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Vitalism and the Scientific Image: An Introduction

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Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 2))

Abstract

To undertake a history of vitalism at this stage in the development of the ‘biosciences’, theoretical and other, is a stimulating prospect. We have entered the age of ‘synthetic’ life, and our newfound capacities prompt us to consider new levels of analysis and understanding. At the same time, it is possible to detect a growing level of interest in vitalistic and organismic themes, understood in a broadly naturalistic context and approached, not so much from broader cultural perspectives as in the early twentieth century, as from a scientific perspective – or at least a view lying at the boundaries or liminal spaces of what counts as ‘science’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) and Laublichler (2000). In the same year, Marc Kirschner and his collaborators published an influential research paper in Cell on what they called “molecular vitalism”: the suggestion was that, faced with the limitations of genomics, researchers should investigate what the authors “whimsically” termed the “vitalistic” properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function. They comment in closing that “the organism has fashioned a very stable physiology and embryology. … It is this robustness that suggested ‘vital forces’, and it is this robustness that we wish ultimately to understand in terms of chemistry. We will have such an opportunity in this new century” (Kirschner et al. 2000, 87).

  2. 2.

    Respectively, Kirschner et al. (2000), West-Eberhard (2003) (for discussion, Huneman 2010 and Walsh 2010) and Turner (2000).

  3. 3.

    Morange (2006).

  4. 4.

    Oyama (2010). Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) are explicit in their intention to discard a ‘bad word’ (‘vitalism’) for a good thing (the family of systemic, non-genocentric approaches to development in current life science), and find a more usable one (‘organicism’). In his recent discussion of von Uexküll as a thinker of ‘biosemiotics’, Emmeche makes almost exactly the same terminological distinction, between a (bad) “vitalism” and a (good, naturalistically specifiable) “qualitative organicism” (Emmeche 2001, 653).

  5. 5.

    Berryman (2003, 346). A 1940 review of Wheeler’s history of vitalism actually makes much the same point, although it is phrased in the then-current language of different “temperaments”: “The mechanist is the kind of person who feels that everything important is known already, in principle at least, and that only minor details remain to be discovered. The vitalist feels that existing knowledge is only of minor details, and everything of importance is undiscovered” (Ritchie 1940, 7).

  6. 6.

    Canguilhem (2008) and Greco (2005).

  7. 7.

    Rey (1992), Williams (1994) (Chapter 1), Boury (2004, 159–164), and Wolfe and Terada (2008).

  8. 8.

    Wolfe (2008).

  9. 9.

    Burwick and Douglass (1992), Duchesneau and Cimino (1997), and Lofthouse (2005).

  10. 10.

    Williams (2003).

  11. 11.

    Rey (1987, 2000).

  12. 12.

    Reill (2005).

  13. 13.

    Wolfe (2012, 2013).

  14. 14.

    In a particularly imprecise way, Walter Pagel was able to describe both Aristotle and William Harvey as vitalists (Pagel 1944, e.g. 147), which is like the historical mirror image of the emptiness of the concept when it is just used to mean the view held by “cranks” throughout the history of biology (as in Francis Crick’s rather arrogant pronouncement: “To those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow”; Crick 1966, 99). In the former case, if we treat Aristotle, Harvey, Montpellier vitalists, Blumenbach, Bernard, Driesch, Bergson and Canguilhem as instances of one view, then ‘vitalism’ seems to be an auberge espagnole, a halfway-house or rumpus room with any possible content; in the latter case, the view from ‘mainstream’ genetics that ‘vitalism’ is simply an archaic remainder destined for the rubbish heap, neglects not just historical context but scientific pluralism.

  15. 15.

    Benton (1974), Coleman (1971/1977), Allen (2005), Gayon (2010/2011), and Wolfe (2011).

  16. 16.

    On Bergson and vitalism, cf. Burwick and Douglass (1992); on Driesch, cf. Freyhofer (1982), and Weber (1999).

  17. 17.

    McLaughlin (2003).

  18. 18.

    Hein (1968, 1969, 1972), compare Berryman (2003) and Wolfe (2012) on mechanism and Life.

  19. 19.

    Feyerabend (1975).

  20. 20.

    Aristotle (1961/1999).

  21. 21.

    For ways in which ‘marginal’ or ‘heterodox’ figures (who are often viewed as vitalists of a sort) can, should (or should not) be incorporated into a canonical version of the history of the life sciences, cf. Giglioni (2008) (for the case of Francis Glisson), Chang (2004) (for the case of Georg-Ernest Stahl), and Normandin (Chap. 8 this volume, for the case of Wilhelm Reich).

  22. 22.

    Canguilhem (2008) and Delaporte (1994).

  23. 23.

    Wright and Potter (2000).

  24. 24.

    Wheeler (1939).

  25. 25.

    Wierzbicka (1989, 46).

  26. 26.

    Jacyna (1983).

  27. 27.

    Wheeler (1939); compare the distinction between physiological and chemical vitalism in Benton (1974), and Chang (2011) on alchemical vitalism.

  28. 28.

    Specifically for biomedicine, cf. the essays collected in Lawrence and Weisz (1998).

  29. 29.

    It is explicit in the later editions of Paul-Joseph Barthez’s work Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (the 1806 edition being the last one he revised): Rey (1987, 2000) and Wolfe (2011).

  30. 30.

    Bernard (1865), e.g. II, 1, § VIII (entitled “Dans les sciences biologiques comme dans les sciences physico-chimiques, le déterminisme est possible, parce que, dans les corps vivants comme dans les corps bruts, la matière ne peut avoir aucune spontanéité”); 136–137; “Le chimisme de laboratoire et le chimisme de la vie sont soumis aux mêmes lois : il n’y a pas deux chimies ; Lavoisier l’a dit” (Bernard 1878, 226).

  31. 31.

    Fabre (1879–1913).

  32. 32.

    Loeb (1912/1964); discussion in Allen (2005).

  33. 33.

    Waisse-Priven (2009) and Normandin (2011).

  34. 34.

    Driesch (1914a, b, 1933) and Wolffram (2009).

  35. 35.

    Lofthouse (2005, 3).

  36. 36.

    Sternhell et al. (1994, e.g. 24, 32). The identification between Fascism and vitalism is made at greater length in Payne (1995, e.g. 14, 26, 208).

  37. 37.

    Harrington (1996) (who studies this ‘identification’ in a series of figures, and then comes to another holist of 1920s German life science, Kurt Goldstein, who, she notes, is Jewish … leaving the aporias and/or fruitfulness of sociocultural contextualist history of science unquestioned or unjustified).

  38. 38.

    Driesch (1933).

  39. 39.

    Brenner (2011).

  40. 40.

    Canguilhem (1955/1977), Avant-Propos, 1. For discussion cf. Wolfe, (ms. 2011, 2014), and Bianco (Chap. 10, this volume) for a different perspective.

  41. 41.

    Ransom (1997).

  42. 42.

    Gayon (1998).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Claudia Alexandra Manta, Sorana Corneanu, Clare Mason, Michel Morange, Richarda Normandin, and Suzanne Wolfe Martin for their assistance and support.

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  1. Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, 919 E. Shaw Lane, East Lansing, MI, 48825, USA

    Sebastian Normandin

  2. Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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  1. Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, Auditorium Road 426, East Lansing, 48824, Michigan, USA

    Sebastian Normandin

  2. Centre for History of Science, Dept. of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, Ghent, 9000, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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Normandin, S., Wolfe, C.T. (2013). Vitalism and the Scientific Image: An Introduction. In: Normandin, S., Wolfe, C. (eds) Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2445-7_1

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