Again with the same category error. An atom as part of a structure may be animate. If that structure breaks down, it may become inanimate.
This is deeply confused, Muze.
You’re running around in circles and avoiding the logical difficulties of your position. You honestly think there’s a fundamental difference in the nature of inert atoms simply because they have binded together.
Do atoms, when they have formed a bond, notwithstanding always
remain, in and of themselves inert protons, neutrons and electrons? According to theory, of course they do. Its mass or energy quantitatively increases but the fundamental nature of the protons, neutrons and electrons does not change in the least. That, ostensibly,
never changes. What I am pointing out to you is that this theory does not amount to an explanation of
the nature of living things : life that manages to be and behave as a
unity distinct and irreducible to its material composition.
For example, if you someone were to ask me what you are, I would not give them a laundry list of chemical substances and even add the quantities. I would not then add height, shape, colour, organizational structure, etc.; if I did, the person inquiring of you couldn’t even be sure you are alive; perhaps you are a recent corpse, which has the same atomic structure and chemical make-up as the man who was, not too long ago, very much alive. You seem to think living organisms are just really fancy material constructions like a building or a computer and have an equivalent unity: when some fundamental part of the building’s structure collapses the whole structure or system falls or fails with it and is reduced to rubble. Living things, however, are this but something more: they surpass their material composition in that they form a unity that goes beyond the merely material: they are actively seeking the realization of certain innate goals such as, e.g., getting food and procreating. Atoms do not seek to get food or procreate. You can’t reduce these things to the atoms themselves. The matter comes and goes (you consume food to replenish your body and discard waste) but the life remains. The matter revolves, so to speak, but the life-principle remains the same and constant: it remains one single organism that is constant in spite of underlying material alterations or changes. The material principle in living things is subordinated to the life-principle that animates the matter (or atoms) and makes it a single, living organism. When you look at a single cell organism it is impossible not to see that
all of the matter in that organism is subordinated to the organism’s, so to speak,
mission or purposes ;
not the other way around. This is even more obvious in any animal. Life adds something to the matter.
And animate means, strictly speaking, alive or living; certainly at least that is what I use it to mean. Aristotle’s
De Anima, after all, is about the soul. Every living thing “functions” in an “animated” way, but you are so used to confounding these two things that you don’t realize that even each single atom, considered individually, “functions” according to its “structure”; that is no feat. Every single material thing “functions” structurally, but not all material things are “animate”. The “animate” is above the inanimate. It is a higher order of thing altogether. Your thinking would reduce organisms to robots, which “function” in an “animated” way too. Various parts of the a robot (in fact all of them) may be replaced over time: it consumes energy and in the process produces some kind of waste. Robots are not, however,
alive. They are not seeking anything at all. A computer program that scripts the machine to do certain things at certain times is not natural nor does it make the robot, as a whole, something that is consciously goal-seeking, let alone on account of an innate nature that
of itself is actively seeking its own realization. No doubt technological advancements provide us with things that, owing to their complexity, suffice at times for helpful or useful analogies for describing the whole world or living things; however, the world and living things especially are not reducible to these artificial products anymore than 16th century mechanists were justified in believing that the whole world and everything in it really was reducible to the awesomeness of mechanical clocks or clockwork. Today, we would laugh at such a ridiculous over-simplification of the universe; our children will almost certianly laugh that we tried to reduce the world to the complexity of a CPU or even an advanced robot.
