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 human beings. Aristotle, H.-L. Bergson, H. Driesch, and N. Hartmann are vitalists in this sense.

In a more restricted sense, V. comprises a series of doctrines extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (the

principal stages of which are indicated by the names of Paracelsus, Stahl, Barthez, and the Montpellier school), which posit beneath biological phenomena a principle distinct from those phenomena and ensuring their coordination: a vital principle assimilable to a spiritual principle called the “arché” and radically distinct from the thinking soul (Montpellier school). In a rigorous sense, it comprises today (under the current designation of “neo-v.”) the scientific or philosophical conceptions which, after the end of the nineteenth 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 the physico-chemical fact, both from the objective point of view (in the realist or Kantian sense of the term) and from the subjective point of view.

Hence the distinction between a methodological V. and a doctrinal V. The former is represented, for example, by Reinke, who, taking up the Kantian idea of the “regulative concept,” assigns to the concepts of “regulating forces” (Die physischen Kräfte) only the value of a “provisional concept” (provisorischer Begriff), useful, indeed necessary, 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 forces and is therefore reduced to an “as if” (Als ob, cf. J. Reinke, Leblos u. Lebendig, in Kantstudien, 31 [1926], esp. p. 205 ff.). Doctrinal v., on the other hand, maintains that organic finalism is a truly constitutive characteristic, either in the sense of the Kantian a priori (as in H. Driesch, Kant und das Ganze, in Kantstudien, 29 [1924], pp. 365–67) or in a more immediately realist sense (as in R. Ruyer, Éléments de bio-psychologie, Paris 1946; id., Néo-finalisme, ibid. 1952). Organic finalism, by virtue of which the living being develops through its internal forces from the embryonic state to adulthood and is genuinely causa sui, and which Driesch contrasts both with descriptive or regulative finality and with 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 adaptation or the regeneration of the embryonic stage (for example, in sea urchins), which led Driesch to elaborate the technical concepts (which he contrasts with collective concepts, ibid., pp. 244–49) of “prospective significance” (prospektive Bedeutung) and “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 disturbance or artificially induced division, the organism as a whole (ibid., p. 271 ff.). While the former, capable, according to the various locations, of producing such a determinate organism, is variable and can be represented by the formula S=f (a, g, E), in which S signifies prospektive Bedeutung, a the situation of the blastomere in relation to an original pole, g the absolute size of the system, and E a constant embracing 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 latter is constant, at least at the initial stage, and equal in all the blastomeres, which thus constitute a harmonious equipotential system (ibid., p. 420, note 255). Reflecting on these facts elaborated through 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 system as a whole, which presupposes the spatial presence, in a single part, of all the others [ibid., p. 299 ff.]). Hence the appeal to a factor transcending the physico-chemical order, factor E, which, invoking Aristotle, Driesch calls “entelechy” (ibid., pp. 300–304), but in a new sense which he attempts to determine through an overall reference to the Kantian categories of relation, causality, and substance, and ultimately to the constitutive category of individuality.

Driesch’s V. 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 point of view (cf. Ruyer, Éléments, pp. 92–93), which objects to the “entelechy” on the basis of the fact of interspecific grafts, incomprehensible within Driesch’s position, and substitutes for factor E the psychological notions of potential, thematic, and significant form, of structure, and of unitary domain (ibid., pp. 134 and 232 ff.; cf. also Néo-finalisme, pp. 269–70).

It should be noted, however, that if the experimental facts, the technical concepts, and the explanatory concepts of a philosophical character are distinguished within Driesch’s theory, it is not necessary to link the fate of the first two to that of the last. The experimental facts have in fact led to the clear distinction between mosaic eggs (for example, those of mollusks) and totipotent or self-regulating eggs (for example, those of sea urchins), while also taking into account the anisotropic characteristic of all germs (cf. C. Bounoure, L’autonomie de l’être vivant, Paris 1949, pp. 16–38); but these additions do not at all destroy; rather, they confirm, the incontestably experimental and operational value of the technical concepts. These enable the philosopher to construct a conception of the organism more adequate to the facts, thereby avoiding the confusion between the efficient and the formal, as well as the alleged autonomy of the “entelechy” with respect to the organism in the Drieschian conception, insofar as the soul is posited in the organism as the form of matter in accordance with the presuppositions of Aristotelian philosophy.