On Time, Being, and Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life

Five

36 Five The living being is concerned with its own process of being. The living being essentially cares for not ceasing to be what it is by nature. Had living beings ceased to be concerned with their own process of being, they would cease to be; they would die. “Care” is thus the fundamental mode of being of living beings. The task of caring for one’s own being implies having been cut off from the conditions granting one’s own existence. It implies that existence lies now in one’s own hands. It implies that being is one’s own, that is, that the process of being is the emergence of the self. We find here a structure very similar to that of self-organization. Self-organization, as we saw in Chapter 3, is not given once and for all but implies that the self ought to be capable of enduring as such, and therefore that it ought constantly to re-create its independence with regard to environmental conditions. The self-organized being consists in the history of its renewed self-creations. In other words, the selforganized being is always exposed to imminent dissolution. Self-organization Chapter Five 37 is the task of resisting the nonself or the antiself (the “other” considered as a threat to self-preservation). Thus the “self” is basically thought of as an immunological entity. The immune self does not stand beside or behind the immunological activity, as if it were first a self-subsistent entity, which only then fights for survival; rather, the self is nothing other than the immunological fight for survival. The self is a historical and changing entity, altered by each immune encounter and in a sense renewed, if not recreated. . . . Challenged by constant engagements between self and nonself, the immune self has come to be viewed analogously to a living entity, continually redefined, reasserted, and redetermined.1 Living beings are the task of creating, by themselves, the conditions for not disappearing, for deferring imminent death. The ability to live is proportional to the degree of freedom with regard to environmental fluctuations, to external conditions, constrictions, and determinations. This freedom has a price, however: The more free and therefore the more capable of living, the more living beings are “by themselves” or the more they are confined to their own singularity, abandoned or delivered to themselves in the task of surviving, hence responsible for their own destiny. To be responsible for one’s own life means having to be the cause of it. It is obvious that it is this traditional characterization of living beings as cause of (as responsible for) themselves what lies behind Hans Jonas’s more recent interpretation of life as “responsibility” and “freedom”: The privilege of freedom carries the burden of need and means precarious being. For the ultimate condition for the privilege lies in the paradoxical fact that living substance, by some original act of segregation, has taken itself out of the general integration of things in the physical context, set itself over against the world, and introduced the tension of “to be or not to be” into the neutral assuredness of existence.2 Never, while alive, can the living being quit this responsibility; never can it free itself from this freedom. That is why no technical invention, no system of exploitation or of slavery, would ever relieve human beings from the responsibility of living—from the “living condition,” as it were. This does not mean that the supposedly “superior” ways of life (for instance, the bios theorētikos and the bios politikos) are fictitious. On the contrary, they are real, 38 On Time, Being, and Hunger but they are neither more real nor more prominent than “inferior” ways of life. They are all, indeed, ways of living; they are all ways of assuming the task of not ceasing to be. That is why in the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics the want of contemplation describes, for humans, not a simple vocation or an ideal of life to come, but the condition of being alive—“by nature men are hungry to know.” There is no point either in sectioning the soul into different parts and in recognizing accordingly a supposedly “sheer” life, that is, a way of life performed by one and presumably more fundamental and inferior part of the soul—the nutritive one. The nutritive function of living beings is...