Philosophies of Life

On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.

Epilogue

I have told a long story about the category of life itself, of the human desire for life, of human longing, of the need for repair, and of how civilizations have sought to address this need through the religions that have driven them and the philosophies that have guided them. The endpoint we have arrived at, although not the end of the story, is an ending in which life itself articulated through civilizations can be understood in terms of repair that can be envisaged as a kind of holiness of life, a bringing of human reality into an intensity of life, and a repairing of shattered communication. This intensity is human integration of life itself into modes of culture at the level of linguistic consciousness. We might say that civilization and the religion that drives it have bridged the evolutionary gap between a pre-linguistic mode of being human and the linguistic one facilitated through the neo-cortex articulated in the structures of civilization. Reflecting this distinction, I have attempted to integrate two modern accounts of human life into a coherence: on the one hand, a tradition of humanist, particularly philological, scholarship on traditions within the broad parameters of Indic, Chinese, and European/Middle Eastern civilizations, and on the other, a tradition of scientific, particularly evolutionary discourse about human life. It seems to me that we need both humanism and science to offer descriptions adequate to the complexity of life in human history and the ways in which civilizations have attempted to repair the human condition. These are distinct modes of description within which to frame both the constraints on human reality along with its freedom. Throughout this story we have seen how the human desire for life has been commonly recognized as a deep human trait and how this desire is transposed as a longing for completion, fulfilment, or even redemption. The religions directly address this desire that is related to a desire for meaning in life. But what are we to do once religions are no more? What cultural forms address the desire for life and the need for repair? What is the human future without religions?...

Religion and the Bio-Sociology of Transformation

This final chapter seeks, first, to account for some recent explanations of human interaction in terms of cognition and evolutionary neuroscience; and second, to show how social cognition is transformed through religion at a cultural level as a system in relation to the environment; religion is a form of bio-sociology. This transformation is echoed in the history of Homo sapiens as a move from sign to symbol, suggesting, third, an abductive philosophical claim that life itself comes to articulation through religion; religions are the transformation of bio-energy expressed at an interpersonal level in human face-to-face encounter re-articulated at structurally higher levels of religious systems comprising practice, doctrine, narrative, and law. This transformation of human bio-sociology into religion is the way in which civilization seeks to repair the human and to bring us more acutely into life through the integration of higher linguistic consciousness with deeper, pre-linguistic forms of life.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

The Phenomenology of Life

This chapter takes up more explicitly the problem concerning the relationship between life understood as a system or process and life in relation to the person. This is to re-tell the story of the relation of life to the living from a different perspective of twentieth-century philosophy. There is a tension between the living system rooted in a materialist metaphysics and the lived reality of persons, between system and lifeworld. This chapter traces the development of the phenomenology of life focused on human experience, juxtaposing this with a new materialism that emphasizes the objective constancy of life itself as material reality beyond the human. This involves delineating the contours of the discussion to show how this debate is relevant to some contemporary religious understandings of the person.

The Philosophy of Life as the Field of Immanence

The philosophies of life that emphasize life as a plane of immanence, in which there is no outside and no transcendence beyond the world, have expressed a modern non-dualism that is compatible with contemporary developments in neuroscience, social cognition, and evolution. A strong philosophical claim is that the immanence view expresses a truth about life itself, supported by science, against which the history of religions can be measured. A weak claim is that modern articulations of life itself are no more adequate than those of tradition, but the modern view is simply another approximation in expressing the field of immanence. The chapter argues for the weak view.

Sacrifice

The affirmation of life through a culture of hunting was a major element in early human practices, but with the Neolithic farming revolution, we have new modes of producing food and new kinds of societies that could be much larger; the first urban landscapes beginning to appear in places such as Jericho, along with the emergence of religion characterized by sacrifice. While the origins of sacrifice are obscure, sacrifice is a category central to our understanding of religion and of human cultural life generally. Sacrifice has had a central place in the history of civilizations as an attempt at human self-repair and bringing people into a fullness of life, attempting to fulfil the desire for life itself and to go beyond death.

The Theory and Philosophy of Life

The idea that there is an animating principle, a life force, that drives the living, that life itself comes to form through the manifold appearances of the world, is very ancient and can be found in Greece, China, and India. We also have more recent philosophical arguments that have understood life in terms of a vital principle or essence. Philosophies rooted in biology have tended to be sceptical of vitalist philosophies, while vitalist philosophies have rejected eliminative, materialist explanations. With reference to these concerns, the chapter examines the question of whether we are to understand life primarily in terms of human purposes, desires, fears, and hopes; or are we to explain life primarily in terms of impersonal, biological drives?

Introduction

There is a deep connection between the ideas of life, religion, and civilization: life has impelled religion, which has driven civilization, and we need to understand religion through the category of life. Although the history of religions has often been characterized by oppression and violence, religions have also promoted human wellbeing and the fulfilment of life variously conceived, often seen as correcting an error or fault in the human condition. Two sources account for this: first, the history of civilizations themselves and, in particular, the religions that drive them that offer accounts of the relationship between life itself and the living; second, we need to turn to human evolution and to read civilizations in terms of niche construction, the environmental structure that promotes the flourishing of particular life forms. The first account locates explanation in the history of civilizations; the second locates it in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences.

Transforming Life

Although the category ‘Abrahamic religions’ is contentious, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do form a group of traditions related historically, conceptually, and practically. The theme of life itself has been central for them all, especially the sacrificial model of transforming death into life and an eschatology that awaits the end of days. The history of these three religions has been more conflictual than harmonious, almost inseparable from the history of power and the emergence of the idea of the nation and state. A conception of life begins to emerge in these religions from common roots in Jewish and Greek thinking. Three trajectories of interest in life itself can be traced: first, a sacrificial imaginary at work across the Greek, Semitic, and Christian histories; second, life understood in terms of verticality; and third, a horizontal, scientific drive to understand life.