Abstract
Living things share a strange property recognized from the earliest biological observations: continuity through change. This property underlies the history of terms like organ, organic, and organism, which suggest multiple parts sharing a common purpose, preserving a living thing through nutrition and reproduction. It provides a teleology that remains in modern biology. A gene is a polynucleotide with context and purpose. Genes and proteins reveal a pervasive teleology in biochemistry; they are composed of abiological elements yet make up larger organisms. Aristotle identified fundamental issues of composition (material cause), cause (efficient cause), identity (formal cause), and end (final cause). His vegetable souls describe a confluence of the latter three acting dynamically to direct the first, form informing matter. Aristotle set the stage for two millennia of biological theory including intense discussion about ends, in Aristotle’s words “that for the sake of which” a thing occurs. The cyclical quality of Aristotle’s definitions provides key insights to biology. Efficient, formal, and final causes remain important in biology as power, form, and function but all three have varied considerably over the centuries, leading to many interpretations of teleology and soul that are inconsistent with modern science.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“organic, adj. and n.” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- 2.
I have avoided saying directly that “biochemistry refers to reactions perpetuating living systems.” We can easily imagine maladaptive, dysfunctional, and diseased reactions and pathways. Some perpetuate a second living system such as a virus, cancer, or pathogen, but others do not. Oxidative stress and prions do not have a clear biological end but, when they occur in metabolic context, they may be called biochemical.
- 3.
Note that the OED entry for metabolism specifies “The chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life” (italics added). “metabolism, n” OED, 3rd Ed. 2001.
- 4.
This observation is often presented as the Ship of Theseus paradox and remains an active question in philosophy. See Gallois (2016).
- 5.
“Soul is the overall working out of order, and the soul aspects are individual stages in the process.” Mix (2018, 37). For more on this, see Plato’s Timaeus and Barney et al. (2012). The critical break for modern readers will be the switch from Platonic Realism to Nominalism in the High Middle Ages. For Platonists, concrete particulars are mere shadows of eternal substantial forms. The forms are more real and thus true knowledge will always be knowledge of things that are immortal and immaterial. Souls were not forms, but an intermediate, which could literally inform particulars. For Nominalists, categories (e.g., animal, mammal, human) are just names used to describe collections of mortal material individuals. Modern science considers true knowledge to involve statements about particular objects and events—data.
- 6.
- 7.
Johnson (2005) explores Aristotelian teleology in detail, including the abiotic inclination of elements.
- 8.
Aristotle supported substantial forms in Metaphysics. For simplicity, I discuss the hylomorphic substances described in Categories and discussed in Shields (2007, pp. 53–64). This seems to be the approach Aristotle took for vegetable souls.
- 9.
See Chap. 1. Hornsby (2004) introduces and critiques the standard model of agency involving prospective imagination and metaphysically distinct causal power. Numerous more natural views have been proposed, particularly for use with non-human actors. Because prospective imagination is ruled out in biology—see Chap. 7—something along these lines will be needed. I use “agency” for the life-specific causal power common to all organisms. In David Haig’s (2020, 281) language, it is an element in the causal chain that is a relevant difference maker.
References
Barney, Rachel, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain, eds. Plato and the Divided Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Freudenthal, Gad. Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gallois, Andre. “Identity over Time.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 ed. Stanford University, 1997–. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/identity-time/.
Goetz, Stewart, and Charles Taliaferro. A Brief History of the Soul. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Haig, David. From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
Hornsby, Jennifer. “Agency and Actions.” In Agency and Action, edited by John Hyman and Helen Steward, 1–24. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Johnson, Monte Ransome. Aristotle on Teleology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Lorenz, Hendrik. The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Martin, Raymond, and John Barresi. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Mix, Lucas J. Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin: On Vegetable Souls. New York: Palgrave, 2018.
Shields, Christopher. Aristotle. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Walsh, Denis M. Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mix, L.J. (2022). What Makes Life Life-Like? The Dynamic Continuity of Living Things. In: The End of Final Causes in Biology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14017-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14017-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-14016-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-14017-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)