The Phenomenology of Life

This chapter takes up more explicitly the problem concerning the relationship between life understood as a system or process and life in relation to the person. This is to re-tell the story of the relation of life to the living from a different perspective of twentieth-century philosophy. There is a tension between the living system rooted in a materialist metaphysics and the lived reality of persons, between system and lifeworld. This chapter traces the development of the phenomenology of life focused on human experience, juxtaposing this with a new materialism that emphasizes the objective constancy of life itself as material reality beyond the human. This involves delineating the contours of the discussion to show how this debate is relevant to some contemporary religious understandings of the person.