Extraordinary, that we humans in advanced civilization are out there in the solar system, in our galaxy and beyond, with sophisticated instruments (telescopes of various kinds, space probes, spacecraft, rovers, etc.) looking for life, all on the assumption that life somehow emerged from matter. Hence a search for the purported building-blocks of life: water, certain elements, certain compounds, etc. We'd even like to do better than just hypothesizing that life emerged from complex chemical processes by actually making it ourselves, but have so far drawn a blank. No self-respecting scientist would dare to question this preconception of 'emergent' life essential to the paradigm.
We even send out DVDs and other inscriptions just in case and in the hope that some intelligent form of life out there, just like us, will pick them up and decipher them as the product of an intelligent civilization on Earth.
Why this wild goose chase? Do we know what life itself is? And do we know who we are ourselves? It seems to be unquestionable that we are a species of animal in a long line of evolution over millennia and even millions of years, hence a kind of what. This puts us into some kind of continuity with other animals. 'Animal' is synonymous with 'living being', i.e. a being endowed with (an) anima that animates it. But what is anima? Itself a kind of being? Or only a mode or way of being of which living beings partake?
Synonyms for 'anima', the Latin translation of Greek ψυχή (psyche), include 'breath (of wind)', 'soul', 'life', 'deceased soul', 'mind', 'psyche'. For modern materialist science these are all no-go areas, since its raison d'être is to reduce, i.e. lead back, all phenomena to material causality. That is why life has to be conceived as somehow 'emerging' (spontaneously?) from material processes as self-moving matter. Non-living matter can only be moved by something else called an 'external force'.
Modern materialist science is sceptical even of this conception of life as self-moving, since it denies any spontaneity of movement. It asserts that movements of living beings that seem to be spontaneous are materially caused by hidden physical processes in the organism. It denies that animate animals have anima. Is a living being then a being only apparently self-moving and self-replicating through automatic, non-living physical processes? Quantum indeterminacy is even roped in to explain the purported illusion of spontaneous movement. After all, quanta are supposed to be physical entities, so ostensibly material causes are not abandoned for this kind of explanation.
When it comes to evolution theory, that today is very much the accepted orthodoxy in modern science, strangely, breaks in the chain of materially causality are not only possible, but necessary. For, the genetic DNA governing the reproduction of a living organism is said to spontaneously mutate. DNA itself is prone to making mistakes when it reproduces itself. Moreover, teleological cause is also clandestinely re-introduced after having been banned as an inadmissible Aristotelean residue early on in the Modern Age. The telos of living beings is quietly assumed to be the striving to keep on living. Random genetic mutations may enhance a given specie's chances of survival, hence fulfilling the telos of life by chance. Loser species in this survival-of-the-fittest struggle (only fortuitously uncannily akin to familiar capitalist free-market competition?) eventually go extinct. Evolution is thus hit-or-miss, lacking rigorous material causality and is also teleological. These anomalies do not seem to unsettle evolution theory's adherents one bit.
Modern science is concerned with explaining one thing in terms of another or others to construct a theoretical model whose empirical truth (i.e. correctness) can be provisionally affirmed until it is falsified by new 'facts' that may even force a paradigm shift to a new explanatory model. This is supposed to be how truth is empirically established, without ever asking for the truth of the phenomena themselves. The scientific gaze is always looking away from the phenomena themselves, taking them to be self-understood. Science's mission is to explain movement so as to theoretically master it predictively, no matter how weirdly construed the model. If it works, it's true.
Seems we're stuck with this dogmatic thinking as long as modern science maintains its grip on our mind and thus hegemony in the world. The truth of the phenomenon of life requires another kind of thinking. My own approach is hermeneutic-phenomenological and is restricted first and foremost to us humans. After all, we are most intimately familiar with ourselves. To be alive, in the first place, is to belong to the openness of three-dimensional time. Our psyche is, in the first place, this temporal belonging, and the first determination of human life as self-moving is the free, spontaneous movement of the understanding mind within the temporal psyche. Starting with the openness of three-dimensional time already breaks with material causality because three-dimensional time itself is nothing physical. The fixation of modern scientific thinking on material, physical movement is also broken to encompass other kinds of movement altogether. The living self-movement of our physical body can only be approached step-by-step on an accretive path of thinking to develop a concept of the empsyched, and thus entimed, body. The kinds of movement of which we humans partake are not exhausted with mental and bodily movement; they include, crucially, our living sociation with each other in kinds of mutually estimative interplay through which our genuine whoness is constituted. In today's world, this mutually estimative interplay is subverted by the unbridled valorization movement of thingified value.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
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