Abstract

To be alive is to be vulnerable. That is probably the most basic truth all living creatures confront, from the smallest to the greatest and from the most primitive to the most complex. As Hans Jonas states in the introduction to his wonderful treatise, The Phenomenon of Life, the paradoxical, still enigmatic fact that vital substance by some original act of segregation has isolated itself from the general fabric of things and set itself over against the world introduced the tension of ‘to be or not to be’ in the indifferent continuum of material existence. With life, Jonas observes with Friedrich Nietzsche, being appears as being in an emphatic sense for the first time. Life means mortality, it is existence affirmed but as such, given the inherent and continuous threat of relapsing back into non-being (all living creatures’ ultimate fate anyway), it is existence as concern. Being alive as being free from the identity with matter implies having its own being as a burden and this means—h