Views on "Life"

If a self continues to exist after the body fails, what do we call the surviving state? Is it “life”? Common usage seems to think so. We speak of life everlasting, life in the hereafter, and survival of death. But we seem to have two things in mind. We also have a down-home definition; it involves breathing, warmth, movement, and the ability to pick up signals. When the body stirs and we cry out, “Oh, thank God! He’s still alive,” we’re not talking about souls. We’re talking about bodies. Can definitions help us sort out this seeming dualism in our own conceptions?

Merriam-Webster produces a number of key words; they have one thing in common; they’re intangible in character. Life is a quality, per Webster; it is a principle or force; and it is a capacity. The definition using that last word comes closest to identifying life with bodies: “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” If we try to determine what the word capacity itself means, we get “facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” And if we seek out the definition of a principle, the most suitable definition the dictionary gives is “an underlying faculty or endowment.” A faculty is a capacity; an endowment is a form of energy or, ahem, capacity.

Life thus seems to be force; power has the same meaning; capacity carries the sense of potential awaiting actualization. Next question: What originates this force? Humanity provides two answers.

One is that life manifests as matter and is therefore one aspect of the material world. Its force is different only in degree and application from (say) the force exerted by the sun in holding planets in their orbits or of the earth in throwing magma up into the air.

The other answer is dualistic. The life-force isn’t physical but something transcending the material order. It is spirit. This view develops into various alternative formulations: one spirit manifests in countless entities; many individual spirits exist and have always done so; their “descent” into matter is what we call life; one God made and continues to create many individual entities; they are endowed with spiritual powers but these ultimately come from and are maintained in force by one agency, God.

But, it seems, bodies get their energy from food and oxygen; life-force is a burning process; no invisible spirit need be invoked in producing that, surely. The dualist answers: Yes, true. The life-force is not the ordinary energy of bodies; bodies are material in composition and must be moved by energies appropriate to them. But the life-force is the constituting and maintaining force; it causes bodies to cohere in highly organized wholes. This may be understood if we think of the soul as giving life to bodies and the soul’s departure as depriving bodies of life. We normally think of this relationship in reverse. Souls exist because bodies do. When bodies die the soul disappears (materialism) or the soul becomes homeless, so-to-speak (transcendentalism).

The soul as a “constituting/maintaining” agency corresponds to the dictionary definition of life as a principle—in the sense defined above. It is the enabling overlord. An analogy. Let’s take a very small woman (to emphasize her relative physical weakness); she decides to build a mansion on a distant, hilly, rocky stretch of land. She has the means to do this, the money and the will. Money is a good analogy; it is an invisible force in that confidence alone gives those dirty dollar bills or that printed check its real value. Machines do the heavy work of land-clearing and digging out the basement; the heavy work of lifting stone and timber; other, able, brawny men do the rest. All of these “tools” operate off a plan drawn up by the architect, but the tiny lady approved images of the structure and of the layout within it. At last, roads having been built to the place, everything connected, she walks into her house. She lacked the capacity to accomplish most of the actual labor involved, yet here she is, the real owner. No, I couldn’t tell you how my liver really works…

It is of course legitimate enough to label this as a fanciful metaphor with no necessary relationship to actuality. But the metaphor gains plausibility when we contemplate the evidence provided by near-death experiences. They suggest that, indeed, we go somewhere; they suggests that, without some kind of material machinery, we are unable to affect matter. They suggest further that, on the other side, in another order, something more naturally accessible to us—without the very coarse space-suit that we are obliged to wear in this dimension—actually exists. Alas, we don’t have equivalent accounts of people recounting their births. If we did, we could be even more certain.