Vitalism

VITALISM. - In a very broad sense it comprises the scientific and philosophical doctrines that affirm the irreducibility (both from the ontological and from the epistemological point of view) of biological phenomena to mechanical or physico-chemical phenomena, as maintained, for example, by J. Loeb (cf. La conception mécanique, French trans., Paris 1911, pp. 1-5), who extends the theory of "tropisms" to animals and man. Aristotle, H.-L. Bergson, H. Driesch, N. Hartmann are vitalists in this sense.

In a narrower sense, vitalism comprises a series of doctrines extending from the 16th century to the 19th century (the principal stages of which are indicated by the names of Paracelsus, Stahl, Barthez and the school of Montpellier), which posit beneath biological phenomena a principle distinct from those phenomena that ensures their coordination: a vital principle assimilable to a spiritual principle called "archaeus" and radically distinct from the thinking soul (school of Montpellier). In a rigorous sense it today comprises (under the current designation of "neo-vitalism") the scientific or philosophical conceptions which, after the end of the 19th century, in reaction to the mechanical conceptions of life and with reference to the positive data of the biological sciences (more particularly of embryology), maintain the irreducibility of the vital to mechanism or to physico-chemical fact, whether from the objective point of view (in the realist or Kantian sense of the term) or from the subjective point of view.

Hence the distinction between a methodological vitalism and a doctrinal vitalism. The first is represented, for example, by Reinke, who, taking up the Kantian idea of the "regulative concept," gives to the concepts of "regulating forces" (Die physischen Kräfte) only the value of a useful, indeed necessary, "provisional concept" (provisorischer Begriff), insofar as life was not created by laboratory means, but which leaves open the possibility of a further reduction either to material forces or to psychic ones, and which therefore reduces to an "as if" (Als ob; cf. J. Reinke, Leblos u. Lebendig, in Kantstudien, 31 [1926], esp. p. 205 ff.). Doctrinal vitalism, on the other hand, maintains that organic finalism is a truly constitutive character, whether in the sense of the Kantian a priori (as H. Driesch, Kant und das Ganze, in Kantstudien, 29 [1924], pp. 365-67) or in a more immediately realist sense (as R. Ruyer, Éléments de bio-psychologie, Paris 1946; id., Néo-finalisme, ibid. 1952). Organic finalism, by virtue of which the living being evolves through its internal forces from the embryonic state to adulthood and is truly causa sui, and which Driesch opposes both to descriptive or regulative finality and to static finality, that of machines (cf. Storia e dottrina del v., Italian trans., Naples 1912, pp. 1-13), has a double aspect: harmony (causal, compositional and functional) and regulation, whether merely possible regulation of adaptation or regenerative regulation of the embryonic stage (for example, in sea urchins), which led Driesch to the elaboration of the technical concepts (which he opposes to collective concepts, ibid., pp. 244-49) of "prospective significance" (prospektive Bedeutung) and of "prospective potency" (prospektive Potenz). The first expresses the actual, real destiny, and is the normal aptitude of each blastomere to produce a determinate organ; the second is the aptitude, common to all blastomeres, to regenerate, in cases of perturbation or of artificially provoked division, the totality of the organism (ibid., p. 271 ff.). While the first, capable according to the various placements of producing such and such a determinate organism, is variable and susceptible of being represented by the formula S=f (a, g, E), in which S means the prospektive Bedeutung, a the situation of the blastomere as a function of an original pole, g the absolute magnitude of the system, E a constant that embraces the original capacity of the elementary organ, within the specific limits of the morphogenetic system and its harmony with the other parts (ibid., pp. 295-98), the second is constant, at least at the initial stage, equal in all the blastomeres, which thus constitute a harmonious equipotential system (ibid., p. 420, note 255). Reflecting on these facts elaborated by the technical concepts, Driesch observes that they are irreducible to an explanation by means of internal factors of an exclusively physico-chemical mechanical character (no part of a mechanical system can evidently regenerate the totality of the system, a thing that supposes the spatial presence in a single part of all the others [ibid., p. 299 ff.]). Hence the appeal to a factor that transcends the physico-chemical order, the factor E, which, with reference to Aristotle, Driesch calls "entelechy" (ibid., pp. 300-304), but in a new sense that he attempts to determine with an overall reference to the Kantian categories of relation, causality and substance and in the last instance to the constitutive category of individuality.

Driesch's vitalism has been criticized both from a scholastic point of view, because his entelechy is not the Aristotelian entelechy (cf. H. Nuyens, Evolution de la psychologie d'Aristote, Louvain 1948, pp. 73-78), and from a scientific point of view (cf. J. Matisse, Le rameau vivant du monde, Paris 1945, pp. 77-91) and a philosophical one (cf. Ruyer, Éléments, pp. 92-93), which objects to "entelechy" the fact of interspecific grafts, incomprehensible in Driesch's position, and replaces the factor E with the psychological notions of potential, thematic and significant form, of structure and of unitary dominion (ibid., pp. 134 and 232 ff.; cf. also Néo-finalisme, pp. 269-70).

It should be noted, however, that if in Driesch's theory one distinguishes the experimental facts, the technical concepts and the explanatory concepts of a philosophical character, it is not necessary to link the fate of the first two to the last. The experimental facts, in truth, have led to the clear distinction between mosaic eggs (for example, mollusks) and totipotent or self-regulating eggs (for example, sea urchins), also bearing in mind the anisotropic characteristic of all germs (cf. C. Bounoure, L'autonomie de l'être vivant, Paris 1949, pp. 16-38); but these complements do not at all destroy, indeed they confirm, the incontestably experimental and operative value of the technical concepts. These allow the philosopher to construct a conception of the organism more adequate to the facts, so as to avoid the confusion between the efficient and the formal and the claimed autonomy of the "entelechy" with respect to the organism of the Drieschian conception, and insofar as one posits the soul in the organism as the form of matter according to the presuppositions of Aristotelian philosophy.

Stanislao Breton