Expanded Mechanism and/or Structural Vitalism: Further Thoughts on the Animal Economy

Abstract

The opposition between mechanism and vitalism is an old and venerable one. It seems to be particularly active in the hands of historians of biology, particularly late nineteenth and early twentieth-century biology (Hein 1972, Allen 2005. Broadly speaking, histories of biology and medicine endlessly and ceaselessly oppose mechanism and vitalism, usually focusing on the most dogmatic pronouncements of both such perspectives (iatromechanistic rhetoric and immaterial vital forces). Thereby they neglect the fertility and diversity of types of early modern mechanism (a diversity noted in Des Chene 2001; see also Hutchins 2015, Wolfe 2014), including as attempts to do justice to the ontological status of Life itself, and conversely, the mechanism-friendly dimensions of core moments of vitalist theorization, notably in the notions of 'organisation' and 'animal economy' in Montpellier vitalism (Wolfe and Terada 2008, Wolfe 2017a, 2019a. Furthermore, the opposition between mechanism and vitalism effectively obscures the singularity and the importance of specifically structural concepts, which are neither restrictively mechanistic (bottom-up reductionism) nor wholly organismic (top-down holism). What kind of history of vitalism results from this new emphasis on the interrelation between mechanism and vitalism? I suggest that vitalism, at least when it is not caricaturally positing immaterial vital forces, is concerned with vital materiality overall, and particularly with 'the living machine', to borrow a phrase from Claude Bernard (Bernard 1865).

Introduction: Vitalism and Its Legacies in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

“…But there has some significant scholarly 'pushback' against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the Montpellier vitalists of the eighteenth century (which is where the word 'vitalism' is first used), associated with figures like Diderot and the Encyclopédie, as has been shown in recent scholarship (Williams 2003;Reill 2005;Wolfe 2008;Normandin and Wolfe 2013;Wolfe 2019), but also, work on Driesch (Chen 2018(Chen , 2019 and Chapter "A Historico-Logical Re-assessment Of Hans Driesch's Vitalism" this volume, Bolduc, Chapter "On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch's Vitalism" this volume) has shown that even his 'neovitalism' is in need of reevaluation. So, there are different historical forms of vitalism, including in their relation to the mainstream practice of science (the topic of Wolfe and Normandin 2013, focusing however on the post-Enlightenment era and functioning in several respects as a predecessor volume to this one).…”