Note 179

The "forces", "principles", and laws, acting in classical chemistry and physics, are sufficient to also constitute Life. But the by us observed and cognizable phenomena, generated, outside Life, from these forces, are not sufficient to, so to say, schoolishly "explain" the phenomena of Life, because the conceptional range of chemistry and physics could still not be expanded to include the supplementary laws at work in, and be expressed by, the organismic. By such supplementary regularities we mean for example that molecules have a perception-of-situation, have a perception of existence, and have a self-consciousness [a self-perception], and therefore actually attempt to preserve themselves [in non-living molecules passively so, in living molecules actively].  ( It belongs to the essence of this perception-of-situation that the anti-crystalline configurative order is being threatened. Only then self-consciousness appears, a self-perception, being needed by that special order of matter, being generated by it, being a being by it. The crystalline order doesn't need it.)

The chemical and physical events, that can, as physiological events, on a large scale, be isolated from the intregral process of Life, are no more than just  indicators  of life-processes, not these processes themselves, and not their cause. The schoolishly chemical doctrine has teached us a view -- there being, it is true, fully legitimate -- to see these chemical and physical events as absolutely independent, a way of handling things that in biology results in misinterpretation.

On may of course limit chemistry and physics to the non-living, as a subdiscipline able to obtain a certain closeness, whereas truly comprehensive chemistry and physics, now complemented by including the living, will always have a never to be closed open end, which, however, as one might at first believe, is not to be found "upstairs" in the most complex phenomena, but on the contrary, all the way "down", into the very base, the base forever inaccessible to experiment and thought. Especially evident the gap is documented in the problem of the origin of Life.

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