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What is life? background illusion,
The sleep of shadows, the bottom of nothingness.
What happiness can give impermanent,
Since a dream is all life
And even dreams are just dreams!
Recently, I started reading Orhan Pamuk's novel A New Life, which prompted me to ask the all-important question: What is life? Is there a question more obvious and at the same time more mysterious than the question of life? Life is an amazing phenomenon in the universe and makes the universe purposeful, because only conscious entities justify the existence of the universe. Goethe described the problem of life in an interesting way in Faust with the words of Mephistopheles:
"I am that spirit that always denies!
And rightly so, because all existence
It only deserves to be destroyed.
It would be best to live in an empty world.
So what you call sin
Decay, simply evil, bottom and bottom,
Mine is the element.
I am a part of the part that was everything before
A particle of darkness that gave birth to light."
As can be seen in the above, the problem of life is also related to Leibniz's question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" To this day, the answer to this question remains an open question. In my opinion, the easiest way to put it is this: existence (life) is a fact, and the question of the cause of being is something separate from it. In other words: "Being is, non-being is not" (Parmenides). So maybe we should approach the issue of life pragmatically and instead of discussing the cause, purpose or justification of life (or the meaning of life) it would be worth making life bearable for all living beings. Life is an extraordinary phenomenon and a puzzle for scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
To learn more about life, let's read the Dictionary of Philosophy (edited by Jan Hartman), in which the authors write: "Life - a property of organisms, manifested in the ability to multilaterally react to the environment (especially to the presence of other organisms), active search for and absorption of energy and building components from the environment, reproduction and adaptation to changing environmental conditions, both at the individual and species level. The above characterization speaks of the manifestations of life. They are studied by a whole range of specific sciences. However, the question of the essence of life can only be addressed by philosophy. In philosophy, life is either one of the principles of reality (e.g. in Ionian philosophers of nature, H. Bergson), or one of the ways of existence irreducible to others (Saint Thomas, R. Ingarden). As a principle of reality, life manifests itself in a special kind of internal movement and self-motion (in the case of animals). These movements are characterized by focusing on a goal important from the point of view of the nature of an animate being, eg digestion as a condition for the permanence of the organism's existence and its development, thinking as a condition for knowing the purpose of human existence and realizing it.
According to ancient philosophers, life had a psychic nature (see soul), i.e. the causes of various manifestations of life were different types of souls: vegetative, sensual, rational. For Bergson, life as the principle of the world determines its process and creative nature. For NA Whitehead, the actual being is an individual, momentary organism that arises in the environment of other organisms, matures and dies, giving way to successive generations of organisms. Life is a special kind of order that organizes successive generations of actual beings into an ongoing community, e.g. a cell. See philosophy of life, vitalism (BO).” Thus, life is a fascinating puzzle that is still waiting to be solved. The main positions on life are creationism and evolutionism, for some life is the result of a creative act, for others the result of the evolution of biological organisms. How is it really hard to tell. Both positions have their supporters. Both life as "intelligent design" as well as the evolution of the matter of the universe. From the perspective of philosophy, life is a fundamental issue and can be regarded as "arche", i.e. the primeval element that is the cause of all things. The changeable nature of the world would testify to the changes of this pre-element.
“6.52 We feel that even if all possible scientific problems were solved, our life problems would not even be touched. True, there would be no more questions then; and that's the answer.
“6.521 The solution to the problem of life is recognized by the disappearance of that problem. (Isn't that what makes those for whom, after long hesitation, the meaning of life became clear, later unable to say what it consists of.)"
Marek Wojnicki