Vitalism

Vitalism

Vitalism is a school of thought which postulates that life cannot be fully explained in physical material terms. According to vitalists, life, which in the material world is manifested as a physical process, emerges as a result of an immaterial impulse. Aristotle, who is regarded as the founder of scientific vitalism, believed that the soul, as a modality of life-energy, kept the organism alive. According to Aristotle, the soul affects the organism without being connected to it in a physical sense.

Historians of science often identify René Descartes as the great intellectual force that facilitated the switch from Aristotelian metaphysics to the more sober mechanistic-materialistic paradigm of modern mainstream science. A fervent Catholic, Descartes altered Aristotle's terminology, retaining, however, the fundamental idea that an organism, being a physical thing, receives direction from a spiritual entity.

Although the powerful mechanistic paradigm created by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) dominated the physical sciences, many natural scientists revolted against what they saw as a lifeless, cold, and rigid conception of the universe. Often branded as purely speculative thinkers, the greatest representatives of vitalism in biology were nevertheless brilliant researchers and practical scientists. For example, Newton's younger contemporary Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), built a comprehensive medical theory and practice on vitalistic foundations. One of the greatest scientists of the eighteenth century was Marie-François-Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), the founder of histology, was a vitalist. Furthermore it was Karl Ernst von Baer, the eminent representative of nineteenth-century vitalism, who in 1827 made history with his discovery of the mammalian ovum.

Twentieth-century scientists and historians of science have often dismissed vitalism as basically obsolete, even unscientific, perhaps because it could not be proved. This insistence on empirical proof shows a profound misunderstanding of the essence of vitalism. Vitalism is an intellectual orientation, and not a mere hypothesis in need of material proof. During the first half of the twentieth century, vitalism's greatest exponents were Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who developed the concept of the elan vital, and Hans Driesch (1867-1941). While Bergson, who was primarily a philosopher, relied on secondary sources in biology, Driesch was a practicing biologist, who, in an experiment with sea urchins, showed that of a half of the egg, following the first division after fertilization, is destroyed, the remaining half will produce a complete, albeit smaller, embryo. In Driesch's view, this kind of regeneration clearly demonstrates that life follows a logic that is not determined by physical circumstances. Finally, the theory of morphogenetic fields, developed by Rupert Sheldrake, affirms the profoundly vitalistic idea that nature develops in harmony with invisible, immaterial, but powerful forces. According to Sheldrake, morphogenetic fields, like life itself, may not be detectable in a traditional sense, but biologists cannot afford to ignore them.