著者

石井 誠士

出版者

日本医学哲学・倫理学会

雑誌

医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, pp.14-25, 1993-10-01 (Released:2018-02-01)

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In the follow reflection, I try to discuss about the essential being of life and to examine the philosophical-biological thoughts of Hans Jonas. According to Jonas, organic identity, which can be observed by the fact of metabolic regeneration, must be different from the physical identity of matter. He adopted the idea of freedom in order to clarify ontologically the phenomena of life. During the course of its life, an organism remains the same, while continually changing its material constituents. Therefore the identity of the form of a living thing is free from the physical identity of matter. Further, it is not the identity of a mere form, but of a self-constituting agent who realizes this living form of itself. We obtain this understanding of life from the experience of our body. The body is the only affair within the entire res extensa which reveals a sort of intimacy. The major problem of philosophical biology must be life, centered in the problematic existence of the living body. But the fundamental freedom of the organism, as realized in metabolic activity, is of a dialectical character, for, to realize itself and to continue itself, the living form needs material constituents and their constant refurbishment. It is a "needful freedom". The independence from the material universe indicates likewise a certain dependence on that universe. Life must die. Understood so, the unity or the bi-unity, as Jonas says, between subject and object, self and its world or freedom and necessity, remains a still unsolved problem. Neither mere partial monism nor dualism can hope to solve it. We need an new, integral monism, which must seek to absorb the radical polarity into a higher unity of existence. Viktor von Weizsacker asserted that the meaning of life is not its continuing to exist, but sacrifice. The fact of sexuality reveals this. Individuals and species die for others and live. The environment is nothing but the whole which lets living things live for and with others.