Life

Life is energy in this framework rather than a property of organisms, and everything else in the vocabulary is built on that. Anima is life energy. An animus is life contained within a membrane for the use of an individual or group. Deanimation is the loss of life from an animus and reanimation is the gain. A person is a fusion of five elements, body, self, life, will and consciousness, so life is one component among five rather than the whole of being alive. Two claims follow in the definition and both are physical in form. Life force expands outward through interactions with other sources of life energy, which makes expansion the default behaviour of the substance rather than a choice or a value. And expansion can be blocked or deviated by a greater opposing force, which is the only thing that ever stops it. Every account of pathology in the framework reduces to that second sentence. Marsh separates life carefully from the things it is usually conflated with. It is possible to be alive and not aware and it may equally be possible to be conscious and not alive, so life is not consciousness. Being is an action requiring energy which the living obtain from life, and death is the absence of life while life is more than simply the absence of death, which is why she treats both as positions on a spectrum of animation rather than as two states.

Biology defines life by a checklist of properties, metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, response to stimuli, and has never settled the definition, with the origin of life and viruses both sitting awkwardly. Schrodinger's What is Life proposed that organisms sustain order by exporting entropy, which is the closest scientific parallel to Marsh's framing. Vitalism, the position that life involves a force not reducible to physics, was abandoned in the 1800s and Marsh's account is a deliberate return to something like it, which she defends on the grounds that every culture outside one recent materialist tradition has described life as a force flowing in and out of objects.