A professor of philosophy at a Catholic University gives us a meditation on life in Diagnosis of the Times of the Catholic Peace Weekly.
A validly established life culture becomes possible when we understand its internal characteristics, not its external form. To do this, it is necessary to understand the meaning and characteristics of life. Philosophy of life attempts to do this. Discourse limited to slogans without a proper understanding of the mystery of life and its beauty is useless. Therefore, life philosophy is a prerequisite for culture and ethics.
Let us briefly explain the essential characteristics of life in terms of the sexual principle and self-examination. A natural scientific understanding of life is a prerequisite. This is because reflective work done without factual conditions and knowledge about them would be a delusion.
All living things on Earth have a common origin. Life comes from the first life that appeared on Earth at some point. All life on Earth is the same organism, originating from the same ancestor. Current life is what this living organism has developed in the flow of time by internalizing its own life and its own characteristics necessary for life. All life has the same living conditions and mechanisms.
At the same time, living beings are communal beings that need each other in relationships. This does not simply mean that living things need other life forms to live, but the body of the living thing itself is a place where numerous living things live together with other living things— literally symbiosis.
Communal life lives in interaction with other life forms. From a microscopic perspective, life is in a relationship of struggle and conflict, but from a macroscopic perspective, living things need each other. Living things have the same identity, but along with them, they also have differences that arise from historical processes. The basis for reflecting on these characteristics, namely the identity and difference, interactivity, and historicity of living things, is the meaning that can be given to life. These principles can be presented as living characteristics.
At the same time, life has the will to preserve its existence as a living organism. It is insufficient to simply accept this as a desire for survival. This is because living things go beyond the desire to blindly maintain their own lives and move toward achieving their own existence as living things and the will to move toward the future. These characteristics can be verbalized as the intentionality of living things. As humans, characteristics such as self-control and self-emptying (kenosis) are concepts that can only be understood and accepted when we reflect on the intentionality of living things. It is in the philosophical interpretation of life that the general intentionality of living things can appear as transcendental characteristics.
It is only through this process that the characteristics of self-realization by abandoning oneself and self-transcendence that can never be understood from a biological perspective are revealed. Even the most outstanding religious characteristic, spirituality, is impossible without this self-transcendence.
Life is contradictory in itself— Life wants to live but ends in death, living for oneself needs the help of others, and life has the same principle but cannot exist without differences trying to unify this contradiction. The reason why this contradiction can be reconciled and internalized within oneself is because of the ontological horizon of life, and it is never possible without transcendence based on the intentionality of living things. Life culture and bioethics will be properly founded only on the basis of this verbalized vitality.
