The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays

do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.

If one is constantly told that genetic codes are “programs” (which is a bad metaphor) and that organisms are “robots” (a worse metaphor) and that genes are “selfish” (a catastrophically worse metaphor), one might be forgiven for forgetting that intentionality belongs to consciousness, not to mere physical events.

Agency exists as a way of life, a reiterative activity of opening or foreclosing different possibilities of materialization of matter, not as a relation of push and pull aimed at imposing force on a mass. We are entangled with, constituted and transformed by the very processes we aim to transform.

All the same, Berzelius added a fruitful notion. Rather than postulate some “vital force”—“a word to which we can affix no idea”—we should recognize that “this power to live belongs not to the constituent parts of our bodies, nor does it belong to them as an instrument, neither is it a simple power; but the result of the mutual operation of the ins