Philosophy on "borrowed being" (Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion):

Existing things, the developments of the natural and spiritual world, take manifold forms, and have an infinite variety; they have a being which differs in degree, force, strength, content; but the being of all these things is not independent, but is supported by, dependent on, something else, and has no true independence. If we attribute a being to particular things, it is only a borrowed being, only the semblance of a beinabsolute self-sustained Being, which is God.

Science on "borrowed life" (Luis P. Villarreal, "Are Viruses Alive?"):

[A] virus seems more like a chemistry set than an organism. But when a virus enters a cell (called a host after infection), it is far from inactive. It sheds its coat, bares its genes and induces the cell’s own replication machinery to reproduce the intruder’s DNA or RNA and manufacture more viral protein based on the instructions in the viral nucleic acid. The newly created viral bits assemble and, voilà, more virus arises, which also may infect other cells.

These behaviors are what led many to think of viruses as existing at the border between chemistry and life. More poetically, virologists Marc H. V. van Regenmortel of the University of Strasbourg in France and Brian W. J. Mahy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently said that with their dependence on host cells, viruses lead “a kind of borrowed life.”

Pop culture on "borrowed love" (S.O.S. Band, "Borrowed Love"):


It's 3:01 in the morning
another sleepless night

I feel your presence with me and it doesn't feel right.
And then it starts flowing through me
from my feet right to my head

Then I scream, calling out your name

I want you back in my bed
my bed.

What could make me think
that I could live on borrowed love ?

Being as borrowed from the supreme being. Life as borrowed from life. Love as borrowed from a lover.