Living

Two senses, and both make living an activity rather than a condition. The first is orientation, an attraction to anima and a continual quest to assure its availability, which describes what a living thing is doing at all times rather than what it is. The second is exertion, the exercise of will to create interactions, which is the same movement described from the other side, since anima is what interactions run on. Neither sense requires awareness, which keeps living apart from consciousness in the way the framework does throughout. Being is at its most basic an action, and an action requires energy which the living obtain from life. Marsh pushes the point further than most vocabularies allow. Living can be described as the state of an individuated consciousness trapped in a wave of life, or a will propelling a wave of life, and the purpose of living is to create the interactions and exercise the will joining them, which makes the activity constitutive of the universe rather than incidental to it. Her most striking corollary concerns what survives. Because interactions always exist in the spacetime they occurred in, the interactional self is immortal, and the secret to immortality is an expansion of balanced interactions rather than a theft and hoarding of anima into an object-self. So living well and continuing to exist are the same project in this framework rather than competing ones.

Biology defines being alive by a checklist of properties rather than by an activity, and the definition has never been settled. Aristotle's account of life as self-nourishment and self-movement is closer to Marsh's, and the autopoiesis theory of Maturana and Varela defines living systems by their continuous self-production, which is an activity-based definition of the same shape. Hannah Arendt distinguished labour, work and action as modes of human activity. What Marsh adds is the object of the activity, since her living thing is not merely maintaining itself but seeking a specific external quantity, which makes availability of that quantity the measure of how well a thing can live.