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Vitalism

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This article is about the non-mechanist philosophy. For other uses, see vital

Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, [19] is

1 : a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces
2 : a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining

Where vitalism explictly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy" or "élan vital", which some equate with the "soul".

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: most traditional healing practices posited that disease was the result of some imbalance in the vital energies which distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition, these vital forces were identified as the humours; eastern traditions posited similar forces such as qi, prana, etc. More recently, vitalistic thinking has been identified in the naive biological notions of children [1].

Development of vitalism

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, whilst Plato points up to the heavens showing his belief in the ultimate truth.

The notion that bodily functions are due to a vitalistic principle existing in all living creatures has roots going back to at least 384-322 BC. While vitalist ideas have been commonplace in traditional medicine,[2] attempts to construct workable scientific models date from the 1600s, when it was argued that matter existed in two radically different forms, observable by their behavior with regard to heat. These two forms of matter were termed organic and inorganic. Inorganic matter could be melted, but could also be restored to its former condition by removing the heat. Organic compounds "cooked" when heated, transforming into new forms that could not be restored to the original. It was argued that the essential difference between the two forms of matter was the "vital force", present only in organic material.

Aided by the invention of the microscope in the 16th century, the germ theory of disease challenged the role of vitalism in Western medicine, and the roles of the organs of the human anatomy in the maintenance of life became better understood, reducing the need to explain things in terms of mystical "vital forces". Nevertheless, vitalist ideas were still thought necessary by many scientists to explain how organisms maintained life.

The phlogiston theory, developed by J. J. Becher and Georg Stahl late in the 17th century held that all flammable materials contain phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or weight that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx. This vitalist theory led to the prediction that substances should lose weight after burning; it was tested and falsified by the experimental demonstration that, when combustion took place in a closed, sealed system, no weight was lost or gained.

In the early 19th century, Jöns Jakob Berzelius, known as one of the "fathers" of modern chemistry, rejected mystical vitalism, but nevertheless argued that a regulative force must exist within living matter to maintain its functions. The geologist Carl Reichenbach, considered to be one of the top 1,000 scientists of all time, later developed the theory of Odic force, a form of life-energy that permeated living things; this concept never gained much support despite Reichenbach's prestige.

Mesmerism

A popular vitalist theory of the eighteenth century was "animal magnetism", in the theories of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). So popular did Mesmer's ideas become that King Louis XVI of France appointed two commissions to investigate mesmerism; one was led by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the other, led by Benjamin Franklin, included Bailly and Lavoisier. The commissioners learned about Mesmeric theory, and saw its patients fall into fits and trances. In Franklin’s garden, a patient was led to each of five trees, one of which had been "mesmerized"; he hugged each in turn to receive the "vital fluid", but fainted at the foot of a 'wrong' one. At Lavoisier’s house, four normal cups of water were held before a "sensitive" woman; the fourth produced convulsions, but she calmly swallowed the mesmerized contents of a fifth, believing it to be plain water. The commissioners concluded that "the fluid without imagination is powerless, whereas imagination without the fluid can produce the effects of the fluid." This was an important example of the power of reason and controlled experiment to falsify theories. [3] It is sometimes claimed [4] that vitalist ideas are unscientific because they are not testable; here at least is an example of a vitalist theory that was not merely testable but actually falsified.

Vitalism in the foundations of chemistry

In the history of chemistry, vitalism played a pivotal role, giving rise to the basic distinction between organic and inorganic subtances, following Aristotle's distinction between the mineral kingdom and the animal and vegetative kingdoms. [5]. The basic premise of these vitalist notions was that organic materials differed from inorganic materials in possessing a "vital force", accordingly, vitalist theory predicted that organic materials could not be synthesized from inorganic components. However, as chemical techniques advanced, Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea from inorganic components in 1828 [20]. Wohler subsequently wrote to Berzelius, saying that he had witnessed "The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." The "beautiful hypothesis" was vitalism; the ugly fact was a dish of urea crystals. [6]

According to the conventional view of the subsequent progress of chemistry, further discoveries pushed aside the "vital force" explanation, as more and more life processes came to be described in chemical or physical terms. However, contemporary accounts do not support the claim that vitalism died when Wöhler made urea. The Wöhler Myth, as it was called by historian of science Peter J. Ramberg , originates from a popular history of chemistry published in 1931 which, "Ignoring all pretense of historical accuracy, turned Wöhler into a crusader who made attempt after attempt to synthesize a natural product that would refute vitalism and lift the veil of ignorance, until "one afternoon the miracle happened"." [7]

Louis Pasteur in his laboratory, painting by A. Edelfeldt in 1885.

Some of the greatest scientific minds of the time continued to investigate these vital properties. Louis Pasteur, shortly after his famous rebuttal of spontaneous generation, made several experiments that he felt supported the vital concepts of life. According to Bechtel, Pasteur "fitted fermentation into a more general programme describing special reactions that only occur in living organisms. These are irreducibly vital phenomena." In 1858, Pasteur showed that fermentation only occurs when living cells are present and, that fermentation only occurs in the absence of oxygen; he was thus led to describe fermentation as ‘life without air’. He found no support for the claims of Berzelius, Liebig, Traube and others that fermentation resulted from chemical agents or catalysts within cells, and so he concluded that fermentation was a "vital action" "

Vitalism in Psychology

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row from left: Sigmund Freud, Granville Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row from left: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi.

Perhaps more than any other area of science, psychology has been rich in vitalist concepts, particularly through the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was a student of the notable anti-vitalist Herman von Helmhotz, and initially struggled to express his concepts in strictly neurological terms. Abandoning this effort as fruitless, he became famous for his theory that behaviour is determined by an unconscious mind, of which the waking mind is unaware. In 1923, in The Ego and the Id, he developed the concept of "psychic energy" as the energy by which the work of the personality is performed.

Although Freud and Jung remain hugely influential, psychology has made a determined effort to rid itself of the most mystical of these concepts in an attempt to appear more like the "hard" sciences of chemistry and physics[8]. However, concepts for instance of mind, or of intelligence, and of motivational states such as anger, fear, anxiety and stress, remain essentially higher level constructs, with observable correlates, but with no adequate low-level description of underlying mechanisms or processes. Whether such low-level descriptions are either possible or desirable is controversial, but some psychologists believe that further change is needed in psychology to eliminate all concepts which have no defined physico-chemical substrates [21]

Vitalism in Developmental Biology

Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-1794) is considered to be the father of epigenetic descriptive embryology. In his Theoria Generationis (1759), he tried to explain the emergence of the organism by the actions of a "vis essentialis", an organizing, formative force, and declared that "All believers in epigenesis are Vitalists." However, even early vitalists were aware that the vital forces that they proposed were to be understood metaphorically, not literally. For example, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, established epigenesis as the model of thought in the life sciences in 1781, with his publication of Über den Bildungstrieb and das Zeugungsgeschäfte. Blumenbach cut up freshwater polyps and established that the removed parts would regenerate; he inferred the presence of a "formative drive". an organic force, which he called "Bildungstrieb". He pointed out that this, "like names applied to every other kind of vital power, of itself, explains nothing: it serves merely to designate a peculiar power formed by the combination of the mechanical principle with that which is susceptible of modification."

Vitalism was also important in the thinking of later teleologists such as Hans Driesch (1867-1941) [22] In 1894, Driesch wrote a theoretical essay entitled Analytische Theorie der organischen Entwicklung where he declared that

Development starts with a few ordered manifoldnesses; but the manifoldnesses create, by interactions, new manifoldnesses, and these are able, by acting back on the original ones, to provoke new differences, and so on. With each new response, a new cause is immediately provided, and a new specific reactivity for further specific responses. We derive a complex structure from a simple one given in the egg.

This insight, which can be seen as anticipating modern developmental biology, came from his experiments on sea urchin eggs; he observed that if an egg was divided in two, it nevertheless gave rise to a perfect, though small embryo. Driesch, already a famous biologist, thus became an avowed vitalist, and in so doing saw his retutation as a biologist ruined. He moved to Heidelberg and became a Professor of Natural Philosophy, seeing his vitalism an extension of Immanual Kant's notion that the organism develops as if it had a purposeful intelligence.

Vitalist notions in the foundations of complementary medicine

Some systems of complementary and alternative medicine, such as as acupuncture and chiropractic, emphasize a holistic approach to the cause and treatment of disease (see main articles on these subjects). They retain some concepts that were originally mystical, vitalist concepts, although in some cases they now use these metaphorically rather than as literally implying an animate essence. For example, "Innate Intelligence" in chiropractic was introduced as an overtly religious sense of an internal guiding force; now it is also used to represent the physiological mechanisms of self-repair, including in particular the regulation of the immune system by the nervous system[23].

The founder of homeopathy, Hahnemann, promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of disease: "...they are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body." However, as practised today, homeopathy simply rests on the premise of treating sick persons with extremely diluted agents that - in undiluted doses - are deemed to produce similar symptoms in a healthy individual. Thus modern expressions of homeopathy have largely excluded early vitalistic concepts, though whether they have gained any credibility as a result is debatable (see main article Homeopathy)

Vitalism in "New Age" mysticism

Vitalism is also an aspect of many "New Age" theories. Examples include Rupert Sheldrake's concept of "morphic resonance" - the idea of telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species[24], and revivals of Reichenbach's Odic force, which is sometimes used to explain colored auras.[9]Anthroposophy, founded by Rudolf Steiner, is a quasi-religious cult whose teachings, in Steiner's words, lead "from the spirit in the human being to the spirit in the universe." [10] An early form of sustainable agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, was fostered by this movement.

Modern versions of vitalism in science

Although scientific understanding of the biochemical processes which distinguish living from non-living matter has become increasingly sophisticated, so has the realization that these fundamental processes are incredibly complicated; no complete, reductionist theory has yet been proposed which coordinates all of the actions which occur in a single cell (let alone a higher organism).

In terms of the biology of the cell, a type of "vitalism" can be recognized in contemporary molecular biology, for example in the proposal that some "high level features" of organisms, perhaps including even life itself, are examples of emergent processes which cannot be accurately described simply by understanding each of the chemical processes which occur in the cell in isolation from all the others [11]; When individual chemical processes form interconnected feedback cycles which produce products perpetuating these cycles rather than unconnected products, they can form systems with properties that the reactions, taken individually, lack [12]. Such emergent processes have been recognised as, for example, contributing to subcellular morphology [13], developmental biology [14], metabolic networks [15], proteomics [16] and indeed in purely physical systems as well as biological systems [17]. At a higher level, emergent processes are a widespread concept in cellular neuroscience [18] and in cognitive science [19]. At a still higher level, emergent properties are recognised for example in the behaviour of ant colonies and the concept of swarm intelligence ,[20]; they have been simulated in artificial systems [21], and parallels have been drawn with human societies [22].

Whether emergent system properties should be characterized with traditional vitalist concepts is a matter of semantic controversy.[23] If vitalism is not used in a strictly literal sense to refer to concepts that explicitly posit a mystical agency, then it is not easy to distinguish objectively between vitalism and contemporary scientific theories of complex systems, as explicitly recognized in a review entitled Molecular "vitalism" published in Cell, the leading journal of molecular biology. [24]

Vitalism; its status in science

Whether particular vitalistic concepts are "scientific" or not is a subjective judgement, one largely passed by the winners of a debate after the debate has been resolved: many "vitalistic" theories now abandoned were considered as mainstream scientific theories in their time. The replacement of vitalistic theories can thus be seen as having been a progressive refinement of scientific understanding, as the underlying mechanisms of complex phenomena are revealed. However the limits to reductionism have become apparent in recent years, most strikingly in the Mathematics of Chaos Theory, and from the work of Benoit Mandelbrot. These ideas are best known in the metaphor of the "butterfly effect", first recognised by a meteorologist, Edward Norton Lorenz, who noted that his deterministic differential equations model of climate systems was unexpectedly sensitive to initial conditions. This finding was expressed famously (and variously) as implying that the flap of a butterfly's wings in a jungle in South America was enough to "cause" a hurricane on the other side of the world. This insight, that complex non-linear systems can produce inherently unpredictable behavior, seemed to set limits on the ability to "explain" complex behavior by any deterministic description, by setting limits on their "predictability". Subsequently, the work of Stephan Wolfram, Stuart Kaufmann and others explored how chaos can be "harnessed", by exploring how organised behaviors can arise in a structured way from complex systems, giving rise to the modern concepts of emergent behavior and self-organisation.

Thus, historically, "vitalist" concepts often "stood for" things that we do not yet fully understand in reductionist terms; this is particularly true in psychology, where the program for replacing vitalistic concepts has been explicitly aimed at replacing them with lower level descriptions. Limits or qualifications to this ambition are now recognised in the concepts associated with emergent behavior.

Opinions of Vitalism

Vitalism is often used as a pejorative epithet [25]. e.g. Bechtel and Williamson [26], talking of the literal mystical definition of vitalism that "holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive "spirit", declare their opinion that "vitalism now has no credibility" because it is often viewed as unfalsifiable, and "therefore a pernicious metaphysical doctrine". However, the same authors also published a book which presents "an approach to explanation that appeals to interactions between simple components, rather than assigning functions to individual components", recognizing the "sometimes false assumption that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchical" [27]. Thus any judgement on whether vitalism is credible or not depends on exactly what is meant by vitalism.

Most of the proponents of avowedly vitalistic theories described in this article were not "fringe" scientists but mainstream scientists of their time; their theories similarly were mostly mainstream theories; Driesch, Pasteur, Reichenbach, and Berzelius for example are all listed among the "top 1,000 scientists of all time". Many of the older theories described here have been refuted or superceded; in the view of philosopher of science Karl Popper, it is the fate of most scientific theories to be refuted or replaced, and this is the hallmark of "good" science. Popper attacked Freud's psychoanalytical theories for their lack of falsifiability, but vitalism per se is not unscientific in this sense: not only were many vitalistic theories falsifiable, many were in fact falsified, notably Mesmerism and the phlogiston theory (see above). The perverse retention of falsified theories might be considered unscientific; but this is the case whether the perversely retained theories are vitalistic or not.

For many scientists, "vitalist" theories are unsatifactory "holding positions" on the pathway to mechanistic understanding. In 1967, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stated “And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” [28]. By contrast, Ernst Mayr, co-founder of the modern evolutionary synthesis and a critic of both vitalism and reductionism, writing in 2002 after the mathematical development of theories underlying emergent behavior, stated:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine…..The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. But all their efforts to find a scientific answer to all the so-called vitalistic phenomena were failures.… rejecting the philosophy of reductionism is not an attack on analysis. No complex system can be understood except through careful analysis. However the interactions of the components must be considered as much as the properties of the isolated components. [29]

See also


References

  • Crick, Francis. (1967). Of Molecules and Men. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 24, 99.


  1. ^ Inagaki K, Hatano G (2004) Vitalistic causality in young children's naive biology. Trends Cogn Sci 2004 8:356-62 PMID 15335462
  2. ^ e.g. Zarrilli PB. (1989) Three bodies of practice in a traditional South Indian martial art. Soc Sci Med 28:1289-309. PMID 2660283, Noll R (1989) What has really been learned about shamanism? J Psychoactive Drugs 21:47-50 PMID 2656952 and Merchant J. (2006) The developmental/emergent model of archetype, its implications and its application to shamanism. J Anal Psychol51:125-44 PMID 16451325
  3. ^ (Best M, Neuhauser D, Slavin L (2003) Evaluating Mesmerism, Paris, 1784: the controversy over the blinded placebo controlled trials has not stopped. Qual Saf Health Care 12:232-3 PMID 12792017 [1]
  4. ^ e.g. Williams Bechtel W. Richardson RC (1998). Vitalism. In Craig E.(Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
  5. ^ see Schummerr J (2003) The notion of nature in chemistry. Stud Hist Phil Sci 34:705-736 for this account within an extensive review on vitalist notions in the foundations of chemistry [2]
  6. ^ cited by Schummerr J, op cit, [3]
  7. ^ [4]
  8. ^ see Warren HC (1918) Mechanism Versus Vitalism, in the Domain of Psychology Phil Rev27:597-615 [5] and Elkus SA (1911) Mechanism and Vitalism J Phil Psych Sci Meth 8: 355-8 [6] for examples of this debate within psychology
  9. ^ See United States Patent 6016450, "Method and apparatus for stimulating the healing of living tissue using aura therapy" [7]
  10. ^ The Anthroposophical Society in America; website [8]
  11. ^ see Berg EL, Kunkel EJ, Hytopoulos E. (2005) Biological complexity and drug discovery: a practical systems biology approach. Syst Biol 152:201-6 PMID 16986261 and see [9] for an explicit discussion of both historical and contemporary "vitalist" concepts in current epithelial cell physiology
  12. ^ e.g. see Gilbert SF, Sarkar S. (2000) Embracing complexity: organicism for the 21st century. Dev Dyn 219:1-9 for explicit discussion of relationship to vitalism. PMID 10974666
  13. ^ Tabony J (2006) Microtubules viewed as molecular ant colonies. Biol Cell 98:603-17 PMID 16968217
  14. ^ see e.g. Theise ND, d'Inverno M (2004) Understanding cell lineages as complex adaptive systems. Blood Cells Mol Dis 32:17-20 PMID 14757407 and Ruiz i Altaba A, Nguyen V, Palma V (2003) The emergent design of the neural tube: prepattern, SHH morphogen and GLI code. Curr Opin Genet Dev 13:513-21 PMID 14550418
  15. ^ Jeong H et al.(2000) The large scale organisation of metabolic networks Nature 407: 651-4 [10]
  16. ^ e.g. Grindrod P, Kibble M (2004) Review of uses of network and graph theory concepts within proteomics. Expert Rev Proteomics 1:229-38 PMID 15966817 and Ye X, Chu J, Zhuang Y, Zhang S (2005) Multi-scale methodology: a key to deciphering systems biology. Front Biosci 10:961-5 PMID 15569634
  17. ^ e.g. Cho YS, et al. (2005) Self-organization of bidisperse colloids in water droplets. J Am Chem Soc 127:15968-75 PMID 16277541
  18. ^ see e.g. Burak Y, Fiete I (2006) Do we understand the emergent dynamics of grid cell activity? J Neurosci 26:9352-4 PMID 16977716
  19. ^ e.g. Courtney SM (2004) Attention and cognitive control as emergent properties of information representation in working memory. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 4:501-16 PMID 15849893
  20. ^ Theraulaz G, et al.. (2002) Spatial patterns in ant colonies. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 99:9645-9 PMID 12114538
  21. ^ Theraulaz G, Bonabeau E (1999)A brief history of stigmergy. Artif Life 5:97-116 PMID 10633572
  22. ^ Bonabeau E, Meyer C (2001) Swarm intelligence. A whole new way to think about business. Harv Bus Rev 79:106-14 PMID 11345907
  23. ^ see "Emergent Properties" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. online at [11] for explicit discussion; briefly, some philosophers see emergentism as midway between traditional spiritual vitalism and mechanistic reductionism; others argue that, structurally, emergentism is equivalent to vitalism. See also Emmeche C (2001) Does a robot have an Umwelt? Semiotica 134: 653-693 [12]
  24. ^ Kirschner M, Gerhart J, Mitchison T (2000) Molecular "vitalism" Cell 100:79-88 PMID 10647933
  25. ^ "Other writers (eg, Peterfreund, 1971) simply use the term vitalism as a pejorative label." in Galatzer-Levy,RM (1976) Psychic Energy, A Historical Perspective Ann Psychoanal 4:41-61 [13]
  26. ^ Bechtel W, Richardson RC (1998). Vitalism. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. [14]
  27. ^ Bechtel W, Richardson, RC. (1992) Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research Princeton University Press ISBN: 0-691-08762-8[15]
  28. ^ Crick F (1967) Of Molecules and Men; Great Minds Series Prometheus Books 2004, reviewed in [16]. Crick's remark is cited and discussed in: Hein H (2004) Molecular biology vs. organicism: The enduring dispute between mechanism and vitalism Synthese 20:238-253, who describes Crick's remark as "raising spectral red herrings" [17]
  29. ^ Mayr E (2002) The Walter Arndt Lecture: The Autonomy of Biology, adapted for the internet, on [18]
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