From creativity to perception: The conditions of possibility for a true biology

The phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras defends an alternative conception of life against the well-known proposals that view life as self-preserving or seeking to replicate its own means of replication in the form of repetition instead of creation or accomplishment as Barbaras proposes. Indeed, he criticizes the reductive nature of scientific inquiry which tries to define life solely on the basis of the internal constraints, which leads to an impossible true biology. Barbaras' conception is rooted in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty who conceives perception as a subjective act by which the subject enters a relationship with the world. This leads the subject to overcome the Husserlian resources to reach the originary link of the organism with itself and the exteriority. This originary link is expressed in the ambiguity of the verb “to live” in French which designates both being alive and the experience of something. According to Barbaras, desire as life is the infinite exploration of the external world. The movement is due to the nature of perception itself, inasmuch as infinite exploration is in the very nature of the perceptive movement itself, which opens an unfulfillable absence within the exterior world. Then, life as desire is the desire of the world. Life is accomplished only as an unfolding of the world. Then, Barbaras' model seems to preserve the unity of the organism that allows the phenomenal level or the lived experience, the indefinite engagement with exteriority and the positivity of absence created by the movement through its activity. From this, we propose to complement Barbaras' insights on negativity and the expressions of desire with our approach concerning three main points. In the first place, we interpret Barbaras' notion of life as accomplishment within the Whiteheadian framework of creativity, thereby granting the thermodynamic reality of living systems. Secondly, we clarify the meaning of the couple movement/manifestation so that these concepts are as fully applicable to the plant world as Barbaras accords to the animal world. Finally, our theoretical approach uses category theory to give scalability to the model.