Psychosomatic medicine and the philosophy of life

1) Being vs. non-being: Always threatened by non-being, the organism must constantly re-assert its being through its own activity.2) World-relatedness vs. self-enclosure: Living beings are both enclosed with themselves, defined by the boundaries that separate them from their environment, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environment and engaging in transactions with it.3) Dependence vs. independence: Living beings are both dependent on the material components that constitute them at any given moment and independent of any particular groupings of these components over time.We then discuss important features of the polarities of life: Metabolism; organic structure; enclosure by a semi-permeable membrane; distinction between "self" and "other"; autonomy; neediness; teleology; sensitivity; values. Moral needs and values already arise at the most basic levels of life, even if only human beings can recognize such values as moral requirements and develop responses to them.Psychosomatic medicine requires a philosophy that surmounts mind-body dualism. Such a dualism has plagued Western thought since the origins of modern science in seventeenth century Europe. In its youth modern science perhaps needed to separate mind from body in order to separate religious concerns from scientific ones. If religion was concerned mainly with the human soul, then Descartes' claim that the human soul (res cogitans) differed in toto from physical reality (res extensa) implied that the science of physics had no relevance for the human soul. As long as science promised not to encroach on discussions of the human soul, it found itself free to investigate physical matter in an entirely new way. Hence modern science could abandon the Aristotelian conception of nature that the Catholic Church continued to advocate because science conceded to the Church a monopoly on all questions of the spirit. Metaphysical dualism thus won a tolerance for new modes of thought by parceling realit