness of natural selection and the lowered status of humans in a hierarchy of being challenge traditional moral and theological beliefs. When life is conceived as an assemblage of adaptations to random and constantly changing circumstances, there remain no forms or essential types to imitate, and no harmonious order or basic good to maintain. Yet despite the most sophisticated explanations, purposefulness does appear to be an aspect of the living.

One response has been the development of a life philosophy (German Lebensphilosophie) that arose as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. Life is prioritized over mere understanding, and life philosophy has had many variants, including artistic movements in which life is used as a concept to assess and critique modern society. Certainly over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries life as "vitality" or vividness, a sense of both spiritual striving and joyous experiencing, played an important role in literature, art, and music as a touchstone of criticism of the scientific and technological. Among the most important representations of this view are attempts made by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to grasp life as an all-encompassing metaphysical category or first philosophy.

Nietzsche's life philosophy differed from the thought of Schopenhauer in its naturalism. In his genealogical work, he traced the development of the life-denying ascetic ideal that he saw as dominant in Western (and most Eastern) philosophy and religion. Value comes to being always in support of life, but ascetic philosophies give vital ideals a life-devaluing interpretation. Anything that is part of the natural, changing, life-world is interpreted as wrong and sinful, and ideals of truth and virtue are rooted in otherworldly, changeless realms. The ascetic ideal removes all source of value from nature, whereas modern natural science removed any faith in a realm outside of nature. One interpretation of the "death of God" is the extinction of this transcendent, nonhuman, and ahistorical realm to ground human values. There is nothing but life on which to base values, including truth. Whether Nietzsche successfully distinguished this revaluation of values from nihilism remains a subject of dispute.

During the mid-twentieth century life philosophy made a new appearance in the forms of phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology especially criticized science as separating itself from the human lifeworld or as disembodying experience. Related arguments have been carried forward in feminist criticisms such as those of Barbara Duden and Donna Haraway. In her studies of women's medicine and experiences such as pregnancy, Duden (1993) defends the primacy of lived experience over its conceptual analysis. In her notion of "companion species," Haraway (2003) criticizes the primacy of conceptual oppositions in favor of mutuality of living relationships, which harks back to the work of Pytor Kropotkin (1842–1921) and his notion of "mutual aid" among organisms.

Whether molecular biology can account for what is apparently goal-directed behavior in organisms likewise continues to spark controversy (see, e.g., Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder 1998). Finally, given the difficulties of understanding the ethical significance of biological life in the modern sense, philosophers such as Hans Jonas (1966) and Leon R. Kass (1985) have even attempted to revive an Aristotelian approach that would understand the most elementary forms of life in terms of higher forms of life rather than vice versa.

The Human Condition, Bioethics, and Biotechnology

According to Hannah Arendt (1958) the life of human activity, or vita activa, may be distinguished into labor, work, and action. Labor pertains to the biological processes of the human body, work to the world of artifice, and action to politics. Political action is so central to the human condition that the Romans used the same term (inter homines esse) to signify both "to live" and "to be among men." But as Arendt also notes, "life" takes distinct forms in each level of the vita activa. In the first instance life is related to the futile, biological labors of the body in which there is a kind of "deathless everlastingness of the human as of all other animal species" (p. 97). In the second instance life takes on the worldliness of work with distinct beginnings and ends and can be told as a story.

The first notion of life corresponds to the Greek zoe, from which English derives zoology; the second corresponds to the Greek bios, from which comes biography and a sense of the historical. For Arendt the modern world may be characterized by an effulgence of zoe as labor moved from the most-despised to the most-esteemed position with a productivity that outstripped all traditional work and overwhelmed action. But action and speech, beyond the necessary but lower forms of the animal laborans (labor) and homo faber (work), is the highest form of human life. The measure of all things, she claims, "can be neither the driving necessity of biological life and labor nor the utilitarian instrumentalism of fabrication and usage" (p. 174).

The term bioethics was initially coined by the biologist Van Rensselaer Potter (1911–2001) to refer to an ethics grounded on the science of life, rather than on religion or philosophy. It has since come to signify the field that studies the intersection of biology and biography, or the science of life studied scientifically and life lived experientially (Kass 2002). The focus on biography and the good life, rather than mere biological life, has taken on more importance as new biomedical technologies expand the capacities of human biology, or what Arendt would call the labor of human bodies. This is best illustrated by advances in life-extending techniques used in palliative care. In many instances, one's biological life is extended well beyond the duration of one's biographical life among the world of things and within the plural realm of action and speech. This raises ethical questions about what it means to die a dignified death and who should make such decisions in various circumstances.

Advances in biotechnology offer new powers to alter and to some degree control the phenomena of life. This has brought both reward and risk. In agricultural uses, biotechnology has raised concerns about risks, especially involving uncertain ecological interactions and health effects. In biomedical uses, similar health risk issues occur along with questions of informed consent and privacy. Additionally, the controversial techniques of abortion, cloning, and stem cell research sustain heated debates about when human life begins. New reproductive techniques have stimulated questions about how much control the present generation ought to have over future generations.

This last issue highlights the fact that both in agricultural and medical biotechnology, traditional ethical issues are complemented by deeper concerns about the proper limits to the human activity of "remaking Eden" and "relieving man's estate." How ought humankind responsibly exercise its power over life and where should limits be drawn? For example, even though biomedical technologies offer obvious rewards in terms of satisfying deep human desires, they can also serve (intentionally or not) to diminish human life. As the President's Council on Bioethics remarked in Beyond Therapy (2003), "To a society armed with biotechnology, the activities of human life may come to be seen in purely technical terms, and more amenable to improvement than they really are" (p. xvii). Promoting the genuine flourishing of human life is foremost a matter of understanding the good life rather than commanding the tools to manipulate life processes.

CARL MITCHAM ADAM BRIGGLE

SEE ALSO Bioethics;Environmental Ethics;Medical Ethics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Colin; Marc Bekoff; and George Lauder, eds. (1998). Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Arendt, Hannah. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Duden, Barbara. (1993). Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, trans. Lee Hoinacki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Haraway, Donna. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Jonas, Hans. (1966). The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper and Row.

Kass, Leon R. (1985). Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: Free Press.

Kass, Leon R. (2002). Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics San Francisco: Encounter Books.

Schrödinger, Erwin. (1944). What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Based on lectures delivered at Trinity College, Dublin, 1943.

U.S. President's Council on Bioethics. (2003). Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, DC: President's Council on Bioethics.