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TAP0010.1177/0959354319889186Theory & PsychologyBrinkmann

Article

Theory & Psychology

Psychology as a science
2020, Vol. 30(1) 3­–17
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354319889186
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354319889186
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Svend Brinkmann
University of Aalborg

Abstract
William James famously defined psychology as the science of mental life. Much ink has since
been spilled over the concept of the mental, but less so over the notion of life. In this article,
I argue that psychologists should address life as an equally important concept. First, I briefly
articulate Aristotle’s idea of the soul (or mind) as a life principle. Second, I argue with reference to
Wittgenstein that the division between the living and non-living is more basic and important than
that between mind and matter. Third, I introduce the work of the philosopher Hans Jonas, who
made the phenomenon of life central to his existential interpretation of biological facts and argued
that nature should be seen as a source of value. My conclusion is that psychology as a science of
life must be a biographical science—a science of what it is to live a life.

Keywords
biographical, bios, life, normativity, zoe

“Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their condi-
tions” (James, 1890/1983, p. 15). This is the first sentence in William James’ famous
exposition of The Principles of Psychology, which was and remains a key reference work
for scientific psychologists. It has always been a standing challenge to define “the men-
tal,” although this has been seen as the key to distinguishing psychology from other sci-
ences that study life processes such as biology or physiology, and collective forms of life,
e.g., sociology or social anthropology. James’ own approach was to locate the mark and
criterion of mentality in the “pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their
attainment” (1890/1983, p. 21). This was how James discriminated between mechanical
and intelligent performances, as he said, viz., with reference to teleology or the pursu-
ance of ends. But what about the other significant term in his definition of the science of
psychology—i.e., life? Psychologists, philosophers, and other human scientists are
rightly eager to debate the nature of the mental, which quickly becomes a discussion

Corresponding author:
Svend Brinkmann, Department of Communication & Psychology, University of Aalborg, Kroghstræde 3,
9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark.
Email: svendb@hum.aau.dk
4 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

about the mind as a noun that refers to an entity (with all the problems that follow from
such reification), but they have been less eager to discuss the nature of life as such and
ask the question: What do we mean when we talk about mental life?
This is what I shall attempt to do in the present article. I shall defend the idea that
psychology is best thought of as a science of life. Not only life in its biological manifes-
tations, of course, as when we talk about someone “being alive” rather than dead
(although this is certainly also significant), but life as a kind of conduct, as when we talk
about someone “living a life.” The kind of life we talk about in the context of “being
alive” was what the ancient Greeks called zoe, which is mainly studied by biologists and
physiologists. And the kind of life we allude to when talking about “living a life” was
called bios in Greek. This distinction is found in Aristotle and was discussed by Hannah
Arendt (1958/1998), among others in the 20th century, and I return to it below. Of course,
as living human beings, our lives involve both processes of zoe—since we have bodies,
brains, metabolism, and numerous other organic life processes—but certainly also bios
in the sense that we act individually and collectively, which gives shape to a biography,
literally a life that can be written down. Life as bios is also life as praxis—a meaningful
way of conducting one’s life within the social practices of a culture.
The point of addressing the notion of life in psychology would be to change focus for
the discipline: instead of asking the usual questions that are perceived as fundamental in
philosophical or theoretical psychology—What is the mind? How does it relate to the
brain and the body? How can we know the minds of other people?—I suggest that there
is much to gain from asking questions about life instead: What is life/a life? What is the
relationship between living organisms (zoe) and the lives of persons (bios)? How can we
know and study lives?
Needless to say, it would be impossible to address all these fundamental questions in
a single article, so instead I shall simply try to argue—with the help of significant phi-
losophers and scientists—that these are the kinds of questions that psychology should
pose. If I am right, then we need less mind-talk and more life-talk in psychology, or at
least realize that mind-talk is in a way parasitic on life-talk. I contend that introducing
more life-talk in psychology would bring us closer to the phenomena dealt with by psy-
chologists, but also that it would dissolve some of the problems inherent in and arising
from mind-talk, or at least lead us away from the dead ends of the dualisms of mind and
world, mind and brain, mind and body, and so on.
With life-talk these dualisms simply do not appear, not even at the biological level.
When we discuss respiration as a life process, for example, it seems misguided to con-
struct a dualism between the lungs and the circulatory system on one side and air on the
other. Respiration is clearly a single, integrated process. Breathing is an affair of the air
as much as of the lungs, as John Dewey (1922/1930) argued around one hundred years
ago, and no one would think of this as a metaphysical dualism. Something similar is
characteristic for digestion, to take another physiological life process, as it cannot be
neatly separated into a subjective consumer and an object consumed. As Annemarie Mol
(2008) has shown us in her thoughtful philosophical reflection on eating an apple:

Take: I eat an apple. Is the agency in the I or in the apple? I eat, for sure, but without apples
before long there would be no “I” left. And it is even more complicated. For how to separate us
Brinkmann 5

out to begin with, the apple and me? One moment this may be possible: here is the apple, there
I am. But a little later (bite, chew, swallow) I have become (made out of) apple; while the apple
is (a part of) me. Transsubstantiation. What about that for a model to think with? (p. 30)

I suggest we do exactly that: take such life processes and use them to build models to
think with about psychological phenomena and human life. Psychology would probably
have been quite a different science had it taken such processes as its starting point.
Instead of beginning with a mind standing opposed to a world that is there to be known
and controlled (the whole Cartesian, cognitivist, representationalist scheme), a psychol-
ogy of life begins with living organisms that breathe, eat, and move, and may attain a
level of biographical complexity that enables them to be responsible for what they do.
Then we call them persons, and we may write their life stories.
I am far from the first to suggest that psychology should operate along these lines, and
significant contributions have come from ecological psychology (e.g., Gibson,
1979/1986) that begins from living organisms in their environments (more recently, the
whole approach to embodied, embedded, and extended cognition belongs to a similar
line of thought), and also from cultural psychologies that begin with acting persons in
sociocultural practices (e.g., Valsiner, 2007). The former can be said to focus on zoe and
the latter on bios, but in order to grasp them both and understand how they are related, I
believe we should move the concept of life to the center stage of psychology. Writing in
the 1930s, the grandfather of cultural historical psychology, Lev Vygotsky, had a similar
idea, when he wrote in his notebook:

On the definition of psychology as the science of mental life. 1. Life not in the biological sense.
After all, it is not breathing and blood circulation that form the topic of a biography, of one’s
existence, of a drama, of a novel, but the events of a human life, i.e., the problem of the
psychologie concrète comes first. (as cited in Zavereshneva & van der Veer, 2018, p. 368)

I believe the time has come to articulate the “psychology of life” that has so far been
more implicit in pragmatism, ecological, and cultural psychology. I will try to do so in this
article, and I shall organize the argument around three main “thinkers of life,” viz. Aristotle,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hans Jonas. First, I go back to Aristotle who in De Anima
depicted the soul (or mind) as a principle of life. Second, I briefly make the point—with
reference to Wittgenstein’s critique of mentalism—that the division between the living and
non-living is more basic and important than that between mind and matter. The former
distinction is where psychology should begin its reflections and investigations. Third, I
introduce the work of the philosopher Hans Jonas, who made the phenomenon of life cen-
tral to his existential interpretation of biological facts. Jonas’ understanding of nature as a
source of value and normativity provides a fruitful theoretical framework for a psychology
that bridges zoe and bios in an acknowledgment of the normativity of psychology’s subject
matter (Brinkmann, 2006). I will certainly not claim that these thinkers agree about every-
thing—indeed, they are quite different from one other—but they each provide some useful
theoretical tools that we may use to develop psychology as a science of life. Finally, in the
conclusion I return to the distinction between zoe and bios, which I have just introduced,
and discuss how psychology as a science of life must be a biographical science.
6 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

Aristotle: Psyche as life principle

I have already touched on how Aristotle regarded the soul or psyche as a biological con-
cept. His book on the mind, De Anima, is not a modern psychology of mental phenom-
ena, but rather a book on biological principles of life (trans. 1957). One has to go to his
works on ethics to find descriptions of human activities that resemble modern analyses
in social and personality psychology (trans. 1976). Aristotle understood the soul quite
generally as a principle of life, or as the form of the living body. For Aristotle, the idea of
the soul is “virtually identical with life” (Ostenfeld, 2018, p. 67). Aristotle distinguished
himself by defending a hylomorphic theory, according to which the soul and the body are
one, just as imprint and wax are (Ostenfeld, 2018, p. 129), so unlike his philosophical
predecessor Plato, Aristotle did not think that the soul could exist without a body. From
the Aristotelian perspective, the soul is not a thing, an entity, but represents instead the
defining properties of a living thing. Aristotle compares the relationship between a living
organism and its soul to the relationship between the eye and vision. If an animal were
an eye, the soul would be the ability to see. The soul is thus not an object that is “attached”
to the body—for it is not an object at all—just as vision is not an object attached to the
eye. Across the biological world, it is true that abilities and capabilities cannot logically
be localized in physical space, which is why it makes no sense to try to find where the
soul is localized (in the brain, for example; Brinkmann, 2018). This is a grammatical
point, as Wittgenstein (1953) would say, i.e., about the meaning of the concept.
As the form of the living body, the soul is what makes the organism what it is. What
makes a human being a human being is not only that we are alive (zoe), because beech
trees and seagulls are alive too. What makes us human is the fact that our soul is rational.
In addition to having motor and sensory functions, which we share with other animals,
the human being is also rational. We are the only species with a substantially complex
language, and we are thus the only species that can reflect on our own actions and, for
example, ask whether there are good reasons to act in a certain way. That is why we are
also the only moral species in a strict sense. We regularly praise and blame human beings
for the ways they live their lives, which testifies to the idea that psychological phenom-
ena in human life are normative, but we do not praise or blame trees or dogs for how they
live theirs (although we may praise the beauty of a tree or the loyalty of a dog, we do not
hold members of these life forms accountable for what they do in a moral sense).
When Aristotle discussed a psychological phenomenon like anger, for example,
he therefore argued that this phenomenon cannot be comprehensively understood by
scientists, who hunt for causalities or seek to reduce the phenomenon to its physical
and chemical constituents (see Brinkmann, 2016; Robinson, 1989, on which the fol-
lowing is based). Natural scientists in Aristotle’s day would define anger as “boiling
of the blood” (today we have other physiological and brain-related explanations) and
this is not entirely wrong, according to Aristotle, but it is only half the story. To
understand the whole story, we have to supplement the natural scientific observation
of the blood heating up with a normative or rhetorical explanation that considers the
anger as a meaningful expression of life. Anger should also be understood norma-
tively as a response to having experienced injustice in the course of one’s life. Just
as a bachelor is defined as an unmarried man, anger is defined as a justified response
Brinkmann 7

to the experience of injustice. We may well get angry in other situations too, but oth-
ers could then rightly reprimand us and say that there was no reason to be angry (just
as we could use the term “bachelor” incorrectly and others will then rightly correct
us). The physiological side of anger belongs to the life processes of an organism
(zoe), while the normative side must be understood with reference to the specific
situation and practices that justified the anger normatively within the flow of actions
and events (bios and praxis).
In somewhat technical terms we can say that anger as a psychological phenomenon
has both a nomic side, i.e., is part of the causal chains of biological life that can be
described by laws, but that it also has a normative side, where the angry person not only
can be described by laws, but can (if she has the properly cultivated skills) follow local
norms for when anger is a legitimate response to events in the world—or indeed violate
such norms (Brinkmann, 2018). The order of non-human life is purely nomic, while the
order of human existence is also normative (Hacker, 2007). Non-human nature cannot
be said to follow natural laws and therefore it cannot break them—rather, it can be more
or less correctly described by these laws. Psychological phenomena are normative,
because life as bios incorporates normativity. This applies not only to emotions like
anger, but equally so to reasoning, remembering, acting, perceiving, and other psycho-
logical phenomena. When we argue, for example, our reasoning is open to judgment in
the context of the normative standards of good reasoning; the most basic of these stand-
ards come from logic. Reasoning thus belongs to a life practice of bios and is not, for
example, a physiological phenomenon. When we remember, we try to remember cor-
rectly, which means that remembering is a normative life phenomenon. And when we
act, the action can be judged from a variety of different norms (e.g., ethical, aesthetic,
instrumental), but the fact that something can be judged in this way is what justifies
referring to it as an action rather than a mere physical movement. It is not “a mind” that
does these things, just as they cannot be located “inside” a mind. The whole entity-view
of the mind is misguided. Rather, it is a person that performs such actions in the course
of living her life.
In the tradition of Aristotle, the specifically human life principle (i.e., soul) is, in
short, something normative. It is what characterizes our lives as bios. If we were to trans-
late this into mind-talk, we could say with Bennett and Hacker (2003) that the mind is “a
distinctive range of capacities of intellect and will, in particular the conceptual capacities
of a language-user which make self-awareness and self-reflection possible” (p. 105). In
this light, the mind is the expression of rational or intelligent life, a widely ubiquitous
term for our abilities and dispositions (Coulter, 1979, p. 13). To emphasize this important
point once more: the mind is not a term that indicates a location or a thing: “the mind is
not a thing; talk of our minds is talk of world-involving capabilities that we have and
activities that we engage in” (Putnam, 1999, pp. 169–170). From the viewpoint of
“world-involving capabilities” (to use Putnam’s apt phrase), there is no more a meta-
physical divide between the mind and the world than there is between our hands and the
things we manipulate in our lives. For there is no mind as a discrete thing within or
around human beings, but there are indeed living human beings that do all sorts of things
when conducting their lives together. The lesson to learn from the Aristotelian line of
thought is that this is what psychology should address.
8 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

Wittgenstein: The living and the non-living

From this Aristotelian starting point, let us take the story into the 20th century and the phi-
losophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most important philosopher of that century.
There are many quite different interpretations of his philosophy, particularly concerning his
later works such as Philosophical Investigations (1953). Was the later Wittgenstein a realist
or an anti-realist, a naturalist or a social constructionist, and is it possible to articulate a
philosophical theory based on his work, or was it exclusively “therapeutic” and quietist,
i.e., against the articulation of positive philosophical theses? Philosophers have been
divided in their interpretations, which is not uncommon when considering the giants of
philosophy. In a helpful book on the Philosophical Investigations, Marie McGinn (1997)
unfolds its major themes, some of which are often highlighted, such as the view of lan-
guage as understood from the perspective of language-in-use and the denial of a private
inner realm of mental phenomena, but she adds a few others as fundamental that are less
often underlined, centered on Wittgenstein as a philosopher of life: “the emphasis on the
body as the objectification of the human soul; the replacing of the division between matter
and mind with the division between the living and the non-living” (p. 8).
This is where Wittgenstein’s ideas are relevant for a psychology of life, and these themes
show that he was much more than a philosopher of language, although this is often how he
has been read by so-called analytical philosophers. Wittgenstein was also what we may call
a philosopher of life in the Aristotelian sense, who saw “Commanding, questioning, recount-
ing, chatting . . . as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing”
(Wittgenstein, 1953, §25). Speaking a language, interacting with others in communicative
relations, is simply what living human beings do as the kind of creature that we are. In this
context, it is worth remembering how Wittgenstein characterized his own project: “What we
are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contrib-
uting curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have
escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes” (§ 415). In a broad sense of
the term, Wittgenstein saw language as a phenomenon of life—both biologically and
socially—for it has meaning only when seen as naturally embedded in the lives of humans.
A key term for Wittgenstein was that of a form of life: “to imagine a language means
to imagine a form of life” is one of the most famous remarks from the Philosophical
Investigations (1953, §19). Of course, a form of life in this sense is a cultural phenome-
non, a species of bios, referring to historical groups of people who are bound together in
communities of practice. Developing as a human being means first and foremost to
acquire more and more of such a form of life. It is not about constructing an ever more
complex inner realm of the mind. As McGinn puts it:

The structure and complexity of psychological states does not lie in the structure and complexity
of some inner mechanism (mental or physical), but in the complex (temporally extended) form
of life that is apparent in an individual’s behavior and accessible from a third-person point of
view. (1997, p. 56)

Understanding the words and practices of one’s culture, for example, is not linked to
what goes on “in the mind” of the individual, but rather to the person’s ability to partici-
pate with others and go on according to the norms of the practices.
Brinkmann 9

As expressions of bios, forms of life are ways that human beings orchestrate their
lives according to certain norms. If mental life in this sense is connected to forms of life,
then it follows once again that mental phenomena are normative, i.e., subject to praise
and blame, which has been argued recently by a number of philosophically inclined psy-
chologists (e.g., Harré & Moghaddam, 2012). This is already inherent in the idea of life
as bios, given that a person’s life is something the person conducts. A life does not simply
happen or lead itself, but is an active process involving the person in collectives of oth-
ers. We live our lives; it is an active process.
If McGinn is right in emphasizing the fundamental distinction between the living and
the non-living in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, then the notion of being alive (life as zoe)
should also be taken into account alongside that of life as practices or bios. Wittgenstein
has numerous remarks about our deep responsivity to living organisms, which is not
about responding to “minds,” and he famously claimed that “the human body is the best
picture of the human soul” (1953, p. 178). Thus, the living, moving, breathing, consum-
ing body is the best picture of the soul, and this is very close to the ancient Greek idea of
the soul (psyche) as a principle of life, which, as we saw, is found in the works of Aristotle
(Ostenfeld, 2018, p. 67). The body is alive, McGinn reminds us, “not merely in the sense
that it moves about, but in the sense that the continual play of its movements and gestures
have a particular meaning or significance” (1997, p. 155).
Wittgenstein was clear that we are normally able to see intentions in facial and bodily
movements. We do not merely associate the movements of living bodies with intentions,
for intentions simply are the meanings of such movements within broader temporal and
social contexts. This applies also to non-human animals. In §647 of the Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein asks us to “Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast
when it wants to escape.” He wants to convince us of what we know (at least when we
are not philosophizing) that there is no gap between the movements of the cat or the beast
and their intentions. Their intentions are simply found in their meaningful movements in
the given contexts and not in any inner workings of the animal. This is life manifesting
itself as zoe, and proof that the living body really is the best picture of the soul, including
the animal soul.
Considering living beings or organisms in this way should divert us from insisting on
talking about the mind as fundamental. Rather, the living, moving body is fundamental,
as it is always already meaningful. Closer than Wittgenstein to the dominant strands of
psychology, Dewey had a similar argument in his book on Knowing and the Known,
which was the last book he wrote (together with Arthur Bentley): “The living, behaving,
knowing organism is present. To add a ‘mind’ to him is to try to double him up. It is
double-talk; and double-talk doubles no facts” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949/1960, p. 132).
Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that “My attitude towards [another
human being] is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul”
(1953, IV). We do not need and do not have a “theory of mind,” neither as researchers or
ordinary people, which grounds a belief in the souls of others. For we simply relate to
others as living beings, as persons that live a life, and here lies our whole human attitude
that is not about “a mind.”
A line of thought thus seems to run from the Greeks, notably Aristotle, and to 20th-cen-
tury giants of philosophy such as Wittgenstein. However different they are in philosophical
10 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

method, they can be said to agree that the soul is the form of the living body (Aristotle, trans.
1957), which is why the body is the best picture of the soul (Wittgenstein, 1953). The soul
is a kind of life principle that becomes manifest in living organisms, and which cannot be
applied to thermostats, computers, or even robots. As human beings, we have a primitive
responsivity to living organisms that is not grounded in a theory of mind, but in life itself.
Wittgenstein explains this by denying that it makes sense to imagine that a stone has sensa-
tions. Why would we ever think that it did? But “now look at a wriggling fly,” he says, “and
at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems to get a foothold here, where before every-
thing was, so to speak, too smooth for it” (1953, §284). This is responsivity to life as zoe,
manifesting itself in psyche, in a way that runs across plants, animals, and human beings.
This phenomenon of life was placed at the center of philosophy by the philosopher Hans
Jonas, whose ideas I shall now address as a third source of inspiration for psychology as a
science of life.

Jonas: The phenomenon of life

Today’s discussions in philosophy and social theory are full of references to “new mate-
rialisms” and key figures often cited are Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Bruno
Latour. The approaches of these scholars and others aligned with them break down dual-
isms of mind and matter, culture and nature, and subject and object. After decades of
social constructionism and discourse analysis, “the material world” is now having a
genuine comeback in many different fields and disciplines. Poststructuralism has in
some forms morphed into posthumanism. I have become interested in Hans Jonas’ phi-
losophy because on the one hand it represents a version of these “new materialisms,” but
on the other hand maintains a distinct human (and humanist) perspective and ethical
outlook without thereby reducing itself to anthropocentrism.1 Like the new materialisms,
Jonas’ philosophy is starkly anti-dualistic and articulates a philosophy of continuity
between plants, animals, and human beings. I have argued above that a psychology of
life must be a science of normative phenomena (doing, feeling, thinking, etc.), and with
Jonas we may add a thorough analysis of a basic normativity in life to the emerging psy-
chology of life.
Although Jonas’ work is known in certain scholarly circles, he is not widely read
today. This is a shame, since he was one of the first scholars to address the dangers of
technological development and climate change in great depth.2 But in the heydays of
postmodernism and discourse analysis, when much was destabilized through decon-
struction, he was probably too metaphysical and “materialist,” and now that the pendu-
lum has swung towards new materialisms, he is perhaps too easily (and mistakenly) seen
as anthropocentric. Like other students of Heidegger and post-Heideggerian thinkers
(e.g., Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas), Jonas developed a moral philosophy based on the
experiences of the Holocaust, partly as a reaction to what he saw as the lurking nihilism
in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology (Jonas, 1996).
I find that Jonas’ work is particularly compelling in the era of what some scientists
now call the Anthropocene—the age of the human being as a force of nature that funda-
mentally changes the planet leading to climate change and loss of biodiversity. In a
recent book on this geological epoch, Davies articulates the normative demand issuing
Brinkmann 11

from the realization of what he calls deep historical time: the new epoch offers a way for
environmentally conscious citizens “to see themselves as ‘members of deep time, along
with trilobites and Ediacaran organisms,’ as ‘one expression of the ever-evolving planet’”
(McKay quoted in Davies, 2016, p. 193). Without referring to Jonas, this is actually a
quite precise characterization of his work and his attempt to provide “an existential inter-
pretation of biological facts” (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. xiv), which was how he often referred
to his own work.
A main point for Jonas was to argue that values emerge from nature itself. In other
words, for Jonas, axiology is a part of ontology (1984, p. 79). He believed that ethics
should be based not on God, community, or the self, but on life itself and the nature of
things. This is already to break with anthropocentric ethics that find the source of value
in the human realm of feelings and preferences (e.g., utilitarianism) or the will (e.g.,
Kantianism). In a way, it is to return to a Greek conception of an ontic logos as the
ground of ethics (see Taylor, 1989), but in a way that is deeply informed by Darwin’s
theory of evolution and modern science. One may say that Jonas synthesized the thoughts
of Aristotle, Hegel, and Darwin. Unlike posthumanist thinkers such as Barad (2007),
who find inspiration in quantum physics, Jonas turns to biology to understand a universe
in flux. His philosophy of life, of biological facts, locates value in the very nature of life
itself, even down to the metabolism of living organisms.
He begins by stating “that the world is alive.” This, he adds, “is really the most natural
view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence. On the terrestrial scene, in which
experience is reared and contained, life abounds and occupies the whole foreground
exposed to man’s immediate view” (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. 7). With the kind of mechanis-
tic natural sciences that emerged with the Renaissance—e.g., when Galileo claimed that
the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics—a primacy of matter and
eo ipso death began. Our thinking since, Jonas says, has been “under the ontological
dominance of death” (1966/2001, p. 12), given the starting point of materialism that the
world is dead matter. Life, then, becomes a riddle to explain, but Jonas turns this on its
head by insisting that life is primary in our understanding of the world. And “life” is not
something attached to a discrete organism, but is a more holistic property: “Organism
and environment together form a system, and this henceforth determines the basic con-
cept of life” (p. 46). From Darwinian thinking, Jonas takes the idea that “all contempo-
rary revisions of traditional ontology indeed start, almost axiomatically, from the
conception of being as becoming” (p. 58).
Although Darwin has been used to express a materialist understanding of nature, it is a
materialism that “contains the germ of its own overcoming,” according to Jonas
(1966/2001, p. 53). Life is at its basis characterized by metabolism, for a living organism
is an entity whose being is its own doing (p. 88). Unlike a rock, an organism exists as such
in virtue of what it does, and the conventional term we use for this is metabolism. As soon
as we talk about animal life, and not just plant life, however, we must also take motility,
perception, and emotion into account (p. 99)—all of which are aspects of what Jonas calls
mediacy that implies some distance between organism and world. This is not the place to
unfold Jonas’ thoughtful elucidation of differences between plant, animal, and human life,
but Jonas makes clear that the plant does not as such have a world, but is confined to an
environment. As a living organism, the plant is in direct chemical commerce with the
12 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

environment, but animals and human beings relate to objects in space, which are per-
ceived, desired, and acted upon, before entering into the metabolic system. Only humans,
however, Jonas conjectures, are capable of seeking perception for its own sake, giving us
forms of pleasure that are not connected to the satisfaction of immediate needs (p. 184).
This is also where aesthetic experience begins.
While plants are moved by need but not desire, and animals have a mediated relation
to the environment that gives them a world, only humans fully master a reflective kind
of mediacy that involves symbols and the interposition of images. It is also this reflective
form of mediacy that gives us our unique form of responsibility, as we shall see below.
Humans have a kind of freedom not granted to plants or other animals, because we can
choose to reflect on an object (rather than only reacting to impinging stimuli), we can
transform what presents itself to the senses into images, and we can transcend the factual
by the creative use of language (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. 174).
All living organisms, however, and not only humans, are ends-in-themselves, Jonas
argues, which means that there is value that is independent of the human perspective.
Value does not spring from human choice or will (because if value were created by will,
it could not bind will), but from the nature of things, from life itself. But what does that
mean? What kind of value, what kind of normativity, can emerge from life itself? For a
psychology of life that approaches its phenomena as normative, this must be a key ques-
tion. Jonas’ (1996) answer was that all organisms are ends in themselves, because all
have needs. There is purposiveness in nature, he argues, which implies that being is
normatively better than non-being. Life says “yes” to itself, as he puts it (p. 91). As we
have seen, his philosophy of nature begins not with dead matter (leading to the riddle of
Newtonian natural science about how life can emerge from death), but rather with living
organisms in their environments and worlds. But, Jonas argues, humans are unique
because they represent the maximal actualization of the purposiveness of nature (p. 16).
This is so because only humans are responsible for their lives and what they do. Jonas
develops a philosophy of natural responsibility by first interpreting nature existentially
(Jonas, 1966/2001) and then developing an account of human nature specifically that
centers on a metaphysical grounding of our ethical obligations (Jonas, 1984, 1996).
From this Jonasian perspective, we learn that nature is not only a resource that is
ready to answer to human needs and interests; it harbors inherent value, since life is
intrinsically better than non-life. And humans have evolved to be creatures that can be
responsible—like no other known organism—giving rise to what Jonas (1984) called
“the imperative of responsibility.” This is the imperative to secure the continued exist-
ence of life, human and otherwise, on a planet in jeopardy. This may seem like anthropo-
centrism—seeing everything in the universe from a distinct human perspective—but in
fact it is the opposite, and Jonas was insistent in his critique of anthropocentric ethical
systems. What for Jonas was a fact—that there is “an unconditional duty for mankind to
exist” (1984, p. 37)—arises not from human dominance over nature, but rather from life
itself, since nature has procured a being that is actually able to assume responsibility, not
only for itself, but for life as such, also in its non-human manifestations.
Jonas thus advanced a theory of value based on an analysis of nature: “axiology
becomes a part of ontology . . . Nature, by entertaining ends, or having aims, as we now
assume her to do, also posits values” (1984, p. 79). He regarded the very capacity to have
Brinkmann 13

any purpose at all as a good-in-itself (p. 80), although not any concrete purpose enter-
tained need be good. “Life is the explicit confrontation of being with not-being” (p. 81),
and this gives a special kind of responsibility to those creatures—notably humans—who
have the power to affect and control being and not-being. Only humans have duties in the
full sense of the term because they have the power to act responsibly; they can imagine the
future and choose between different courses of action. All this belongs to nature, because
humanity is part of nature through and through. This is not a form of anthropocentric eth-
ics, according to which a normative “ought” can only issue from humans themselves
(from the will as in existentialism and Kantianism, or the emotions as in emotivism and
utilitarianism). Anthropocentrism is a metaphysical prejudice that can and should be dis-
cussed and criticized, according to Jonas, who believed that the deepest normative “ought”
comes from life itself, from nature (and the nature of things). This means that humans
have a special role to play as creatures endowed by natural processes with responsibility.
Thus, Jonas arrives at his “imperative of responsibility,” which he puts as follows: “Act so
that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life,”
or, expressed negatively, “Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the
future possibility of such life” (Jonas, 1984, p. 11). Needless to say, Jonas thought that we
fail to pay heed to this imperative in the epoch of the Anthropocene.
Jonas developed a philosophy of nature that placed human beings within nature—as
living, responsible creatures—and because of our nature, we face a moral paradox: “the
self forgets itself over the pursuit of the object, so that a higher self (which indeed is also
a good in itself) might come into being” (Jonas, 1984, p. 85). And he continues:

The good man [sic] is not he who made himself good but rather he who did the good for its own
sake. But the good is the “cause” at issue out there in the world, indeed the cause of the world.
Morality can never have itself for its goal. (p. 85)

When acting morally, we do not act for the sake of morality, but rather to help others,
for example; and we do not act well in order to become morally elevated, and yet this is
what happens when acting morally. Morality—like aesthetic experience—in this sense, is
about having a non-instrumental relation to others and the world, and this is made possible
by the uniquely human way of existing in nature—by bios and Aristotelian praxis. All in
all, Jonas developed a philosophy of life that gives humans a special duty to exist and
protect the intrinsic value of nature. I have not unpacked all his arguments or his philo-
sophical system here, but what I find interesting is how he articulates a philosophy that on
the one hand builds on a relational, processual, anti-dualistic ontology like the posthuman
and new materialist philosophers, and on the other hand finds a way for us to pinpoint
what is specifically human, especially concerning our unique forms of responsibility.

In conclusion: Being alive and living a life

In order to begin articulating a psychology of life (rather than mind), I have now referred
to the contributions from Aristotle and also from two great philosophers of the 20th cen-
tury: Wittgenstein and Jonas. Although interpretations of Wittgenstein in particular vary
a lot, I believe it is fair to read them both as carrying on what is fundamentally a Greek
14 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

view of humanity as part of nature—humans as zoon logikon—continuous with plants

and animals and yet with a distinctive set of qualities. Exactly this should be the starting
point for psychology as a science of life. Wittgenstein emphasized our linguistic abilities
as uniquely human, and Jonas pointed to our responsibilities, which, however, are inti-
mately related to the mediacy that language and other semiotic tools provide us with. For
both, life is a primordial phenomenon on a deeper level than a notion like mind. In my
view, their contributions should alert psychologists to study life as both zoe and bios with
a view to the inherent normativity of life. From Aristotle we should learn that mind sim-
ply is a principle of life, which is why psyche is the form of the living organism; from
Wittgenstein we should take the point that the living/not-living distinction is primitive in
our understanding of the world and the basis on which we relate to others; and finally,
with Jonas, we should begin to explore the idea that normativity at its most basic levels
is not a result of human feeling or willing, but rather inherent in life processes as such.
These three points or principles may be foundational for a psychology of mental life.
The project of considering psychology as a science of life is aligned with that being
pushed by Tim Ingold in a related discipline, viz. anthropology. In a book aptly entitled
Being Alive, Ingold refers to his project as one of “restoring life to anthropology” (2011,
p. 14). He sees this project in continuation of the ecological psychology of James Gibson
and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose approach (Merleau-Ponty’s)
Ingold characterizes as follows: “his conclusion was that since the living body is primor-
dially and irrevocably stitched into the fabric of the world, our perception of the world is
no more, and no less, than the world’s perception of itself—in and through us” (p. 12).
Life is the way that the world relates to itself, and in the case of humans—as Hans Jonas
argued above—this happens in a reflective way that grounds our responsibilities.
In a strict sense, there is thus no mind standing opposed to a world that is to be known
and controlled, but only a world that perceives itself through various life processes or
forms of life. This can happen reflectively in the case of humans, but not even here is
knowing a matter of creating correspondence between the “contents of the mind” or
“mental representations” and “the world out there.” Rather, as Ingold puts it:

knowing does not lie in the establishment of a correspondence between the world and its
representation, but is rather immanent in the life [emphasis added] and consciousness of the
knower as it unfolds within the field of practice set up through his or her presence as a being-
in-the-world. (2011, p. 159)

Similarly, persons are not discrete entities, containers, or vessels of representations,

beliefs, and desires, but rather life movements:

persons are not beings that move, they are their movements. It is in their very patterns of
activity that their presence lies. And places are not so much locations to be connected as
formations that arise within the process of movement, like eddies in a river current. In short, in
such a world names are not nouns but verbs: each one describes a going on. (p. 168)

Ingold insists in a related text that “to human is a verb” (2015, p. 115). In order “to
human,” we might say, a human being conducts a life with an exercise of one’s rational
powers (cf. Aristotle) that enables one to assume the uniquely human kind of responsibility
Brinkmann 15

(cf. Jonas). This is where life as zoe becomes life as bios—where being alive necessarily
becomes a way of living a life, because only by living a life of commitments and obliga-
tions to existential projects and other people can we say that human beings are persons that
can be responsible. Unlike the realm of zoe, we are here taken to the realm of praxis and
narrative in the sense of life stories. For the chief characteristic of life as bios or praxis, as
Arendt has put it, “is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story,
establish a biography” (1958/1998, p. 97). This is life not as a brute biological occurrence
that begins with birth and ends with death, but rather life as a story of interconnected
human actions.
This is where a study of life (as bios) must engage with its subject matter hermeneuti-
cally. According to the hermeneutic tradition, we are self-interpreting animals (Taylor,
1985), who make sense of the world through storylines that generate meanings. The writer
of fiction Douglas Coupland puts it well through one of his characters in the novel
Generation A: “How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit
together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and
clouds and lava and blackness” (2009, p. 1). Without stories, we might say, we are simply
alive, but incapable of living a life. We can understand the world in which we live only by
attending to the relations of things, including our relations to things and to ourselves, and
this we do most importantly, “by telling their stories,” as Ingold says, and he continues:
“For the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by the
paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations” (2011, p. 160). Our human lives—
actions, thoughts, and emotions—are nothing but physiology or zoe if considered as iso-
lated elements outside of narratives and interpretative contexts. A life, as Paul Ricoeur once
said, “is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted”
(1991, p. 28). If he is right, it is interpretation and narrative that take us from zoe to bios—
from the kind of life we share with other animals and to a specific human form of life.
Do we not end, then, by constructing new dualisms—between being alive and living
a life, between zoe and bios, the nomic and the normative, etc.? No, I would argue that
these conceptual pairs are different in kind from those inherent in mind-talk (mind contra
world, matter, brain, body, etc.). They are more like the difference between the physical
attributes of a bank note (its molecular structure, weight, color, etc.) and its value. The
difference between the physical and normative dimensions of a bank note does not rep-
resent a metaphysical mystery or express a dualistic worldview, just as the difference
between biological life and biographical life is no dualism. As a science of life, psychol-
ogy will obviously continue to study the ways that humans perceive the world in the
course of life, sharing much of the basic perceptual apparatus with non-human animals,
but it will also study the ways that persons conduct their lives within communities of
practice that are susceptible to norms, the most important of which are moral. Just as
breathing and eating are world-involving capabilities, so is participating in the social
practices of one’s communities. The former is about being alive, the latter about living a
life, and psychology should, in my view, be about both. If I am right, this is how psychol-
ogy could become a science not simply of the mind, but of mental life, both of its phe-
nomena and of their conditions, as William James said in psychology’s scientific
childhood. In one way, it has been a science of life since Aristotle, but not in a way that
has defined the discipline, at least in modern times. Perhaps this can finally change now
in the age of the Anthropocene?
16 Theory & Psychology 30(1)

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Svend Brinkmann https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7579-1212

Notes
1. The following reworks passages from Brinkmann (2019).
2. Jonas was a pupil of Martin Heidegger, and, as a Jewish person, he had to flee from Nazi
Germany before World War II, first to England and Palestine, and then, as a soldier in the
British army, he went to Italy and finally to Germany again as part of the victorious army
(he had sworn to return to Germany only as a victor). After learning that his mother had been
killed in Auschwitz, he decided never to live in Germany again, and he eventually became a
professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he lived for the rest
of his life (Jonas died in 1993 at the age of 89).

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Author biography
Svend Brinkmann is a professor of psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His research
interests concern the philosophy, ethics, and methodology of psychology. Currently, he is director
of The Culture of Grief, a large interdisciplinary research project that studies grief in its many
manifestations.