This article aims to unravel the lines that have carried the cosmological conception of ‘life’ in Western culture into our times, and to explore how this trajectory illuminates current philosophical and anthropological thought. Since the 18th-century vitalism has been a major arena of discussion about the phenomena of nature and life, in parallel with broader romantic emphases on flux, totality, dialectics, and preserving the embeddedness of nature and culture, or things and people. Distinguishing between life as the phenomenological experience of existence and the cosmological conception of the vital condition is central to my argument. I focus upon the latter dimension to show that awareness of the long-range history and present complexity of those conceptions contributes to the contextualization of the contemporary interest in life.

本文旨在揭开将西方文化中的“生命”这一宇宙学概念带入我们时代的界限，并探索这种轨迹如何照亮当前的哲学和人类学思想。自18世纪以来，活力主义一直是讨论自然与生命现象的主要场所，与此同时，浪漫主义也更加关注通量，整体性，辩证法，并保留自然与文化或事物与人的内在包容性。在我的论点中，区分作为生命的现象学经验的生命与生命状态的宇宙学概念之间的区别是至关重要的。我专注于后一个维度，以表明对长期历史的认识和这些概念的当前复杂性有助于当代对生活的兴趣的语境化。