Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 16
What Is Life?
16.1 The Definition of Life
There are three aspects to
life
: Life as
is
, life as
experienced
, and life as
theorized
. (16.1)
In addition to the pragmatic maxim of Peirce, which led to the philosophy of
pragmatism
popularized by William James, Peirce made a major contribution to
modern philosophy by formulating his
triadic metaphysical doctrine
that all phenom-
ena in theUniverse comprise three fundamental elements or aspects which he referred
1997; de Waal 2001; Sheriff 1994; Feibleman 1946). It is important to keep in mind
that Peircean categories are
ordinal
, not
cardinal
in the sense that
Firstness
can exist
all by itself, but
Secondness
cannot exist without
Firstness
, and
Thirdness
cannot exist
without
Firstness
and
Secondness
. We may refer to this concept as the
ordinality of
the Peircean categories
and represent it diagrammatically as follows:
Firstness ! Secondenss ! Thirdness
(16.2)
where the notation “A
B” reads “B cannot exist without A,” or “B presupposes A.”
Statement 16.1 may be made to connect logically to the Peircean categories, if
the following proposition is accepted:
“Life as is” can be identified with
Firstness
; “life as experienced” with
Secondness
; and
“life as theorized” with
Thirdness
.
!
(16.3)
By combining Scheme
16.2
and Statement 16.3, it can be inferred that no theory
of life (
Thirdness
) is complete without containing elements of
Firstness
(metaphys-
imental grounding such as cell biology)
.
The theory of life presented in this topic
contains all these elements: (1)
Firstness
¼
Life is intrinsic to gnergy
(see Table
2.6
), (2)
Secondness
¼
Gnergy can be actualized (or reified) into Energy/Matter
