Vitalism

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

The idea of vitalism is supposed to have been refuted long ago, but today we see a group of thinkers called the New Materialists talking about a ‘vital materialism’ and a ‘vitality intrinsic to materiality’.  Is the New Materialism some kind of refreshed version of the old vitalism?  What could materialism possibly have in common with a discredited metaphysical idea that is used today principally as a term of abuse?  Is there anything of real value left in the idea of vitalism?

This article is part of a project investigating chiropractors’ beliefs on the role of vitalism in their philosophical and practice approaches and how that might contribute to addressing current epidemics of non-communicable diseases. It aims to present atomism, reductionism, materialism and mechanism as fundamental  ontologies in biomedicine and to examine what role these might play in its struggle to deal with these epidemics; to present from them might be contributing to difficulties in addressing
these epidemics. The use of more balanced approaches by chiropractors involving not only mechanistic biomedical ontologies but also an increased focus on vitalism might offer value in addressing these epidemics and should be investigated.

In this essay I examine Kant's analogy with life from §65 of the Critique of the power of Judgment. I argue that this analogy is central for understanding his notion of a natural end, for his account of the formative power of organisms in the third Critique, and for situating Kant's account of this power in relation to the Lebenskräfte of the vitalists.

Vor genau 100 Jahren wurde der bis dahin weitgehend unbekannte Privatgelehrte Oswald Spengler (1880– 1936) mit seinem Monumentalwerk vom Untergang des Abendlandes auf einen Schlag berühmt und avancierte zu einem der einflussreichsten Denker der Weimarer Republik. Dem durch und durch von der Goetheschen Formenlehre und vom Nietzscheanischen Elitismus Geprägten waren die Nationalsozialisten in ihrer Pöbelhaftigkeit und Gemeinheit zutiefst verhasst.

Während das Buch in der Zwischenkriegszeit in fast jedem bildungsbürgerlichen Haushalt zu finden war und auch ausländische Intellektuelle wie etwa José Ortega y Gasset, André Fauconnet, F. Scott Fitzgerald oder Henry Miller beeinflusste, spielten Werk und Verfasser nach 1945 jahrzehntelang eine immer geringere Rolle.

Indes: Fast siebzig Jahre, nachdem Theodor W. Adorno voreilig das Vergessen Spenglers konstatierte, hält sich der Universalgelehrte immer noch hartnäckig in der Diskussion und feiert in jüngster Zeit geradezu eine Wiederauferstehung. Vom Feuilleton über die Literatur bis zur wissenschaftlichen Debatte in verschiedensten Disziplinen beeinflusst er zunehmend das geistige Leben.

Das hat seinen Grund. Mit seiner grandiosen Gesamtschau der Weltgeschichte überwand Spengler als einer der ersten Denker die eurozentrische Betrachtungsweise. Seine Prognosen erweisen sich bis heute oftmals als hellseherisch visionär. Im vorliegenden Band finden sich die Gedanken von zehn deutschen und internationalen Autoren über Spenglers Bedeutung für das einundzwanzigste Jahrhundert vereint. Ob es um seinen Stellenwert für das Verständnis der Frühgeschichte, der Geschichtsphilosophie, der Rechtsgeschichte, des modernen Finanzkapitalismus, der Rolle der USA als eines »faustischen« Imperiums oder der gegenwärtigen Identitätskrise des Westens geht – in allen Beiträgen zeigt sich: Spengler bleibt weiterhin brandaktuell.

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3, 7], is also well known. From these facets of Carter's music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet–inspired solo flute piece, Scrivo in Vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative pathways by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition. Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002; Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and common-note voice leading between the tetrachords. While acknowledging such features, my analysis emphasises oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords as separate entities which cooperate and conflict as they manoeuvre to outdo each other.

The analysis advances three theses: (1) it guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way which resonates with Carter's concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration and his affinity for all-interval tetrachords; (2) it shows that music-analytical detail can be organised into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory's relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds; and (3) it shows how detailed pc-set analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity."

Communication dans le cadre de la journée d'études "Approches écocritiques dans les études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles en France: état des lieux et perspectives".
CERILAC, Université de Paris, organisée par Gaspard Delon, Charlie Hewison et Aymeric Pantet.
18 juin 2021.

Un élément important des pensées écologiques et écocritiques contemporaines est la question du (ré-)enchantement du monde et de la matérialité. Du « nous n’avons jamais été moderne » latourien aux divers animismes évoqués dans les études scientifiques et culturelles écocritiques, on voit multiples tentatives de questionner le fameux désenchantement apparemment provoqué par la modernité, tel qu’il a été décrit par Max Weber en 1919. En effet, que ce soit le tournant ontologique dans le champ de l’anthropologie, le « néo-matérialisme » ou les études biosémiotiques, on retrouve à chaque fois le sentiment que pour mieux rendre compte de nos liens avec l’environnement qui nous entoure – environnement mis en péril par les actions humaines – nous devons (ré-)apprendre à voir le monde autrement : comme constitués d’agents qui s’entrechoquent et se co-construisent, comme rempli d’affects, de signification non-humaine. 
Dans le domaine du cinéma, surtout en France, cette recherche d’enchantement a très souvent été mené sous le signe de l’animisme. « L’une des plus grandes puissances du cinéma est son animisme » écrivait déjà Jean Epstein dans Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926). Sergueï Eisenstein voyait l’animisme dans les films Disney comme une révolte à l’encontre de « l’inertie métaphysique ». Plus récemment, le concept du cinéma animiste est au centre de l’un des premiers ouvrages français qui traite ouvertement de l’écocritique cinématographique, Puissances du végétal, dirigé par Teresa Castro, Perig Pitrou et Marie Rebecchi. L’animisme auquel fait référence ces pensées cinématographiques s’inspire surtout des études anthropologiques et ethnographiques. Elle se définit, comme l’écrit Teresa Castro, comme une « croyance, qualifiée alors de primitive, qu’un grand nombre d’entités non humaines telles que des animaux, des végétaux, des artefacts ou des éléments de la nature possèdent une âme  ». Elle vise donc principalement les puissances de la caméra ou de l’image mouvante, qui peuvent révéler ou donner une semblance de vie aux objets filmés. L’on donne au cinéma un certain pouvoir « magique », un principe mystérieux qui permet d’insuffler tout ce qu’il touche d’une nouvelle vitalité.
Nous voudrions, dans cette intervention, problématiser cette pensée de l’animisme, en le rapportant à ces origines chez les chymistes du 17e et 18e siècle. Car si effectivement le premier à utiliser le terme dans le contexte de l’anthropologie était Edward B. Taylor en 1871, il l’a emprunté à la philosophie « chymique » de Georg Ernst Stahl. A l’époque des chymistes, ces chercheurs en biologie, chimie et médecine à l’aube de la révolution scientifique, pris entre la tradition « enchantée » de l’alchimie et la rationalisation « désenchantée » du scientisme moderne, on retrouve aussi des « animistes ». Là aussi, l’animisme luttait contre ce qu’on voyait comme une inertie métaphysique, incarné par le mécanicisme hérité de Descartes et de Newton.
Mais il y avait aussi dans le rang des chymistes une troisième voie : le vitalisme. Les animistes comme Stahl pensaient que la matière vivante devrait être perçue comme plus que simplement la somme de ses parties, puisqu’une certaine force vitale (entéléchie, vis essentialis, etc.) se trouve ajoutée ou infusée aux composantes chimiques. Les vitalistes comme le chymiste belge Jean Baptiste Van Helmont ou les médecins de l’École de Montpellier, bien qu’opposés au mécanicisme, rejetaient tout principe vital ou extérieur. Plutôt, ils prônaient une philosophie plus « matérialiste », définissant ainsi la vie comme émergeant à partir de dispositions particulières de la matière, comme un produit de la matière qui ne peut être entièrement réductible à ses composantes matérielles. La vie ne serait pas une force extérieure qui vient donner vie à de la matière perçue comme inerte, mais au contraire un principe qui émerge à partir d’agencements de matières entre elles, sans que ce principe puisse être réduit simplement à la somme des parties.
Cette forme de vitalisme « fonctionnel » ou « structurel  » a par ailleurs trouvé des héritier·e·s au XXe siècle, dont le plus notable serait Georges Canguilhem. Pour Canguilhem, être vitaliste c’est non seulement penser la vie comme ce qui est « non-indifférent » aux conditions matérielles qui la rend possible, mais aussi une attitude particulière à prendre face à l’objet du savoir. L’attitude mécaniste, selon Canguilhem, consiste à affirmer une séparation entre observateur·ice et objet, permettant d’énoncer des lois et des principes abstraits, qui peuvent être appliqués plus largement à d’autres objets « similaires ». L’attitude vitaliste, en revanche, est une « subordination » à la contingence de ce qui est observé. Il y a reconnaissance d’une relation mutuellement constitutive entre le savoir et l’objet du savoir, et cette relation est donc toujours ouverte, en devenir perpétuel .
Nous proposons ainsi d’aborder l’enchantement cinématographique nécessaire à une pensée écocritique à partir de cette forme de vitalisme, inspiré à la fois de Canguilhem et des chymistes qui l’ont précédé. Cela viendrait alors complémenter et complexifier une pensée animiste de l’image. À partir d’études de cas venant des cinéastes associé·e·s aux laboratoires d’artistes autogérés en France, nous voudrions prendre le pari de penser le cinéma comme chimie, cette science « nomade » et « mineure » dans les termes de Deleuze et Guattari. C’est prendre le pari de retrouver l’enchantement non seulement dans les images mouvantes projetées sur l’écran, mais aussi dans la matérialité de la création cinématographique, dans les processus vivants qui contribuent à faire émerger ces images : voir les films comme étant pris dans des réseaux d’agencements atériels et sémiotiques. C’est aussi prendre une attitude particulière, vitaliste, relativement aux objets de nos études, permettant de ne pas les figer dans un rapport réifié au monde, mais de les voir comme affectant tout en étant affecté par le monde qui les entoure.

Radical, ‘eventful’ bodily vulnerability has yet to receive sustained attention in contemporary human geography. As one way of addressing the implications of existential vulnerability, this thesis explores the social geographies of people living with epilepsy. It draws upon multiple-methods research comprising an extensive mixed-methods questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, all conducted with people with epilepsy who are members of the charity, Epilepsy Scotland, the project partner. By paying attention to the (post-)phenomenological experience of ‘seizures’, the thesis argues that a failure to appreciate the complex and often extremely troubling spatialities of epileptic episodes invariably results in sustaining the stigmatisation of epilepsy and the partial views of ‘outsiders’. By exploring changed, changing and changeable relations between self, body, space, time and others, the thesis suggests that spatial behaviours in and across different places shift according to various biographical, social and illness experiences and contexts. More specifically, it contends that certain spaces become risky some or all of the time because of the body that not only threatens personal disorientation but also the very foundations of the social order. While there is a corresponding risk that individuals with epilepsy will confine themselves within the socially (although not materially) contained homeplace, many adopt active and resourceful practices, taking into account immediate time-space and embodied knowledges so as to resist being told what they can do, where and when. Disciplining the ‘epileptic body’ and environment to accommodate the unpredictability of seizures are put forward as a challenging case study for thinking through how the vital vulnerabilities of everyday life are made sense of through the very governmental regimes that they will always escape.

The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.

Introduction available online at Duke University Press

El artículo tiene por objetivo bosquejar un concepto de vivencia retomando los aportes de la fenomenología de Edmund Husserl y el vitalismo de Georg Simmel. De esta manera, comienzo mostrando el vínculo entre la vivencia y su objeto a partir de la noción fenomenológica de intencionalidad y el nexo de la vivencia singular con el todo de vivencias en el planteo de Simmel. A tales efectos señalo que mientras Husserl enfoca la vivencia en general y propone un acceso reflexivo a la misma, Simmel da cuenta de la vivencia excepcional y cómo ésta se manifiesta inmediatamente. Acto seguido, avanzo en una interpretación del problema de la temporalidad. En este contexto Simmel sostiene que el tiempo de la vivencia es el de un presente incondicional y Husserl, en contraste, expone cómo la temporalidad de la conciencia es un continuo que se estructura a partir de “retenciones”, “protensiones” e “impresiones”. A modo de conclusión buscaré sintetizar los diferentes aspectos del concepto de vivencia utilizando la noción simmeliana de vida.

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein.

Helmut Berve's impact on his pupils in Leipzig was more intense than his successful 'Habilitanden' would acknowledge. His notion of the state did not draw on an elaborated theory of state; it was composed of various elements of his 'Weltbild', closely connected with NS-ideology. His essentialist view of the state influenced his pupils in different ways. But all of them agreed that there is a primitive state of the people (Volksstaat) to be separated from the more modern territorial state.

This chapter examines the rhetoric of Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–70), an Irish-language writer and activist. Ó Cadhain developed a few key tropes in Irish-language expression—‘dead’, ‘live’ and ‘clay’—to reveal a series of analogies which he used to interrogate the views and policies of the Irish state and its cultural, intellectual, and political representatives. His writing and oratory drew its power from its use of these key figures to effect a reversal of perspective in terms of what we see as “living” and “dead” in Irish social, cultural, and political life. Cré (‘clay’) functioned as a key trope for Ó Cadhain, standing for sociality itself—the language and social life of people, especially the Western, Irish-speaking lower classes. “Clay” was also the soil they are formed by, soil which is largely man-made in many communities where Irish is spoken.
I suggest that, like our bodies and the clay they return to, tropes are alive because they are made of the same stuff as ourselves. Ó Cadhain’s poetics point to a radical immanence within human sociality, and I argue that this is the stance from which his interventions gain their power.

An analysis of Conway’s solution to the mind-body problem with (1) an argumentation against Carolyn Merchant’s reading of Conway’s philosophy as spiritualistic reductionism and (2) a discussion on Conway’s philosophy in relation to the methodology of history of women in philosophy.
In this essay, I will focus on Conway’s solution to the mind-body problem. Based on my own reading of The Principles, I wish to challenge Merchant’s (1979) interpretation of Conway’s philosophy as “reducing body to spirit”5. In connection to this, I will refer to other readings of The Principles, which either interpret Conway’s concepts in the same way, or differently. Rejecting Merchant’s statements, I will argue that the substance in question is not essentially spiritual, but vital and in constant change - the concept of vitality being the core of Conway’s solution to the mind-body problem. Secondly, I will look at the consequences of a pure biographical contextualization, arguing that Merchant’s reading does not legitimize Conway’s “theoretical curiosity”.

Fashion is about growth, feeling, and aliveness. It thrives in excess and abundance. With the everyday discourse around circular business, we buy sustainable fashion. But how can we shift focus to how we become sustainable and more fashion-able? This book discusses circular fashion models and how these can amplify the vitality and purpose of fashion. As fashion renegotiates its relationship with consumerism, designers must not forget how fashion plays with desires, passion, and flourishing. If fashion is any good, it must be vital, or it is nothing.

Androids, if they were to come into existence, would be the outcome of scientific and engineering ingenuity and thus be products of past living labour. Although the androids might be Turing-compatible, Voight-Kammpf cheating and Asimov-law abiding, they would be dead labour. Indeed as outcomes of a capitalist production process they would surely be commodities, objectifying a quantity of value and have particular uses for business, comfort or pleasure. In other words, androids would be very advanced machinery and Marx is quite clear that machinery cannot produce surplus value.

Drawing on John Johnston’s (2008) analysis of artificial life theory and experiments, this paper will explore whether androids or artificially intelligent robots can create surplus value. It will do so by interrogating and critiquing the key Marxist categories of labour and value. In this science-fictional quest to discover value producing androids, I will consider Marx’s problematic vitalism or whether there is something else specific to Man that is necessary for his value theory. I will consider Marx’s vitalism, and the android from the point of view of the labour process and valorization process before suggesting that under certain conditions androids can in fact produce value. These conditions have nothing to do with the peculiarity of either Man or machine, but rather with what value is and how it functions in Marx’s theoretical framework. Although Marx could be charged with vitalism, I will conclude that this aspect of his theory can be understood as referring to the life of capital and that in this context labour is negentropic to capital’s entropy. An implication of this exploration is that capitalism is alive and that it could reproduce itself without the existence of the human race.

I examine a series of definitions and ways of locating, defending or rejecting ‘vitalism’ in early modern thought, roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. This yields a broad distinction between more or less metaphysically committed forms of vitalism, which partly (but not wholly) overlaps with a distinction I had suggested in earlier work, between ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ vitalism, in which the former is indeed a form of metaphysical vitalism. Given the plurivocity of the term, I suggest that we restrict the term ‘vitalist’ to thinkers who are actively concerned with the distinction between life and non-life (whether or not they substantialize this distinction), with special reference to the case of eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalism – where the term was first explicitly used. Further, I discuss the ways in which the association of vitalism with a (potentially problematic) metaphysics of life is partly a polemical construct – and one which is internal to the process of defining projects and programs in life science, where at times one vital(istical)ly oriented author will, with a slight air of desperation, seek to brand a predecessor or a rival as a vitalist in order to legitimize his or her own apparently more ‘experimental’ brand of organicism. But perhaps metaphysics is endemic to vitalism?

To say that interology is a way of life is to say that it is a practical philosophy, an ethics. This way of life is characterized by dialogue, communitas, life-enhancing relationality, productive tension, mode switching at opportune intervals, the primacy of leisure, frontiersmanship, liminality, readiness for rapture, playfulness, creativity, the sensation of freedom, and, if one is truly awakened, the capacity for unconditional bliss. The last phrase is a big claim reserved for buddhas, immortals, sages, yogis, and the like. In the final analysis, this understanding of interology is vitalistic in nature. It is preoccupied with autopoiesis, sees life itself as an artistic medium, and treats every instance of doing and non-doing as an opportunity for self-fashioning. Life starts to give off a different aura when one lives this way. Eventually, happiness becomes endogenous, and a species of inalienable spiritual triumphalism (not the vulgar stripe displayed by philistines, nor the type held in contempt by LU Xun 鲁迅) takes over, so much so that one becomes "unswayable by the eight winds," as the Zen expression has it. The Stoic-minded Kenneth Burke would use "heads I win, tails you lose" to characterize this attitude toward life. Spiritual self-sufficiency by no means implies isolationism, since one is always already thrown into relations. It is rather a matter of managing to get vital nourishment wherever one is thrown, and involves an intuitive, prudential praxis of selection and deselection, prehension and negative prehension, affectability and imperturbability, engagement and disengagement.

Daniel Dennett has claimed that if Chalmers' argument for the irreducibility of consciousness were to succeed, an analogous argument would establish the truth of Vitalism. Chalmers denies that there is such an analogy. I argue that the analogy does have merit and that skepticism is called for.

Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new materialism's goal to come to terms with the non-living origin of life? Or is it rather to recognize that seemingly dead materials are always in some sense incipiently alive? For convenience , we can think of two neomaterialist perspectives: the rationalist or elim-inative neomaterialism, and the vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism. I explore some of the conceptual problems faced by both camps and, drawing from the recently developed theory of consciousness as integrated information (Tononi), as well as its quantum physical construal by Max Tegmark, I suggest some provisional ways to address those issues.

В монографии впервые рассматривается метапоэтика К.И.Чуковского (изучение автором языка, собственного творчества и творчества других художников слова) в свете лингвистического витализма – исследования языка как «живой системы», формы и главной артикуляции жизни. К.И.Чуковский предстает как симфоническая личность: писатель, переводчик, критик, ученый-филолог, теоретик перевода, принимавший живое участие в формировании языковой политики и языкового строительства в СССР.

The monograph for the first time examines the metapoetics of K. I. Chukovsky (the author's study of the language, his own work and the work of other writers) from the point of view of linguistic vitalism. Linguistic vitalism is the study of language as a "living system", a form of life. K.I.Chukovsky is presented as a symphonic personality: a writer, translator, critic, philologist, translation theorist, who took an active part in the formation of language policy in the USSR.