The feeling of being alive: phenomenology and biology

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.