Abstract

The phenomena of life have special significance for us. Living things impress us in ways inanimate things couldn’t. This is because livings things do things. They act for the sake of some purpose, a purpose which moreover seems to be their very own. They instil in us the impression that there is something they are ‘up to’. This certainly seems to be the case with animals and, to a lesser degree, with plants and other growing things. Their goal-directed behaviours are presumably the reasons why living things are closer, more interesting – and sometimes also more repelling – to us than inanimate things: they have, one might say, certain interests they pursue. We can understand these interests and therefore interact with these pursuits in sometimes cooperative and sometimes inimical ways. This is why our attitudes towards animate things are so very different from our attitudes towards the inanimate.