Is the Earth Alive?

Craig Holdrege

From In Context #54 (Fall, 2025) | View Article as PDF

Can we think of the earth or perceive the earth as being alive? If you ask many scientists, they would say no. They would say organisms — plants and animals, bacteria and fungi, and human beings — are alive. The earth supports living beings, but the earth itself is not alive. Earth is a substrate for the life of the beings that live on earth. Then there are people who say: “Of course, the earth is alive. The earth is a kind of being.” This is a view that is present in ancient and indigenous cultures. It has also continued as a small undercurrent of thought in Western culture even as the dominant view of the earth as an inanimate object prevailed with the development of modern science.

Between the views of the earth as an inanimate entity supporting life and as a being that is the source of all life, there are a variety of perspectives. For example, James Lovelock published in the late 1970s his influential book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. He took the ancient Greek word for the earth goddess, Gaia, and developed the idea of the earth as a kind of superorganism, a living system that is dynamic and self-regulating. Lovelock himself was not at all happy with the more New Age view of Gaia as a being. He was an atmospheric scientist and thought of Gaia as a theory that can make predictions that can be either validated or not.

I don't want to ascribe to any of these views. When I consider the phenomena and ideas that form the basis of conclusions that the earth is alive or not, more questions than answers arise for me. Here I want to sketch a particular pathway that develops what I see as an expanded view of life itself, and then consider how this view lets us ask in a fresh way the question: Can we think of the earth as being alive?

Defining Life?

It’s clear that much hinges on what we consider “life” to be — whether it be the life of an organism or the life of the earth. I recently picked up the 600-page Oxford Dictionary of Biology to see what it says. I looked for the entry “life.” It's not there. I was surprised and at first amazed that there is no entry for “life” in a dictionary of the science of life we call biology. Likewise, in the extensive glossary of the 1,200 page college textbook, Life – The Science of Biology, there is no entry for “life.” You can at first think these might be glaring oversights. But that is unlikely. I imagine it is a well-considered exclusion. The authors themselves may have not been able to agree on a definition and may well have foreseen that any definition they would offer would be subject to criticism from many sides.

In his book, Gaia, James Lovelock does take the bull by the horns and offers a definition of life at the end the book:

Life: A common state of matter found at the Earth’s surface and throughout its oceans. It is composed of intricate combinations of the common elements hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus with many other elements in trace quantities. Most forms of life can instantly be recognized without prior experience and are frequently edible. The state of life, however, has so far resisted all attempts at a formal physical definition. (Lovelock 1979, p. 152)

You can see that he is circling around a difficult problem. He declares that life is a “state of matter” — a special combination of chemical elements — and at the same time admits that this special state resists all attempts at a definition based on physical properties. He also acknowledges that we all know life when we see it. The sense that something is alive is an immediate experience — you know it when you see it. But when you start analyzing and seek to put your finger on it in order to define it, it’s no longer there.

If I were to ask you to show me life, what would you do? I know what I would do. I would point to another person, to the potted plant on the window sill, to a fly buzzing around me. In doing this I point to living organisms, to living beings. That’s not the same as pointing to “life.” And that’s what’s intriguing: Any time something displays as a living presence, I can’t situate “life” in any detail — the whole organism is alive and the organs, tissues and cells are alive, but I don’t find “life” as an object of perception, as an entity in space. This is the problem that Lovelock addresses when he says that life resists a physical definition — it cannot be found as a physical thing. For a strict materialist this would mean that life as such does not exist. When Lovelock says that life is a “state of matter” he means a particular configuration of matter (chemical elements). That “state” as a configuration is not a sense perceptible entity, it is a concept that indicates relations that one discovers at the level of molecules or elements when one is analyzing what one already holds to be alive based on felt experience.

Take a seed. How do I know whether it is alive or not? It’s not like a slithering snake, or a wilting plant. On the basis of outer perception I cannot know if it is alive or not. I learn that it is alive when I plant it and it begins to grow. Life shows itself here through the plant in its doing. Life is a special way of forming and doing. Paraphrasing philosopher and physicist Henri Bortoft, life is not a thing but certainly not nothing (Bortoft 1995, p. 14).

Here I am reminded of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s statement:

Any attempt we make to express the inner nature of a thing is actually fruitless. What we perceive are effects, and a complete history of the effects would encompass this inner nature. We labor in vain to describe a person’s character, but when we draw together their actions, their deeds, a picture of their character will emerge. (Goethe 1808/2003, p. 315; my translation)

The same is true for life: The sense of aliveness that we have, more or less instinctively (intuitively) as living beings, provides a context for the study of life. On this basis we proceed to study and articulate the characteristics of living beings. But in this work “life” never becomes an object for analysis or dissection. We can only behold it relationally.

Life Bounded and Centered

Inquiry into life in biology focuses on organisms and their characteristics. Biologists discover organism-bound, life-related essential characteristics that we can articulate in general concepts such as metabolism, homeostasis, integration, responsive and interactive boundary, growth, transformation, reproduction, and death (see Rosslenbroich 2023). We can learn to see an organism more and more as a center of ongoing creative and highly coordinated activity (Talbott 2025). Life as it manifests in organisms I will call “life-centered,” in contrast to “life-peripheral,” a concept that I will develop in the course of this article.

Organismic characteristics such as growth, reproduction, or death reveal themselves differently depending on what creature we consider — a mammal or bird, an insect, a flowering plant, an alga, a fungus, or a bacterium. Our understanding becomes increasingly saturated, differentiated, and expansive when we consider diverse life forms on earth.

Take, for example, death. If you have ever experienced a dog, cat, or bird die, you know that there is a moment of death. The creature was alive and is now dead. It is distressing to witness — what was full of life is suddenly still, and immediately a process of decay begins. Death is an event ending the life of the active bounded and centered organism. Death in these kinds of organisms brings home vividly the reality of life-centered.

It’s a different matter when you study plants. If the trunk of a tree snaps in a violent storm, the stump might sprout new shoots and the tree continues to live. Or a tree falls over in a storm and is partially uprooted. One of the former side branches can become a new trunk and out of the old trunk roots can develop so that a new tree can thrive for hundreds of years — until it falls and perhaps forms yet again a new tree. Or think of the fact that we can cut off parts of plant — make cuttings — and they each develop into a new whole plant. As the great naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre wrote, “To divide an animal is, in the vast majority of cases, to destroy it; to divide the vegetable is to multiply it” (Fabre 1924, p. 16). Clearly there is death of parts — in branches, roots, or leaves — but through what we dryly call vegetative reproduction, we witness both the continuity of life, and the difficulty of pinning down a moment of death and even what we could describe as the definitive physical boundary of a given plant. We might think we have a whole plant when we uproot a weed, and yet that weed will have left many roots and perhaps bits of stem in the ground out of which it can regenerate. Where does a plant begin or end?

The matter can become even more puzzling. I have a plastic container in which I put a sandwich when I go on a hike. Some time ago I couldn’t find it and, being attached to it, I looked in all the kitchen drawers and still couldn’t find it. Then I finally thought, maybe it’s in my backpack that I took on a hike a couple of weeks before. So I went and found the backpack and discovered the container. When I opened it I was confronted with a landscape that did not at all resemble my cheese sandwich. I beheld a beautiful array of greens, reds, and orange mats — my uneaten sandwich had completely transformed into a diverse array of fungi and bacteria.

It was one of those “aha” moments when you are amazed by, and realize deeply, what you already “know” as a biological fact: Everything we eat is covered with tiny spores of bacteria and fungi. They are everywhere in the environment. Ubiquitous but unseen. Under particular conditions, which my closed container with a cheese sandwich provided, the spores germinated and mats of bacteria and fungi developed.

From the perspective of naked-eye observation, it would be reasonable to ask: Did my cheese sandwich bring forth the fungi and bacteria? Doesn’t this look like spontaneous generation? It was only when the microscope and then further microbiological techniques were invented that it became gradually clearer that there are always centers of embodied life out of which new organismic life develops. In the 17th century Francesco Redo, an Italian physician and a pioneer in experimental biology, demonstrated that wherever he found organisms they had developed from previous organisms. He coined the now-famous phrase in biology omne vivum ex vivo ("all life comes from life"), whereby “life” means life-centered. While this is clearly the case, it is equally clear that no organisms develop independently of an environment.

Organism-Environment Unity

A seed is a phase in the life of a flowering plant that we can describe as a clearly bounded and circumscribed physical entity. It is also the phase in which a plant is minimally active. A seed requires certain conditions for its further development. Many seeds in our temperate climate must go through the cold of winter in order to be ready to germinate. Others seeds need the extreme heat of fire to leave dormancy. Given such initial “readiness,” together with warm moist soil, a seed can germinate. It gives up its isolation. The seed takes in moisture, swells, and becomes physiologically active. The seed coat breaks open and the primary root grows out of it. It doesn’t matter what the orientation of the seed is, the primary root grows down. “Down” means towards the center of the earth. The primary shoot (stem) of the plant grows in the opposite direction — away from the center of the earth. In germinating, the plant becomes a creature of a particular place on earth through taking root, and at the same time displays a relation to the whole of the earth. All taproots are radii directed toward the center of the earth, just as all upright growing stems and tree trunks are radii directed away from the center of the earth. A seedling is both a creature of a particular place and of the whole earth.

In growing, the plant develops new substances and forms. At the beginning of germination the substances usually derive from those stored in the seed that developed on the mother plant. But soon it is only through the larger environment that the plant can form its substances. From the outset the plant needs environmental warmth and moisture. Growing plant tissue consists mostly of water that is taken in through the seed and then the roots. Water plays an essential role in all life processes. Soon the plant requires the efficacy of sunlight and air to begin to form new organic substances through photosynthesis. It’s an astounding fact that most of the carbon-based body of the plant (starch, sugar, and cellulose) is built up from what the plant receives, via its leaves, through the air — through carbon dioxide. In one sense we can say that the organic substances of the plant consist primarily of transformed air and water. The important realization is that the plant builds up its body through participating in, interacting with, and internalizing its environment — sunlight, warmth, air, water, and minerals from the soil. It becomes what it is by virtue of these relations. At the same time, we need to recognize the immense creativity of plants as life-centered. Consider all the unique substances plants form that exist nowhere else on earth. Just think of the taste of garlic, an orange, or a carrot; or the scent of a rose, lavender, or cloves.

When we consider the plant-environment relations, we can recognize that it is correct but one-sided to say: A plant grows out of a seed. What is in the seed is not something that simply unfolds into the plant. We move beyond this one-sided view when we understand that it is also correct, and also one-sided, to say: The environment grows into the plant via the seed. Only the two thoughts together bring us closer to the reality of life.

In the words of early 20th century physiologist J.S. Haldane:

Just as the life of any individual organism exists only as including within itself what are [sic] often called its physical environment, so does its life, when more widely interpreted, include within itself the lives of other organisms, so that these lives are not outside of its own life, though for practical purposes we usually regard separately what we can most readily treat as individual lives. (Haldane 1931, pp. 30-31)

What is important here is the realization that in any essential sense “organism” is not outside of “environment.” Organism and environment cannot be thought of as two separate things. We can’t think organism without including environment, and the concept of environment only takes on meaning when seen in relation to an organism. When we speak of something being “outside” the organism-as-centered, we mean a “mere surrounding” (a spatial outside) to which we have discovered no vital relation to the organism. If we discover a relation, then it is no longer in any essential sense outside. Organism-environment is a larger unity, a relation of belonging and becoming. Life-centered — the organism as creative, generative activity — is connected with the environment as life-peripheral — the potency in the larger world that supports and participates in life-centered.

Life-Peripheral

I want to continue to give due attention to life-peripheral from a few different perspectives, never forgetting that it is impossible to speak about without including life-centered. I live in upstate New York at about 42 degrees northern latitude. As everywhere north of the equator, the shortest day of the year is around December 22. The sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest and doesn’t rise very high in the sky. It can be very cold in winter — we can occasionally have temperatures down to minus 22°F (minus 30°C). While still cold in February, the days have become considerably longer. We can hear birds beginning to sing — though nest building is a long way off. When the daytime temperature rises above and at night drops below freezing, the sap in trees begins to rise. Solid starch in the roots is transformed and a watery sugar sap rises through the tree trunk into branches and buds, making possible the later unfolding of leaves and flowers that were already preformed in the previous summer.

The days continue to get longer and the earth slowly warms. The first small forest wildflowers appear in April before the trees leaf out. Each year the same species appear first, followed by waves of other species. As the latter develop, the earliest spring ephemerals already begin to bear fruit and, as the name indicates, then wilt. When the trees leaf out and the forest floor becomes shaded during the longest days of the year in late June, the main understory growth slows. In June and July, the plants of the meadows and roadsides, open to the sky, come to full development. All this burgeoning life is a revelation of the shifting earth-sun relation. And I haven’t even mentioned the insects whose lives are so intimately entwined with those plants, or migratory birds, such a bobolinks, that have flown from the southern hemisphere and reach our meadows in early May each year.

While the earth-sun relation is so important everywhere on earth for the development of centered life, so are the specific conditions of a particular place for particular species. One prevalent plant in our area is the dandelion. If you've ever watched its development, you know how the bright yellow flower head transforms into a puffy white globe that children love to blow out into the air, which can carry the little “parachutes” far afield. The plant’s seeds are connected to the base of the parachutes. While wind is the main means for dandelion seeds to travel afar, they also get caught and carried away in mammal fur, or eaten and excreted by animals. Each April in our lawns and meadows innumerable dandelion seeds are released into the larger surroundings. But do dandelions grow everywhere? No. In the forests bordering the meadows dandelions are rare.

Eastern columbine, to mention one other plant, grows in our area mostly in the cracks of rock outcrops. Each flower can form numerous small round seeds — a little larger than poppy seeds — that are eaten and carried away by ants, birds, and mammals. And yet it is where the seeds happen to land in those cracks of rock outcrops with their special conditions that columbines thrive.

Taking the perspective of life-peripheral, can’t we say: The meadow brings forth dandelions, rock cracks bring forth Eastern columbine and early saxifrage, the swamp brings forth skunk cabbage and calla lily? Of course, the seeds have to be there, but the seeds themselves aren’t enough. They need to be met, be embedded in, and become active through their environment — the world that is appropriate for them and furthers their becoming.

At any given latitude the relation of earth and sun is the same each day and during the course of the year. But how different these places can be from each other. For example, Cape Chidley borders the Atlantic Ocean at the northern tip of Labrador, Canada, and lies at about 60 degrees northern latitude. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, on the western coast of Norway, is Bergen, also at about 60 degrees northern latitude. In Cape Chidley a relatively warm day in January reaches 1°F (minus 17°C) and the nights can be minus 18°F (minus 28°C). Bergen’s high daily temperatures in January are around 43°F (6°C) and at night it freezes only occasionally. Bergen has a rainy climate, receiving in some years 90 inches (7.5 ft.; 2.3 meters) of precipitation, mostly as rain. Cape Chidley receives much less precipitation (around 24 inches; 0.6 meters), which falls as snow for over half of the year. Both places are on the same latitude and border the Atlantic Ocean, and yet in climate and ecology they are so different. To begin to understand such differences — and it is just a beginning — you have to consider prevailing winds, which blow from west to east at this latitude, and oceanic currents. Cape Chidley receives mainly dry and cold air from the west and north, and the Labrador current brings cold arctic water by the coast all year long. In contrast, Bergen lies on the west coast of Europe and receives the relative warm, moist air blowing over the warm Gulf Stream, which flows north along its coast.

With the long cold winters and dry climate, the area around Cape Chidley develops mainly low growing and sparse tundra vegetation, while in Bergen mixed deciduous forests thrive that are similar to those at much lower latitudes in North America. Such a contrast and yet the same latitude!

This is just one example that points to the membering of Earth — to the larger contexts and specificities of places in which all life forms are embedded and to which they contribute. Even where we can say that there are the “same” biomes in different regions of the earth — think tropical rainforest, savannah, or desert — we find distinct characteristics. One can speak, for example, of the Fynbos in South Africa as having a Mediterranean climate — middle latitude, wet mild winters, and dry hot summers. A similar type of shrub-dominated vegetation develops around the Mediterranean sea in Europe (called maquis) or near the Pacific coast in southern California (called chaparral). And yet there is nothing comparable on earth to the Fynbos in respect to its unique vegetation with numerous endemic species, especially of plants but also of animals.

Earth Alive

With the greater unity of life-centered and life-peripheral before the mind’s eye, we come to the heart of our topic. I want to quote a statement by Canadian ecologist, Stan Rowe, which has stimulated my thinking about what we might mean when we speak of the earth being alive:

Just as the living parts of an organism depend on the vitality of the whole [organism], so living organisms depend on the energetics of Planet Earth from which they evolved and by which they are maintained. From an ecological viewpoint Planet Earth, the inclusive supra-organic Ecosphere, is the best and most logical metaphor for “life” in its largest sense. (Rowe 2006, p. 141)

Clearly, the living parts of an organism depend on the vitality of the whole organism. My liver, brain, or kidneys cannot live without the vital reality of the whole body that informs all the organs. This analogy helps to sharpen awareness for what I’ve been characterizing, namely that — and now in Rowe’s words — the whole Planet Earth provides the vital context for all organismic life. Therefore it only makes sense to view the planet as alive — Rowe calls it the supra-organic Ecosphere. He’s not speaking of the earth as an organism, as bounded life-centered. Rather, earth alive encompasses all contextual and peripheral features without which life-centered could not exist.

In this sense, the living earth includes not only the physical globe we think of with its continents, oceans, and organisms, but also the winds and atmosphere, and extends out at least as far as the sun, the giver of light and warmth. But the sun is not only an “out there.” Jochen Bockemühl, a teacher of mine, used to say: “The sun is where she is at work.” In other words, the sun is not just a far-away body, but is efficacy. Where sun is at work, sun is present. Sun is present in the warming of a rock or lake, in the shimmering surface of lake, and in a green growing plant. In this sense, sun is part of earth (or: earth is part of sun). We can also say: To earth belongs what she receives and interacts with. All these articulations are attempts to approach life as a relational reality, a reality that is so difficult to express since it can’t be nailed down like an object in space. We can only approach it by viewing the phenomena from a variety of perspectives.

Belonging Together

Goethe wrote in the introduction to his major work on color:

The eye is indebted for its existence to the light. From neutral ancillary animal organs, light has called forth an organ that becomes its like; and thus the eye forms through the light and for the light, so that the inner light can meet the outer light. (Goethe 1808/2002, p. 323; my translation)

Here again we find the emphasis on fundamental relatedness or belonging. The eye is not simply an organ that developed and happened to be able to perceive the illumined colorful world. Organ and what it perceives are two aspects of the same larger reality — center and periphery belong together. With our eyes we perceive a world in degrees of brightness and darkness, and in an array of colors. We don’t “see” light; if we did, we’d only see it and not a dark shadow or a bright red apple. Light allows the colorful world to appear, and the eye allows us to participate in this world. They belong together. In a similar way we can say: Were a plant not sun-like, how could it grow through the sun? Light and plant reveal a special form of sun-life relatedness.

Rudolf Steiner offers further examples of center and periphery belonging together:

Let us assume that we as contemporary human beings lay a fish on the table or put a bird in a cage. Then we look at the fish and the bird outwardly with our senses. But we are so egocentric in our way of knowing that we hold fast to what is immediately in front of us. We become unegocentric in our way of knowing when we not only see the fish in water or the bird in the air, but when we can see in their forms, that the fish is an animal of the water and through the water, and that the bird is an animal of the air and through the air. (Steiner 1923/1966, p. 115; my translation)

In speaking of “unegocentric” knowing, Steiner is encouraging a knowledge practice that goes beyond the centered perspective and includes a peripheral perspective. You focus not only on the center-as-agency, but consider also how the periphery — water or air — is intimately part of fish or bird formation. It’s not about establishing causal connections between two separate things (water and fish) but seeing how the qualities of water and fish form a unity (in and of the water).

Think of a trout with its streamlined form and its skin that produces a slippery mucous allowing it to move through water with little resistance. With segmented muscles contracting on each side of its body in alternating waves, the fish propels itself in meandering whole-body curves through the dense body of water. A unitary body in a unitary medium. Water gives the fish buoyancy. In a body of water the pressure increases with depth. When a fish swims into deeper water or rises toward the surface, it secretes gas (mainly oxygen) into its swim bladder or reabsorbs gas, allowing it to remain buoyant at different depths.

A primary sense organ of fish is the lateral line organ that runs along both sides of the body. It is clearly an organ for the water and of the water. Through it a fish perceives the movements of water. So, for example, when another fish swims close by, it perceives its presence through changing pressure waves. This sense is sometimes called “touch at a distance.” Through it the fish perceives much of what occurs in its environment. Fish also smell and taste through the water, and breathe by virtue of water flowing through them — entering their mouth, flowing through the gills and leaving through the gill slits on the sides of the body. This might give you at least an intimation of how one can begin to see in a qualitative, and not causal way, a fish as a creature not only in the water but of and through the water.

These considerations indicate a qualitative way of knowing that allows us to conceive of what we habitually think of as separate, as belonging together. An organism with eyes does not end at the physically boundary of its cornea, nor does a plant end at the physical boundary of its leaf surface. Light belongs to both of these formations, just as water belongs to fish. In this sense life does not end (or begin) at the boundaries of organisms but includes the entirety of earth, and to earth belongs the sun, moon, and stars. Then we can say: The earth is alive.

Human Inwardness and World

Let me take one further step. When I was preparing the talks on which this article is based, I contemplated the following thoughts. I am outdoors and witness a sunset and am moved by its beauty. I go to the ocean and walk along the beach, taking in waves, wind, and sand. I feel enlivened and refreshed. I can also be enlivened by the countless sparkling dew drops on the meadow plants as I walk to work, or the fog forming into wispy clouds in the neighboring valley. In these experiences I am participating in events in which a variety of elements and conditions weave together. I have been in the desert and experienced red rock promontories glowing in the light of the setting sun and I feel enlivened, and yet no living organisms are to be seen.

In all this I am participating in a world that takes hold of me. I feel beauty, I sense depth, I become more alive. After treading the pathway I have described in this article I can now ask: Aren't we perceiving here something of the life of the earth that is not centered-life as in an organism but rather life-peripheral? I think we are actually perceiving, in a dreamy or almost unconscious way, those qualities of life that can be found when we participate in their weaving relations.

After gaining this growing sense of the life quality that can be experienced in what we would normally call nonliving circumstances, I returned to the quotation from Steiner about fish and birds that I’d worked with in earlier years, because I remembered that his description was in the context of a consideration of truth, beauty, and goodness. When one begins to view an organism in the expansive way through which it embodies and expresses the larger reality of which it is a part — fish-water or bird-air — then, he says, “what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me.” This way of knowing leads us into a perception of beauty in the world: “We cannot come to a real feeling for beauty other than by starting in this way, by viewing things differently…. To really learn to live with the things gives us a sense of beauty” (Steiner 1923/1966, p. 123; my translation).

So often we think, when we experience a sunset, a rainbow, or the sublimity of a thunderstorm, that what rises up in us as a feeling of beauty or awe only relates to us. This holds true only as long as we think of ourselves and our inwardness as being separate from world events. When we acknowledge that we are always active participants in the way the world comes to expression, and when we begin to see how phenomena reveal their nature through their larger relations, we are engaging in a process of catharsis through which we can experience the world in us and us in the world — a world to which we belong not only as physical and biological beings but also in our innermost core.

Immanuel Kant concluded his Critique of Practical Reason with words that I have long known, but that in this context harbor a new and seed-like meaning to me:

Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and intently we reflect on them: The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I should not seek either of these as beyond my horizon or presume that they are veiled in darkness or extravagance. I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. (Kant 1788/2003, p. 215; my translation)

It is hard to imagine a greater polarity than between the most distant reaches of what is usually considered the purely physical world of the the starry heavens and our internal, invisible, nonphysical source of moral action. Yet Kant’s experience of awe and admiration for the starry heavens and the moral law living with in him — these two poles of our existence — led him to see them as related. They are two connected features of one world. I bring his bold thought, which is grounded in inner experience and deep reflection, at the conclusion of this essay to point to the possibility of an ever deepening and broadening experience and understanding of the essential connectedness of center and periphery in existence, a connectedness that can encompass human nature and cosmos.

References

Bortoft, Henri (1995). The Wholeness of Nature. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.

Fabre, J. H. (1924). The Wonder Book of Plant Life. London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd.

Goethe J. W. v. (1808/2002). “Zur Farbenlehre” in Werke, Bd. 13, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften I. Munich: C.H. Beck.

Haldane, J.S. (1931). The Philosophical Basis of Biology. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Kant, Immanuel (1788/2003). Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

Lovelock, James (1979). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosslenbroich, Bernd (2023). Properties of Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rowe, Stan (2006). Earth Alive – Essays on Ecology. Edmonton: NeWest Press.

Steiner, Rudolf (1923/1966). Lebendiges Naturerkennen. Bibl. Nr. 220. Dornach, Switz.: Rudolf Steiner Verlag.

Talbott, Stephen L. (2025). Organisms and their Evolution: Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life. Ghent, NY: The Nature Institute.