The feeling of being alive: phenomenology and biology

The feeling of being alive reveals a deep link between biological life and subjective experience. Self-awareness is not a mental model produced in the brain but a manifestation of the whole organism's life. The feeling of life has two components: vitality (basic vital feelings) and conation (drive, urge, desire), both grounded in self-regulating processes that maintain the organism's homeostasis. The sufficient basis of self-awareness lies in the organism's self-organization and relationship to its environment, not in neural correlates of consciousness. The paper also examines how depression and Cotard syndrome disrupt the feeling of being alive.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The feeling of being alive points to an intricate connection between the organic process of life and foundational subjective experience, or between life and experience ( Leben and Erleben ). Based on this premise, I argue that self-experience cannot be understood as an internal mental space or a “self-model” that could be produced and localized in the brain, but rather that it is a manifestation of the life of the organism as a whole. I first examine in detail the phenomenology of the feeling of life, distinguishing between two components: vitality (basic vital feelings) and conation (drive, urge, desire). Furthermore, I demonstrate the foundations of both components in self-regulating processes that maintain the homeostasis of the entire organism. The sufficient basis of self-awareness cannot then be found in individual “neural correlates of consciousness,” but only in the self-organization and life process of the organism in its relationship to the environment. The feeling of being alive is then shown to be the fundamental form of self-awareness, both from a phenomenological and a biological point of view. Finally, the paper explores the psychopathology of the feeling of being alive, taking the examples of depression and Cotard syndrome.