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deny this brute fact , if acted upon by stopping the heart , would kill the organism . Needy freedom refers to another brute fact about life : living beings depend on materials outside their own bodies to maintain their physical existence , such as water and food . Ironically , meeting these needs frees the living being to continue living .
The first and most essential purpose a living being must meet is to maintain its existence . Hans Jonas , according to Gilbert Meilaender ’ s commentary , writes that metabolism actually fulfills this first inclination to preserve one ’ s being . Living beings maintain their physical being by a “ special goings-on ” we call metabolism , which is the internal and external exchange with the environment that goes on over time . 83 This internal activity constitutes the living being as a substantial entity , a particular thing in itself . 84 The phenomenon of metabolism furthermore reveals a kind of centeredness in physical , living beings . This metabolic centeredness demonstrates that organisms are more than the materials composing them ; they are unities . 85 The collection of functional concepts throughout an organism work together for the survival of the whole .
In addition , the nature of centeredness also distinguishes between kinds of living beings . Living beings display centeredness in different ways based on the immediacy of the relation between environment and surroundings . 86 For example , plants depend more greatly on their surroundings than animals ; therefore they are defined by a greater immediacy – a kind of internal need for their exterior environment to support them . Animals , however , depend less on their immediate surroundings than plants , because they possess more flexible mobility and enough reasoning skills to meet needs . Finally , humans display the least immediacy , because they possess reason in rationality , and understand how to manipulate their environment in ways that animals cannot reproduce . 87
Philosophical biology accords neatly with the Scholastic distinctions between kinds of souls in living beings , yet without appealing to the religiously loaded concept of a soul . Joseph W . Koterski , S . J . summarizes this notion of a religiously loaded concept of soul : “ To modern ears , ‘ soul ’ sounds more poetic than scientific , or at least vaguely religious .” 88 Any postulation of unseen forces ( such as the four fundamental forces of physics ), in this scientific mentality , presupposes that the unseen forces stands in for something which we lack sufficient data to explain . 89 The idea of a functional concept really present in a thing may appear to the modern ear as a similar concession . Jonas ’ writings , however , testify to a cross-over between the abstract and the concrete , a cross-over wherein the abstract manifests concretely as “ lived .” Functional concepts play a critical and
83 Ibid , 10 . 84 Ibid . 85 Ibid , 11 . 86 Ibid , 12 . 87 Ibid . 88 Joseph W . Koterski , S . J ., An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy : Basic Concepts ( Malden , MA : Wiley-Blackwell ,
2009 ), 173 . 89 Joseph W . Koterski , S . J ., An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy : Basic Concepts ( Malden , MA : Wiley-Blackwell , 2009 ), 173 .