This is a question which we are bound to ask due to the nature of our reason having sufficiently matured to have established a sense of self.
The light thrown from one side on the subject from a purely empiricist perspective of some responders is indispensable, though not complete – our never ending frustration. We will never reach a sufficient answer. By accommodating various (and apparently contradictory) explanations each of us individually - and the community gradually as a whole - may achieve (and has achieved) some sense of having at least started on the road of enlightenment. This is a road with no grand finish line where a weary pilgrim may say: “I have achieved”. Typically “life” as an object is not a meaningless abstracted word from “living organism”, but a concept full of meaning. For example - as one responder implied – “life” or “living thing” transcends the biological realm as we have defined it. As in the sense of an ant community, “life” also transcends an individual organism and points towards a unity of individual elements (in this case separate organisms). If this unity is lost the “living thing” (in this case an ant community) may be dead, although the corresponding parts may still “have life” or “live”. Life always struck me as having an absolute property. A thing is either alive of not alive – there is no gradual progression in- between. My personal inclination is towards the possibility of an unknowable origin and sustaining force of life itself. This force which keeps the whole from disintegrating into its constituent parts. It is “unknowable” in the sense that our reasoning faculties are part and parcel of “our being alive” and we can not objectively stand back to sufficiently examine the subject at hand. I would thus discard the phrases “meaningless” and “in language only” for the concept of “life” used by some responders while retaining the phrase “eluding definition” when such a definition is sought for the concept of “life” in general. We can at most define “life” for very specific applications as some responders have emphasized. On Dec 24, 12:11 pm, Awori <awori.ach...@gmail.com> wrote: > In heated discourse about the meaning of nature---I was one time asked > to define life. This is what I said: "Life is a moment in space and > time". To my disappointment--I got no reaction from the group. Is it > because I was absurdly wrong? I have continued to use this response as > my standard explanation of what life is. Has anyone in out there given > this age old subject a better look? > > AA -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemol...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
