ABSTRACT
The conception of nature as fundamentally semiotic is certainly not new; what is new, rather, is the nearly unanimous repression of this conception by learned society. The German-American philosopher Hans Jonas has pointed to the strange fact that our conception of nature has undergone a 180-degree inversion in the course of human history (Jonas 2001 [1966]). Originally, life was conceived as the uncontested principle inherent to everything, and the idea of nonlife was simply unimaginable (as, accordingly, was the idea of an entity distinct from the body, the soul). Now, thousands of years later, non-life or inanimate nature has come to stand as the uncontested prime ontological entity. The deepest challenge to the scientific conception of nature now comes from the undeniable fact that some objects in the world are living creatures. For how can bodies be anything but chemistry? Isn’t DNA, a purely chemical substance, the ultimate ruler of living systems?
