From substantival to functional vitalism and beyond, or from Stahlian animas to Canguilhemian attitudes

Abstract

I distinguish between what I call ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of something like a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied by scientific means, or remains a kind of hovering, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate ‘post facto’, from the existence of living bodies to the desire to find explanatory models that will do justice to their uniquely ‘vital’ properties in a way that fully mechanistic (Cartesian, Boerhaavian etc.) models cannot. I discuss some representative figures of the Montpellier school (Bordeu, Ménuret, Fouquet) as being functional rather than substantival vitalists. Time allowing, I will make an additional point regarding the reprisal of vitalism(s) in ‘late modernity’, as some call it; from Hans Driesch to Georges Canguilhem. I suggest that in addition to the substantival and functional varieties, we then encounter a third species of vitalism, which I term ‘attitudinal’, as it argues for vitalism as a kind of attitude.

Full text

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From substantival to functional vitalism and beyond, or
from Stahlian animas to Canguilhemian attitudes
Charles T. Wolfe
Unit for History and Philosophy of Science
University of Sydney
charles.wolfe@sydney.edu.au
HSS, Montréal, November 2010
Session on Rethinking the History of Organicism: New Perspectives on Vital Science
I distinguish between what I call ‗substantival‘ and ‗functional‘ forms of vitalism in the
eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of something like a
(substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied
by scientific means, or remains a kind of hovering, extra-causal entity. Functional
vitalism tends to operate ‗post facto‘, from the existence of living bodies to the desire to
find explanatory models that will do justice to their uniquely ‗vital‘ properties in a way
that fully mechanistic (Cartesian, Boerhaavian etc.) models cannot. I discuss some
representative figures of the Montpellier school (Bordeu, Ménuret, Fouquet) as being
functional rather than substantival vitalists. Time allowing, I will make an additional
point regarding the reprisal of vitalism(s) in ‗late modernity‘, as some call it; from Hans
Driesch to Georges Canguilhem. I suggest that in addition to the substantival and
functional varieties, we then encounter a third species of vitalism, which I term
‗attitudinal‘, as it argues for vitalism as a kind of attitude.
I shall not speak here of ‗organicism‘ proper but rather of vitalism; yet the main aspects
of the doctrine or rather set of doctrines I shall discuss under the heading ‗vitalism‘ will
be their understanding of organic order, of what distinguishes organisms from
inanimate beings, and so forth. Vitalism has suffered from its nineteenth-century
reinterpretations in terms of ‗vital forces‘ and ‗entelechies‘, notably at the hands of Hans
Driesch (Driesch 1914). It continues to be presented as a very extreme, almost mystical
view in current biological and philosophical discourse: in a recent review essay on the

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status of theoretical biology, we are told that ―in vitalism, living matter is ontologically
greater than the sum of its parts because of some life force (―entelechy,‖ ―élan vital,‖ ―vis
essentialis,‖ etc.) which is added to or infused into the chemical parts‖1; the authors
prefer, precisely, the term ‗organicism‘ for the family of theories they wish to defend.
But when we consider the body of writings produced by the ‗Montpellier vitalists‘, that
is, the physicians associated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of
Montpellier in the second half of the eighteenth century (the school considered in
doctrinal terms was extended into the early nineteenth century by figures such as
Jacques Lordat, but on increasingly dogmatic, non-clinical bases), notably Théophile de
Bordeu, Louis de La Caze, Henri Fouquet, Jean-Joseph Ménuret de Chambaud and,
best-known, Paul-Joseph Barthez, we find no traces of such metaphysically laden vital
forces – or hardly any traces, for Barthez flirts with the idea in the first edition of his
Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (1778; revised 1806) but gives up it
subsequently.2 Hence one can interpret this ‗Enlightenment‘ form of vitalism as
functional rather than substantive, as I have argued recently (Wolfe 2008, 2009b): it is
more of an attempt to ‗model‘ or ‗describe‘ organic life without reducing it to fully
mechanical models or processes, than an overt metaphysics of Life.
But perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss the metaphysical
commitments of vitalism and happily proclaim that it is a more ‗modern‘, egalitarian
vision of embodiment free from some of the aporias of the ‗dialectic of Enlightenment‘
(as suggested recently by Elizabeth Williams, or in a quite different way by Peter Hans
Reill; see Williams 2003, Reill 2005). That is, maybe it is impossible to have a viable
concept of vitalism without also having some degree of a metaphysical commitment
1 Gilbert and Sarkar (2000), p. 1.
2 Barthez had initially asserted the existence of an independent vital force, but withdrew this and added a
chapter to the second edition of his book entitled ―Skeptical considerations on the nature of the vital
principle‖ (Barthez [1858], III, p. 96f.; all translations are mine unless otherwise indicated). He warned that
one should follow an ―invincible skepticism‖ (p. 32) or a ―reasonable Pyrrhonism‖ (p. 274) when it comes
to the vital principle. He only ―personified‖ the vital principle, he explains, for ease of argument (p. 126).
What does it mean to investigate the nature of life skeptically? Contrary to what one might expect, it does
not mean to approach vital phenomena with a demystifying, deflationary attitude, but rather, that Barthez
only wants to attribute properties to the vital principle ―that result immediately from experience‖ (ibid.).

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towards either (a) the uniqueness of living beings within the physical universe (this is
the classic version, that of Georg-Ernest Stahl and, differently, of Driesch‘s ‗neo-
vitalism‘) or (b) the idea that the act of understanding what is unique about living
beings requires a certain kind of attitude (this is the modern version, articulated by
Georges Canguilhem, who went so far as to proclaim himself a vitalist; see Canguilhem
1955, 1965).
In this paper I want to return to the relation between the Montpelliérain model of
organism (organized bodies, organization, animal economy) and more metaphysically
committed forms of vitalism such as Stahl‘s ‗animism‘, focusing in particular on Stahl‘s
Theoria medica vera, Bordeu‘s Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes (Stahl
1730/1860, Bordeu 1751), and Ménuret‘s articles in the Encyclopédie. I will suggest that
the Newtonian-influenced, organizational, functional models of life developed by the
Montpellier vitalists open onto an ‗attitudinal‘ vitalism which can survive the various
counter-arguments mounted over the course of the twentieth century, from the Vienna
Circle onwards. But this attitudinal vitalism may still require (or ‗be‘) a metaphysics.
1. Substantival versus functional vitalism
We are familiar, I think, with vitalism as a strong, ontologically laden
commitment to the existence of certain entities or ‗forces‘, over and above the system of
causal relations studied and modeled by mechanical or mechanistic science, which itself
seeks to express these entities or the relations between them in mathematical terms.3
This is a common, indeed dominant view of the subject, whether it is presented in
positive terms, as a kind of commendable backlash against the de-humanizing,
alienating trend inaugurated by the Scientific Revolution, which seeks to ‗revitalize the
world‘ (and one can hear echoes here of ‗reenchantment‘4) or in negative terms, as a
3 That this picture of ‗mechanism‘ is itself quite caricatural or simplistic is not a topic for the present paper;
I discuss the complexity of various forms of 17th and 18th century mechanism faced with Life in Wolfe
(forthcoming 2010).
4 Cf. Elizabeth Williams‘ comment that Montpellier vitalism ―entailed consequences markedly at odds
with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of

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kind of anti-scientific or ‗para-scientific‘ trend which needs to be refuted (an example
that comes to mind is Francis Crick‘s rather confident pronouncement, sounding very
much like someone who feels he has the whole scientific community behind him: ―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‖5). And there is
plenty of historical evidence that such a position existed – even if interpreters have
regularly made the mistake of retrospectively projecting the category ‗vitalism‘
backwards onto all sorts of disparate figures, from Aristotle to Harvey, from Glisson to
Diderot, from Bichat to Bernard.6
But there is something wrong with this vision of things; not because we can
adduce one counter-example (such as when, faced with the claim that all 18th-century
materialists were atheists, we can put forth the case of mortalist physicians such as
William Coward, for whom the soul is mortal yet is resurrected at the time of the Last
Judgment7) but because an entire school does not fit the description: the so-called
‗Montpellier vitalists‘, best known to eighteenth-century scholars because of their
relation to Diderot (including his ‗postmodern‘ usage of Bordeu as a fictional character
in D’Alembert’s Dream8) and the Encyclopédie. And they are the ones for whom the term
‗vitalist‘ was coined!
Who are they? Louis de Lacaze, Jean-Joseph Ménuret de Chambaud, Henri
Fouquet, Théophile de Bordeu and perhaps most famously, Paul-Joseph Barthez. More
info. Barthez expresses a desire not to be equated with other vitalists: ―I do not wish to
nature and the universality of physical laws‖ (2003, p. 177) – despite my appreciation of Williams‘ work
overall and our past and future shared projects, I disagree with this statement. Further work would have
to confront this with Reill‘s vision of a ‗vitalized‘ Enlightenment in his (2005). The difference is that he
thinks the Enlightenment has been misinterpreted precisely in this mechanistic fashion. If we think of
figures such as La Mettrie, Buffon and Diderot it seems fair to say that the materialists did not have such
strong beliefs in universal laws and most importantly, were ‗embodied‘ theorists. I argue the case for La
Mettrie in Wolfe (2009c) and for Diderot in Wolfe (2009a).
5 Crick (1966), p. 99.
6 Walter Pagel is a particular culprit here in the history of medical thought.
7 Thomson (2008), ch. 4.
8 Dieckmann (1938); Kaitaro (1997), ch. 3; Boury (2003).

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be the Leader of the Sect of the Vitalists.‖9 When Barthez speaks of this ‗sect‘ he
probably has in mind Charles-Louis Dumas, the author of a vitalist ‗synthesis‘ published
in 1800-1803 and, starting in 1807, the Dean of the ‗Ecole de Santé‘ in Montpellier. ―It
was Dumas who, to further his ambitions and to defend Montpellier amid the
institutional upheavals brought about by the Revolution, first began referring to
‗vitalism‘, using this neologism to stress the unity and range of Montpellier teaching‖
(Williams [2003], p. 276).
The Montpellier medical faculty was one of the oldest in Europe, possibly the
oldest, only preceded by the ‗school‘ at Salerno in the 11th and 12th centuries AD (the
manuscripts of which were kept from then until now at the monastery at nearby Monte
Cassino), which was not however incorporated with license to train students. A first
document in 1240 states the rules of the School at Montpellier, ―by the Prior of Saint-
Firmin, Pierre de Conques and the Franciscan Hugues Mans, who had been called in to
arbitrate between the instructors and the students‖; these regulations are in addition to
the rules concerning the organization of the School, set out in 1220 by Cardinal
Conrad.10
Following the groundbreaking work of Rey (1987/2000), Duchesneau et al.
(1997), and Williams (2003), who have done much to put it on the map, I have tried to
argue that the Montpellier vitalist school expresses a ‗structural-functional‘ form of
vitalism, with the celebrated image of the bee-swarm (found in Maupertuis, Bordeu,
Diderot and also Ménuret‘s Encyclopédie article cited below) expressing the structural
relation between one life and many lives (Wolfe and Terada [2008]). The bee-swarm is
the single most famous image and, really, conceptual construct of 18th-century vitalism.
Here is Bordeu‘s version:
How to understand the action of all the parts, their departments, and their periodic
motions.
Most physiologists only discuss circulation in general [en gros]; they do not notice
that it can be quite different in large vessels and in the smaller ones. Couldn‘t
9 Barthez (1806), p. 98, n. 18.
10 Vidal (1958), p. 77.

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each part even have its own circulation, which might increase or diminish,
without the overall (general) circulation being affected? It appears that
circulations are more or less prompt, according to the different orders of the
vessels, and according to the action and use of the parts. All of these truths may
be considered as corollaries of what I have asserted thus far.
Hence there is a general circulation, and many particular circulations, which are,
if I may speak thus, like small circles which gradually form a larger one. We have
customarily used the term ‗circle‘ to convey that a part, even if it receives blood
by means of the general circulation, as occurring in the largest vessels,
nevertheless has a particular circulation, depending on whether it is in action or
not; the other parts which ‗feel‘ [qui se ressentent de] this action, belong to its
department, its circle, etc.
Hence the least part should be considered as ‗a body apart‘, so to speak. True, it
acts by means of the general circulation, but it is as distinct as the system of blood
vessels is distinct from the chiliac vessel system, or as the circulation of the lung
and the liver are from what occurs in ordinary large vessels.
Might I make use of a comparison which, however rough, may be useful?
I compare the living body, in order to properly assess the particular action of each
part, to a swarm of bees which cluster together [se ramassent en pelotons], and hang
from a tree like a bunch of grapes; I find the image suggested by an ancient
author, that one of the lower organs was an animal in animali11, to be quite helpful.
Each part is, so to speak, not quite an animal, but a kind of independent machine
[machine à part] which contributes [concourt] in its way to the general life of the
body.
Hence, following the comparison to a bee swarm, it is a whole stuck to a tree
branch, by means of the action of many bees which must act in concert to hold on;
some others become attached to the initial ones, and so on; all concur [concourent]
in forming a fairly solid body, yet each one has a particular action, apart from the
others; if one of them gives way or acts too vigorously, the entire mass will be
disturbed: when they all conspire to stick close, to mutually embrace, in the order
of required proportions, they will comprise a whole which shall endure until they
disturb one another.
The application is easy: the organs of the body are connected to one another; they
each have their district and their action; the relations between these actions, the
resulting harmony, is what makes health. If this harmony is disturbed, either
because one part relaxes, or another wins out over that which is its usual
antagonist, if the actions are reversed, if they no longer follow the natural order,
these changes will constitute more or less severe illnesses.12
11 [This is apparently a very old euphemism for an organ that, as we might say, ‗has a life of its own‘…—
C.W.]
12 Bordeu (1751), § CXXV, in Bordeu (1818), vol. 1, p. 187. For more discussion of the different versions of
the bee-swarm image in Bordeu, Maupertuis, Ménuret and Diderot see Wolfe ed. (2008) and Wolfe
(2009b).

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Similarly, in the Encyclopédie article ―Observation,‖ Ménuret mentions the bee-swarm
and Bordeu in order to emphasize that life in the body occurs, or is best described as, a
―connection of actions‖ (―liaison d‘actions‖):
One could, following these authors, compare man to a flock of cranes which fly
together, in a particular order, without mutually assisting or depending on one
another. The Physicians or Philosophers who have studied and carefully
observed man, have noticed this sympathy in all animal movements – this
constant and necessary agreement in the interaction of the various parts, however
disparate or distant from one another; they have also noticed the disturbance of
the whole that results from the sensory disagreement of a single part. A famous
physician (M. de Bordeu) and an illustrious physicist (M. de Maupertuis) likewise
compared man, from this luminous and philosophical point of view, to a swarm
of bees which strive together to hang to a tree branch. One can see them pressing
and sustaining one another, forming a kind of whole (une espèce de tout), in which
each living part contributes in its way, by the correspondence and direction of its
movements, to sustain this kind of life of the whole body, if we may refer in this
way to a mere connection of actions (liaison d’actions).13
In a variety of other places including the important article on the pulse (―Pouls‖)
Ménuret multiplies the structural, relational, positional approach to what makes living
bodies unique.
Not only is the form of vitalism expressed in the above passages far removed
from claims about mysterious vital forces; by extension, this structural-functional
approach to life is closer to materialism than is often said. However, there is nothing
monolithic about this; by the early nineteenth century the heads of the Montpellier
medical school are steering it in a spiritualist (and royalist) direction.14 Additionally,
significant figures such as Bichat are explicitly identifying Barthez‘s vital principle with
Stahl‘s anima and Van Helmont‘s archaeus (Rey [2000], p. 361); Broussais claimed that
13 Ménuret, s.v. ―Observation,‖ Encyclopédie XI, pp. 318b-319a. (Further discussion might focus on the
variety of organismic metaphors in addition to this one, such as the polyp – more than a metaphor! - or
the same image of the beeswarm but used differently, such as Jonathan Swift‘s description of the brain as
a ―crowd of little animals,‖ clinging together ―in the contexture we behold . . . like Bees in perpendicular
swarm upon a Tree‖ (Swift, Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 1704, cit. in Smith (2007), p. 18).
14 See e.g. Lordat‘s Apologie de l’École de Montpellier which is an attack on the ‗materialism‘ of the École de
Paris (Lordat 1842). For an interesting discussion of the political undertones (or overtones) of late
Montpellier vitalism see Reill (1989), Lavabre-Bertrand (1992), Williams (2003).

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Barthez ―founded medicine on his readings rather than observations.‖15 Bichat also says
that the Montpellier physicians ―considered science philosophically; they would have
made greater [scientific] progress if they had known more anatomy – Haller only made
such great progress for that reason.‖16 In fact each of these figures has to denounce his
immediate predecessor as a vitalist… Gayon (1994) makes the useful point that we
should be careful when using, say, Bernard‘s judgments about ‗vitalism‘ as historical
pieces of evidence, since Barthez, Bernard and ‗us‘ all have different conceptions of
matter, living matter and the relations between them.17 One can add that ‗vitalism‘ is
also a feu follet, perpetually reinvented in order that one thinker seeking to articulate a
claim for the autonomy of biological entities (like Bichat‘s famous ―la vie est l‘ensemble
des fonctions qui résistent à la mort‖) can accuse his predecessor of having been the real
vitalist (Oyama 2010).
If the Montpellier vitalists were not ‗cranks‘, who did believe the sort of thing
Crick makes fun of? Georg-Ernest Stahl, a court physician to Duke Johann Ernst of
Saxon-Weimar and subsequently, as of 1694, a Professor of Medicine at the University of
Halle.
2. Stahl and Driesch
Stahl bluntly stated a problem about Life in the early 1700s: in all these competing
theories of the human body, notably the very successful mechanistic theories, ―Life was
never mentioned nor defined, and I could find no logical definition provided.‖18 To
follow Stahl‘s suggestion, we could say that Life is either discussed but immediately
15 F. Broussais, Examen des doctrines médicales (1821), quoted in Lavabre-Bertrand (1992), p. 89.
16 X. Bichat, Discours sur l’étude de la physiologie, included in Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et sur la mort.
17 Gayon (1994), p. 99f. This is not the place to attempt proper discussion of Bernard, not least since he is
not part of our eighteenth-century mandate; suffice it to say that he extends a kind of structural model
further, as is best-known in his analysis of physiological determinism. On Bernard and vitalism see
Normandin (2007).
18 Stahl (1706b), in Stahl (1859), p. 224.

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dissipated into the entities and processes which subserve it, or promoted to the extent
that vital spirits, vital heat, animation are so co-extensive to the field of investigation
that Life again dissipates into the analysis as a whole. Stahl‘s answer is a multi-tiered,
extremely confusing system with metaphysical and physical levels, with specifically
medical, biological, chemical and even physical levels; but he is, notoriously, an animist
because he considers that the body and its organs are literally mere instruments of the
soul, a position sometimes revised so that ―organs are not, as the name might suggest,
mere instruments,‖ but nevertheless, ―it is the soul that makes the lungs breathe, the
heart beat, the blood circulate, the stomach digest, the liver secrete.‖19
Despite their criticism of mechanistic models for Life – for their inertness, for
their inapplicability to living beings, and so forth – the Montpellier vitalists are quite
dismissive of this intrusion of a non-medical entity (the soul) into medical explanations.
(The missing figure in this story is Haller – there is in fact a kind of triangulation
between Montpellier vitalists, Stahlian animism, and Hallerian ‗micromechanism‘.
Haller micromechanist but in a complex dance with vitalism. Cf his 1772 article ―Faculté
vitale,‖20 where he says faculté vitale is a nom d‘attente.)
Here is Ménuret:
Who wouldn‘t laugh at an animist or Stahlian who would argue that this illness is
a gift of Nature or the soul, a kind and farsighted mother who directs all efforts to
heal the illness, and even exacerbates them on the pretext of necessity, hoping for
benefits that one hopelessly expects from elsewhere?
(―Ténesme,‖ Enc. XVI, p. 137a).
In a very different way, Bordeu, in his masterpiece the Recherches anatomiques sur la
position et la function des glandes (1751), when discussing the (very philosophical)
problem of whether the secretory process of the glands can be reduced to a type of
sensation or not, makes a gentler, but equally distancing comment on Stahl‘s notion of
anima. Bordeu answers his question in the affirmative: each gland, each orifice will
possess its own unique ―taste‖ so to speak which will enable it to accept or reject various
19 Stahl (1706a), § xcviii, in Stahl (1859), p. 347.
20 In Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire universel raisonné des connoissances humaines (1770-1779), vol. XVII, 244b-
250a.

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substances. And when he calls it a type of sensation he adds a footnote to the word
‗sensation‘, and emphasizes that both this idea of sensation and Stahl‘s anima are
metaphors:
(*) This is again one of these metaphors which must be allowed us ; those who
consider these questions closely know just how difficult it is to explain oneself,
when it comes to speaking of the force which so carefully directs a thousand
singular motions in the human body and its parts; what terms should we use to
describe them? For instance, certain movements in plants and even certain
properties of minerals; some ‗physicists‘ [physiciens], struck by these movements,
have had recourse to particular causes. We will discuss Stahl‘s hypothesis
elsewhere: he claimed that the soul directed everything in the animal body.
Whatever the case may be, we can state that all living parts are directed by a
preserving or conservative force [force conservatrice] which is ever-vigilant; does
this force belong, in certain respects, to the essence of a portion of matter, or is it a
necessary attribute of its combinations? Once again, here we can only suggest a
way of conceiving things, metaphorical expressions, comparisons...21
To say that the Stahlian concept of soul is a metaphor (which Stahl does not say!) is
essentially to say that the concept has functional value (or not) depending on how well it
models phenomena – rather than making a claim about what sorts of things exist. If
Bordeu were writing sometime after the 1970s he would quite likely have spoken of
such images as ‗heuristics‘.
Stahlian animism and vitalism as articulated in the Montpellier school are thus
two distinct models of ‗life‘ – of organic order, of the approach required to understand
living beings and the possible basis for construction of a ‗science‘ of such beings.
(Neither of these directly flow into the constitution of ‗biology‘ as a science, in the first
years of the nineteenth century22; Stahl is much more concerned with chemistry, even if
it is in part what we would call organic chemistry, and the montpelliérains are,
tautologically, much more concerned with medicine. One would have to look to
Blumenbach and Wolff for vitalistic biology proper.) Of course within the Montpellier
school there is a spectrum of views, from Sauvages‘ more animism-friendly work23 to
21 Bordeu (1751), § CVIII, p. 163.
22 Barsanti, Caron, Wolfe forthcoming 2011.
23 Sauvages praises the ―Stahlians‖ who have both ―the support of the ancients and an infinite number of
reasons in their favour derived from practice‖ (Sauvages [1752 ]in Sauvages [1770], II, p. 12, note (g))..

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Fouquet or Ménuret‘s materialistic and in fact mechanism-friendly views. Ménuret after
all goes as far as presenting the human body – la machine humaine, he says, although we
should not make too much out of this choice of terms, since ‗machine‘ was often used to
simply mean ‗body‘24– as a structural ensemble of ―springs,‖ which taken as a whole
―all pursue an overall motion‖; a kind of ―irritability or sensitivity spreads throughout,
animates the springs, excites their motions,‖25 etc.: good mechanistic language! But the
point is that we have a substantival form of vitalism (also ‗ontological‘) and a functional
form. (I can discuss the relation to materialism further if desired: the key point there is
less of a change in our picture of vitalism than of materialism – but how? ‗Vital
materialism‘ as portrayed by Lenoir? Reill? Belaval?)
The Stahlian belief in ‗anima‘ can be compared to what we now call the ‗neo-
vitalist‘ position of the embryologist Hans Driesch in the late nineteenth century.26
Driesch comes out of the school of Wilhelm Roux‘s Entwicklungsmechanik or study of the
mechanisms of the developmental process. His experiments with sea urchin eggs
involved halving the two blastomeres (daughter cells) of the egg and successfully
producing two whole embryos and larvae, complete in every respect. This total equality
of the halved eggs is their "totipotency." The cells derived from the egg were termed by
him a harmonious equipotential system;27 Driesch became so absorbed with this feature
24 The Dictionnaire de l’Académie, in 1694, defines ‗machine‘ as ―a set of parts or organs which form a
whole, living or not, and produce determinate effects without transmitting a force externally; organism,
body‖ (cit. in Cayrou [1948], s.v. ―Machine,‖ p. 530). Buffon comfortably speaks in the same sentence of
‗animal economy‘ and ‗machine‘, or ―la mécanique vivante‖ and ―le mécanisme de l‘économie animale‖
(Buffon (1753), pp. 3-4; article ―Histoire naturelle,‖ Enc. VIII, 226b). By the nineteenth century the situation
is different, with the Encyclopédie méthodique explaining (in 1808) that one should no longer use the
expression ―machine humaine‖ … but that ―animal economy‖ or ―organism‖ are suitable substitutes: ―It
is preferable to use the synonymous expressions ‗living economy‘, ‗vital economy‘, ‗animal economy‘,
‗organism‘, ‗organic mass‘, ‗the entire economy of the human body‘. The term ‗machine‘ seems to refer to
a system of causes and effects which belongs wholly to the mechanistic theory‖ (―Machine,‖ in
Encyclopédie méthodique, 1808, 310).
25 Ménuret de Chambaud, art. ―Spasme,‖ Enc. XV, 435b.
26 For a different perspective on Stahl‘s work that seeks to minimize the significance of his metaphysical
claims and thereby emphasize the ‗practical‘, ‗empirical‘ side of his work, see K.-M. Chang‘s recent essays,
e.g. Chang (2004).
27 Cf. Driesch (1914), p. 209.

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that he gave up experimental work and taught philosophy at the University of Leipzig,
developing the idea that entelechies exist in all living organisms. The historical
background to which he appealed (distinct, then, from our history of vitalism) was
primarily that of the physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and his notion of a
Bildungstrieb or nisus formativus (formative drive) in living organisms, and secondarily
that of Caspar Friedrich Wolff, who had developed an early critique of mechanistic
reduction of life targeting preformationism and emphasizing the merits of the epigenetic
account of embryonic development. In Driesch‘s view, the importance of these figures
lay in their renewal of a vitalist thinking which had lain dormant since Aristotle (the
Montpellier school does not appear here). More relevant for our purposes, Driesch‘s
appeal to these thinkers shows how embryology becomes the standard-bearer of
vitalism within biology itself. Faced with the evidence that there was no physical
structure we can find in the sea urchin embryo which is responsible for the "regulative"
or "equipotential" force, he felt obliged to posit a vital force, the entelechy.28 Canguilhem
comments on Driesch‘s ‗shift‘ from science to metaphysics:
―Le biologiste vitaliste devenu philosophe de la biologie croit apporter à la
philosophie des capitaux et ne lui apporte en réalité que des rentes qui ne cessent
de baisser à la bourse des valeurs scientifiques, du fait seul que se poursuit la
recherche à laquelle il ne participe plus. Tel est le cas de Driesch abandonnant la
recherche scientifique pour la spéculation et même l‘enseignement de la
philosophie. Il y a là une espèce d‘abus de confiance sans préméditation. Le
prestige du travail scientifique lui vient d‘abord de son dynamisme interne.
L‘ancien savant se voit privé de ce prestige auprès des savants militants. Il croit
qu‘il le conserve chez les philosophes. Il n‘en doit rien être. La philosophie, étant
une entreprise autonome de réflexion, n‘admet aucun prestige, pas même celui
de savant, à plus forte raison celui d‘ex-savant.‖ (―Aspects du vitalisme‖, in La
connaissance de la vie, 2e éd., Paris, Vrin, 1965, p. 94).
For more on Driesch cf Marcel Weber, “Hans Drieschs Argumente für den Vitalismus,” Philosophia
Naturalis 36: 265-295 (1999).
28 This was critiqued early on by Bergson, sometimes wrongly associated with Driesch under the banner
of vitalism. Bergson‘s response to this claim of a life-force in all living organisms is to ask: where? at what
level? He expresses doubts that nature can be interpreted strictly in terms of this internal "finality"
(teleology, purposiveness); Wolsky & Wolsky (1992), p. 156f.

13
Another version of his ‗experimentum crucis‘ (on sea urchin eggs), as discussed by
Cassirer:
The results of experiment had shown that perfectly normal organisms could
develop from embryos which had suffered from very severe injury produced by
the experiment: thus when the embryo was bisected an entirely normal larva of
half size developed, and when embryos were crushed between glass plates so as
to disarrange their cells completely, the wholly abnormal positional relationships
did not necessarily exclude the formation of a normal, whole organism. No
confusion resulted in the system. The embryo with misplaced cells remained an
autonomous whole, and followed the usual course of development undisturbed.29
The conclusion drawn was that since the formative power at work is not
interfered with by division, separation or displacement, it must be a ‗something‘
without spatial character and to which no definite position in space can be
assigned.30
Cassirer adds that Driesch tends to describe this ‗something‘ in psychic terms,
although he moves from speaking literally of a soul in earlier writings to speaking of
something soul-like, ultimately, an entelechy. An entelechy uses the physicochemical
forces of the organism, but is not ‗of‘ them.
The classic refutation of Drieschian vitalism came with the Vienna Circle, notably
Moritz Schlick‘s ―Philosophy of Organic Life.‖ The argument relies on a basic fact of
physics, the causal closure of the physical (space-time) world, to point out contra
Driesch that there cannot be nonspatial causes of organic processes which are
themselves necessarily spatial. For Driesch the entelechy is a life-force affected by
various physical constraints in the cell. Schlick seizes the opportunity to say: if all the
various sub-systems are required as active constraints on this force, but this force is not
accessible to us, we can just factor it out! For a non-physical entity to profitably interact
with a physical entity, or bring about a physical process, it must at some point itself
become physical. Driesch cannot reconcile the action of his non-physical entelechies
with the basic (methodological or ontological) determinism of Newtonian physics. A
non-spatial force such as the entelechy vanishes, in this case; ―if the causes are fully
contained in the initial conditions, then there is no reason whatsoever for the
29 Driesch, ―Experiments on the Egg of the Sea-Urchin,‖ The Science and Philosophy of the Organism I, p. 59f.
30 E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, trans. W. Woglom & C. Hendel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1950), p. 195.

14
assumption of a non-spatial intermediary.‖31 Schlick comes out squarely on the other
side: biological laws can and will be reduced to physical laws. This refutation of
substantival vitalism is thus also a full-fledged reductionist view of the nature of the
biological. What we will see with Canguilhem (himself influenced by Claude Bernard,
who himself was interested by Diderot‘s late writings on physiology32) is that one can
share the rejection of mysterious vital forces without necessarily adopting such a
reductionist approach to the biological.
It is significant to note the absence of Darwin from any of the biological
references of the Vienna Circle: it‘s all Driesch. Not that this means Darwin confirms
vitalism! 33
The ‗functional‘ form of vitalism can be explicated further, not least with
reference to Claude Bernard (see Normandin, but esp. Bechtel 2007, section 3, for an
interesting treatment of 19th c. vitalism or rather the use of the appellation ‗vitalism‘).
3. Vitalism as an attitude : Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem is well known chiefly as the author of The Normal and the
Pathological, and as Foucault‘s teacher and mentor. He was also the author of a variety of
influential essays on the history and philosophy of the life sciences, focusing on the
period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Less well known is the fact
that Canguilhem often refers to vitalism in his work, going as far as describing himself
as one in the Foreword to his these d’État on the development of the notion of reflex
action: ―Il nous importe peu d‘être ou tenu pour vitaliste…‖ and presenting the book
itself as a ―defense of vitalist biology.‖34 Even if he is wearing the hat of the historian of
medicine, looking at the construction of a concept (say, the cell theory), Canguilhem the
31 Schlick (1953), p. 536.
32 Barral (1900).
33 As in the recent claim by the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen that ―Evolution has come to do for
biology today what vitalism did for it previously‖ (Rosen (1991), p. 255); an assertion of uniqueness and
thus unexplainability in terms of inanimate nature). (Then one gets to Canguilhem and Darwin...)
34 Canguilhem (1955), Avant-Propos, p. 1.

15
philosopher asks highly ‗motivated‘ questions of science, in a manner which
undoubtedly owes a great deal to Bachelard‘s historical epistemology. The history of
science has to study possible conceptual developments rather than just invalidate the
past (the error of ‗presentism‘). What this entails for vitalism is that it has a specifically
philosophical place, whether it is scientifically ‗validated‘ or ‗refuted‘, and apart from its
status as a scientific ‗construction‘.
In this sense, Canguilhem suggests, vitalism is not like geocentrism or phlogiston (to
pick two classic cases of scientific ‗errors‘): it is not refutable in quite the same way.35 (Or
Haldane: ―Vitalism thus represents no clearly definable working hypothesis,‖ so that he
suggests it is not worth ―considering further‖36).
Vitalism is generally considered to have been ‗refuted‘ twice. First, according to a
celebrated scientific tale, with Friedrich Wöhler‘s synthesis of urea in 1828, which
showed that organic substances can be produced out of inorganic compounds, thus
rendering the claim that the chemistry of the living body is categorically distinct from
that of inanimate bodies, invalid. Second, a century later, this time because of physics, in
early twentieth-century Vienna Circle arguments against Hans Driesch and Bergson, in
the name of the causal closure of the space-time world.37 The undead character of
vitalism shows up in the first case, with Wöhler‘s synthesis of urea, when people start to
describe the purported refutation as a ―chemical legend‖ (including because the
synthesis was actually only performed by Berthelot later on), and when chemists like
Berzelius continue to speak of vital forces afterwards38; in the second case, substantival
35 Canguilhem (1965), p. 84.
36 Haldane, in Haldane et al. (1918), p. 12.
37 See Frank (1998 [1932]), especially chapter 4; Wolsky and Wolsky (1992).
38 McKie (1954). See also Schiller (1967) (on Berzelius and von Liebig); Ramberg (2000). For the classic,
‗heroic‘ view of Wöhler see Jacques (1950). Raymond Ruyer conversely asserts the link between chemistry
and vitalism, declaring that it was ―lack of chemical knowledge‖ that made seventeenth-century Cartesian
biologists be mechanists (Ruyer [1958], p. 51). If we look back at Stahl, he insists on the importance of
chemistry for conceptualizing what is unique in organic beings (their characteristic mixtio rather than
mere aggregates) but, somewhat dialectically, he adds that once that reaches the level of a theoria medica
vera , then one can dispense with the chemical analysis of bodies, like the ladder we leave behind after
having climbed up it (not his image!). Stahl (1706b) in Stahl (1859), vol. 2, p. 224.

16
vitalism is refuted, not what we might call explanatory or heuristic vitalism – which are
derivative forms of what I‘ve earlier called functional vitalism.
So not only is vitalism a unique kind of historical object; much more
metaphysically, Canguilhem suggests that it is Life itself which dictates a certain kind of
attitude on the part of the inquirer. There is something about Life that places the knower
in a special relation to it. Indeed Canguilhem frequently makes an overtly metaphysical,
ahistorical claim that the living animal is necessarily a knower, so that conversely, the
nature of Life itself forces the knower to approach it in a certain way (the echoes of the
first sentence of Aristotle‘s Metaphysics, ―All men by nature desire to know,‖ are
probably deliberate).
The idea is that vitalism is a fundamental existential attitude – not just one
historical episode amongst others:
Vitalism expresses a permanent requirement or demand [exigence] of life in living
beings, the self-identity of life which is immanent in living beings. This explains
why mechanistic biologists and rationalist philosophers criticize vitalism for
being nebulous and vague. It is normal, if vitalism is primarily a ‗demand‘, that it
is difficult to formulate it in a series of determinations.39
Vitalism expresses a permanent ―requirement‖ or ―demand‖ of life as present in living
beings; the self-identity of Life immanent within living beings. What exactly is this
―requirement‖? Something teleological? Purposive? Foucault (??), seeking to give a
charitable interpretation of the place of vitalism in Canguilhem‘s thought as what we
might call a heuristic concept, quotes another passage from this article in which
Canguilhem uses the word exigence again (he uses it 7 times in all): vitalism is ―more a
requirement than a method, an ethics rather than a theory.‖40 Now, it may be a
requirement rather than a theory, but it is, I suggest, a big requirement: that Life itself,
symmetrically to the inquirer‘s attitude, is understood as self-positing, spontaneous
activity (I don‘t discuss ethics here but one observation would be that as this is a
39 Canguilhem, ―Aspects du vitalisme,‖ in Canguilhem (1965), p. 86.
40 Ibid., p. 88. Although the image of the egg sounds more like Driesch (except it‘s also Harvey and the
Oxford physiologists) than like Bordeu or Ménuret.

17
specifically medical vitalism, that comes with an ethics, as the Hippocratic motif in
Montpellier vitalism also indicates):
It is certain that the vitalists view generation as the basic biological phenomenon,
for the images it generates and the problems it raises impact all other biological
phenomena. A vitalist, I would suggest, is someone who is led to reflect on the
nature of life more because of the contemplation of an egg than because of s/he
has handled a hoist or a bellows.41
Notice how the above passage moves imperceptibly from the historical (a description of
―the vitalists‖) to the assertive (―a vitalist is…‖), and even to the prescriptive (in his best-
known writings on the ‗normal and the pathological‘, which stress the way in which an
organism is its own norm of existence).
Vitalism then has two dimensions in Canguilhem‘s thought: on the one hand it is
heuristic, a claim that living phenomena need to be approached in a certain way in order
to be understood; on the other hand, it also possesses a more ontological dimension.
Consider the example Canguilhem gives in ―Aspects du vitalisme‖: vitalism is not like
(the theory of) phlogiston or geocentrism. Now, faced with this ‗fact‘ that vitalism is not
like phlogiston, there are two possible responses:
— it‘s not like phlogiston because it‘s true and thus one‘s ontology needs to include
it (like Driesch‘s entelechies);
— it‘s not like phlogiston because it has this heuristic value, or explanatory power.
In fact, it‘s not entirely clear where Canguilhem falls in this divide. However, his
comments on vitalism as an ―orientation‖ (what I have called an attitude) tend towards
the latter interpretation. Indeed, it is clear that both philosophically and as a historian of
science (to reintroduce this naïve distinction) he is careful to distinguish his claims from
the more inflated ones of substantival vitalism.
Canguilhem is careful to distinguish strong metaphysical vitalism from the views
(and practices) of the eighteenth-century vitalists, in contradistinction to people like
Driesch. This is the theme of ‗biological Newtonianism‘ (referring to the popularity of
Newtonian analogies amongst the vitalists in the eighteenth century, among others):
41 Ibid.

18
Eighteenth-century vitalists are . . . not impenitent metaphysicians but rather
prudent positivists, which is to say, in that period, Newtonians. Vitalism is first of
all the rejection of all metaphysical theories of the essence of life. This why most
of the vitalists referred to Newton as the model of a scientist concerned with
observation and experiment. . . . Vitalism ultimately means the recognition of life
as an original set or realm [ordre] of phenomena, and thus the recognition of the
specificity of biological knowledge.42
A medical vitalist in the eighteenth century is not a substantival, metaphysical vitalist of
the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Indeed, Canguilhem goes as far as to say
that eighteenth-century vitalists are anti-metaphysicians opposed to the strong
metaphysics of animism or mechanism.43 As Karen Detlefsen has suggested in a
different context, ontological reduction does not have to affect the ‗scientific‘ pertinence
of the distinction between the living and the non-living.44
The importance of the Newtonian motif is that, by means of an analogy with
Newton‘s method in positing an unknown entity (such as gravity) from which he can
then derive a series of mathematical equations with real tangible value – for instance in
linking together phases of the moon and tides – the vitalists can say (I‘m paraphrasing
Barthez notably): let me posit this unknown called ‗life‘ and derive from it various other
phenomena, from digestion to sensation, to the functioning of the glands: these
suddenly appear as interconnected, goal-oriented processes which do not exist either in
an inanimate mechanism or (a frequent opposition) in the same body but in the state of a
corpse. But significantly I (or rather the vitalist, here, Barthez) will make no ontological
claims about the nature of this vital principle, or even attempt to make causal
connections between such a principle and observable phenomena: ―I am as indifferent
as could be regarding Ontology considered as the science of entities.‖45
42 Canguilhem (1955), p. 113.
43 Canguilhem, ―Le normal et le pathologique,‖ in Canguilhem (1965), p. 156.
44 Detlefsen (2007). An excellent historical example of someone who rejects mechanistic explanations of
generation at the scientific level without being a metaphysical antimechanist, is Claude Perrault; see
Perrault (1680-1688), and the discussion of Azouvi (1982, 1985).
45 Barthez (1806), p. 96, note 17.

19
Returning to Canguilhem, there is a long and difficult passage in ―Aspects du
vitalisme,‖ in which he rejects Drieschian vitalism (or mysterianism as we would call it
today) more clearly than anywhere else:
In sum, the classical vitalist grants that living beings belong to a physical
environment, yet asserts that they are an exception to physical laws. This is the
inexcusable philosophical mistake, in my view. There can be no kingdom within a
kingdom [empire dans un empire], or else there is no kingdom at all. There can only
be one philosophy of empire, that which rejects division and imperialism. . . . One
cannot defend the originality of biological phenomena and by extension, of
biology, by delimiting a zone of indeterminacy, dissidence or heresy within an
overall physicochemical environment of motion and inertia. If we are to affirm the
originality of the biological, it must be as a reign over the totality of experience, not over
little islands of experience [un règne sur le tout de l’expérience et non pas sur des îlots
dans l’expérience]. Ultimately, classical vitalism is (paradoxically) too modest, in its
reluctance to universalize its conception of experience.46
‗Classical‘ vitalism as described here is what is commonly termed substantival vitalism.
And Canguilhem‘s diagnosis of an ―inexcusable philosophical mistake‖ is clear enough.
But what should we make then of his defense of the ―originality of biological
phenomena,‖ i.e. the autonomy of biology, as a ―reign over the totality of experience‖?
What looks at first glance like metaphysical holism might instead be an ‗attitudinal‘
conception, that is, a point of view on experience. Indeed, even when Canguilhem
discusses the uniqueness of organisms he never denies that their ‗holistic‘ quality is
enabled by various regulatory processes or mechanisms that subserve the whole and
preserve its integrity (much like Cannon‘s notion of homeostasis, itself explicitly
indebted at least in its theoretical form to Bernard‘s notion of milieu intérieur47).
Unlike the ―classical vitalist‖ (who corresponds in our discussion both to Stahl
and Driesch, and to vitalists as targeted by philosophers of biology such as Sarkar and
Gilbert or earlier Moritz Schlick), Canguilhem insists, using Spinoza‘s phrase, that we
are not a kingdom within a kingdom, an imperium in imperio! That is, the laws of the
physical world apply in full to all living beings, humans included, without exceptions.
So all problems would appear to be solved. Yet this statement creates new problems!
46 Canguilhem (1965), p. 95, emphasis mine.
47 Cooper (2008).

20
Granted, to the standard question, how can one be a vitalist and reject any imperium in
imperio?, we can answer on Canguilhem‘s behalf that one can be a constructivist or
heuristic vitalist; but what do we do then with all the talk of ‗Life itself‘, le vivant?
Similarly, if we grant in addition that the ontological dimension in his vitalism – the
stress on how Life itself creates a certain attitude on the part of the knower – is not to be
confused with mysterianism, we are left with the rather opaque invocation in the above
quotation of ―experience.‖ It doesn‘t seem to fit with the rest of his views … except if we
recall that he was, after all, significantly influenced by the work of Kurt Goldstein
(known for his ‗holistic‘ theory of organism, Goldstein 1934/1995, see also Wolfe 2010),
who he greatly contributed to introduce into French discussions. Goldstein and
Canguilhem both stress the importance of the relation between the ‗subject‘ (the knower,
the philosopher or scientist, etc.) and Life itself.
Indeed, in a very real sense one cannot distinguish between a historical claim and
a philosophical claim in Canguilhem‘s ‗history of vitalism‘ or ‗vitalism‘. Of course,
dialectically enough, Canguilhem‘s blurring of the divide between being a historian-
épistémologue focusing on the life sciences, and being a ‗metaphysical vitalist‘ can again
be seen in a more positive light, i.e., in more manageable, ‗attitudinal‘ terms: one can
argue that (a) the ontological dimension, (b) that of experience, and (c) the existential
dimension all cohere with his claim that vitalism is an ―attitude‖ (―une orientation de la
pensée biologique‖) rather than strictly an episode (―une étape de sa démarche‖).48 And
if, as present-day historians of science, we point out that he gives a partisan reading of
biological thought intended to delegitimize Cartesian mechanism in favor of biological
epigenesis – and vitalism, then why shouldn‘t we also acknowledge that present-day
biological thought is, if not fully reversing course, at least arguing in a strongly
‗epigenetic‘ direction and privileging developmental biology over genetics (or at least an
essentialist vision of genetic information)?49
48 ―Aspects du vitalisme,‖ in Canguilhem (1965), p. 84.
49 See van Speybroeck et al. (2002) and the work of Susan Oyama, passim.

21
Nevertheless, even if we can agree that vitalism is unlike geocentrism or
phlogiston in the way Canguilhem suggested, and we can see the possible interest in
discussing vitalism as an ‗attitude‘, we should also recognize that Canguilhem‘s
revisionist project to put the life sciences at center stage in the history of science overall
(which had traditionally been dominated by the hard sciences) is bound up with strong
ontological commitments, and a certain conceptual vagueness to boot. Namely, his
project must amount to a claim regarding the specificity of its object, but it is not easy to
make out exactly which claim he wants to make:
— Life itself as an object is ontologically unique, including in its anomalousness;
— living entities are meaningful and meaning-producing entities and thus have to
be understood as such (this covers both the existential and the Goldsteinian
aspects of his claim).
Canguilhem‘s vagueness appears, e.g., when he denies that vitalism is a
metaphysics, and then adds immediately afterwards that it is ―the recognition of the
originality of the fact of life [le fait vital].‖50
4. Conclusion
I have tried to illustrate the existence of three forms of vitalism: substantival,
functional and attitudinal. It is typically the first form which is targeted in critiques of
vitalism (such as that dating back to the Vienna Circle); it is represented here by Stahl
and Driesch. The second form matches up fairly well with what philosophers of science
in contemporary times would call ‗heuristic‘ concepts of mechanism or organism, as
explanatory structures or models. Historically, this ‗functional‘ kind of vitalism is
associated with the Montpellier school and with the attempt to articulate a relation
between parts and whole in which the parts are construed as little lives (recall the image
of the bee-swarm, a Life composed of many little lives). A bit more from Bechtel 2007.
The third form is chiefly articulated by Georges Canguilhem (under the influence of
50 Canguilhem, ―Le normal et le pathologique,‖ in Canguilhem (1965), p. 156.

22
Kurt Goldstein‘s philosophy of organism); we might also call it ‗projectivist‘ or
‗constructivist‘, since it stresses that there is something about Life that leads us to adopt
a certain standpoint towards it in order to understand it properly (in its totality,
directedness, etc.). Of course, Canguilhem also plays on an ontological set of
associations since he claims that it is Life itself which affects both the scientific theories
we formulate in relation to it, and our experience in general. It is possible to see a kind
of development or gradual evolution in these three forms of vitalism, although one can
also approach them as separate and parallel to one another.
A few questions then arise:
 The question of the posterity of the Montpellier form of vitalism is difficult to
address, partly because of the general difficulties in tying Enlightenment
natural philosophy or medicine to developments beginning in the nineteenth
century (‗positive science‘). I mentioned earlier the fact that the words
‗vitalism‘ and ‗biology‘ are coined at about the same time, and believe this is
worth investigating. Just because an episode such as Montpellier vitalism
does not get to be part of the history of medicine the way John Snow‘s
discovery of cholera does, does not mean we have to go along with Francis
Crick‘s pronouncement quoted above, or with similar scientific views that
vitalism is a kind of verbiage quickly dispelled by molecularized life science.51
For one thing, there is Canguilhem‘s point about the difference between
vitalism and phlogiston or geocentrism. For another, we have this intriguing
possibility that vitalism in the form presented here – not a theory of ‗wonder
tissue‘ or ‗vital forces‘ – is a source of intellectual support to current
movements in biological thought such as epigenetics, developmental systems
theory, evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), and so forth. After
all, Driesch did claim that ―All believers in epigenesis are Vitalists‖52! But this
51 Bosc (1913).
52 Driesch (1914), p. 39.

23
kind of connection, in terms of some of the oppositions that have structured
the history and philosophy of biology (here, epigenesis versus preformation
in the eighteenth century and epigenesis versus genetic reductionism in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries) is quite different from the valuative,
polemical tone of those who claim that ‗vitalism‘ is a kind of suprahistorical,
almost messianic entity that can come back to save us in times of need, such
as: ―The affirmation . . . of ‗vitalism‘ as an intellectual requirement which aims
to acknowledge the originality of Life, is just as significant today when the
conjunction of a biochemical materialism and a mathematical formalism tend
to negate [this originality], the better to ‗neuronalize‘ thought.53 (this from the
former student of Althusser, Dominique Lecourt !)
 There is also the related issue of how closely we can link, or correlate,
‗ontological shifts‘ with the emergence of a science. In this particular case,
there is the very broad question ‗does vitalism impact the history of science‘
and the slightly more specific one ‗does vitalism lead to a science such as
biology?‘54 One version of this is to emphasize how, faced with mechanism
and animism at opposite extremes, vitalism avoided ―the worst of both
systems‖ and developed the best parts, notably their explanatory richness and
a kind of synthetic experimental protocol. Roger French suggests that out of
this ―What emerged was the idea of biological properties, that is, qualities
(principally of sensation and motion) that were unique to living systems and
53 Lecourt (1993), p. 269.
54 I remember once reading something which suggested that each time biology takes a ‗step forward‘, it is
a vitalistic moment, even if this is subsequently ‗refuted‘ or ontologically eliminated, but cannot find the
source of this idea anymore (I thought it was Depew and Grene‘s Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History
but it does not seem to be in there). Prima facie this seems obviously wrong (the discovery of DNA is not
a very vitalistic moment) but there is something to the idea that each time one has pushed back the
boundaries of ‗pure physicalism‘. Philosophers of biology following David Hull and then Alex Rosenberg
would then argue about ‗ontological autonomy‘ versus ‗explanatory autonomy‘ with respect to biology.
See Hilde Hein‘s papers (Hein 1968, 1969). The first paper discusses 'Mechanism and Vitalism as
Meta-theoretical Commitments'; in the second one she tries to show how the debate between molecular
biology and organicism manifests the same kind of tension as the old debate between mechanism and
vitalism. In both cases more of ad hominem issue depending on prior commitments, than general
experimental opposition at level of data.

24
not to be derived from a mechanical model.‖55 I am not sure this actually
happened in the way he presents it. For one thing, the figure who much more
closely matches this story is Haller, whose relation to vitalism is complicated
to say the least (also for reasons like the rivalry between him and Bordeu).
It is sometimes suggested that vitalism is primarily a vision developed by
physicians, not biologists, which is why it is not so surprising that it has
vanished from the philosophy of biology. This specifically medical dimension
can be conveyed in the basic claim that all living beings die and get sick –
hence there is a necessary axiological element (that is, an element of values or
norms). This appears specifically in Canguilhem‘s focus on, and interest in
Bichat.56
 It seems plausible that this story about vitalism should impact debates going
back to Foucault about the status of ‗Life‘ in the eighteenth century, the
existence of which he curiously denied.57 Indeed a key difference between the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this context seems to be the
‗biologization‘ of various issues: case in point, Diderot‘s short and provocative
Encyclopédie entry ―Spinosistes‖, which describes ―modern Spinozists‖
essentially as people who theorize biological epigenesis (see Wolfe [2009a]).
La Mettrie makes a similar distinction between ancient and modern
Epicureans (i.e. in each case the ‗modern‘ variant of the theory is explicitly
tied to new biological and/or medical ideas).
 But in none of these cases (Stahl, the Montpellier vitalists, Canguilhem, etc.)
does it appear to me to be straightforwardly the case that a vitalist ‗theory‘ or
55 French (1981), p. 130.
56 Thanks to Jean Gayon for pointing this out to me.
57 As is well known, Foucault declared – controversially – in Les mots et les choses (1966, pp. 139, 173-174)
that ‗Life‘ did not exist before the emergence of biology as a science bearing that name, in the nineteenth
century. In contrast, Canguilhem, despite being a discontinuist in the history of science, holds that
something called ‗Life‘ determines the emergence of various theoretical enterprises, and exerts a kind of
traction on the knower / theorist / scientist. Further analyses could extend this distinction to discussions
of vitalism in contemporary thought (Deleuze and beyond — Roberto Esposito, Bios).

25
‗claim‘ or ‗metaphor‘ gets naturalized or formalized or quantified and turned
into mainstream science – with the exception of Blumenbach et al. However,
there is a distinctive ‗form of life‘ that emerges in the reflections of the
Montpellier School and the various related projects, whether antecedent
(Glisson, Willis, Stahl), contemporary and congenial (Diderot), contemporary
and competitive (Haller), or posterior (Cabanis, Bichat, Bernard). In that sense
I hope to have called attention to a different ‗face‘ of vitalism than the one
usually seen.
References
François Azouvi (1982). ―Entre Descartes et Leibnitz: l‘animisme dans les Essais de physique de
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