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BOOK REVIEW
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2024) 46:24
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9
“What, then, is life?” This question, addressed in the new book by Bernd Rosslen-
broich, could be seen as a variation of Augustine’s question about the nature of time,
to which the church father replied: “If no one asks me, I know what time is, but
if someone asks me, I do not know”. We naturally and intuitively recognize living
beings, but biology has been struggling to nd a satisfactory denition and explana-
tion of them for over 2000 years.
Rosslenbroich’s original approach to the question is phenomenological: “What
characteristics do living organisms typically exhibit when they are studied by physi-
ology, embryology, molecular biology, and so on?” (p. 64). Unlike other authors,
he does not attempt to dene the living organism, but rather to describe those of its
characteristics which cannot be reduced to physicochemical principles. These range
from the organism’s integrative system functions to its autonomy and agency, from
its ability to process molecules and information to the generation of shape, from the
maintenance of autonomous time processes to growth, development and evolvability,
from sensibility to consciousness, and some more. As Rosslenbroich compiles these
characteristics based on extensively researched current literature, the book is a trea-
sure trove for anyone looking for the current state of aairs on the respective topic.
The author argues in two directions. Firstly, he emphasizes that the reductionist
machine metaphor of the organism, which still dominates mainstream biology, is
inadequate to explain the properties of living things. Instead of mechanistic reduc-
tionism, biology must recognize the living organism as such and place it at the center
of its investigations. “Life must be understood as life and not as something else” (p.
75). Rosslenbroich’s particular concern is not only to fully integrate the organismic
approaches in the literature, but also to consider the results of experimental research:
Accepted: 1 July 2024
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Bernd Rosslenbroich, Properties of life. Toward a theory of
organismic biology. Vienna series in theoretical biology,
2023, The MIT Press, 326 Pages, ISBN 9780262546201
(Paperback)
Christoph J.Hueck1
Christoph J. Hueck
hueck@akanthos-akademie.de
1 Akanthos Academy, Zur Uhlandshöhe 10, D-70188 Stuttgart, Germany
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C. J. Hueck
“The working hypothesis is that empirical research is developed far enough today to
reveal by itself the material and prerequisites to allow us to understand more of the
specic organismic properties of the living” (p. 63).
Second, Rosslenbroich demands that the organismic paradigm requires a unifying,
comprehensive concept, albeit one that does not focus solely on a single property.
Other approaches often only emphasize singular aspects of the organism such as its
processuality, or its agency and autonomy, or the ability to proliferate and evolve.
As an example, he discusses a perspective advocated by Daniel Nicholson and John
Dupré, who have argued for a general processual view of life. Rosslenbroich claims
that this view can be reformulated “somewhat more biologically” (p. 266) by add-
ing other characteristics, e.g. that the process is a continuous agential activity which
is organized within a spatial and developing shape and a specically regulated time
structure generated by the organism itself. Furthermore, the organism exhibits a cer-
tain autonomy toward its surroundings, in which it actively maintains itself in a status
of disequilibrium. Rosslenbroich therefore attempts to “bring the [various] aspects
together to try to develop a coherent concept of the phenomenon of life” (p. 263), a
concept that he regards as “living” and exible and open to correction and expansion.
“The vision is to think [these properties] in toto” (p. 272) (my addition).
The introductory two chapters describe the development of concepts of life from
antiquity to the present, with perspectives evolving from the vitalistic to the mecha-
nistic. Rosslenbroich outlines the transition from the view of the cosmos as a harmo-
niously ordered whole, in which natural philosophy strove for knowledge of divine
wisdom and a life in harmony with nature, to Galileo, Descartes and Newton, who
conceived of nature as a calculable mechanism made up of particles of dead matter.
The contrast between holistic (vitalistic) and reductionist views runs through the text,
and Rosslenbroich repeatedly describes the tenor of the dispute: “While the vitalists
asked essential questions about the nature of the living, but were unable to answer
them, the physicalists were able to give many answers, which, however, did not touch
on the essential properties of the living” (p. 23).
Organismic thinking attempts to nd a way out of this dilemma. Rosslenbroich
describes its history in the 20th century in detail. In the rst half, there was a wave of
organismic biology inuenced by Alfred North Whitehead’s process ontology, sup-
ported by researchers such as Spemann, Goldschmidt and Haldane and by theorists
such as von Bertalany, Waddington and Weiss. Rosslenbroich also refers to the
views of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who is not normally mentioned
in these contexts. Steiner expressed the idea—later advocated by Hans Jonas—that
humanity had lost sight of the realm of the living through an increasing separation of
self-consciousness from the object world (p. 28).
During the second half of the 20th century, organismic thinking was pushed into
the background by the reductionist view of molecular biology and the evolutionary
synthesis. Since the turn of the millennium, however, there have again been many
voices criticizing the genocentrism and the “nothing-buttery” of the physical reduc-
tionists, who consider organisms to be nothing but gene-controlled survival machines
(p. 40). According to the author, the repeated rise and fall of the reductionist and
organismic views shows that the central problem has not been solved: “We need a
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Bernd Rosslenbroich, Properties of life. Toward a theory of organismic…
realistic conception of the organism and not defective metaphors that lead to a mis-
guided handling of nature” (p. 60).
According to his “working hypothesis” (put forward in Chap. 3) that essential
features of the organism can be derived from empirical research, Rosslenbroich
describes a total of 15 such properties of living things in great detail and with exten-
sive literature references in Chap. 4. Some of these features, such as the recipro-
cal interdependence of organic functions, autonomous self-generation, organismal
agency, and evolvability are frequently found in discussions over denitions of life.
Others, like time autonomy, or the ability to generate shapes, are rarely mentioned
by others.
Finally, Rosslenbroich integrates these features in Chap. 5 by describing some
additional and overarching principles of the living. He stresses the processual nature
of life which, at the same time, enables the organism’s stable identity (p. 71) and
emphasizes the principle of concurrency of partially contradictory properties (e.g.,
the skin is both a closing boundary and a permeable membrane; organisms are both
autonomous and environmentally dependent; processes generate specic substances,
which in turn determine the processes; etc.). Thus, living beings show an “indissolu-
ble” interdependence of processes, substances, energy and information (p. 74), which
enables a multitude of regulatory eects and fosters the resilience of the organismal
system against external disturbances.
A central feature of the organism is its autonomous agency. Rosslenbroich empha-
sizes that the concept of agency brings a creative element into nature, which has been
forbidden ever since the Newtonian revolution (p. 200). This banishment has led to
the conception of a particulate, material world which is essentially passive. At this
point at the latest, it becomes clear that the statement of organismal agency, even if
it is only meant to be empirical and descriptive, inevitably touches on an ontologi-
cal question. This question becomes urgent precisely against the background of the
comprehensive compilation of the properties of the living: How can agential beings
have emerged and exist in a purely material world? Rosslenbroich avoids this prob-
lem, stating that “questions on the origin of life are not addressed here” (p. 64) and
claims that “certainly, no attempt shall be made to design an alternative world-view”
(p. 212). However, a philosophy of life would ultimately have to consider our under-
standing of the whole of nature, the cosmos and its becoming. In this regard, Rosslen-
broich’s repeated rejection of any form of vitalism (pp. 4; 65; 265) possibly leads to
a theoretical self-restriction that makes further perspectives dicult. If organisms
cannot be reduced to mechanistic laws and causality, how can the holistic proper-
ties of organic matter be explained if no forces other than physical or chemical ones
are accepted? This question is hardly ever asked in the literature on organisms, but
Rosslenbroich’s book makes it almost obvious. The appreciation of the organism’s
living properties may be a bridge to seriously asking such deeper questions.
In summary, Bernd Rosslenbroich’s book is clearly structured, well thought out,
highly informative, balanced, contains the latest research and discussion (500 refer-
ences) and should be basic reading for any student of life sciences.
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional aliations.
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