What we meant by life was defined chiefly by the life of an individual organism. We consider as an organism any carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen system which is capable of reproducing itself, healing itself, and remaining stable for some particular lifetime. This definition is not so easy to pin down perfectly. There are plenty of uncomfortable boundary problems: For example, is a fertilized egg alive during its first few minutes? Is a virus alive? Is a forest alive (as a whole, and over and above the life of the component species taken as individuals)? Are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen necessary to what we shall define as life?
We have obviously non-living systems mixed in with the living systems: for example, the rafters of a house, the roof tiles, the road, the bridge, the gate; even the furrows in the field. In normal scientific parlance, one could not possibly call these things alive. And yet clearly they do have a vital role in the overall life of the larger systems.
The moment we want to treat the more complex system of buildings and nature together, as one living system, we run into intellectual problems because we no longer have an adequate scientific definition of what we are trying to do. For example, according to present-day biological terminology, a city is not a living system, even though it is often referred to as a living system by social scientists in search of a metaphor. Obviously, too, a building is not a living system. How can we try to make a living system out of a region, or a city, or a building—even out of a garden—when, according to current scientific orthodoxy, these things are not living systems?
I shall be looking for a broad conception of life, in which each thing—regardless of what it is—has some degree of life.
A center is a pinpoint of actual life, a center of life, in the everyday and ordinary sense, which simply appears in space. Thus the geometric center which we first learn to see as a purely geometric thing is also a center of real life. The life emerges from matter through the organization of matter itself.
What we call ‘life’ is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city… Each center gets its life, always, from the fact that it is helping to support and enliven some larger center. The center becomes precious because of it. Thus, life itself is a recursive effect which occurs in space. It can only be understood recursively as the mutual intensification of life by life.