THE LIVING AND THE DIVINE
Part 2: The New Biocentric Image of the World
Chapter 4: On the Origins of Life

4.6  The Interrelation of Animate and Inanimate [Being]

That actual power, life in the cosmos, may constitute the world's essential component. Whereas we usually see the world-all in terms of endless space and material immensity, altogether separate from the notion of a connection with life in the world, we might find a bond in a real world 'order' between the, in itself a-rational, burden of matter in the world and life as a world factor. Even if the astronomical parameters of material mass and its commensurate space infinitely outweigh the material and dynamic mass of living energy in the cosmos, - a somewhat questionable comparison in view of the fact that they are not really commensurate -, to see that vast, overwhelming world matter as 'groundwork', 'discharge', 'reconstruction material' of cosmic life for all time would still be open to question. Even if it is accepted, life may yet be the essential, as it were the factual, gravitational centre of the world, the ultimate link to its material order. It is hard to believe that the matter-astronomy structure of the world is nothing but a fragment of an order that has no continuation if it is the order of inanimate matter as such and not there 'for' another order of things.

It may be possible for life to exist in an inanimate cosmos given certain circumstances, as a result of the nature of autonomous matter of an inanimate cosmos. Life would then be a cosmic 'accident'. It could also result from the cosmic character of life that seemingly permeates the inanimate part. The world would then be an 'organism' and the inanimate part would be seen as 'having a soul'. Lastly, it may be understood as a special relationship between the animate and the inanimate, with a pre-existing bond of the animate and the inanimate to a whole. In that case, the inanimate would not be thought of as 'having a soul' at all, but rather as structurally linked to life, itself structured for the bond.

It is as unlikely that the world should be an organism of an empirical kind in a category in which there is nothing inanimate as it is that it should be an accidental phenomenon in an inanimate cosmos. It is not really probable that the two spheres, the animate and the inanimate, should have no connection. Rather, all the features of matter, of the inanimate, while not living, seem to evince an original connection to life even where those features have no function in forming life. That interrelatedness may simply be due to the totality structure of the cosmos. It may also be seen as due to an originally common nature, undifferentiated, derived from living 'Ur' matter, where nothing was inanimate but where there was no organism as yet. The phenomenon of life would have been manifest in some alteration of the constituent elements, such as the 'separation' of inanimate matter, something different from that which exists and which constitutes 'actual' life.

True, matter then only becomes inanimate at the original differentiation, but its structure was a given in the still common state and was retained when it became 'shell', 'relic'. There is no inanimate matter other than 'non-living matter in terms of life'. The cosmos is not an organism, but it is something, a unit structure not naturally explained anywhere else, consisting of organisms and stages of life, its material operations of destruction and reconstruction and its environment - a structure that carries its biological environment within itself. A lifeless, objective matter cannot be taken out of the unit, nor must it be thought of as autonomous matter, unrelated to life, as understood in the dominant modern scientific thinking on the concept of matter. Physics and chemistry take this view because it is indeed possible to 'isolate' inanimate matter to a considerable extent. However, problems arise when the structure of inanimate matter is brought closer to the phenomena of life, e.g., when the situation arises where inanimate and animate parts of one comprehensive reality both become relevant; in short, when there is a problem that single sciences cannot address.

It is evident that the concept 'organism', taken from experience, does not fit the cosmos. It should be equally clear that the concept of inanimate matter cannot describe the essence of cosmic reality. The relationship of relative magnitudes of animate and inanimate does not apply at this point. A system cannot be characterized by the 'majority' of its features, only by its most pronounced feature in relation to the rest.

We should add that we know nothing about a distribution of the life factor in the cosmos outside of its earthly context. While the cosmic life factor undeniably brings a teleological direction to the world, that does not mean that the constitution and nature of inanimate matter cannot enable it to be a life bearing vessel; and this, even though inanimate matter, in an of itself and left to itself ( always a deliberate restriction) is without any element of striving in the sense of being directed towards a future. Indeed, even if the inanimate mode of matter were to consist of a mosaic of a thousand-fold break-up and overturning of that structure, it would still relate to life at the point ruled by the laws of breakage, determined, that is, by the laws of inanimate nature.

In that case, the boundless mass of matter and the limitless space of the cosmos would have to be seen as the matter and the material reservoir of an equally limitless power of life, as the room for maneuvers whose ultimate point of reference is inexhaustible life. Only a cosmos focused on life, even if its base is an overwhelming expanse of inanimate matter, can provide an imprint on the world that offers an opening to 'meaning' and, with it, to cognition, a cosmos whose essence is determined by the field that is also its crowning phenomenon.