Life: Between Nature and Meaning

I have wanted to emphasize the goodness of life, in spite of the fact that many things are wrong in the world. But what is “life”? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer, but I do have a few thoughts.

Nature is said in many ways, of course, and these yield different perspectives on life from the side of nature. In an evolutionary context, I prefer to stress the marvelous diversification of organic forms over competition between individuals or species. Life, I think, is better understood in terms of purposes and what Aristotle calls “that for the sake of which”, than by attempting to reduce it to elements and efficient causes. All those purposes are intrinsic to the nature of the things that have them, and indeed they constitute that nature.

It does not make sense to inquire about “the” meaning of life. Rather, life is meaning, in superabundance and overflow. We should look at life not in terms of minimal biological prerequisites, but in terms of its highest development in each of the many kinds that flourish. That is the real significance of Aristotelian and Hegelian “actuality”.

Bounty of Nature

Nature as we experience it is more characterized by superabundance and diversity of form than by univocal necessity. Even nonorganic phenomena like the weather involve material tendencies toward a kind of dynamic equilibrium. These tendencies — which are even more pronounced with living things — involve an “ability” to spontaneously recover when disturbed, a kind of resilience and adaptability to new circumstances.

The neoplatonists developed a whole metaphysic of “eternal generation” by a kind of overflow. For them, beyond every intelligible essence was something “supra-essential” that could be characterized only indirectly, through its overflowing superabundance. Essence ended up as a kind of after-image of the eternally overflowing primary superabundance of the Good or the One. Transformed in various ways, this notion greatly influenced historical developments in theology, supporting notions of the generosity, providence, and grace of a more personal God.

In a more modest and down-to-earth way, Aristotle had also dwelt on our experience of superabundance, applying it in his biology and in the more general notion of potentiality. In between, the Stoics developed a contrasting emphasis on a univocal direct divine omnipotence with respect to events. In the tradition, all three of these approaches came to be hybridized in all sorts of ways. While I think the approach of Aristotle himself was the best of all, I have a lot more sympathy with theologies of superabundance of form than with theologies of power-over and dominion. (See also Fragility of the Good.)

“Transgression” as Ordinary?

Ricoeur’s unexpected old talk about a “transgression” (which the translator says in a note should be taken in an etymological sense, without the moral connotation it has in English) — or an overflowing, as I would put it — inherent in ordinary language use and ordinary determination of concepts makes another interesting rebuttal to the Badiouian claim endorsed by some of the Žižekians that only a few extraordinary “Events” and utterly arbitrary acts avoid chaining us to the status quo.