The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.
I think this is incorrect. The whole is very much more than the sum of it's parts. "Life" may be difficult to define in the same way that consciousness is because they are both emergent properties.
I agree, of course, that when we drill down we get nothing but chemical processes. However, we label whatever property it is that emerges at some level of complexity "life" but no one individual process is "alive". This is a match to what goes on in our brain. There is no consciousness anywhere in there that we can point to but it emerges from all the processes going on in there.