While our world’s specificity and complexity increase exponentially, while global technologies flood the disciplines with new possibilities, while overcaffeinated producers and consumers frantically chase their own tails in a desperate attempt to catch up, inquiry into the deeper essence(s) of living beings is napping in the backseat. Descriptive theory has been conquered by empirical analysis, statisical research and scientific observation, and questions of essentialiasm have been deemed idealistic – and therefore useless – by a competitive world doctored by hyperutilitarian logic. Heed the need for speed, they say: there is no room for daydreamers here.
I tread carefully upon the intellectual middle ground between essentialism and pragmatism; while attempts to provide universal explanations for phenomena strike me as haplessly constrained by context & incapable of accurately articulating an “objective” truth about an infinitely complex world, I can’t subscribe to a purely concrete, mathematical worldview. Empiricism is too narrow to yield truth. Scientific observation is but a snapshot depiction of a puzzle piece of the world, from a certain perspective at a certain point in time; the cleavages of puzzle are ever shifting, and when one puts it together it never looks the same twice. Scientific analysis cannot fully account for an ever-evolving world. Even the most well-researched subject adapts, evolves, changes as everything changes. Political science is an oxymoron: Politics is not a science, it is a social experiment, a process which has not reached its end, and there are no quantifiable results to measure. There aren’t even standard units. No theory yielded by statistical analysis can account for the inevitable variation, mutation of its subject material. A scientific argument is steadfast in its claim to authority, but lacks imagination; it is about as spontaneous as yesterday’s milk. Indeed, both universalist and empiricist frameworks – the two main historical methods of describing existence and rationalizing the living world – leave much to be desired. The former is too broad and subjective to be meaningful, and the latter, in true utilitarian style, is too specialized to shed light on exceptions and loftier questions.
My dissatisfaction with these two methods of reason, which dominate my university coursework, was my ticket aboard a peculiar train of thought. I stumbled over thoughts of a more enlightening approach for descriptive thought, one which does not catalog the content of human life but rather explores the nature of human ideas of life itself, endowed with wonder and whimsicality. Deciding to steer clear of the epitome of academic old-white-man circlejerks otherwise known as metaphysics, I opted to inwardly meander down a genealogy of sorts; better to explore the winding snail trail of its changing meanings than jump to conclusions. Slow and steady wins the race. As Stephane Mallarme tells us, “to define is to kill. To suggest is to create.”
Life, and life itself – that is, the (human) concept of life – is incredibly narrow. Obviously an individual’s perception of life is necesarily limited by their condition and experience, but that’s not quite what I’m getting at. I’m speaking of the human conception of what separates living beings from inorganic material. What makes a thing more alive than something else? Perhaps the ability to reproduce? Or the capability to adapt to one’s environment? The potential to engage in purposeful activity? Wikipedia that shit. Our favorite bastion of democratic information claims that life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit the following phenomena: Homeostasis (the ability to internally regulate temperature), organization (being composed of cells), metabolism, growth, adaption, and response to stimuli (in any form or manner). But there are already some holes in this definiton. Consider, for example, worker ants and bees. They do not reproduce (for reproduction is the queen’s domain, a royal pain?) yet they are no less alive than their matriarch. Hybrid animals like mules and ligers cannot self-reproduce either, yet still they are real.
This seven-sided definition of life is even more shortsighted when one ponders the possibilities of Extra-terrestrial Life. Though earth may be the only planet in the universe known to harbor life, it’s only logical that life, in some shape or form, exists elsewhere. We are but chance (or, depending on what you believe, not-so-accidental) combinations of specific molecules that endow us with the ability to perform the septagon of phenomena described above; it is statistically probable, even inevitable that such a chance combination appeared somewhere else. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Just look at the evolution of life on earth. Our complexity is the product of the lack of direction in evolutionary processes, of the accumulation of fortuitous accidents, rather than the product of design. We all came from similar compounds, bacterias, base materials, but through variation and a couple of misadventures along the way, living organisms have proliferated into a diverse buffet of biomass. Something for everyone (and friends for dinner!)
Who’s to say that this happy little accident didn’t or couldn’t occur somewhere else? After all, certain theories (exogenesis, panspermia) hold that life originated elsewhere in the universe and was subsequently transferred to earth, via as meteorites, comets or cosmic dust. Imagine those galactical nomads, fresh off the boat, only to find themselves party to another voyage, this time around the sun. Welcome! Thank you for choosing Planet Earth! Please enjoy your flight – cocktails will be served shortly.
Enthusiam for extraterrestrial life is not limited to astrobiologists and conspiracy theorists. The search for life beyond life on Earth has been the subject of countless scientific studies, novels, sketchy government projects, movies, and theories of varying persuasion. Contemporary author Tom Robbins believes that hallucinogenic mushrooms came from star systems far away, their spores durable enough to endure the long, strange trip through infinity-and beyond! Alternative historian Michael Tsarion claims that the history of the world stems from an alien visitation before the biblical Great Flood (as expounded upon in his dauntingly comprehensive 22-DVD, 60-hour masterpiece Oracles and Origins.)
But were we ever to cross paths with an extraterrestrial life form (a true alien encounter!), how would we recognize it as a living being? The seven criteria of earthly living beings are not given a priori – they are retrospective descriptions of living beings based on observation of our existence. We cannot assume that they will automatically apply to beings created elsewhere and possibly under radically different conditions (chemical climates, pressures, etc. etc.) Though life as we know it is carbon based, it is not unreasonable to speculate that silicon-based or hydrogen-based life forms have the potential to exist. In all living beings code for instructions is embedded in DNA or RNA, yet there may be other genetic systems possible that we just don’t know about. The real Milky Way doens’t have its ingredients listed on the wrapper. The sheer vastness of the universe – and with it the matrix of possible combinations of elements and variables – leaves us with little guidance for our predictions, leaves us constantly guessing. It is probable that when we do encounter alien life it will possess characteristics different from, beyond the seven we currently acknowledge; we can only hope that our imaginations will be liberal enough to realize their significance, and that we will be able to appreciate the life inside the foreign forms.
I am able to conceive of my own death, but I can’t imagine the world without myself. So too is the human race shackled by its own subjectivity, staring at the stars (how I wonder what you are…) yet completely unprepared to identify whatever it is that’s out there. Of course, the difficultly of imagining entirely new life forms isn’t entirely our fault; in fact, it illuminates the neurological limits of the human intellect. The brain’s memory bank, comprised of accumulated perceptions, is the basis of knowledge and any cognitive activity in which it’s employed. When the brain forms mental images – even when the images are spontaneously generated – it draws from bits and pieces of these preexisting perceptions. Seemingly-original images are but unrecognizable combinations of past visions. The imagination is simply a collage of the magazine clippings of memory, with volumes and volumes to draw from. The form may change, but the base content stays the same. Creativity, in the truest sense of the world, is an illusion. We cannot produce ideas that are not somehow rooted in our known reality.
This would seem to suggest that the search for extraterrestrial life is a lost cause: alien life may not embody immediately recognizable characteristics of terrestrial life, yet our pithy brains can’t handle enough imagination to expand our definition of life. We can only hope that our potential visitors, acknowledging the infiniteness of human stupidity, meet us in the middle and give us a sign, some hint of their organic nature. It’s equally possible that such an encounter will never take place because of different atmospheric or climatic requirements for the cultivation of life; perhaps we cannot coexist with other life, at least not in the same place at the same time. If not our bodies, maybe our eyes, our brains can’t handle the blinding luminance of the knowledge of ethereal beings. Unraveling primal mysteries carries a dangerous stigma. Genius is associated with madness. Once you’ve seen the devil, you’ve seen the ultimate truth – and you are forever insane to the mortal world. Every mobster’s favorite death sentence: you know too much.
But I digress. There is a reason behind asking all these questions, and the reason lies in the fact that there are no answers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the failures of the Enlightenment, it’s that trying to come up with universal explanations for phenomena is a lost cause. Postmodernism’s emphasis on the reality of social complexity makes Hobbes’ and Locke’s attempts to essentialize human nature appear juvenile and desperate. We must scrutinize with equal rigor the endeavours of the scientific community to create an all-encompassing definition of life. Life is a many-splendoured thing, and it would be a crime to stifle it by squeezing it into a categorical box. Best let it run free and flourish, grow wings and take on dimensions of its own. Voltaire is right that doubt is an unpleasant condition. It is human instinct to systematize existence; it is our ability to do so that has brought us where we are. But certainty is absurd, and all of our “answers” beg dozens more questions. We must accept the unknown along with the known, for it is a necessary condition of human experience. We may never know what extraterrestrial life is, but that also means that we will never know what it is not. And it is the latter, that blank canvas, that begets wonder – the inspiration for knowledge.
Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, spent his entire life theorizing about synchronicity, the (limits of the) psyche, and archetypes. He broke with intellectual tradition by forgoing the tendency to rationalize his studies with self-justifications and contrived conclusions; he was humble enough to admit that all he knew is that there were things he didn’t know. And that is all we really need to know, he said: “Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.”
