The Story of Life: Zoegraphy

The Story of Life = Zoegraphy (生命傳記)

What is life? This question is usually answered by a sort of biological definition. In biological science the life is objectified as an object of modern scientific knowledge. Biology objectifies what is defined, that is, the life. It usually gives a reductionist definition, in terms of cells or genes. The definition means to objectify what is defined and to reduce it to a irreducible and individual bit for a definition. Furthermore, the biological definition of life is "mechanistic" and the categories of biology is basically a conjugation of those of the physics, which explains the reality in mechanical terms.

Biological View of Life Open for Integral Study

Let us look into the biological definition of life. Biological view of life: The Life is reduced and understood as cells in a mechanical model.

"Life has properties that clearly distinguish it from everything else. Every living thing is cellular. In other words, it is either a single-celled creature or a creature composed of biological cells. Every cell is bounded by its own outer membrane and contains a full set of instructions necessary for its operation and reproduction. Furthermore, every cell uses the same operating system: "DNA makes RNA makes protein." DNA is a long complex molecule that contains the cell's       instructions. It is transcribed into RNA, another long complex molecule similar to DNA; and then the RNA transcript is translated into protein. There are hundreds of billions of different proteins used by living things (3), but all of them are made from the same twenty amino acids, the "building blocks of life." Life also has these properties, and other things have some of them: Living things reproduce themselves. Life undergoes evolution. A Cell Is Like a Computer.

Three important characteristics are notable in this definition. One is that the biological definition understands the by reducing the life to a cell(s). Two is that it allows for the life to be the subject of reproduction and evolution. Three is that it looks into life in the mechanical model of computer. On the one hand the biology recognizes the subjecthood or selfhood of the life; but on the other hand it can only objectifies the life by reduction in a mechanical way.

This means that the biological definition and understanding of the life of living beings is incomplete. Jacques Monod (Chance and Necessity: 19??) affirms the mystery of life connected to the two aspects of biology: 1) the Evolutionary Choice, and 2) the Autopoietic Beginning. These two dimensions cannot be determined by any mechanical process for example by the cybernetics.

This has two implications. One is that the subject of life belong to a mystery, which cannot be explained and it is beyond the rational and scientific grasp. Two is that the life is open and connected to the "reality" beyond the biological boundaries and thus to the area of humanities, for example, a possibility of a connection of the neurological system to the linguistics, which is not clearly know yet.

The Life is the Living Subject of Conviviality.

But we are looking for an answer for an integral and holistic understanding of life. We are rejecting any understanding of the life that is reductionist, fragmentary and compartmentalized. Life is known through its story. The story of life is a best way to describe the way the life lives. The underline assumption is that the life is not object, but the subject.

This has two important understanding of the life. The life is not to be fragmented and reduced as minutest parts; and its subjecthood is in the whole of the living being, not in the part of the living body. This means that the whole of the living being constitutes the subjecthood. The subjecthood of life does not abide in the particle of the living being. The subject abides in the whole bing of the life.

This is analogous to the subjecthood of the Minjung. The Minjung is the subject who creates the whole life. The subjecthood of the Minjung is revealed through the whole story of the Minjung, in action, in thought, in feelings and senses, in belief and in spirit. The subjecthood of the life is revealed through the story of the life, in action, in thought, in feelings and senses, in belief and in spirit. The feminist studies use the story as the best way to understand the reality of the suffering and struggle of the women for liberation to be subjects of their own life in body and spirit. The feminist study is an excellent mode of integral studies.

We call this as "Zoegraphy (story of life)." We decided to avoid the term, biography, for it is almost exclusively used referring to a story to an individual person. We have used the social biography in reference to the story of the Minjung to express the social and community dimension of the subjecthood of the Minjung. The Zoegraphy is used here in reference to an integral study of the whole life (living being), which involves biological and ecological as well as social and cultural dimensions of the life.

Here life is the most inclusive category, which includes all living beings. The discrimination between human life, animal life, life of plants and trees are arbitrary. The life of humans, animals and plants and trees forms one inter-related webwork of life. The fragmentation and reduction is abstract and arbitrary. Even the discrimination between the organic and inorganic is abstract and arbitrary, for the life cannot exist without inorganic substance. Live lives as an inclusive webwork of living beings. This is what we call "webwork of conviviality," meaning common life. In reality there is only one common life in the universe. Thus, Zoegraphy is a universal story of life as a whole.

Prof. Zhang argues that the whole(global)life is the only conceivable notion of life. Other concepts of life are fragmentary, and only derivative of the whole life. He believes that a notion of individual human person cannot be a  viable concept of life in an ultimate sense; and so is any individual animal and plan life. The viable concept of life must include the interconnected web of life as a whole. His argument is that the concept of the whole or global life is based upon scientific argument. However, he suggests that this concept of the whole life  should be interfaced with the Asian cosmic understanding of life. This suggestion is significant in that any concept of life must include not only biological, social and ecological dimensions, but also cultural and spiritual dimensions.

When we affirm that the life is subject(Juche=主體), it is inclusive of all dimensions of the whole life. The subject of the whole life means that it is spiritual and cultural as well as social, biological and ecological. Thus the only way we can understand the whole life is that we must describe the life in terms of its story. The life is the subject of the whole universe. The whole universe is the body of the life. It is easily understandable to say that the community is the body of life. The community is a webwork of all dimensions of life, ecological, biological, sociological, cultural and spiritual. The study of integral study of life will clarify this proposition. The Asian philosophy can easily explain such a notion. For example, the individual self, the family, the nation and the universe are one and the same entity of life.

The selfhood and subjecthood of life is not like the epistemological self or subject of the modern science as we find the Cartesian ego. It has aesthetic perceptions, spiritual senses as well as thinking reason. It is based upon the unknown mystery of life. It is creative and open. It cannot be objectified, although it is bodily, physical, biological and social. It cannot be reduced to an object, to an abstract entity, and even to transcendent.

The life as the subject reproduces itself in the context of the whole webwork of life. The birth and death of life should be understood in this context. The reproduction of life cannot be explained in the biological terms, that is, merely in terms of cells and genes. It is not a simple bio-chemical process, for it involves the inherent subjecthood of life beyond the biological dimension. The birth of living beings are not merely an internal process but closely related to the natural. social and cultural environments. This is true of human beings and also of other living beings.

Perhaps on the level of the whole life the reproductive subject should be intelligible and perceptible. The whole life is a dynamic webwork of a permanent reproductive and productive activities of living beings. As Loverock has asserted, the earth as GAIA is a living being in a whole. Therefore, the earth as a whole living being must have the subjecthood. It cannot be understood as a purely bio-chemical or physical agency. The subjecthood of life cannot be explained away on the biological, bio-chemical or physical way on the micro or macro level. It has an unknown dimension.

The productive and reproductive dynamics of birth and rebirth is an elaborate and wholistic network of mutual cooperation and common life. Here the subject of life is not an individualistic or fragmentary entity. It is the convivial entity. The subjectivity of any living being should be understood in the close and organic cooperation of cells and genes on the micro-level. It should be understood in terms of symbiosis of living beings. It should be understood in terms of interaction of the organic and inorganic elements. Any living being is a subject in this complex matrix of "common life, cooperation and co-existence." Yet it is a mystery. It is a mystery that the life is a subject, not an object, of its being.

The life grows by itself. The growth of life cannot be understood as merely a natural, biological and ecological dynamics. It is a  indication that it is the subject, which experiences internally its inner life and interacts in relation to external environment. The life nourishes and nurtures itself in the webwork of living beings. The living beings are nourishing mutually. This is a key expression of its subjecthood.

The life learns to live. This is a self-education process. It learns from the environment. It learns from experiences interaction with other living beings. Living beings learn from each other. They learn from the past and from the present. It is open to learn from the future. It adjusts to the living situations and overcome obstacles to life through self-educational process. One cannot reduce the self-educational process of living beings as a function of mere instinct or automation. One cannot understand the life in a deterministic way.

The life heals itself. When it is injured or ill, it cures its own illness and restores its wholeness and its balance for wholesome life. Asian health is very much dependent upon the notion that the life has self-healing energy. Medical treatment is fundamentally to strengthen the self-healing power of the life. The life is self-healing subject.

The life communicates among the living beings and with environment. Plants and insects communicate with each other. This communication is mutual. The life of living beings involves symbols and semantics of communication. The plants, animals and human beings are equally capable of mutual communication. We do not fully understand this communication process, and yet it indicates that the life is a communicating subject.

The life matures and fulfills itself. It realizes itself toward its fullness. The maturity and fulfillment of the life is neither the natural destiny nor mechanical process. It involves a telos or a destiny toward which the life as the subject moves. All living beings seem to have its own destiny of self-fulfillment. This is another mark of its selfhood.

The life creates and recreates itself. It interacts creatively with living beings. The creative subjecthood can be understood on the bio-logically evolutionary levels as well as on the cultural level. Living beings are creative beings. The creative activities of living beings involves a process of creating a novelty in the life. The evolutionary and culturally creative process is an integral part of life.

The life lives in the world of meaning. Living beings create meaning of life and of the world in the context of the webwork of common life. The life should be understood in the context of the community of meanings. Living being creates meanings and it fulfills the meaning of life and of the world, in which it lives.

The life is the spirit. Living beings are spiritual as well as material. They are bodies as well as spirits, individually as well as communally. The spirit of the life is not confined only to human beings. The spirit is cosmic, ecological, biological as well as cultural and religious. This spiritual subjecthood of life cannot be reduced and understood as a biological question. It is a cultural and religious question. But the spirit should not be understood without its body like a ghost. The spirit is bodily and ecological reality in an living organism and in a community of living beings.

The subjecthood of life can be more fully understood in an integral way. This is the reason why we are suggesting the story of life, the Zoegraphy as an alternative paradigm to talk and learn about the life. In this learning of life we are concerned about the wisdom of life for its fulfillment. We are not excluding scientific knowledge of life. We are putting and transforming it in an integral context of the wisdom of life.

To learn the wisdom of life we would propose an integral and inter-disciplinary studies as well as ways of fusion between the Western and Eastern wisdom of life. This is the meaning of the Integral Study of Life. And it begins with the Zoegraphy = the story of life.

The Zoegraphy of Life and Death

The Story of Life (Zoegraphy) beings with the story of death and destruction of living beings as well as fulfillment of life, not with the origins and birth of life.

Modern scientific biology begins the study of life with a question of the origin of the life in the cosmic history. The answer we get is highly hypothetical, highly reductionist, and highly remote in time and space. We could even say that it is an extension and construction of modern scientific ideas. The question of the origin of life in the modern sciences reveals its own limitation. Here the history of life is also very reductionist and abstract. This is a very limited way to learn wisdom of life.

Zoegraphy (the story of life) begins with the present situation of life on earth in seeking the wisdom of life. It deals with experiences of life hear and now (a Kairotic way). Then we ask the question of the past stories to open the questions about the present and future. The story of life is not be determined by the modern time framework of absolute or relative time. The life has its own time.

The Zoegraphy is a very local story of living beings in a concrete geographical and ecological situation. It does not transcend the time and space and become "abstractly universal", for it refuses to be reduced to a minute particle or to a highly abstract entity. The life has a home of its own. We are reminded of an integral methodology of "cultural anthropology" which can be evolved and applied to the Zoegraphy.

Zoegraphy is a story of the conviviality of life. Living beings are living together, forming a webwork of life. Humans form community, living together with animals, insects and plants and with many micro-organism. There can be no separation between humans and other living beings in this conviviality. There is a network of mutual support in this convivial life. Zoegraphy is an expression if the convivial subjecthood of life. Conviviality is an expression of the body of life in micro and macro cosmic framework.

The story is an integrating way to reveal the reality, experiences and dynamics of the life of living beings. It is a way of connecting dimensions of life, a way of weaving and integrating experiences of life in terms of time and space. In fact it can frame its own unique time and space to tell the unique story of life. The story is a way of tell about the reality of life without closing it. It is open story. It cannot be reduced to a narrow sequence of scientific and objective causality. it is a way of revealing the meaning and wisdom of life. It is holistic about the whole of the life. It should integrate any scientific and objective knowledge of life so that they may become an integral element of wisdom of life.

The most important integral study of life may be the story of conviviality of all living beings: How do we discover the story of the life together of all living beings, especially human and natural beings. The primary mode of the living together among living beings is not a competition but cooperation and mutual adjustment. Biological sciences, ecological sciences, social sciences and human sciences are to studied together in the context of the Zoegraphy, an integral story of life of living beings.

The story cannot begin with the human subject of life. the story must begin with the convivial community of living beings, which would include humans, animals, plants, and soil and all other living beings as well as the so-called inorganic elements. The convivial community of living beings is not human centered entity, but the life centered identity. Relatively speaking, the agrarian community before industrialization had such Zoegraphy of the convivial community of living beings. In this community all living beings had to live together, adjusting and adapting to each other for mutual life (Sang Saeng (相生)).

The Global Life, advanced by Prof. Zhang, is related to this integral story of life. The GAIA is also a notion that may be related to the common life of all living beings on earth and their organic relations.

The Story of Life is the Story to Overcome the Arbitrary Death and Destruction.

The story of life is in a dialectical relationship with the power of death and destruction. In human his/herstory the life is to overcome the arbitrary death by the natural and human disasters as well as by disease, hunger, violence, war and other social causes and ecological causes. The subject of the life is the protagonist of the life and the agency of the death and destruction is the antagonist to the life in the drama of the Zoegraphy. In an analogous and connected way all living beings are struggling to overcome the powers of death and destruction to fulfill their destinies.

"Natural death" is only a part of the life. When we understand the life as a webwork of all living beings, the death is a moment of fulfillment in the story of the life. What is the death of butterfly in the life of insects? What is the death of worms of insect(catapilar) It is a moment in the story of the insect. When we look at the whole life in conviviality (common life), the natural death of one living being may be a moment in the whole story of life (Zoegraphy). Humans have sought ways to overcome natural death and to have a permanent life. This is being done through biological and medial means. This is an arbitrary human hybris to extend the natural life beyond its limits.

There is also death in the convivial webwork of life itself. For example, there is a chain of mutual nourishment through mutual sacrifice. Humans eat plants, fruits of trees, and some animals. This is supposed to be a convivial, mutual and interconnected webwork of life in the garden of life. The "natural death" may be regarded as an end to begin a new life. In the biology, however, this is conceived as a chain of the power struggle, in which the fittest and the strongest survive. But in Asia  philosophy it is regarded as a common life, a mutual life and a convivial life, which is a webwork of mutual service. This is nowadays called sustainability.

There are moments of arbitrary death and destruction, caused by the powerful in the Zoegraphy - the story of life. The first instance is the human destruction of life. The life become the victim of arbitrary human destruction and killing of living beings. This is immensely intensified in the process of globalisation in the 21st century.

The most powerful human agency to destroy the life is that of modern science and technology, technocracy. This is manifested in various modern sciences, such as biology. At the foundation of modern science and technology the life itself and all living beings and their components are objectified on the level of epistemology. They are fragmented and reduced to the minutest particles, cells and genes. The life is an arbitrary construct of scientific theories. 

Technocracy, organized technology, is the most powerful agency to control, dominate and destroy the life. Even if we view the science and technology as value-neutral, it is an epistemologically totalistic over the object, in our case, the life and all living beings. It manipulates, modifies and distorts according to designs of human sciences. The technocracy as a power of domination is driven by the powerful principalities and powers that be in the global market for their profit. The technocratic regime, under the control of the global market and the Empire, derives the globalization process, which involves the ecological destruction, the pollution and manipulation of the biosphere, the destruction of human life through the increasing hunger and poverty and the accompanying spread of diseases, the omni-cidal wars, ensuing social violence, political oppression, and economic exploitation. This process creates threats to life as a whole. In this context the Zoegraphy is closely connected with the process of globalisation.

The Life Seeks to Fulfill its Destiny.

Zeography is the story of resistance against the internal and external power of death and destruction. The life as the subjective agency resists the destructive power, or adapts itself to the hostile environment throu gh transformation. Life overcomes the power of death through its self-renewal with its inner strength.

Zoegraphy is the story of the "transformative" change in the life. On a biological level, this is regarded as an evolution. The evolution is not a mechanical or automatic process. It involves a qualitative change of the old into the new. It involves revolutionary and transformative change. The life as subject is creative and creates anew dimensions of life in the course of its birth, growth and death.

In the process of creative change and self-transformation, the life moves towards its fulfillment. This could mean a creative adaptation to the life environment for its survival and its fulfillment. This could mean a radical change into a new living being on biological, ecological, geo-political, socio-economic, and cultural and religious levels as a process of self-fulfillment of life.

It is important to note that the "utopia of life" is often depicted as a place of the whole life, not merely the human life. The utopia or the Messianic reign is a new life in the new city on new earth and new heaven. It is a new convivial garden of life, where all living beings live together to enjoy the feast of life, the fullest life of Shalom. In this sense life as a subject to fulfill its destiny projects its vision to overcome the powers of death and destruction.

This means that the Zoegraphy contains the vision of life, a sense of its fulfilled destiny. It is not a deterministic and automatic end of the life. It is an open, creative and concrete OMEGA point. It is a dynamic movement towards an open ended higher level of fulfillment of life. It is the movement towards the end (ESCHATON) of life.

In sum the Zoegraphy is the story of the resistance and struggle to overcome the powers of death and destruction. It is at the same time a creative movement to fulfill its own destiny in the universe. The  Zeography in the context of globalisation is the story of creative engagement for the life in fullness, struggling against the forces of death and destruction.

In this sense we are proposing an alternative paradigm to undrstand the life in Zeographic terms, not in a biological terms. It is honistic, not reductive; it is concrete, not abstract. It is an integral approach, but not a fragmentary one. It is life-fulfilling, not life-dominating. It is not the origin-oriented, but the end-oriented. It is not past oriented, but the future oriented. It is not domination-oriented, but servanthood-oriented. It is not human-centered, but it is the conviviality-centered. This is the basic orientation for the integral study of life as a search for the wisdom of life on earth.

Our proposal is that we begin the integral study of life from humanities, social sciences and that we integrate the natural scientific wisdom, by overcoming the totalitarian epistemology of the modernity. Our proposal is that we integrate the Western wisdom of life with the Eastern wisdom of life, overcoming the Cartesian captivity.

Our proposal is that we bring the religious, the mythical and cultural wisdom of the past and the present to the present world to overcome the tyranny of the powers of arbitrary death and destruction. We propose that the Asian and African wisdom of life be respected and be rehabilitated as a base wisdom of life on earth. It is to overcome the domination of the domination-oriented dynamics of the Western modern science and technology.