Vitalism and its Legacy in 20C Life Sciences and Philosophy (original) (raw)
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Theory, Culture and Society, 2019
This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos' (Osborne, 2016). I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualised historically, and referred exclusively to the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions.
Vitalism and the metaphysics of life
Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy
I examine a series of definitions and ways of locating, defending or rejecting ‘vitalism’ in early modern thought, roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. This yields a broad distinction between more or less metaphysically committed forms of vitalism, which partly (but not wholly) overlaps with a distinction I had suggested in earlier work, between ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ vitalism, in which the former is indeed a form of metaphysical vitalism. Given the plurivocity of the term, I suggest that we restrict the term ‘vitalist’ to thinkers who are actively concerned with the distinction between life and non-life (whether or not they substantialize this distinction), with special reference to the case of eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalism – where the term was first explicitly used. Further, I discuss the ways in which the association of vitalism with a (potentially problematic) metaphysics of life is partly a polemical construct – and one which is internal to the process of defining projects and programs in life science, where at times one vital(istical)ly oriented author will, with a slight air of desperation, seek to brand a predecessor or a rival as a vitalist in order to legitimize his or her own apparently more ‘experimental’ brand of organicism. But perhaps metaphysics is endemic to vitalism?
An evolving language coupled with a developing concept often will produce terminology that is a delight for etymological detectives but a hindrance to a person investigating the subject attached to that enigmatic term. While the linguist (and the layperson, for that matter) is fascinated by the complex lexical evolution, someone merely seeking corroborating or contradictory argumentation on a subject will often be overwhelmed by the diversity of investigation associated with such an evolved word. Vitalism fits this bill perfectly. Vitalism is a term that has appeared in various forms and been coupled with a variety of phrases or disciplines that alter (sometimes significantly, at other times not so) the plausibility and viability of the term as an indication of anything substantially beneficial. However, its use in the fields of rhetoric and human thought have been areas where theorists of all sorts have successfully appropriated this word to a great extent. Vitalism has a long and tumultuous history in the world of science and philosophy. The concept of vitalism as the idea that " life can be explained only by postulating a supernatural vital entity that animates the physical bodies of living beings " (Shaffer 553) can be traced back to at least the third century BC in the works of the Greek anatomist, Galen. However, the term as a representation of the idea that " living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things " began to be seriously examined and debated with the advent of modern science in the 16 th and 17 th centuries (Becthel 919). The development of vitalism was in large part a response to the mechanist ideas of Descartes in which he argued that animals (including humans) are " mechanical devices differing from artificial devices only in their degree of complexity " (Becthel 919). Two important branches of vitalism developed in the world of scientific inquiry to expand on the idea that " that processes of life involve some vitalistic
Vitalism in early modern medical and philosophical thought
Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, 2020
Vitalism is a notoriously deceptive term. It is very often defined as the view, in biology, in early modern medicine and differently, in early modern philosophy, that living beings differ from the rest of the physical universe due to their possessing an additional ‘life-force’, ‘vital principle’, ‘entelechy’, enormon or élan vital. Such definitions most often have an explicit pejorative dimension: vitalism is a primitive or archaic view, that relies on the existence of “mysteries” (Monod 1970, 42) and has somehow survived the emergence of modern science (the latter being defined in many different ways, from demystified Cartesian reductionism to experimental medicine, biochemistry or genetics: Cimino and Duchesneau eds. 1997, Normandin and Wolfe eds. 2013). Such dismissive definitions of vitalism are meant to dispense with argument or analysis. Curiously, the term has gained some popularity in English-language scholarship on early modern philosophy in the past few decades, where it is used without any pejorative dimension, to refer to a kind of ‘active matter’ view, in which matter is not reducible to the (mechanistic) properties of size, shape and motion, possessing instead some internal dynamism or activity (see James 1999, Boyle 2018, Borcherding forthcoming for this usage). The latter meaning is close to what Ralph Cudworth termed ‘hylozoism’, namely the attribution of life, agency or mind to matter, and he implicitly targeted several figures I shall mention here, notably Margaret Cavendish and Francis Glisson, for holding this view. However, one point I shall make in this entry is that when vitalism first appears by name, and as a self-designation, in the Montpellier School (associated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montpellier, in the second half of the eighteenth century; thus vitalisme appears first, followed shortly thereafter by Vitalismus in German, with ‘vitalism’ making its way into English publications only in the early nineteenth century: Toepfer 2011), it is quite different from both the more ‘supernatural’ view described above – chiefly espoused by its rather obsessive opponents – and by the more neutral, but also de-biologized philosophical view (that of e.g. Cavendish or Conway who are, broadly speaking naturalists). Rather than appealing to a metaphysics of vital force, or of self-organizing matter, this version of vitalism, which I shall refer to as ‘medical vitalism’, seems to be more of a ‘systemic’ theory: an attempt to grasp and describe top-level (‘organizational’, ‘organismic’, ‘holistic’) features of living systems (Wolfe 2017, 2019). In this entry I seek to introduce some periodization in our thinking about early modern (and Enlightenment) vitalism, emphasizing the difference between the seventeenth-century context and that of the following generations (culminating in the ideas of the Montpellier School). This periodization should also function as a kind of taxonomy or at least distinction between some basic types of vitalism (and as I discuss in closing, these distinctions can cut across the texts and figures we are dealing with, differently: metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical vitalism, philosophical vs. medical vitalism, medical vs. ‘embryological’ vitalism, and so on). I examine successively its Renaissance prehistory, its proliferation as ‘vital matter theories’ in seventeenth-century England (in authors such as Cavendish, Conway and Glisson, with brief considerations on Harvey and van Helmont), and its mature expression in eighteenth-century Montpellier (notably in authors such as Bordeu and Ménuret de Chambaud).
Vitalism-A Worldview Revisited: A Critique Of Vitalism And Its Implications For Integrative Medicine
Integrative medicine, 2019
Health has not generally been viewed as a proper object of philosophical study. It is not well known that health and health care were important topics for Plato and Aristotle, as well as for Descartes, Locke and Kant. Few people know that the dominant school of medicine in Europe until the seventeenth century-Galenic medicine-was an application of central themes in Aristotle's natural philosophy i or that many of the schools that followed were highly influenced by Descartes' philosophy of man. Even fewer would believe that philosophical analysis or speculation could make any valuable contribution to modern medicine. Medicine has for a long time … been liberating itself from the bonds of philosophy in its move to become an empirical science. A Brief History Of Vitalism There are many opinions about what vitalism actually is. In general, it is the doctrine that life originates in a vital principle, distinct from chemical and other forces. It is a belief that there is a vital force operating in the living organism and that this cannot be reduced or explained simply by physical or chemical factors. As Lipman observed, 2 "We can then define vitalism as the belief in the existence of some operating principle which is not found in inorganic nature and which distinguishes a living organism from the physico-chemical world. " Vitalism has a long history in both Western and non-Western societies. In Western societies, the concept of i. Throughout much of 1100-1600, and preceding the Newtonian Scientific Revolution, medicine was considered a "natural science" though this was debated. The natural sciences emerged from natural philosophy.