Élan Vital

I find myself inexplicably drawn to the discredited theory of vitalism, all the more so since it's been my business for the last few years to build tools to help vitalism's murderer, mechanistic biology. Whatever draws me has got to be the same force that draws me towards religion, another area where I really ought to know better than to go. Not very surprising, I suppose, that I should feel some kind of connection between the animation of living matter and the animation of the cosmos as a whole.

Just as I have no truck with fundamentalist or literalist forms of religion, I don't think I'm interested in dumb literalist theories of vitalism, which posit some force or substance that is somehow beyond matter yet acts on it. Dumb vitalism died when the synthesis of urea from inorganic components was demonstrated, thus showing that there was no substantial quality that distinguished the living from the nonliving. So what remains? I'm not sure, just this unshakeable feeling that there is something alive that permeates the world, and that it is as real as anything else, and that it is somehow transcendent or at least orthogonal to the realm of unliving matter. "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower". Or something like that. Just as there are compatabilist versions of religion that can coexist peacably with science, there is perhaps room for a compatabilist vitalism, one that is does not argue against mechanism but lives with it, in it, on it, over it.

I cannot figure out what to do with this feeling. It doesn't really interfere with whatever work I do in support of ordinary science, but it doesn't help much either. Some of it crept into my PhD dissertation, where I looked at how metaphors of aliveness were used in the discourse of programming languages. This was not really ontological vitalism -- it was more of an epistemological treatment, based on the idea that we have different modes of understanding when we think about non-living, physical systems compared with how we think about those that are alive. It's not that living systems contain a magic substance; it's that we can't think about such systems without using concepts like goals, desires, and purposes, and other properties associated with being alive. Organisms may be machines, but they are machines on a level of complexity that we can't capture by comparing them to dishwashers and cars -- they are machines with goals, desires, purposes, and a degree of autonomy. (Of course since then Latour has taught me to see goals and purpose in everything).

I haven't really pursued the idea further since then, but it won't leave me alone.

Awhile back I stumbled on the book Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett whichs seems to be a post-Latourian philosophy of vitalism, or something like that. From there I learned about the concept of conatus, which means something like the innate tendency of all things to try and persist themselves. There's a whole modern vitalistic tradition that is apparently not dumb (as defined above) but it's not clear what it's implications are or whether it's truly worthwhile or a dead-end.

See also previous posts: Hylozoism, Proteus

Hylozoism

[updated below]

is my vocabulary word for today (via). It's one of those things I feel I ought to have known many years ago. Wikipedia says:

Hylozoism is the philosophical conjecture that all or some material things possess life, or that all life is inseparable from matter.

I was unusually moved to make some Wikipedia edits, and added two of my favorite intellectual weirdos to the list of contemporary hylozoics:

Architect Christopher Alexander has put forth a theory of the living universe, where life is viewed as a pervasive patterning that extends to what is normally considered non-living things, notably buildings. He wrote a four-volume work called The Nature of Order which explicates this theory in detail.

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, based in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some resemblance to hylozoism. This work has spawned a movement called Object-oriented philosophy which promotes the idea of a "democracy of objects".

And I see animism has a homepage.

I find myself attracted and repelled by these ideas; partly out of intellectual naughtiness -- they are very much not in the spirit of the nerdy materialist culture I was educated in. On the other hand, they aren't that far apart either -- you can see both strands of thought (mechanistic AI style and squishy panpsychic California style) intermingle over the years, for instance at the historical Macy conferences.

And of course, I'm a victim of the same tendency I criticized in this post on the Singulatarians. For some reason, everybody thinks its very important to get metaphysics straight, to know for certain whether mind or matter or life or god or whatever is the ultimate foundation of reality. On my better days I know this is a dumb question, dumb because unanswerable, and the question itself is just a reflection of the limited metaphors we use to construct our models of the universe. Perhaps the real foundation of the universe is status, and the real reason we are so eager to fight for our particular metaphysics is so that the intellectual tribe we identify with (eg, physicists, anthropologists, theologians...) can thump its chest and declare itself more important than the rest.

[update: this earlier post is on related themes...which I realize now probably falls under the rubric scientific romanticism. Here's no less a light than Freeman Dyson:

Is it possible that we are now entering a new Romantic Age, extending over the first half of the twenty-first century, with the technological billionaires of today playing roles similar to the enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century? ... a new Age of Wonder would be a shift backward in the culture of science, from organizations to individuals, from professionals to amateurs, from programs of research to works of art...If the new Romantic Age is real, it will be centered on biology and computers, as the old one was centered on chemistry and poetry.

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