My cat, which purrs and meows, is alive.  The stone, over there, isn't.

Biologists only have trouble deciding whether a thing is alive or not at the lowest end, where viruses merge with lifeless chemical precursers.  For doctors, the grey area is for such things as people in a coma, where there is brain death yet machine-sustainable body life.

There is a tendency to think of "alive" as a thing that either "is" or "isn't," as with things that are either "black or white." Psychologists, if they could join the 20th Century, would be wondering about the "black-and-whiteness" of life, and they would wonder whether or not a normal living person is continuously experiencing various gradations of "aliveness."

Aliveness, as a word, has an uncertain existence.  The "ness" ending connotes a variableness in the amount of something, as in loudness, or hardness.  It is important to remember that we learn the world through a process of successive approximations.  At first, our categories are broad, and all-inclusive.  Things are either "good" or their "bad."  With experience, we learn how to sub-categorize.  And for some things, we acknowledge a continuous gradation.  Black and white eventually permits grey.

If aliveness is a thing with gradations, then what characterizes times of greater aliveness from other times?

I can recall the first time I heard the Brahms Second Piano Concerto.  I was driving to do some forgettable errand, with the car radio on, and as I heard the opening chords I suddenly came to life!  It was this way also when I first heard Vivaldi's Four Seasons.  Most of my encounters with favorite music have been like this.  I can also recall the first kiss with a certain woman.  Life sparkled!

It seems that the common feature associated with heightened feelings of being alive is "emotion."  In contrast, intense cerebral thought, such as writing a difficult computer program, can be exhausting, but it is usually an unemotional process, and perhaps for this reason it does not create the sensation of heightened aliveness.

Aliveness is a sought property, with one qualification.  People seek the positive emotional experiences, but avoid the negative ones.  It is tempting to try to write an equation accounting for behavior, such as:  we select behaviors in such a way that we maximize the experience of desired emotions while minimizing the experience of undesired ones.  But each person has an individualized life style.  Some live as if they are avoiding all emotional experiences in order to avoid painful ones, whereas others are undeterred by the prospect of bad experiences as they lunge forward in mad pursuit of good ones.  The calculus for living, for being in pursuit of aliveness, is potentially different for each person.

Some people seem to be more alive than others.  At one end of the spectrum is the "couch potato."  At the other end are people who are involved in many things and who are happy with the fullness of their lives.  Would it be fair to say that one person is more alive than another?

I am alleging two things:  first, that any given person varies in aliveness during the normal course of living, and second, that some people average a greater level of aliveness than others.  I feel the need to deal with some implications of these allegations.  It seems natural to place greater value on the times when a person is more alive, and to value a person more if they are consistently able to attain higher levels of aliveness.

There seems to be a taboo about comparing people.  There is a social pressure to think of all people as having the same worth, in keeping with the silly notion that we are all created "equal."  I feel this pressure as I conjecture that one person can be deemed more alive than another.  The truth is, almost every person considers himself to be worth more than everyone else.  Each person's public presentation of self is groomed to hide this fact (for reasons that have to do with the need to manipulate others in order to maximize the successful penetration of the person's genes into the future).  This issue is a matter for more extensive discussion elsewhere.  What matters here is that we acknowledge that our natural revulsion for the idea that life has a variable value cannot be trusted as an unbiased guide to viewing the idea.  We must try hard to be open-minded about the matter.

I am less bothered by the idea that my life varies in aliveness.  When I am sick, and lethargic, I am not bothered much by the fact that I am doing nothing except lying in bed, waiting to recover.  At such a time the prospects of what life might offer during the near future are meager.  The thought of death is less disturbing at these times than at others.  The "will to live" is reduced.  This, at least, is my recollection of past subjective experiences.

There are times when the mind and body function well together.  Things are under control, life is abundant, and it is great to be alive.  The thought of death at these good times, were it to occur, would probably be more disturbing than usual.  There is an unmistakably greater feeling of aliveness at these times.

If different degrees of aliveness can be discerned through subjective feelings, there is hope that the concept has a valid basis for eventual objective measurement.  When a consensus forms around a method for defining aliveness, if it eventually does, then we will perhaps be treated to charts of a typical person's "ups and downs" during common life situations.  Daily patterns, random variations with timescales of weeks or months, and perhaps variations that correlate with life-stage sequences.

Could a capability for charting aliveness pose a challenge to common attitudes?  Could aliveness information be "subversive?"  When people know how their aliveness is influenced by the activities they choose, or the decisions they make, could they be changed by this information?

This group of questions belong to a category of speculations that has been perilous in the past.  Whenever we create hypothetical insight that should produce change we tend to think that thoughts and behavior will be influenced by the power of logic.  This is not always true.  Thoughts often follow behavior, and rationalize it.  People's behavior is robust, and is less easily dislodged by logic than we are ready to admit.  People will always fall in love, make love, and have babies; regardless of the void of logic to do so.

Thus, if it could be demonstrated that having a baby creates more trouble and work than the rewards can justify, when measured by aliveness charts, women would continue to want babies.  If it could be demonstrated that unquestioning adherence to overtime work schedules was less rewarding than pleasureably "smelling the roses," workaholics would not slow their pace.  After all, people are confronted daily with information about the way smoking degrades health and shortens life span, yet this information, by itself, has virtually no influence over smokers.

I believe that the genes will have their way, no matter how much logic is brought as witness against their agenda.  (Smoking, like drug use, must be an impulse-driven behavior, having positive results in primitive settings, and therefore rooted in instincts, which lead the individual astray in our modern world.)  Insight has been powerless in the past, and it shall be powerless in the future.  The genes have little to fear from knowledge.  Individuals will never liberate themselves from the genetic grip!

This assessment does not say that individuals will not try to liberate themselves.  If I could construct my aliveness chart and discover that my dissatisfaction with not being married was intruding in a thousand little ways upon my otherwise successful pursuits, and jeopardizing my overall level of happiness, I would perhaps seek a more fatalistic posture on the matter.  My endeavor might involve waging war on the way the genes simply hand the individual an agenda.  I might take Nietszche seriously, and create a "new morality," or set of values.  But in the end, I will be doomed to follow in the same footsteps as my ancestors.

Aliveness will be a concept that, like all other Human creations, will serve only to impotently light the walls of the Individual's Experience of Life.  A person's path is destined, I believe, and the individual can only influence the shades of awareness during the journey.

This site opened:  November 17, 1998.   Last Update: November 17, 1998