Living Being

The term ‘Living Being’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several intersecting axes that resist easy synthesis. From Plotinus, the concept carries its most exalted valence: Intellect itself is a ‘complete living being,’ and the Intelligible realm contains the essential Idea of Living Being from which all particular creatures derive their ontological warrant. Plato’s Timaeus situates the cosmos as an ensouled, rational living being whose divine reason animates matter from within. Aristotle, by contrast, establishes a serial hierarchy in which different orders of living beings are distinguished by the powers of soul they instantiate — nutritive, sensitive, locomotive, rational — establishing the framework that later depth-psychological thought will contest or refine. In the modern register, Simondon’s treatment is the most philosophically radical: the living being is defined not as a finished product of individuation but as a being that is simultaneously its own principle of further individuation, perpetually resolving vital problems by modifying itself rather than merely its milieu. Thompson synthesizes phenomenological and biological approaches, insisting that life and mind form a deep continuum and that the lived body just is the living body performing itself. Jung introduces a distinction between the material body as a ‘purposive arrangement of matter’ and the ‘living being’ as the additional, irreducible principle that animates it — anticipating debates about emergent vitality. McGilchrist foregrounds the organism as a stabilized metabolic flow rather than a static structure. Together these positions configure the living being as the central contested term between mechanism and vitalism, individuation and identity, embodiment and transcendence.

In the library 26 passages

the living being resolves problems, not just by adapting, i.e. by modifying its relation to the milieu (like a machine is capable of doing), but by modifying itself, by inventing new internal structures, and by completely introducing itself into the axiomatic of vital problems.

Simondon argues that the living being is ontologically distinguished from both machines and inert matter by its capacity to perpetuate and amplify its own individuation through internal self-transformation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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Intellect, holding all existence within itself, is a complete living being, and the essential Idea of Living Being. In so far as Intellect submits to contemplation by its derivative, becoming an Intelligible, it gives that derivative the right also to be called ‘living being.’

Plotinus identifies Intellect with the complete Living Being as such, making the Idea of Living Being the transcendental ground from which all particular living things derive their ontological status.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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the living being is to itself partially its own principle of individuation; it continues its individuation, and, instead of merely being a result that progressively degrades, the result of an initial operation of individuation becomes the principle of a further individuation.

Simondon distinguishes the living being from all technical objects by showing that, for the living, individuation is an ongoing allagmatic relation rather than a completed singular event.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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the living being is what maintains, transposes, prolongs, and sustains this metastable equilibrium through its activity. The complete universe only exists so long as the living being enters into the axiomatic of this universe.

Simondon posits the living being as the active maintainer of metastable equilibrium, making it constitutive of any universe of vital becoming rather than merely a product of it.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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the body cannot be understood as a mere heaping together of inert matter, but must be regarded as a material system ready for life and making life possible, with the proviso that for all its readiness it could not live without the addition of this ‘living being.’

Jung distinguishes the material body as necessary but insufficient for life, positing the ‘living being’ as a separate, irreducible animating principle that exceeds physical organization.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis

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The Collective Being, the Authentic, There, is at once Being and Intellectual-Principle and the Complete Living Form; thus it includes the total of living things.

Plotinus equates the Authentic Collective Being with the Complete Living Form, which comprehends all living things as necessary members of an all-inclusive intelligible life.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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the dualistic separation of consciousness and life makes it impossible to understand consciousness in its basic form of bodily sentience. According to the enactive approach, there is a deep continuity of life and mind.

Thompson argues that the living being must be understood through the enactive continuity of life and mind, making sentience intrinsic to, rather than superimposed upon, the living body.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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The lived body is the living body; it is a dynamic condition of the living body. We could say that our lived body is a performance of our living body, something our body enacts in living.

Thompson dissolves the Cartesian gap by identifying the phenomenologically lived body with the biological living body, treating subjectivity as the living organism’s own self-enactment.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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The difference between the living being and the inert crystal consists in the fact that the interior space of the inert crystal does not serve to keep extending the individuation carried out at the limits of the crystal undergoing growth.

Simondon uses the contrast with crystal growth to show that the living being uniquely integrates interiority and exteriority as an ongoing topological process rather than a surface accumulation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the living being is itself a modulator; it has a power supply in energy, an input or a memory, and an effector system.

Simondon frames the living being as an autonomous modulator of information and energy, distinguishing it from physical individuals that depend on the milieu for both energy and effect.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the particulars subsumed under the common name in both cases — figures and living beings — constitute a series, each successive term of which potentially contains its predecessor.

Aristotle establishes a serial hierarchy of living beings ordered by the powers of soul they possess, from nutritive to rational, providing the classical taxonomy that later thinkers will contest.

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting

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certain functions never become solely psychical or solely somatic, and, in this way, they maintain in the living being the status of the individuated but not individualized being.

Simondon identifies functions such as sexuality and social relations as maintaining an irreducible psychosomatic unity within the living being that resists full individualization into either mind or body.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the psychical leads to an order of trans-individual reality; indeed, the pre-individual reality associated with individuated living organisms is not segmented like them and does not have limits comparable to those of separate living individuals.

Simondon argues that the psychical dimension of the living being opens onto a transindividual reality that exceeds any single organism’s individuation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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consciousness in the sense of sentience as a kind of primitively self-aware liveliness or animation of the body. Does sentience emerge with life itself, with the first living bodies, namely, bacteria?

Thompson, invoking Jonas and Damasio, raises the question of whether sentience is co-extensive with life itself, making the living being the minimum threshold for a primitive subjective interiority.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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what constitutes individuality is non-immortality; each individual can be treated as a quantum of living existence; conversely, the colony does not possess this quantum characteristic.

Simondon argues that genuine individuality in living beings is defined by mortality, making death the ontological correlate and condition of individual existence.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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life cannot be explained through reduction to its chemical elements. The human organism is not like a watch that can be made to function by putting together the components, springs, gears, stems and so on.

Levine invokes Schrödinger to assert that the living being is an irreducibly self-organizing system that exceeds the sum of its physical and chemical constituents.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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the total level of information is then measured by the number of stages of integration and differentiation as well as by the relation between integration and differentiation (which can be called transduction) in the living being.

Simondon proposes that information-theoretic transduction — the ratio of integration to differentiation — is the operative measure of complexity in the living being’s individuation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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there is life, there is intellect, not in extension but as power without magnitude, issue of Authentic Being which is power self-existing, no vacuity but a thing most living and intellective — nothing more living, more intelligent, more real.

Plotinus identifies the Authentic Being as the supremely living and intellective reality, making vivid life and intellect mutually constitutive at the highest ontological level.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Lucretius represents living beings as relay runners that pass on torches; this is no doubt how he understands the flame of life given at birth.

Simondon uses the Lucretian image of torch-passing to describe how living beings relay individuation across generations, situating individual life within a collective transindividual becoming.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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at the level of macromolecules, it can hardly be said whether viruses are living or non-living. To adopt the notion of information reception as an essential expression of the operation of individuation would be to assert that individuation is carried out on a certain dimensional scale.

Simondon locates the boundary between living and non-living in information-reception at a particular topological scale, dissolving any sharp ontological discontinuity between them.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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these vitalists thought it conceivable that organized, moving bodies, functionally indistinguishable from organisms, could lack ‘vitality.’ These vitalists asked, why are these organized movements accompanied by life?

Thompson traces the historical parallels between vitalist debates about life and contemporary philosophical debates about consciousness, showing that both encounter a ‘hard problem’ of irreducibility.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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individualization is merely a partial splitting (in normal cases), for the psycho-physiological relation sustains the unity of the individuated being.

Simondon shows that in the living being psychical individualization is never complete, as the psycho-physiological bond preserves a functional unity that cannot be entirely resolved into either pole.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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Life is the final individualising operation of the all-comprehending and all-apprehending Supermind, the process by which its consciousness works individualised in each form from the standpoint proper to it.

Aurobindo situates the living being as the individualized expression of Supramental Consciousness-Force, positioning life as the instrument through which cosmic intelligence diversifies into distinct forms.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939aside

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if reason is ‘present’ in the body of the universe and in man’s body, that body must be alive, endowed with soul, which is defined in the Laws and the Phaedrus as the self-moving source of all motion.

The Timaeus commentary establishes that for Plato the cosmos is a living being because reason cannot inhere in matter without soul, making ensoulment the defining mark of any genuinely living body.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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the theory of autopoiesis provides a naturalistic interpretation of the teleological conception of life originating in experience, but our experience of our own bodily being is a condition of possibility for our comprehension of autopoietic selfhood.

Thompson argues that autopoiesis theory and phenomenological experience are mutually conditioning frameworks for understanding the living being, neither being reducible to the other.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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