Some theories in science disappear like a glacier because their time has come, while others are fiercely fought against. One of the latter ones is vitalism. Generally speaking, vitalists are those who claim physics is insufficient to explain life, as life requires a special vital law, force, essence, or property. However, there are many flavors to vitalism. Those flavors are covered in the book that I had read: “Vitalism and it’s legacy in twentieth century life sciencies and philosophy” edited by C. Donohue and C.T. Wolfe. 

Vitalists attempted to find an answer to questions that each and every one of us asked at some point: 1) What differentiates living beings from non-living objects? 2) How, from all possible heterogeneity of matter, do biological entities emerge that can realize a variety of specific functions? 3) What is the purpose of life?
Let me try to align philosophers according to their answers. 

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) answered the third question by introducing the Élan vital (or vital impetus) of evolution. He claimed that if the organism has a purpose, then it is fundamentally separate from the purpose of each of its individual parts. Therefore, it is not possible to specify a border between the purposes of different beings, as there should be an external principle. This means that life should be considered as a whole, and evolution as a single, unfinished event. For his book Creative Evolution (1907), where vital impetus was introduced, Bergson won a Nobel Prize in Literature. 

However, Bergson didn’t conceive of himself as a vitalist, and somewhat fairly since there were more radical philosophers. Hans Driesch (1867 – 1941) was a biologist from Germany. Actually, he was an experimental biologist, and his research results later led him to become a vitalist. Driesch experimented with the separation of sea urchin eggs (and also their blastomers). He discovered that mechanistically dividing eggs into two parts didn’t bring about two half-larvae but two typical larvae. This finding did not align with some of the mechanistic theories of development popular at the time. However, instead of driving results to refine theories, Driesch turned to a new theory of his own. The theory’s main concept was entelechy (or life force). It was an answer to the first and second questions I outlined earlier. Entelechy, according to Driesch, is a non-physical and ‘use’ matter of the egg and ‘guide’ its development to a typical form. Later in his life, Driesch became a professor at Leipzig University but was removed from his position for expressing his pacifist views. 

Entelechy didn’t seem like a satisfying answer for many scientists. Georges Canguilhem (1904 – 1995) advocated that living beings should be understood in terms of their autonomy and identity, and their interactions with their environment (or "milieu"). According to Canguilhem, the relationship between an organism and its environment is not static but involves continuous adaptation and transformation, and that’s why living beings are different from non-living objects (the answer to question one). Despite sounding more down to earth, Canguilhem still believed that living beings are self-mantained and therefore not comprehendible. He was a practicing phisician and served in resistance during the Second World War. 

There were others who didn’t commit to full-blown vitalism but showed appreciation for questions. Vienna Circle (including Carnap) admitted the unanswered question of the reducibility of biology to physics but didn’t agree that this poses an offense to physicalism. Bioexceptionalists argued for the advantage of studying biology separately from physics and chemistry from a methodological perspective. Walter M. Elsasser proposed that maybe life is too complex (for us) to trace all the causation from organisms down to particles. 

The book is a collection of papers, some of them being fairly technical and philosophically focused. Sometimes, it was difficult for me to follow. However, that was one chapter that I enjoyed very much: the story about Francis Crick and his attack on vitalism (see the reference at the end). 

It may seem to some that vitalism is dead and only suitable for the history of science. But I actually disagree. In my opinion, vitalism was transformed into something more scientific-looking but still very weird. I’m talking about enactivism. My next review will be about it.

Favourite quote “Since we, as cognizers of life, at the same time live the lives of cognizers, our reflection must encompass… how it modifies that selfsame dynamism…, thus altering both it's conditions of possibility and it's subsequent operations”

Peterson, E. L. (2023). A ‘fourth wave’of vitalism in the mid-20th century?. In Vitalism and its legacy in twentieth century life sciences and philosophy (pp. 173-192). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

July, 2024