[Excerpt relating to “birth” from Sobre el hombre (On Man), Xavier Zubiri, Madrid, 1986, pp. 554-563]


Chapter 10
The Vital Course of Life

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B. The structure of human living.

Life is a fundamental mode of whatever is alive and not something substantive by itself that might be studied independently of it. Its radical structure is described by the three moments that define it during its time: its birth, its course of time and its death. Birth, course of time and death are three fundamental phases of human life. What we are concerned with here is not the living itself of the three phases, because it is not the case of looking at life from inside its being lived, but life as a mode of the one living. And from this point of view these three phases are not interrelated as simple successions, but co-belong to each other in a radical unity.

Consequently, when we ask for the structure of human life two sets of problems appear. One, what is the characterization of human life in these three phases. The other, what is the radical unity of these three phases at each living moment.

a) Birth. To be born, in the first place, is to be born to something. It is not enough just to say that to be born is to live, simply because birth already constitutes an act of living. One might then say that to be born is to be born to the world, to come to the world. Of course, to be born is also to be born “of”. Birth inexorably unifies in one vital occurrence {555} the “born of” and the “coming to” the world, the separation “of” the mother and the attachment “to” the world. However, if we consider birth as a coming to the world we find new ambiguities. What do we mean here when say “to come”? What do we mean by “world”? Can we say at childbirth that the child opens by itself to a world that is its own? The child, up to that point, opens to the world of its parents and will have to get through a series of vicissitudes in order to open itself to a world of its own that may really be its own. Therefore, if we give to the term “birth” all its meaning we will have to say that the living constitutes itself as such and at a certain moment opens itself to the world. Birth is constituted by three fundamental phases: the constitution of a living substantivity, the structure of a life that leads to the world and the aperture to that world.

A living human is a substantivity provided with independence and control. Two characteristics relative among themselves, with respect to a medium. The one living proceeds from another living one by generation. The problem of the constitution of the living human is the problem of the generation of a psychophysical substantivity by other psychophysical substantivities. Certain living ones such as the human, by means of a vital act, produce something that I might call the otherness of the living.

The otherness of a living human does not presuppose a scission or discontinuity. There is a real continuity of the life of the parents in the life of the offspring. There is no scission because the first constitution of the germinal plasma somatically considered is the constitution of the first stage of animation. With the somatic structures of a germinal plasma the first stage of animation of that new substantivity is univocally given, because the body is the one constituting the root of the content of the first stage of animation. The constitution of the first stage as biologically other is the first animated stage that the new living one has. The structures that constitute and configure it {556} circumscriptively as biologically new are numerically the same that definitively conform the structure of the first animation. There is no psychophysical scission.

How is this continuity established? Somatically there is a transmission; the problem is whether a psychophysical transmission takes place. If transmission in this sense were to exist we would have not only continuity, but also a donation. And that is what takes place, because transmission of the somatic structures, due to the psychophysical unity, is the transmission of the first animated stage. What remains now is the problem of what is there, in the life of an adult organism, that may be able to influence the internal structure of its own germinal cells. This concerns facts the investigation of which corresponds to genetics. But in the structure of these genetic cells, and not strictly in the somatic, is where the whole weight of what is transmitted from parents to offspring rests. Not only do we have the transmission of some somatic structures, with which and in continuity with which there would be a continuity of psychic life, but a first psychic stage is also transmitted. This first psychic stage consists in nothing but the first stage of animation the human being has by virtue of these structures.

Nevertheless, a living human, like any reality upon Earth, is a constitutively respective reality. But still, the living human being expresses in its own peculiar way the difference between the living human and its world.

The medium is not simply constituted by the surroundings. In the same surrounding different biological media can fit. On the same medium many organisms live that incorporate a wide variety of different species and forms of life. Also, the medium is not the situation because a living being finds itself placed in the most diverse situations. The medium is wider because the whole diversity of situations is inscribed in something such as the medium. The medium is something that circumscribes the possibility of all the situations that will be offered {557} to the living being. The medium is lesser than the surroundings, but greater than the situation. The medium is constituted by all the elements of the surroundings that may affect the structures of the living; therefore, the structures of the living are the ones that define a priori the characteristics of the medium within which it is going to move.

These structures are not a plan for action. The error of the biology of Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) and of Hans Driesch (1867-1941) was to believe that the medium is a kind of compensation by the surroundings of the possible activities through which the living being is going to perform its type of conduct. That is not true, because in that case a pathological element would not form part of its medium. The medium is defined by the type of structures the living being has and not by the living style the living is going to adopt within that medium. What this plan may constitute is a portion of the situations within that medium that the living may encounter. The articulation between the living and its medium is what may be called the “vital drive”. In the case of man the first medium and therefore, the first vital drive, is constituted and it is also given within the maternal womb.

For the living, the most diverse situations are produced in that medium. The situation is not the mere emplacement of things in the medium with respect to the living. It is defined by two terms: that which drives the living to respond in certain ways, and that which makes us give, what we may call the provocation. The medium in a particular situation provokes actions from the part of the living. Putting aside the question whether there is irritability in living beings and what this might consist of, what is certain is that the medium provokes a reply on the part of the living in which it is entirely involved. The provocation implies a response, which persists beyond the action. The unity of provocation and response is what provides, both to things in the mediun and to the living immersed in it, the characteristic of stimulus. {558}

In its maternal medium the living human finds itself dynamically subjected to a vital drive, which involves the interplay, through stimulation, of a process of provocation and response. In it, the living becomes a point of departure and arrival; its sensitive apparatus confers to substantivity the characteristic of a center, something like an absolute “here”; the medium acquires the characteristic of vital space in the triple order of direction, orientation and distance.

The situation defined as such is unsustainable by itself. For two reasons. First, because by the answer it provides the living finds itself in a different condition from the one previous to the reply. Second, because the living, having as one of its components a body subjected to the physical process of motion, necessarily changes the situations. It now finds itself necessarily in transition. The drive acquires the characteristic of tension.

When the second situation arrives, the living gives a response more or less adequate in order to maintain its own substantivity. This adequate response is securely provided at that moment by the somatic structures it has. Hence, this tension that from the prospective point of view is a distension that takes it to another stage from the point of view of a living, is a retention and in retaining its own substantivity, even with the tension, is that in which the psychophysical duration consists. The formal structure of this tension is not a succession in time, but a unity of duration in which each stage reverts to the living because the second stage towards which it has proceeded with tension has not been able to break its internal substantivity. The living in its duration constitutes the absolute now. This substantivity affected in this manner by the reflux of tension in a substantivity that is always the same —otherwise there would be two substantivities— is a substantivity that at the same time is never the same way. This unity of always being the same and never {559} the same way, is what expresses the unity of independence and control in the living. And that unity is what allows the empowerment of life.

The prolongation of the constitution of the germinal plasma with its independence and control over the medium does not mean separation. During that prolongation the living continues to prolong its own structures from the somatic point of view and consequently from the psychic. However, this modification of the structures has a peculiar characteristic. The germinal plasma is going to open the step towards the totality of the structures of the living. Its initial empowerment is multiple. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it is performing its functions of independence and control, on the one hand, certain structures are being established and that is the aspect of stabilization, which restrains the empowerment. But, on the other hand, thanks to this greater stabilization, the area of superior potencies and possibilities is opened. Stabilization is intrinsically united to liberation. And reciprocally, liberation is not viable except when riding upon stabilization. The internal unity of both dimensions resides on the fact that stabilization rips out, by means of liberation, activities of a different order. And liberation is only possible and is defined by the establishment of inferior structures. There is regularization through integration. Hence, the relative omni-potentiality becomes established as a more determined and richer potentiality.

In this process of stabilization and liberation the step from the vegetative to the vegetative-sensitive type of living is constituted. Specific sensing organs are constituted and with them stimulating sensations of diverse types appear. The vital drive is being modulated by the diversity of liberation into multiple impulses and tendencies, and the motor responses are being formalized in the form of reflexes, habitual motions, and adapted motions and in general by the channeling of the spontaneous motions of the living. That is the dynamic underlying tension or sub-tension. {560} Through each one of its impulses and tendencies, in which from the sensitive point of view the living is going to modulate itself, its entire vegetative life is involved. The sensitive is not a stratum mounted on the stratum of the vegetative, but is a dynamic liberation based on that vegetative stability in a dynamic sub-tension. Here potentiation is a potentiality. Potencies are being constituted and with them the radical and basic possibilities constitutive of the living being.

If we apply the concept “to live-is-to posses oneself” to this stage, life at this stage is possession as automorphism. It is an automorphism, which is not limited only to the somatic anatomy, but also to the physiological potentialities and even to the constitution of the very form of psychism. In all these senses, life in its first stage makes that man may possess himself in the form of automorphism.

That is a questionable term. From Aristotle to Uexküll and Driesch automorphism seems to implicate the idea that the soul is organizing the body. Nothing further from the truth of reality. Initially, the somatic automorphism is a phenomenon of autoregulation, which also appears in the physical world. What there is of automorphism in man is not simply based on autoregulation, but rather on the autós that is found in regulation. Regardless of how intensely heteromorphic the somatic formation may be, the substantivity is automorphic. It is in this automorphism that the characteristic of autopossession of life resides. The unity of always being the same and never the same way is founded on an autós in the whole amplitude and potentiality of its morphé. That is the first characteristic of life, an automorphism that operates without separation from the mother.

By the very structure of automorphism the separation from the mother is going to be accomplished, that is what birthing (Sp. alumbramiento, enlightenment) is. This occurrence, which constitutes the second stage of the life that takes us to the world, is constituted for the living by two dimensions. By the first, {561} independence turns into separation. With this the medium is enormously expanded. This formal expansion of the medium is what constitutes the first characteristic of birthing. For all the other men already living in the open air it is an “enlightenment”, but for those coming to the light it means coming to the open air. The second dimension consists in the fact that the set of somatic structures no longer simply assures its articulation with the medium through adequate responses. All impulses of the living acquire the characteristics of indigence; at this point that which is formally going to be a constitutive necessity is constituted. Indigent and necessitated, the substantivity of the living has greater independence, but with a lesser possibility of control over its medium. That is what initiates the aperture to its world.

By the loss of control due to having more things to control and not being able to do it through its own structures in these first stages, the living —perhaps only a few weeks— encounters a control over the medium that has two dimensions.

First of all, we detect an instinctive reversion towards the mother in search of sustenance and protection; two needs that impress characteristics on the life of man. Automorphism produced the somatic structures and with them the first psychic configurations. That same automorphism, when the living severs its connection with the mother, is opened to the necessity of nutrition and protection. It will no longer be able to subsist unless through the intelligence, at least through the intelligence of others, when least expected as a whole and as a species.

In addition, facing the expansion of its medium, automorphism will have to prolong itself with respect to the organization of its structures and standards of operation facing that hostile medium. That is so, from the motor point of view, since the motions are broader and the inadequate and painful responses more frequent. The living continues to organize a system of motions that forces him {562} towards a new form of perception of the physical world, which is constituting stimuli into things. Similarly, the first impressions of an affective order begin to appear. There is also an organization of the phonemes, which implies an organization of the brain, its formalization. A formalization that takes it to confer a certain leveling characteristic to what is going to constitute the set of its perceptive world. Namely, the repertory of motions with which I can respond to it and the primary repertory of all the affective impressions it is going to receive from that world. Automorphism is, thus far, an automorphism of formalization.

The living has possessed itself until now only in the form of automorphism. In a first stage as autoconformation. On a second it has reverted by formalization, in the form of necessity, over its mother and in the form of organization, over the physical world and the consequent reactions. But this formalization is continuing and man becomes a hyper-formalized animal. Now his life appears as something unsustainable, not only because his somatic structures are insufficient to him, not only because the reversion to the mother is not enough, but because of the very richness of his hyperformalization. Man is the most defenseless being, not because it may be the most incomplete animal, but because it is the most complete in the line of animality due to his cerebral structure. The brain is the most perfect product of human nature.

In this new situation, substantivity sets into motion the intelligence it never had before nor been able to set into motion. To become aware of the situation is the radical transformation at this point, which implies to take the stimulus as stimulating reality. By the same token, the medium is converted into a world for it. Now, it is not the case of a system of stimuli constitutive of the medium, but of a system of stimulating realities constitutive of the world. It is now that life acquires a radically different characteristic. It is not the case {563} that life may stop being what it was before, but rather that in order to continue being what it was before, it opens up and keeps itself open to the reality of its stimuli and to the world of its own reality. Automorphism acquires a different characteristic. Neither the structures nor the working patterns are now going to be what constitutes its form, but something whose trajectory is life in the sense of bíos, “what is going to become of me”. The living is going to possess itself in a different way. However, there are not going to be two lives, the psychophysical and the biographic, but only one life that possesses itself in a different way.

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