# Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

Charles T. Wolfe, Christopher Donohue

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Charles T. Wolfe, Christopher Donohue. Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy. Springer, 2023, Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy, P Hunemlan, T Reydon, C. Wolfe, 978-3-031-12606-2. halshs-04242728

HAL Id: halshs-04242728

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04242728

Submitted on 15 Oct 2023

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
Christopher Donohue

Charles T. Wolfe *Editors*

Vitalism and
Its Legacy in
Twentieth Century
Life Sciences and
Philosophy

OPEN ACCESS

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Springer
# History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

## Volume 29

### Series Editors

Philippe Huneman, Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, CNRS - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (IHPST), Paris, France

Thomas A. C. Reydon, Institute of Philosophy & CELLS, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

Charles T. Wolfe, Département de Philosophie & ERRAPHIS, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

### Editorial Board Members

Marshall Abrams, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL, USA

André Ariew, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Richard Burian, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Minus van Baalen, Institut Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Pietro Corsi, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

François Duchesneau, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

John Dupre, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Paul Farber, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Lisa Gannett, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Andy Gardner, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

Jean Gayon, UFR de Philosophie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

Guido Giglioni, University of Macerata, Civitanova Marche, Italy

Paul Griffiths, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Thomas Heams, AgroParisTech, Paris Cedex 05, France

James G. Lennox, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Annick Lesne, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

Tim Lewens, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Alexandre Métraux, Archives Poincaré, Nancy, France

Hans Metz, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Roberta L. Millstein, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

François Munoz, Université Montpellier 2, Montpellier, France

Dominic Murphy, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

Stuart A. Newman, New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY, USA

Frederik Nijhout, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Samir Okasha, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Susan Oyama, The City University of New York, New York, USA

Kevin Padian, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

David Queller, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Stephane Schmitt, Archives Poincaré, Nancy, France

Phillip Sloan, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Jacqueline Sullivan, Western University, London, ON, Canada

Giuseppe Testa, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

J. Scott Turner, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry,
Syracuse, NY, USA

Denis Walsh, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Marcel Weber, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
**History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences** is a space for dialogue between life scientists, philosophers and historians – welcoming both essays about the principles and domains of cutting-edge research in the life sciences, novel ways of tackling philosophical issues raised by the life sciences, as well as original research about the history of methods, ideas and tools, which constitute the genealogy of our current ways of understanding living phenomena.

The series is interested in receiving book proposals that • are aimed at academic audience of graduate level and up • combine historical and/or philosophical and/or theoretical studies with work from disciplines within the life sciences broadly conceived, including (but not limited to) the following areas: • Anatomy & Physiology • Behavioral Biology • Biochemistry • Bioscience and Society • Cell Biology • Conservation Biology • Developmental Biology • Ecology • Evolution & Diversity of Life • Genetics, Genomics & Disease • Genetics & Molecular Biology • Immunology & Medicine • Microbiology • Neuroscience • Plant Science • Psychiatry & Psychology • Structural Biology • Systems Biology • Systematic Biology, Phylogeny Reconstruction & Classification • Virology The series editors aim to make a first decision within 1 month of submission. In case of a positive first decision the work will be provisionally contracted: the final decision about publication will depend upon the result of the anonymous peer review of the complete manuscript. The series editors aim to have the work peer-reviewed within 3 months after submission of the complete manuscript. The series editors discourage the submission of manuscripts that contain reprints of previously published material and of manuscripts that are below 150 printed pages (75,000 words). For inquiries and submission of proposals prospective authors can contact one of the editors: Charles T. Wolfe: ctwolfe1@gmail.com Philippe Huneman: huneman@wanadoo.fr Thomas A.C. Reydon: reydon@ww.uni-hannover.de
Christopher Donohue • Charles T. Wolfe
Editors

Vitalism and Its Legacy in
Twentieth Century Life
Sciences and Philosophy

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Springer
Editors

Christopher Donohue

National Human Genome Research Institute

Bethesda, MD, USA

Charles T. Wolfe

Département de Philosophie & ERRAPHIS

Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès

Toulouse, France

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

ISSN 2211-1948

ISSN 2211-1956 (electronic)

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

ISBN 978-3-031-12603-1

ISBN 978-3-031-12604-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12604-8

© This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply 2023. This book is an open access publication.

**Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
# Contents

<table><tr><td>Introduction: Vitalism and Its Legacies in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Christopher Donohue and Charles T. Wolfe</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation: Another Look at Bergson's Élan Vital</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Tano S. Posteraro</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch's Vitalism</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Ghyslain Bolduc</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>A Historico-Logical Re-assessment of Hans Driesch's Vitalism</td><td>49</td></tr><tr><td>Bohang Chen</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>"A Mountain of Nonsense"? Czech and Slovenian Receptions of Materialism and Vitalism from c. 1860s to the First World War</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>Christopher Donohue</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer's Philosophy of Science</td><td>85</td></tr><tr><td>M. Chirimuuta</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Canguilhem and the Greeks: Vitalism Between History and Philosophy</td><td>107</td></tr><tr><td>Brooke Holmes</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Canguilhem and the Logic of Life</td><td>131</td></tr><tr><td>Arantza Etxeberria and Charles T. Wolfe</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Is There Not a Truth of Vitalism? Vital Normativity in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty</td><td>153</td></tr><tr><td>Sebastjan Vörös</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>A 'Fourth Wave' of Vitalism in the Mid-20th Century?</td><td>173</td></tr><tr><td>Erik L. Peterson</td><td></td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td><strong>Metabolism in Crisis? A New Interplay Between Physiology and Ecology</strong></td><td>193</td></tr><tr><td>Cécilia Bognon-Küss</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Vitalist Arguments in the Struggle for Human (Im)Perfection: The Debate Between Biologists and Theologians in the 1960s–1980s</strong></td><td>217</td></tr><tr><td>Victoria Shmidt</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?</strong></td><td>239</td></tr><tr><td>Cat Moir</td><td></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Index.</strong></td><td>263</td></tr></table>
# Introduction: Vitalism and Its Legacies in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Christopher Donohue and Charles T. Wolfe

Vitalism has spent most of the twentieth century, and part of the twenty-first, being perhaps the most misunderstood and reviled philosophy of life, with organicism being a close second (on the latter see (Martindale 2013), although some theorists seek to drive a wedge between the two in favor of a 'reasonable', less 'metaphysical' position often associated with organicism (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). As a number of the essays in this collection point out (see especially the contributions by Donohue and Moir) vitalism has been conjoined to fascism and the Nazi horrors, and has been reduced to a series of ahistorical propositions. As both Moir and Donohue emphasize, such associations require more study, but at the same time are fundamentally misleading. Nonetheless, the traditional association of vitalism and fascism as well as vitalism and pseudoscience (or anti-science, as Shmidt underscores) has been remarkably pervasive, and still operates.

Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that vitalism has been accused of both everything and nothing at the same time (regarding its associations with fascism and irrationality.) Gilbert and Sarkar observe that vitalism's association with organicism has led to the latter's being associated with "fascism, communism, and New Age spirituality" which they observe "should be enough to bring down any philosophy" (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, 5).

Similarly, philosophers since the Vienna Circle (particularly Schlick, Frank and later Nagel), have addressed (and oftentimes) castigated vitalism in various ways. Carnap himself was open to at least questioning the reducibility of biology to

<footnote>C. Donohue
National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA
e-mail: donohuecr@mail.nih.gov</footnote>

<footnote>C. T. Wolfe (✉)
Département de Philosophie & ERRAPHIS, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès,
Toulouse, France
e-mail: ctwolfe1@gmail.com</footnote>
physics and chemistry. He noted that “The philosophical problems of the *foundations of biology* (italics his) refer above all to the relation between biology and physics. “If yes” (he seemed undecided) all elements of biology can be reduced to physical occurrences.” Carnap also described (in a relatively neutral way) that the core of the “vitalism-problem” was whether “the laws of biology be derived from the laws of the physics of the inorganic.” He was much more dismissive of various ways to reduce psychology to physics (Carnap 1934, 18–19). Schlick, on the other hand, described the “psycho-vitalism” of Driesch as “wild speculations” (Schlick 1968, 79).

Phillip Frank is a bit more forgiving than Schlick (for more discussion of differ-
ing Vienna Circle attitudes towards Driesch and vitalism, see Chen 2019). Frank
noted how both philosophers and scientists must be indebted to Driesch because he
was the first to provide “a clear and unprejudiced formulation of the problem” of not
only vitalism versus mechanism, but also whether “must we, in order to satisfy the
law of causality in the domain of life, ascribe to the body besides the properties....
of physics and chemistry, also other, qualitatively different properties?” On Driesch’s
account of the *entelechy*, Frank noted that it was “not entirely convincing,” as it was
not entirely impossible that scientists had not discovered a combination of inorganic
elements which could account for the particular characteristics of life (Frank 1949,
59–60) Nagel opined that “...vitalism has not proved to be a fruitful notion, and it
no longer seems to present a live issue in the philosophy of biology” (Nagel 1979,
264). Nonetheless, Nagel underscored elsewhere that “the historically influential
Cartesian conception of biology as simply a chapter of physics continues to meet
resistance. Many outstanding biologists who find no merit in vitalism are equally
dubious about the validity of the Cartesian program....” (Nagel 1961, 429).

Morris R. Cohen in his *Reason and Nature* took much of the same stance as
Nagel (which is understandable considering that Cohen was Nagel’s advisor and
had a profound influence on him, see (Nagel 1957)). For Cohen, vitalists maintained
that there was a “radical discontinuity between vital and non-vital phenomenon”;
that biological laws were “different in character from the laws of the inorganic
world” insofar as biological laws “add the fundamental category of purpose”; and
that “the method of biology must differ essentially from that of physical science”
(Cohen 1978, 248–9). While sympathetic to vitalism in some sense (Cohen observed
that, “In general we may conclude that while the obvious and important differences
between organic and non-organic....) he contended nonetheless that there did not
exist a “logical proof that physics and chemistry will never be able to explain the
phenomenon of life.”

Cohen broke with the geneticist J.B.S Haldane when he further observed “that
atoms, crystals” and other systems “do maintain their own structure” where “the
maintenance of a certain form together with the splitting off of a part which forms
the copy of an original is physically illustrated in the phenomena of vortex rings.” It
was also not clear for Cohen “where the progress of mechanical explanations will
stop” (Cohen 1978, 269) Nor, according to Cohen, was it clear whether vitalists
could decisively prove that “biological phenomena” resist all “physical analogies”
(Cohen, ibid).
Likewise, Mikhail Bakhtin, appropriating the work of Nikolay Lossky, critiqued the 'neovitalism' of Driesch and Bergson as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or 'forces' (Bakhtin 1992), over and above the system of causal relations studied and modeled by mechanistic science, which itself sought to express these entities or the relations between them in mathematical terms. Lossky himself observed that "The greatest difficulty for vitalism is to understand how this undoubtedly immaterial factor, according to Driesch's research, interferes with the course of material-mechanical processes, ordering them" (Losskii 1923, 84) (emphasis Losskii's, my translation).

These comments concerning vitalism represent a common 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,' or in negative terms, as a kind of anti-scientific or 'para-scientific' trend which needs to be refuted (as in Francis Crick's rather confident pronouncement: "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" (Crick 1966, 99)). And there is plenty of historical evidence that such a position existed (see Burwick and Douglass 1992). For sustained criticism of Crick's account of vitalism see (Waddington 1967 and Peterson's Chapter "A 'Fourth Wave' of Vitalism in the Mid-20th Century?" this volume).

But there has some significant scholarly 'pushback' against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the Montpellier vitalists of the eighteenth century (which is where the word 'vitalism' is first used), associated with figures like Diderot and the *Encyclopédie*, as has been shown in recent scholarship (Williams 2003; Reill 2005; Wolfe 2008; Normandin and Wolfe 2013; Wolfe 2019), but also, work on Driesch (Chen 2018, 2019 and Chapter "A Historico-Logical Re-assessment Of Hans Driesch's Vitalism" this volume, Bolduc, Chapter "On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch's Vitalism" this volume) has shown that even his 'neovitalism' is in need of reevaluation. So, there are different historical forms of vitalism, including in their relation to the mainstream practice of science (the topic of Wolfe and Normandin 2013, focusing however on the post-Enlightenment era and functioning in several respects as a predecessor volume to this one). Faced with this plurality, some adopt the strategy of presenting Enlightenment vitalism as somehow a different scientific paradigm – a holistic, non-reductionist project, directly opposed to mechanistic explanations which is sometimes enhanced philosophically as "mechanistic materialism" (Williams 2003, 177). This has echoes of Carolyn Merchant's 'Death of Nature' narrative (Merchant 1980). P.H. Reill's work presents a rather similar view: "Relation, rapport, Verwandschaft [affinity, kinship], and interconnection replaced mechanical aggregation as one of the defining principles of matter. By emphasizing the centrality of interconnection, Enlightenment vitalists modified the concept of cause and effect. In the world of living nature, each part of an "organized body" was both cause and effect of the other parts" (Reill 2010, 66; see also Reill 2005). A more nuanced picture, concerning the vitalist approach to reductionist scientific practices such as pathological anatomy, is presented in Wolfe (2013), as well as more broadly regarding the fruitful interplay between mechanistic and
vitalistic models in early modern and Enlightenment science, and the emergence of biology (Wolfe, 2022, forthcoming).

But another option has so far been left out: what happens if we return to the challenge of the anti-vitalist arguments formulated by the Vienna Circle and its successors, and look at vitalism and its connections to biology, genetics, philosophy and medicine in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and/or scientific model for working biology and medicine? Is it possible to grasp some of the conceptual originality of vitalism without either (a) reducing it to mainstream mathematicocentric models of science (in a kind of “victors’ narrative”) or (b) just presenting it as an alternate model of science? In other words, without either normalizing it or projecting a kind of ‘weak messianic power’ onto its supposed abnormality?

This volume seeks to promote dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life in the context of ancient philosophy to the late twentieth century. As such, these essays consistently move against the idea that the twentieth century biological sciences must be genetic and must be deterministic and reductionist. The idea that mechanism and materialism are essential to the development of the modern life-sciences has furthermore become a mantra, which frequently drives out understanding of holistic, organistic and more system-based approaches. As importantly, the contributions not only detail a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century vitalisms and conceptions of life, but engage with important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. Most importantly, all of the contributions to this volume work against a reduced and monolithic account of vitalism. As several contributions make clear, even when vitalism is rejected or ‘refuted,’ such refutations and questionings often promote fruitful engagements which show the workings of vitalist ideas in a kind of negative reception (a kind of ‘negative’ vitalism and its influence). Last, this collection brings together the perspectives of scholars from across disciplines in the history and philosophy of biology, bridging critical *lacunae* in our understanding of key nineteenth and twentieth century figures, without reducing any of them to caricatures. This volume, drawing upon an already robust and transformative scholarship, not only illustrates the contemporary relevance of vitalism, organicism and holism to recent biology and medicine, but begins the characterization of these rich and complex perspectives on life.

The essays in the volume follow a roughly chronological order. We begin with Tano Posteraro’s contribution. Posteraro, drawing on the significant progress of scholarship on Bergson, does much work on clarifying exactly what kind of vitalist Bergson is: his vitalism is certainly not that of Driesch and may even be argued as contra-Driesch. Next, Ghyslain Bolduc narrates how Driesch’s vitalism was key to the progress of embryology in the twentieth century, often advancing concepts in order to refute Driesch’s arguments. Bohang Chen argues that Driesch’s vitalism should not be rejected due to its metaphysics, but rather because it produced no vital
laws. Nonetheless, Driesch's account of the entelechy provides insights into both physics and theories of evolution.

Next Christopher R. Donohue argues that if there is indeed a receptivity towards vitalism in eastern and southeastern Europe, that this was the result of virulently anti-materialist polemic in Czech-speaking and Slovenian-speaking lands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mazviita Chirimuuta contends that Cassirer's rejection of vitalism and his embrace of holism in his critique of Bergson tells us a great deal about many of his central philosophical and ethical commitments, placing him in conflict with logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle. Then Brooke Holmes demonstrates how Canguilhem appropriated an image of Greek philosophy as part of his discussion of vitalism. Holmes argues that Greek texts, rather than being static entities, function as entities that are consistently read and reread, becoming an essential structure in twentieth century accounts of the life sciences.

Arantza Etxeberria and Charles Wolfe examine Canguilhem's Kantian account of the living individual vis-à-vis vitalism. Regarding the naturalistic perspective of the logic of the living individual articulated by Maturana and Varela, both authors find instructive divergences with Canguilhem especially regarding the connection to vitalism. Sebastjan Vörös begins his contribution by noting that both Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty independently developed a critique of the mechanical-behaviorist view of the life sciences, which generated for both an account of the organism that is not indifferent. Both authors filiations with vitalism (and in the case of Merleau-Ponty really in spite of himself) pave the way for what Vörös calls “ouroboric thought.” This underscores that we as constituters of nature (or cognizers) live lives that are decisively changed through these acts of constitution.

Cécilia Bognon-Küss shows how what she calls the historical “crisis of the concept of metabolism,” through a fresh interrogation of historical vitalism, allows for solutions to the corresponding “crisis” of biological identity and the limits of “autonomy” in the context of biological entities. Drawing from a deep discussion of the issues of “distinction” and “persistence” and matter and form as foundational problems of the organism, Bognon’s contribution underscores the necessity of “ecologicizing” biology to account for life as a series of dynamic systems in flux and in openness with the world.

Moving into the realm of genetics, Erik Peterson underscores that Crick's (in) famous critique of vitalism targeted individuals who were often not vitalists at all. Rather Peterson underscores that many of the objects of Crick's ire were proponents of "bioexceptionalism" (or the idea that biology was irreducible to the laws of chemistry and physics). Although Crick was misinformed, his status cemented a reductionistic account of vitalism in the life sciences and beyond for decades. Victoria Shmidt argues that the critique of vitalism was key to the demarcation of health and disease. She contends that anti-vitalist polemic was a rhetorical resource in the post-war life sciences for ensuring the dominance of genetics, and its consequent reductionism and essentialism of the human person. Shmidt underscores further that epistemologies influenced by vitalism encourage the humanistic dissolution of these dichotomies.
Last, Cat Moir critically examines whether vitalism does indeed have politics, and whether that politics can be mapped to any kind of ideological framework. A closer look shows that vitalism is often confused with other frameworks (such as holism), and that any account of the political consequences of vitalism need to begin with a far narrower view of vitalism than has been usually admitted, which is nonetheless consistent with the historical and philosophical tenants of vitalism as it has developed.

Taken as a whole, whether or not these essays testify to the 'vitality of vitalism', we hope that they offer scholars from different domains and perspectives, some novel and challenging material – sources, arguments, connections between disciplines and *problématiques* – that may contrast with, or simply complement, both earlier, somewhat flat emergence of 'science and its controversies' narratives or the distinctively (feverishly?) enthusiastic 'life-philosophy' ontologies and ontologies.

## References

Bakhtin, M. 1992. Contemporary Vitalism. Trans. Charles Byrd. In *The Crisis of modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy*, eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, pp. 76–97.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burwick, F., and P. Douglass. 1992. *The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carnap, R. 1934. On the Character of Philosophic Problems. *Philosophy of Science* 1 (1): 5–19.

Chen, B. 2018. A Non-Metaphysical Evaluation of Vitalism in the Early Twentieth Century. *History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences* 40 (3): 1–22.

———. 2019. Revisiting the Logical Empiricist Criticisms of Vitalism. *Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science* 7: 1–17.

Cohen, M.R. 1978. *Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method*. New York: Dover Publications.

Crick, F. 1966. *Of Molecules and Men*. Tacoma: University of Washington Press.

Frank, P. 1949. *Modern Science and Its Philosophy*. Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press.

Gilbert, S.F., and S. Sarkar. 2000. Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century. *Developmental Dynamics* 219 (1): 1–9.

Losskii, N. O. 1923. *Материя и жизнь (Matter and Life)*, Обелиск (Obelisk).

Martindale, D. 2013. *The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory*. Taylor & Francis.

Merchant, C. 1980. *The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution*. New York: Harper and Row.

Nagel, E. 1957. Morris R. Cohen in Retrospect. *Journal of the History of Ideas* 18 (4): 548–551.

———. 1961. *The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation*. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

———. 1979. *Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science*. New York: Columbia University Press.

Normandin, S., and C.T. Wolfe, eds. 2013. *Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010*. Cham: Springer.

Reill, P.H. 2005. *Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment*. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2010. Eighteenth-Century Uses of Vitalism in Constructing the Human Sciences. In *Biology and ideology from Descartes to Dawkins*, ed. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, 61–87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schlick, M. 1968. *Philosophy of Nature*. Greenwood Press.
Waddington, C.H. 1967. No Vitalism for Crick. *Nature* 216 (5111): 202–203.

Williams, E.A. 2003. *A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier*. New York: Ashgate.

Wolfe, C.T. 2008. Vitalism Without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment. *Science in Context* 21 (4): 461–463.

———. 2013. Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century. *Journal of the History of Biology* 46: 255–282.

———. 2019. *La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie : une histoire du vitalisme*. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

———. 2022. Expanded Mechanism and/or Structural Vitalism: Further Thoughts on the Animal Economy. In *Mechanism, Life and Mind in Early Modern Natural Philosophy*, Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, ed. C.T. Wolfe, P. Pecere, and A. Clericuzio. Cham: Springer.

———. forthcoming. Vitalism and the Construction of Biology: a Historico-Epistemological Reflection. In *Philosophy, History, and Biology: Essays in Honor of Jean Gayon*, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. P.-O. Méthot. Cham: Springer.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
# Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation:
Another Look at Bergson's *Élan Vital*

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Tano S. Posteraro

**Abstract** Mikhail Bakhtin's 1926 essay, "Contemporary Vitalism," includes Bergson alongside Driesch in a short list of "the most published representatives of vitalism in Western Europe," and, indeed, Bakhtin's critique of Driesch is intended to undermine what he calls the "conceptual framework" of "contemporary vitalism" as a whole (The crisis of modernism: Bergson and the vitalist controversy. Eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992, p 81). The conceptual framework that Driesch and Bergson are supposed to have shared in common consists at bottom, for Bakhtin, in the ontological commitment to the autonomy of life, "its independence, its disconnectedness from physical-chemical phenomena" (81). This has long been understood as the defining mark of vitalism, at least in the mind of its critics: the contention that matter and the mechanical models that track it are insufficient to the reality of biological forms, and that the explanation of life therefore requires the postulation of a non-mechanical, possibly immaterial, uniquely vital principle, force, substance, or property. Recent scholarship has made considerable headway in complicating these pictures by attending to earlier and subtler forms of materialism, and by distinguishing between different types of vitalism and drawing out the heuristic or scientific utility of some of them (Wolfe, Eidos 14: 212-235, 2011, Antropol Exp 17(13): 215-224, 2017; cf. Wolfe and Normandin, Vitalism and the scientific image in post-enlightenment life science, 1800-2010. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013). The focus of some of this work has been on the critical revaluation of Driesch himself (Bognon et al., Kairos J Philos Sci 20(1): 113-140, 2018). Yet the status of Bergson's commitment to the existence of a vital principle remains underdeveloped. In the midst of what some are calling a "Bergson renaissance," I think that it calls for the same kind of critical reappraisal (Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: thinking beyond the human condition. Bloomsbury, New York, 2018: 1; cf. Lundy, Deleuze's Bergsonism. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p 5, 2018). The aim of this paper is to attempt the outline of an answer to that call. I begin with a brief summary of Driesch's vitalism, then I reconstruct Bergson's underappreciated critique of internal finality, or what

<footnote>T. S. Posteraro (✉)
Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada</footnote>
Kant called inner purposiveness, and locate in it a subterranean criticism of vital principles of the Drieschian variety as well. Two consequences follow: first, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, it cannot be in the Drieschian sense and we are therefore wrong to associate the two; and second, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, then his vitalism has to be understood—somewhat counterintuitively, and certainly contra Driesch—on the basis of a principle external to the ostensible individuality of biological forms.

Hans Driesch is the primary target of Mikhail Bakhtin's 1926 essay "Contemporary Vitalism." But Bakhtin includes Bergson alongside Driesch in his short list of "the most published representatives of vitalism in Western Europe," and, indeed, Bakhtin's critique of Driesch is intended to undermine what he calls the "conceptual framework" of "contemporary vitalism" as a whole (1992: 81). The conceptual framework that Driesch and Bergson are supposed to have shared in common consists at bottom, for Bakhtin, in the ontological commitment to the autonomy of life, "its independence, its disconnectedness from physical-chemical phenomena" (81). Driesch locates the difference between this contemporary vitalism and its parent approaches not in the postulation of a special force whose action in the biological domain safeguards the irreducibility of life to mechanistic explanation, but in the fact that contemporary vitalists are concerned to justify that postulation with empirical data while the older vitalists "silently assumed [its] permissibility" (80). Contemporary vitalism is supposed to serve as a viable biological programme, capable not only of orienting research (as Bergson insisted [1977: 112, 115–116, 249]), but well-founded as a conclusion drawn from the evidence of existing biological research as well (as Driesch and Bergson both claimed). "For this reason," Bakhtin says, "we may term contemporary vitalism 'critical vitalism,' in contradistinction to the old vitalism" (1992: 80–81). Yet Bakhtin is clear that he thinks the critical aspirations of contemporary vitalism remain unrealizable, as vitalism is by its very nature a dogmatic position that cannot hope to justify itself with reference to empirical research (81). This is because in contending that biology is irreducible to physicochemical explanation, and that explanations of the specificity of life require something superadded to the material world, vitalism, "like any metaphysical theory," "uses subjective schemes beyond the scope of experimentation" (96).

This has long been understood as the defining mark of vitalism, at least in the mind of its critics: the contention that matter and the mechanical models that track it are insufficient to the reality of biological forms, and that the explanation of life therefore requires the postulation of a non-mechanical, possibly immaterial, uniquely vital principle, force, substance, or property. Every element of that contention is the artifact of a polemic: the vitalist is conceived as an anti-materialist by her critics, and the materialist is conceived as a necessary partisan of mechanism, usually reductionism as well, by her critics in turn. Recent scholarship has made considerable headway in complicating these pictures by attending to earlier and subtler forms of materialism, and by distinguishing between different types of vitalism and drawing out the heuristic or scientific utility of some of them (Wolfe 2011, 2017; cf. Wolfe and Normandin 2013). The focus of some of this work has
been on the critical revaluation of Driesch himself (Bognon et al. 2018). Yet the status of Bergson's commitment to the existence of a vital principle remains under-developed. In the midst of what some are calling a "Bergson renaissance," I think that it calls for the same kind of critical reappraisal (Ansell-Pearson 2018: 1; cf. Lundy 2018: 5). The aim of this paper is to attempt the outline of an answer to that call.

I begin with a brief summary of Driesch's vitalism, though I intend it only as a preparation for Bergson's own response to Driesch and concede in advance that a more nuanced picture of the latter could and should be drawn. Then I reconstruct Bergson's underappreciated critique of internal finality, or what Kant called inner purposiveness, and locate in it a criticism of vital principles of the Drieschian variety as well. Two consequences follow: first, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, it cannot be in the Drieschian sense and we are therefore wrong to associate the two; and second, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, then his vitalism has to be understood—somewhat counterintuitively, and certainly *contra* Driesch—on the basis of a principle *external* to the ostensible individuality of biological forms.

The final sections of the paper deliver an account of what we might tentatively call Bergson's "external vitalism." The first step of this account consists in the *position* of Bergson's infamous *élan vital*, the vital impetus: that is, its externality to all constituted forms. The second step is a reconception of the *nature* of the *élan* on the basis of Bergson's own overlooked pragmatic minimalism regarding its ontological status. I insist upon two points: first, that the *élan vital* is not an actual force, property, substance, or principle, but a *tendency*—technically a “virtual” tendency—which means that when it is referred to as a principle, it is in abstraction from the concrete particularities in which it is embodied as a tendency to some degree of realization; and second, that understood in this way, the *élan* is an image drawn from the psychological register intended to best capture the nature of living systems. It is, in other words, *only an image for life*, though Bergson regards it as the best image we have available (1998: 257). I conclude by gesturing towards a discussion of some of the possible benefits of the Bergsonian account.

# 1 Driesch

Driesch's first major theoretical work in English, *The Science and Philosophy of Organism*, appeared in 1908 (but drew heavily from earlier works published in German). It offered a defense of vitalism on the novel basis of the experimental facts of regulation and regeneration. Driesch's idea was that only if undisturbed development was possible could everything about organisms be mechanistically explained (1929: 103). What he therefore set out to prove was that development could be interrupted without the individuality of the developing organism being compromised as a result. Cases of regulation and regeneration seemed to evince the point. Driesch argued that they could not be understood mechanistically, and that they testified as a result to the non-mechanical action of an immaterial force.
By compressing early sea urchin embryos between glass plates, Driesch was able to reconfigure the divisions in their eggs, reshuffling their nuclei so that some nuclei that would normally have produced dorsal structures were found in ventral cells instead. According to mechanistic (or preformationist) principles, the embryos should have developed in a disordered and unviable fashion. Yet Driesch famously obtained normal larvae from them, which meant for him that the early embryo was composed of pluripotent cells, and that the developmental processes through which they gave rise to differentiated organs must be self-regulating (cf. Sapp 2003: 100). Driesch linked the phenomenon of regulation to the already well-established facts of regeneration such as it occurred in his own experiments on salamanders, which are capable of regenerating the lenses of their eyes after they are removed.

Driesch argued that regulation and regeneration indicate the existence of an individualizing agency at work in the organism, distinguishing it from the mere mechanical assemblage of parts and securing its autonomy as an organized whole over and above changes in its constituent elements. Driesch's word for this agency was "entelechy," an Aristotelian term with its roots in the Greek *enteles* [complete], *telos* [end], and *echein* [to have]. Leibniz would later popularize the word with the definition of "something analogous to soul, whose nature consists in a certain eternal law of the same series of changes, a series which it traverses unhindered" (1989: 173). Driesch's entelechy is an immaterial force, acting to bring about the unified development of an organic individual from out of initially pluripotent cells. As a result of entelechy, "a sum (of possibilities of happening) is transformed into a unity (of real results of happening) without any spatial or material preformation of this unity" (Driesch 1929: 215).

Entelechy was what guided initially pluripotent cells to the specific structures in which their development culminated. Cellular pluripotency explained the fact that cells isolated at the two-cell stage of development in sea urchin eggs did not produce two half-embryos but two fully formed sea urchins. Entelechy explained the way those cells were guided towards their final forms, since their pluripotency seemed like evidence of the idea that no physical or chemical structures existed in order to determine development in advance. Driesch thought that cases of regeneration supported the existence of entelechy as well, since they demonstrate the way the individuality of the organism could be safeguarded against changes to its composition. Not only can living things self-regulate developmentally, but they can do so compositionally as well (153–154). The special force that brings about the individual whole from out of a pluripotent cellular field also secures the integrity of that whole once it is constituted. Regulation is regeneration for the adult organism. Driesch supposed both to be impossibilities for mechanical systems. He concluded that "embryological becoming is 'vitalistic' . . . it is impossible to comprehend it by the laws of physics and chemistry" (1914: 226). This is vitalism neatly stated: physics and chemistry are inadequate to the explanation of biological phenomena, and biology therefore requires the addition of a supplemental principle.
## 2 Bergson's Critique

As Driesch demonstrated, vitalisms typically consist in critical as well as construc-
tive elements. Their criticisms target the scientific understanding of matter, usually
mechanistically conceived, and argue that it is insufficient to the explanation of
what is distinct about biological phenomena. Their constructive arguments advance
varying positions regarding the new and irreducible principle, property, or force that
has to be introduced in order to capture the specificity of life. Vitalism's critics pur-
port to attack both, but it is only really a succession of variants of vitalism's con-
structive aspect that have been consistently discredited. Like many others, Bergson
considers the critical moment worth taking seriously. Biology is for him irreducible
to physicochemical explanation. In this respect Bergson is no doubt a vitalist, but
this tells us little. The more interesting question is whether he advances his own
constructive hypothesis as well, of the sort that would put him in line with Driesch.

Bergson does of course advance a positive theory of his own, but it is not one that puts him in line with vitalists of the traditional variety. Bergson is in fact an ardent critic of such theories. They share on his account an important deficiency with mechanism: both are human contributions and do not exist in nature independently. According to this criticism, Driesch's vital principle is an intellectual abstraction born of the projection of the manufacture model of organization onto the biological world. It understands organisms as if they were built artifacts and attempts to explain their composition on that basis. Here is Bergson (1998: 225):

> When we think of the infinity of infinitesimal elements and of infinitesimal causes that concur in the genesis of a living being . . . the first impulse of the mind is to consider this army of little workers as watched over by a skilled foreman, the ‘vital principle,’ which is ever repairing faults, correcting effects of neglect or absentmindedness, putting things back in place.

This first impulse is natural to the intellect, a product of our adaptation to acting on
matter. It consists in treating the organism as if it were an object, its organization as
if it were designed, and concluding that there must be a principle to account for that
design, just as artifacts are constructed and repaired by external agents. The mistake
is in thinking that organisms are complex in the same way that made things are
complex. The appearance of that complexity is only “the work of the understand-
ing” (250). It is not a fact, but a projection, and so does not require a superadded
principle that would act as a designer in order to explain it.

That is the first problem with any vitalism that accounts for organization through
the postulation of an organizing principle: its anthropocentric artifactualism. The
second—and more important—is its supposition that determinate individuality is a
biological reality. Bergson delivers a somewhat sophisticated critique of this posi-
tion, though it is ultimately in service of his rejection of the theory of internal final-
ity or inner purposiveness. I suggest nevertheless that the argument against biological
individuality can be redeployed in the context of Bergson's engagement with
Driesch.
Bergson understands internal finalism, or the theory of inner purposiveness, to have arisen as a consequence of the empirical difficulties faced by the external finalism that he attributes to Leibniz. The Leibnizian doctrine is supposed to consist—on Bergson's gloss—in the idea that “beings merely realize a programme previously arranged” (1998: 39).<fnref n="1" /> On that account, the event of any actualization was preceded not only by its own specific possibility, but by a global set of possibilities together comprising the plan or programme on the basis of which it was realized. Bergson calls this externalist because it locates the goal, end, aim, or purpose orienting the actualization process external to any particular individual being actualized; it is attributed to world, not to the beings that populate it. There is more to say about this interpretation of Leibniz—as well as about the possibilism that it implies—but what is important for now is (1) the idea that doctrines of finalism have to locate ends, or purposes, *somewhere*; and (2) that external finalism consists in the location of purpose beyond or outside of the particular beings that realize it, in the whole instead of its parts.

Now, Bergson suggests that it is “the tendency of the doctrine of finality” to “thin out the Leibnizian finalism by breaking it into an infinite number of pieces” in response to the fact that “if the universe as a whole is the carrying out of a plan, this cannot be demonstrated empirically” (40). Indeed, “the facts would equally well testify to the contrary,” for nature taken as a whole would seem to evidence as much disorder as order, chaos as harmony, as much retrogression as progress (40). Though it seems unlikely that finality might be reasonably affirmed of the whole of life as such, “might it not yet be true, says the finalist, of each organism taken separately?” (40). By further individuating its object, finalism locates the empirical reality of disorder in the clash of organisms with each other in order to preserve purposiveness at the level of each individual organism taken with respect to itself. Bergson calls this “internal finality” since it attributes purposiveness to the internal composition of the organic body as an explanation for the division of labour among its parts and their integration in service of the end of the individual whole (41).

When Bergson declares this “the notion of finality which has long been classic,” I think he has Kant and Hegel in mind (41). It was Kant who first distinguished between external and internal purposiveness, the same terms that Bergson employs

<footnote n="1">¹This is something of a caricature of Leibniz’s defense of teleology (cf. Jorati 2017: 59–91). Leibniz serves to personify a certain position within Bergson’s critical programme; that position is the elaboration to its conceptual conclusion of the idea that actual entities are the realizations of possibilities that pre-exist them. To the extent that the reality of time requires, for Bergson, a concomitant epistemic unforeseeability, it follows that any defense of preexistent possibilities at all is as mistaken as the extreme form of the position that he attributes to Leibniz. Consider also Bergson’s methodology of tendency-analysis, according to which he extrapolates from a given tendency its fullest culmination and takes that to represent the core principle of the tendency itself (cf. 1998: 136).</footnote>
in order to effectuate his own distinction in theories of biological finalism.<fnref n="2" /> By external purposiveness, Kant meant the finality of artifactual manufacture, since the particular end served by the artifact lies outside of itself in its use; by internal purposiveness, on the other hand, he meant the particular kind of finality that qualifies living beings, for the ends served by the organization of their parts are *internal* to the wholes that they compose (2000: §82; 5: 425). The living being was to be conceived for Kant through itself, as self-organizing: it is, as a whole, the final cause of the efficient-causal relations among its parts, even as it is constituted by them recursively. And yet, the thought of purposive organization nevertheless required the thought of an external intention; this was the central antinomy of his “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment” (§70; 5: 387). Its resolution was to come by way of Kant’s account of regulative judgments. Teleology was not, then, to be predicated of the organism constitutively, as if it really was a made thing; teleology was rather to be ascribed to it only regulatively, as a necessary constraint on the intelligibility of the organism as organized matter. Hegel later famously undertook to push the concept of internal purposiveness beyond its Kantian heritage by unbinding it completely from the yoke of externality (cf. Kreines 2004). The decisive Hegelian definition of life was therefore to consist in large part in the non-oppositional reciprocity between organization and purpose in the individual being (1969: §216, §219; cf. Kreines 2008). It is Hegel, then, that best represents the internalist culmination of the second tenet of Leibnizian finalism (cf. Michelini 2008). And so by 1907 it would have made sense for Bergson to consider “classic” the formulation of finalism that restricted the attribution of purposiveness to the organism qua self-organizing individual.

Bergson's contention that "finality is external or it is nothing at all" is therefore an audacious one; its foil might well be the entire history of the German Idealist philosophy of nature (1998: 41; cf. Wandschneider 2010: 71). I reconstruct the argument in four steps: discernment, criticism, and two inferences. Bergson begins by discerning in the theory of internal finality its dependence on a conception of the organism as a rigorously bounded individual. If its parts are to be subordinated to the organismal whole as the final cause of their organization, then there must be a determinate distinction between that whole and its outside; the whole must, in other words, have a definite shape. Purposiveness can only be internal with respect to a limit—a bounded individuality—that would differentiate that internality from what is external to it. The theory of inner purposiveness stands or falls with the individuality of the organism.

<footnote n="2">²Note that the organic body was, for Leibniz, to be understood as analogous to a human-made machine; the difference was that organisms were *infinitely* complex, while man-made machines eventually bottomed out into organized parts—which were, again, infinitely complex machines themselves (cf. Illetterati 2014: 89). Whereas the technical artifact was a product, for Leibniz, of human intelligence, the organic machine was to be understood as a product of the divine intellect instead (Smith 2011: 165–196). But both, on Kant’s gloss, are equally made things; and therefore the purposiveness of the organization of both reside outside of them, in their respective makers (2000: §65; 5: 374). A properly *natural* purposiveness therefore required, for Kant, the overcoming of the utility-based teleology still prominent in Leibniz’s externalism.</footnote>
The second step to the argument is a criticism of this conception of the organism. It is motivated by two considerations: the relative autonomy of the parts, patterns, and processes that constitute the organism; and the continuity of the germ cells through their temporary instantiation in the soma. Bergson begins by noting that each of the elements of the organismal whole “may itself be an organism in certain cases,” that “the cells of which the tissues are made,” for instance, “have also a certain independence,” and that, in sum, there is to be attributed to the organism’s parts a relative autonomy from the whole (1998: 41–42). Thus, the same self-organizational powers that define the organism as a whole are characteristic too of the parts and processes that constitute it, as well as the subsystems whose interactions constitute them in turn. The unified individuality of the organism is perhaps better understood as the coordination of a set of self-organizing living systems that are each at the same time conceivable as unified biological individuals in their own right. It follows for Bergson that the inner purposiveness of the organism is in principle *external* to the inner purposiveness of each one of its parts when they are understood as self-organizing systems themselves. This is what Bergson means when he says that “the idea of a finality that is *always* internal is therefore a self-destructive notion” (1998: 41; cf. Ansell-Pearson 2002: 134).

Bergson prefers to put the point in terms of the impossibility for individuation, identity, or mereological closure to ever establish itself fully or finally in the organic domain. This formulation is represented in the second reason motivating Bergson's argument against the internalist's conception of the organism: given the facts of reproduction, organic individuation is always incomplete. Bergson makes passing reference here to the "Weismann barrier," the theoretically inviolable division between germinal and somatic cells (1998: 42). On Weismann's account, it is only germinal cells, or gametes, that have heritability functions: they pass information along their own line only (1893: 174). The somatic cells are an effect or product of the totipotent zygote, which is itself a product of the fusion of haploid gametes or germ cells. The germ cells are formed on the basis of a vital substance that Weismann called the germ-plasm, which remains continuous and unchanged through each iteration of this process (1893: 184). The causal line runs in one direction: the germ cells give rise both to themselves as well as to the somatic cells, while the somatic cells produce only cells that develop into the body of an organism (cf. Sabour and Schöler 2012: 716). This internal split rends the organic world in two, subtracting evolutionary significance from constituted organisms and relocating it in the pre-individual germ line that runs through them. This means that somatic mutations cannot be inherited; neither can habits, acquired characteristics, or associations. The germ line is deathless; individual organisms are its temporary excrescences, epiphenomenal byproducts deposited along the course of the germinal flow (cf. Bergson 1998: 26–27, 87). This is an extreme position, and has since been weakened and complicated by the epigenetic revolution in evolutionary theory (cf. Surani 2016: 136). Bergson thinks, in any case, that reproduction is on its own sufficient to furnish his conclusion that individuation is, in the organic domain, always necessarily unfinished (1998: 43, 27).
The implication is that if there is to be a vital principle, it cannot be indexed to individual organisms, because—if for no other reason—organisms are never completely individual. Germinally understood, reproduction undermines the closed individuality of the organism from behind by opening it onto its generating conditions. Since those conditions are developmentally continuous through it, the organism is less a thing of its own than a derivation from the material of its progenitors, a secondary effect. And the germ-plasm is, on Weismann's account, continuous not only through the processes of fertilization and development responsible for the formation of the adult organism, but through its entire phylogenetic lineage as well (184). This continuity must be what Bergson has in mind when he claims that in the attempt to locate and determine the principle of the beginning of an organism “gradually we shall be carried further and further back, up to the individual's remotest ancestors: we shall find him solidary with each of them, solidary with that little mass of protoplasmic jelly which is probably at the root of the genealogical tree of life” (1998: 43). If the organism is formed out of a combination of its parents' vital substances and determined by the unchanged germ-plasm continuous through them, then the same must go for each progenitor in turn. The parents on whose combined body the bud of the organism first sprouted are each themselves the flowers of budding parts of a combination of parental substances of their own. The process of their formation was determined and directed by germ-plasm that was continuous through them as well. This means that the principle of closure that would secure the determinacy of the organism as a distinct individual is deferred backwards through each of its generations, arriving finally at the last common ancestor shared by all extant forms of life, Bergson's “little mass of protoplasmic jelly” (43).

“Where, then,” he asks, “does the vital principle of the individual begin or end?” (43). The question is unanswerable, for “each individual may be said to remain united with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds” (43). It follows as a consequence of this invisible (germinal) unity that “the individual is not sufficiently independent, not sufficiently cut off from other things, for us to allow it a ‘vital principle’ of its own” (42). Any attempt to individuate the vital principle is therefore going to collapse back onto the entire history of evolution and encompass “the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace” (43). Here is the anti-internalist logic running through this rebuke against vitalism: the vital principle is, when individuated, a variant of internal finality. When Bergson claims that the individual is not sufficiently independent for us to allow it a vital principle of its own, he means too that the individual is not sufficiently independent for us to allow it a *final cause*, or inner purpose, of its own either.

The closure required for the bounded individuality of the organism is frustrated by its reproduction and development just as it is by the relative mereological autonomy of its parts. Unifying and motivating these considerations is the same implicit premise: that internalism stands or falls with the complete reality of organic individuation. From this it follows, first, that in the absence of the ability to fully specify a limit between one living being and another—to individuate them—there can be no determinate distinction according to which purposiveness can be rendered internal. Second, and finally, we can conclude that if finalism—and any associated vital
principle—is to be viably thought, it will have to be rendered *external* to any ostensibility individuated biological form. To say that finality is a necessarily external attribution is to say that it is to be attributed to all of life *indivisibly* (43). Internality requires that divisions be cut into the organic domain, and since they are always incompletely determinate, the locus of finality will always reside external to them, on the outer side of any individual so considered. At the limit, this externalism is a global phenomenon, qualifying the *whole* from out of which internalism attempts to dissociate its individual parts.

If by vitalism we understand the postulation of a specific *x* internal to the purposive organization of living things in order to explain their irreducible distinction from inorganic matter, then Bergson is no vitalist. There are no autonomous individuals in the organic domain. Yet Bergson does not conclude by rejecting the idea of a vital principle; he affirms instead that if it is to be attributed to the organic domain, then it has to be predicated of life as a whole.

## 3 External Finalism

This “external vitalism” is a variant of finalism because it still predicates purposiveness of life. It predicates it of the “whole” of life. It also inverts its position: purpose is not to be located at the end of a process of change, as the plan or program according to which the change is unfolded, but rather at its beginning, as the impetus or impulsion that sets off the process and provides it a kind of directional puissance without constraining its development in terms of a pre-existent end. There are three components to Bergson’s external vitalism: (1) a particular conception of the “whole” to which externalism attributes purposiveness; (2) an inversion of the location of that purposiveness within the whole (that is, not as its end, but as its originating push); and (3) a reformulation of what it is that accounts for the existence of that purposiveness in the first place (that is, an impetus, not a plan, program, organizational unity, or otherwise).

### 3.1 The Whole

What is the whole, for Bergson, if it is neither the sum total of all currently present individuals (actualism), nor the pre-existent plan on the basis of which they are actualized over the course of time (Leibnizian externalism or “possibilism”)? Here is what Bergson says (43):

> If there is finality in the world of life, it includes the whole of life in a single indivisible embrace. This life common to all the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically *one* that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have
to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates
not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with
the collective whole of all others.

To ask after the whole is to ask after what it is that is common to all the living, unit-
ing every living being with every other at every level of organization. Bergson's
explicit answer comes late in *Creative Evolution*: that which “links individuals with
individuals, species with species, and makes of the whole series of the living one
single immense wave flowing over matter” is, he says, a “unity” of “the élan” “pass-
ing through generations” (250 tm). The unity of the élan is a “movement,” “a simple
process” (250–251). Partially individuated organisms are to be understood as
moments of a movement that traverses them, phases of a process that is realizing
itself across them. It is that movement, that process, that unites them (128). The
whole of life is therefore not comprised of all living beings past and present, taken
together as one total collection. The whole of life is rather to be understood as the
event of their progressive generation over evolutionary history. The whole of life is
the movement of evolution considered as a single unfinished event, driven by a uni-
fied impulse (cf. Montebello 2012).

Life as a whole is external to any one of the ostensibly individuated biological
forms that populate it because individual forms are only ever artificially stable per-
spectives on what is an event in the process of unfolding itself (128). It is in fact not
exactly correct to speak of the event and its unfolding as separate things. The event
of life is the very process of its unfolding, its movement, and nothing besides. Any
determinate form is by definition an artificial stabilization of it. Consider the flight
of Zeno's arrow, one of Bergson's favourite images. If the localization of the arrow
at any of the spatial locations through which it passes is an artificial operation, this
is because those locations are spatializations or freeze-frames of a qualitatively
whole movement, and have no reality outside of it. The arrow's trajectory is external
to any one of its possible locations in space as those locations represent possible
stopping points and are therefore derivative on the movement as such. The move-
ment, for this reason, is not only external to its possible stopping points; it is also
immanent to them, coextensive with them. The same should be said of life. It is the
qualitative whole of the event of evolution. Determinate organic forms are only its
possible stopping points, and it is therefore external to any possible set of them. At
the same time, and as a result, it is also immanent to all of them, for they are nothing
outside of the movement through which they are formed (43–44).

## 3.2 *Unity*

If it is their shared history of development within the event of evolution that unites
the extant plurality of life forms—what contemporary theorists call the “deep
homology” beneath constituted organisms—then evolution unfolds in contradis-
tinction to the way artifacts are constructed. This is to say that in the domain of life,
unity resides prior to the differentiation of parts, or the proliferation of species. This model of life is at odds with what Bergson takes to be the Leibnizian finalism—or what we might better understand as preformationism—that understands the world to be harmonized in view of the ends that pre-exist and orient its trajectories of development, as if to integrate an initially disparate set of parts in view of a shared telos. Bergson’s response is, again, not to deny purpose to the process, but rather to detach it from its telic location at the end, and relocate it at the beginning. Purpose—to put it this way—is a function not of final cause, but of efficient cause, of initial impulsion. For it is the latter that is shared in common across a plurality of different forms, it is the latter that unites them and provides a minimal directional constraint on their differentiation.

If there is unity in the domain of life—whether developmentally or evolutionarily determined—then it is to be located at the origin of a process of change, as change means differentiation and differentiation means the divergence of directions. It is never manifest in fact, but only in principle, as the state ever further away from which evolution is always in the process of developing (51). We can add now that if pre-existent ends unify *initially* disparate elements by *attracting* them from *ahead*, then common origins unify *eventually* disparate elements by *impelling* them from *behind* (103). That is the inversion.

Bergson’s position is best described, I think, as an immanent finalism. Life “takes directions,” he writes, “without arriving at ends” (102; cf. 16). Life is purposive because it is directional, which means that its shape is not entirely the result of a series of accidents pressed into form via the mechanical force of external circumstance. But the cause of life’s directionality is not teleological; it does not pre-exist or reside outside of the contingent trajectories taken by life over the course of its own unfolding. The cause of evolutionary directionality is rather immanent to that directionality itself, interior to it. External causes shape, divert, and constrain it, but they do not explain it. This is the idea behind Bergson’s claim that it is the “movement” through which novel forms are generated that “constitutes the unity of the organized world,” and that the exterior force of “adaptation explains the sinuosities of the movement of evolution, but not its general directions, still less the movement itself” (105 and 102). Bergson offers the image of “the wind at the street-corner,” dividing “into diverging currents which are all one and the same gust” (51; cf. Cunningham 1914: 649–650). The air owes a bifurcation in its current to the mechanical influence of its encounter with the corner, but the directionality of its movement, which both precedes and survives its division around the corner, has to be explained in another way. No matter how many times it is divided and diverted, each new current continues an original gust in a new direction. It is the unity of the evolutionary movement, by analogy, that each of its forms has in common. Just as their unity lies behind them, so too does the finalistic force that accounts for it, the originary impulsion that is prolonged through the movement that differentiates them. Bergson calls it an impetus, the *élan vital* (101).
## 3.3 Tendency

What is an impetus? Bergson is emphatic that it is first and foremost an image bor-
rowed from psychology; that is, “it is only an image” for life, yet “no image bor-
rowed from the physical world can give more nearly the idea of it” (257). This is
because “the essence of the psychical is to enfold a confused plurality of interpen-
etrating terms,” and in this sense it should be said that “life is of the psychological
order” (257). There are five other mentions of the psychological nature of life in
*Creative Evolution* (51, 54, 77, 86, 208).<fnref n="3" /> One has to be careful about how to inter-
pret them (cf. Ansell-Pearson 2002: 137, 2005b: 68). One instance in particular has
attracted a lot of attention. This is the apparent definition of life as “consciousness
launched into matter” (Bergson 1998: 181; cf. 261).<fnref n="4" /> Bergson is clear, however, that
life only *appears* “as if a broad current of consciousness had penetrated matter”
(181). By consciousness here, Bergson means a “current”—elsewhere he says
“wave” (250)—“loaded, as all consciousness is, with an enormous multiplicity of
interwoven potentialities” (181). What makes the evolutionary movement look like
a current of consciousness is this multiplicity of interpenetrating tendencies. In the
equation of life with consciousness, it is the idea of interpenetrating tendencies that
is at issue (257). Bergson does not contend that consciousness really did penetrate
matter in the constitution of the first living cells, for example; he says rather that it
is *as if* that is what happened. Life appears as such, it makes sense to consider it as
such, but such is not in fact what it is.

Why the appearance? Life is essentially movement or mobility (128). The indi-
visibility of a movement means that its past swells with it as it endures. The ele-
ments of a continuous movement are tendencies, tending toward some limit, whose
progressive materialization over the duration of the movement describe its evolving
shape. When Bergson claims that “between mobility and consciousness there is an
obvious relationship,” or that “every [mobility] has a kinship, an analogy, in short a
relation with consciousness,” he has these attributes in mind (109 and 2004:
304–305). Understood as mobility, life can be seen therefore to evolve “exactly like
consciousness, exactly like memory” (1998: 167). For consciousness and memory
are defined by “continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real
duration” (23). This is what it means to say that there is something consciousness-
like in the evolution of life. The best way to grasp the analogy is via the materializa-
tion of tendencies over time. And the best model we have for how to understand
tendency is that of our own consciousness (Bergson 1998: 54; cf. 201–202). A ten-
dency is not yet an actuality; it is the potentiality to become some actuality if
unthwarted by the other tendencies with which it conflicts (13). When Bergson

<footnote n="3">³ Bergson makes similar claims, with similar qualifications, about matter as a whole and consciousness as well (cf. 2004: 292–293, 313, and 331).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴Alliez 2013: 69; Barr 1913: 646; Balz 1921: 637; Gunter 1999: 172; Kreps 2015: 171–172; Rignano 2014: 128. This is a small selection. The conception of life in terms of consciousness launched into matter plays a central role in most commentaries on *Creative Evolution*.</footnote>
claims that tendency “cannot be resolved into physical and chemical facts” he is stating the obvious, for only actualities can be resolved into the physicochemical components that comprise them (1977: 114). This is one important reason why evolution cannot be exhaustively mechanistically explained. This is also why the idea of psychological impetus, the effort by which a psychological tendency is actualized in image or action, is the best analogue we have for life.

Tendencies are less like the component parts of an organism, less still like a group of objects placed side by side, and more like “psychic states, each of which, although it is itself to begin with, yet partakes of others, and so virtually includes in itself the whole personality to which it belongs” (Bergson 1998: 118). This is how we ought to understand the suggestion that life, as original tendency, is virtually instantiated in the developmental trajectory of each particular tendency that is dissociated from it. It is virtually immanent to them both as the global tendency towards temporalization *and* as a domain of interpenetrating tendencies from which every actual developmental trajectory can draw in evolving, even after they are externalized from out of that domain.

I have said that the unity of this movement is owed to its commonality of origin. We can now see that there are two senses to this claim. According to the first, the evolutionary movement is unified historically, as each lineage ultimately originates in a common ancestor, something like the way every marble sculpture human history has ever produced can be traced back to a developmental origin in the biogenic formation of minerals. In this sense, every distinct species and individual being is a moment in the ongoing elaboration of a single history, an unfinished event, and can be traced back to the one common origin of all evolvable terrestrial life. Its difference from the history of marble is that every present living being retains the whole evolutionary past in the form of organic memory. This is what it means to say that life endures (15). According to the second sense of the claim, the common origin of all life is in turn the manifestation of a densely heterogeneous tendency towards indetermination, implicating within itself an interpenetrating mass of virtual tendencies as well (258). This global whole is contracted and instantiated in the actuality of each extant evolutionary trajectory, unifying every living being with every other as dissociated parts from the whole that implicates them. The *élan vital* is both the originating condition of all living forms as well as the immanent unification of the divergent directions taken by the evolution of those forms via the register of virtual tendency that is instantiated across each (cf. Deleuze 2006: 94).

In sum, Bergson's form of finalism consists in (1) a reconception of externalism, (2) an inversion of its location of unity, and (3) a reconfiguration of what it is that accounts for the existence of that unity in the first place. (1) Bergson conceives the “whole” to which purposiveness is attributed not as the sum total of living entities in harmonious relation with each other, but as the evolutionary movement whose unfolding generates each of those entities from out of itself. As we will see, this means, for Bergson, that stable forms—whether of the organ, the individual, the species, or otherwise—are in fact best understood as the outlines of the directional movements that run through them. (2) Bergson detaches externalism's principle of unification from the teleological postulate of a pre-existent end, or plan, and
relocates it in the originary impetus driving the evolutionary movement from which stable forms are to be derived. Finally, (3) he reconfigures the commonality of the origin of movement according to the psychological interpenetration of life by reformating it through his modal mereology and positing it as both the register of interpenetrating tendencies as well as the essence of tendency as such, which is to extend itself to its limit, dividing in response to obstacles in order to extend itself ever further in divergent directions.

## 4 Conclusion

The problem with vitalism, for Bergson, is not that it insists on a difference between life and matter, but that it incorrectly individuates the difference-maker between the two. Bergson's difference-maker is something like Driesch's entelechy, though it is not an actual force—whether material or immaterial—but rather a virtual tendency. More importantly, its position is external to the ostensible individuality of any given biological form. Driesch's entelechy safeguards biological individuality; Bergson's *élan* explodes it. As a consequence, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, he should be positioned diagonally to the ideas of biological individuality, organization, and autonomy that are taken to characterize the “contemporary vitalism” at issue in Bakhtin's critique, for instance. Bergson is better understood as advocating for a tendency whose finality is immanent to it, and a directionality or orthogenicity that resides in the whole movement of evolution understood as a single event. For this reason I think that Bergson may be better situated in line with thinkers that problematize biological individuality than with the thinkers—the vitalists—that attempt to safeguard its reality and explain its irreducibility. Another way of putting the point is to say that what is at stake in Bergson's peculiar form of vitalism is the incomplete individuation of biological forms in the movement of evolution and their association with each other, both in organized quasi-wholes, and over time, in generationally striated processes of populational differentiation.

This, then, is Bergson's vitalist wager: contra Driesch, *there are no complete individuals in the biological domain*, and thus instead of having to account for their individuality, it is rather their trans-individuality, or their openness both to each other and to the evolutionary process through which their closure is effaced, that has to be accounted for—and Bergson does this through the idea of a tendency realizing a directional but open-ended progress across them. I think there are at least three possible benefits to this shift. One is that it avoids the problems that Bergson identifies in Driesch's brand of vitalism, though of course this only registers as a benefit if one accepts Bergson's criticism of Driesch. A second is that it seems nicely fitted to theories of deep homology and developmental constraint, as the *élan* is intended as an explanation of the deep continuity running beneath ostensible individuals, and it is an explanation that mediates the force of selection in accounting for the generation of heritable traits by positing directional constraints—in a process of what Bergson calls canalization—that trend and pattern the evolutionary movement.
Finally, a third possible benefit might be located in the fact that since the élan is in some ways an anti-individuating, or perhaps a trans-individuating tendency, then it might also be brought into a profitable alliance with recent work on the near-ubiquity of symbiosis, the microbiome, and holobiont or related revisions to biological notions of individuality. These remain for now only intimations of how Bergson's distinctive variety of vitalism might be thought today.

## References

Alliez, Eric. 2013. Matisse, Bergson, Oiticica, etc. In *Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film*, ed. John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille, 63–79. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2002. *Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life*. London: Routledge.

———. 2018. *Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition*. New York: Bloomsbury.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1992. Contemporary Vitalism. Trans. Charles Byrd. In *The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy*, eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, 76–97. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Balz, Albert G.A. 1921. Reviewed Work: *Mind-Energy* by Henri Bergson, Wildon Carr. *The Journal of Philosophy*. 18 (23): 634–643.

Barr, Nann Clark. 1913. The Dualism of Bergson. *The Philosophical Review* 22 (6): 639–652.

Bergson, Henri. 1977. *The Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

———. 1998. *Creative Evolution*. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola: Dover Publications.

———. 2004. *Matter and Memory*. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc.

Bognon, Cécilia, Bohang Chen, and Charles Wolfe. 2018. Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism. *Kairos: Journal of Philosophy & Science*. 20 (1): 113–140.

Cunningham, Watts G. 1914. Bergson's Conception of Finality. *The Philosophical Review* 23 (6): 648–663.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. *Bergsonism*. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.

Driesch, Hans. 1914. *The History and Theory of Vitalism*. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: MacMillan.

———. 1929. *The Science and Philosophy of the Organism: The Gifford Lectures delivered before the University of Abderdeen in the Year 2907 and 1908*. 2nd ed. London: Adam and Charles Black.

Gunter, P.A.Y. 1999. Bergson and the War Against Nature. In *The New Bergson*, ed. John Mullarkey, 168–183. New York: Manchester University Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. *Hegel's Science of Logic*. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Illetterati, Luca. 2014. Teleological Judgment: Between Technique and Nature. In *Kant's Theory of Biology*, ed. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, 81–98. Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

Jorati, Julia. 2017. *Leibniz on Causation and Agency*. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2000. *Critique of the Power of Judgment*. Trans. Paul Guyer and Ed. Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kreines, James. 2004. Hegel's Critique of Pure Mechanism and the Philosophical Appeal of the Logic Project. *European Journal of Philosophy* 12 (1): 38–74.

———. 2008. The Logic of Life: Hegel's Philosophical Defense of Teleological Explanation of Living Beings. In *The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy*, ed. Frederick C. Beiser, 344–377. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kreps, David. 2015. *Bergson, Complexity, and Creative Emergence*. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Leibniz, G.W. 1989. *Philosophical Essays*. Trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Lundy, Craig. 2018. *Deleuze's Bergsonism*. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Michelini, Francesca. 2008. *Thinking Life: Hegel's Conceptualization of Living Being as an Autopoietic Theory of Organized Systems*. In *Purposiveness: Teleology Between Mind and Nature*, ed. Luca Illeterati and Francesca Michelini, 75-96. Piscataway: Transaction Books.

Montebello, Pierre. 2012. *La question du finalisme chez Bergson. In Disséminations de l'Evolution créatrice*, ed. Shin Abiko, Hisahi Fujita, et al. New York: Olms Verlag.

Rignano, Eugenio. 2014. *The Nature of Life*. New York: Routledge.

Sabour, Davood, and Hans Schöler. 2012. *Reprogramming and the Mammalian Germline: the Weismann Barrier Revisited*. *Current Opinion in Cell Biology* 24 (6): 716-723.

Sapp. 2003, January. *Genesis: The Evolution of Biology*. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Justin E.H. 2011. *Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life*. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Surani, Azim. 2016. *Breaking the Germline-Soma Barrier*. *Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology* 17 (3): 136.

Wandschneider, Dieter. 2010. *The Philosophy of Nature of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel*. In *The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy*, ed. Dean Moyar, 64-103. New York: Routledge.

Weismann, August. 1893. *The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity*. Trans. W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt. London: Walter Scott.

Wolfe, Charles. 2011. *From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes*. *Eidos* 14: 212-235.

———. 2017. *Materialism New and Old*. *Antropologia Experimental* 17 (13): 215-224.

Wolfe, Charles, and Sebastian Nordmandin, eds. 2013. *Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010*. Dordrecht: Springer.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>
# On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch's Vitalism

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Ghyslain Bolduc

**Abstract** In the first half of the twentieth century the harshest critics of Hans Driesch's vitalistic theory depicted it as an animistic view driven by metaphysical moods, while others merely saw it as a barren hypothesis. In the last decades the heuristic value of vitalistic principles was nevertheless suggested. In this chapter I examine the epistemic role of Driesch's critical vitalism in the progress of embryology. I first show that it did not contribute to falsify mechanical explanations of development such as Wilhelm Roux's mosaic theory and Driesch's own embryonic induction model. However, Driesch's argumentation for vitalism led to the final formulation of the most challenging developmental *explanandum* of the twentieth century: the harmonious-equipotential system (HES). I point out how major *explanans* like Charles M. Child's metabolic gradients, Hans Spemann's induction fields and Lewis Wolpert's positional information were conceived as promising answers to Driesch's problem.

**Keywords** Hans Driesch · Harmonious-equipotential system · Entelechy · Experimental embryology · Epigenesis · Gradient · Field · Wilhelm Roux · Positional information

## 1 Introduction

In the December 1913 issue of *Nature* the British morphologist Ernest MacBridge (1913: 400, 401) made critical remarks against Hans Driesch's main proof of vitalism; if the value of a biological theory “is its fruitfulness in connecting facts and in leading to the discovery of new facts” then the concept of *entelechy* – which represents a nonspatial organizing agent that drives the organism towards the realization

G. Bolduc (✉)

Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST),
Edouard-Montpetit College, Longueuil, Canada
e-mail: ghyslain.bolduc@umontreal.ca
of its purpose – is “barren”. Rudolph Carnap later rejected Driesch’s vitalism for similar reasons. While the laws of science provide “*explanations* for observed facts” and “a means for *predicting* new facts not yet observed”, Driesch’s entelechy “does not give us new laws” and “did not lead to the discovery of more general biological laws” (Carnap’s emphasis 1966: 16; Chen 2018). Philipp Frank (1932/1998: 85, 125), another logical positivist, even severely considered that vitalism comes from the surrender of scientific *rationale* driven by “metaphysical moods”. If “the problem of the *method* of biology remains unaffected by the controversies between vitalism and mechanism” (Driesch’s emphasis 1913), is the idea that living bodies are guided by nonphysical agents strictly metaphysical? It may not be after all a coincidence that Driesch became a philosophy professor in 1909 and gradually abandoned his empirical research.

However, metaphysical principles have historically guided the elaboration of fruitful hypotheses and have been key elements of successful research programmes (Lakatos 1976). As a “meta-theoretical commitment” (Normandin and Wolfe 2013: 5), vitalism may indeed have *epistemic virtues* such as a distrust of simple explanatory models and their expansive generalization (Hein 1972: 165). Dupré and O’Malley (2013: 312) have suggested that vitalism in general acts as a “heuristic that stimulates productive inquiries into the nature of living and non-living things”. Does Driesch’s vitalistic view had a significant heuristic value for the progress of biology? To answer this question, we must first distinguish negative from positive function of a potential vitalistic heuristic. Negative heuristic of vitalism must clearly contribute in revealing the falsehood or at least the insufficiency of existing or virtual mechanical models, i.e. their flaws and their basic inadequacy with known living phenomena. On the other hand, using vital principles as *explanans* does not alone constitute a positive heuristic. Vitalism must rather guide the elaboration of biological concepts, theories, hypotheses or methods that somehow are added to the toolkit of successful research programmes. These derived epistemic products must therefore be involved in fruitful *explanans* that may lead to the discovery of new facts.

In order to examine this hypothetical heuristic, I proceed in this chapter as follows; first I investigate the potential role of Driesch’s vitalistic turn in the falsification of the Roux-Weismann thesis and Driesch’s own embryonic induction model. In the next section I shall: (1) evaluate the epistemic function of Driesch’s ultimate *explanandum*, the *harmonic-equipotential system* (HES), in the context of Charles M. Child’s gradient theory, Hans Spemann’s investigations on organizers and Lewis Wolpert’s positional information theory and (2) determine the role of Driesch’s vitalism in its formulation.

## 2 Driesch’s Empirical Falsification of Mechanical Models

As an embryologist, Driesch deeply undermined ontogeny most successful mechanical explanation of the 1880s: the so-called “Roux-Weismann thesis” (Hertwig 1896) that a mosaic of self-differentiating parts is led by the unequal distribution of
preformed chromatic factors during cell division. He also highlighted the insuffi-
ciency of the induction model that he had elaborated as an alternative to Roux's
mosaicism. In both cases the *explanans* was highly challenged by experiments that
occurred before Driesch's vitalistic turn in 1899. Here I then show that Driesch's
vitalism did not act as a negative heuristic on existing explanatory models.

## 2.1 Entwicklungsmechanik and the Roux-Weismann Thesis

We must first look back at the early history of *Entwicklungsmechanik*, Driesch's research program as an embryologist. Development, claims Wilhelm Roux (1885: 414), the originator of the program, is “the production of visible manifoldness [*Mannigfaltigkeit*]” and the origin of this manifoldness remains ontogeny greatest mystery: Is development new formation “in the strongest sense, the real increase of an effective manifoldness” (*Epigenesis*) or “the mere expression of latent and pre-existing differences” (*Evolution*)<fnref n="1" /> (414)? This is the problem this new program for embryology mainly tried to solve.

Roux (1883) suspected that most of this morphological and functional manifold-
ness was already latent in the newly discovered chromosomes – which were soon
related to heredity and called *idioplasm*<fnref n="2" /> by the Neo-Darwinian August Weismann
and others. Typical development would then involve the transfer of complexity from
the chromatic organization to the becoming somatic organization by means of indi-
rect cell division. But first the *modus operandi* of differentiation had to be specified.
The formation of the whole embryo or of one of its parts is *self-differentiating* if it
depends only on its own inner factors, while its differentiation is *correlative* if it
also depends on external determinations. Self-differentiating development led by
the nucleus would mean the actualization of pre-existing manifoldness in the germ –
while correlative differentiation may have “epigenetic” effects, the production of
new manifoldness.

In 1885 Roux expected complete self-differentiation of the organism performed
by partial self-differentiation of its components, and in order to test his hypothesis,
he carried out in 1888 what became his most famous experiment: the production of
half- and quarter-embryos after having punctured frog blastomeres of 2-cell and
4-cell stages with a hot needle. Spared 2-cell stage blastomeres became

<footnote n="1">¹ It has been shown since Karl von Baer that development consists in the metamorphosis of simpler forms into more complicated combination of parts, what Driesch (1908: I 25) calls epigenesis "in the descriptive sense". Roux's renewal of the old question of preformation (or "evolution") and epigenesis (Roger 1997; Duchesneau 2012) in the context of *Entwicklungsmechanik* conditioned the elaboration of "New preformationist" and "New epigenetist" theories of development (Maienschein 2005; Bolduc 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²This concept originally comes from Karl von Nägeli's theory of heredity. Nägeli distinguished a highly organized molecular structure which he called "the idioplasm" from the cell nutritive plasma - the "trophoplasm".</footnote>
semi-gastrula and semi-neurula while still being attached to the operated blastomere in disintegration. In Roux's eyes, the development of the healthy part could not depend on the remaining uncelled plasma because fixing and staining processes later confirmed that the targeted chromosomes were destroyed by the heat. Because self-differentiation seems simpler and less costly than correlation, Roux (1888/1895: 454, 455) concluded that *typical* development (without experimental disruption) of the frog embryo was also, at least until neurulation, a *mosaic* of at least four independently developing parts. He also assumed that these results would eventually be generalized to every embryonic cell and was convinced at this stage that cell division often involves what August Weismann (1893: 34) later called *heterokinesis* – the unequal distribution of the inherited idioplasm to somatic cells. Although empirical evidences showed that the distribution of the chromatic material to daughter cells is always quantitatively equal, Weismann postulated a not yet visible decreasing complexity of the somatic nuclear organization at each differentiating cell division. The formation of the somatic body would then rely on a stem tree of cells (Dröscher 2014) in which each branching division would be heterokinetic; the somatic idioplasm of each cell then only contains the *Anlagen* (morphogenic qualities) that its descendants need according to their preestablished fate. This was the best mechanical explanation for the inferred self-differentiation of blastomeres.

## 2.2 The Discovery of Part Formation

As soon as 1890 Driesch was convinced that *Entwicklungsmechanik* was the central discipline of biology but did not endorsed Roux's mosaic theory despite the most recent empirical results in its favor.<fnref n="3" />

Though Roux concluded from his experiments on frogs that development is the “metamorphosis of manifoldness” rather than its new formation (Driesch 1892a: 161), these had to be corroborated with similar experiments on other species. As Oscar and Richard Hertwig had already shown that vigorous shaking of unfertilized sea urchin eggs in water resulted in the separation of parts from each other (Maienschein 1994: 51), Driesch used this method to separate the first two blastomeres of cleaving sea urchin eggs. At the stage of sixteen cells he first witnessed half-embryos as expected, but the next morning he surprisingly found typical swimming larvae of half size (Driesch 1892a: 168). For Driesch this remarkable result showed that 2-cell stage sea urchin blastomere does not receive from the fertilized egg only half of the *Anlagen*. It is rather *totipotent* because “a normally formed whole larva can come from it; a part formation [*Theilbildung*], not a half-formation” (172).

<footnote n="3">³The French teratologist Laurent Chabry (1887) obtained even more conclusive results than Roux by puncturing blastomeres of ascidian eggs. For example, the formation of a “demi-individual” from a two-cell stage blastomere without “post-generation” of the missing part clearly supported the mosaic theory (Fischer 1991: 38).</footnote>
Roux (1893/1895) nevertheless interpreted this result in line with mosaicism: before these half-blastulas started reacting to their missing halves with *post-generation* process, their initial formation clearly showed the self-differentiation of the first blastomeres. In fact, Roux himself had noticed in 1888 late regeneration of punctured, seemingly dead halves of frog embryos. He understood post-generation as functional adaptation to the disruption of typical conditions and thought it must be distinguished from “direct” development (Roux 1888/1895: 520): (1) by its modus operandi, correlative differentiation; (2) by the material involved – a *reserve* idioplasm that is located in the nucleus of each cell. In the case of his famous frog experiment, Roux assumed (without any empirical evidence) that this back-up nuclear material travelled from the developing half to the destroyed half during gastrulation before proceeding with nuclearization and cellulation of inert protoplasmic substance. Weismann (1893) then suggested a mechanical model for regeneration that was based on multiple “accessory” idioplasms; for example, because the same worm cells give rise to the tail-end or to the head-end of the worm according to whether they are situated on the anterior or posterior surface of the amputation plane (126), he assumed that each worm cell had two accessory idioplasms (one for each end). According to this model each possible morphogenetic fate therefore relies on a separate idioplasm.

However, there is a crucial difference between these types of “post-generation” and sea urchin part formation: in the former the development of the healthy part is not affected by the regenerating part, while the latter involves the complete cellular *re-differentiation* of the isolated halves. Driesch did not witness the part formation itself but inferred that the opening of the half-blastula was closed by bringing together and merging the adjacent sides (*M*<sub>o</sub> and *M*<sub>u</sub>) (Fig. 1): the material which normally belongs to the median region would in this case form the right side, but at least no change of the embryo *polarity* would be required. It would involve nevertheless a global redistribution of the cell morphogenetic fates.

Sea urchin blastomeres are indeed totipotent, admitted Roux, but only because they can rely on a reserve nuclear material that can take over “indirect” development

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1** Simplified illustration of a half-blastula hemisphere. L left side material; B and C poles of the median plane; *M*<sub>o</sub> and *M*<sub>u</sub> adjacent edges of the median region.

(Reproduced from Driesch 1892a)</figcaption></figure>
in case of “defect.” Roux (1893/1895: 839) still acknowledged that how this mate-
rial was triggered and at what scale cell correlation was taking place was totally
unknown at this point. Driesch (1894: 11) however expressed his opinion on the
current state of mosaicism with a vivid image: “Roux’s theory is a pyramid stood on
its point: below, the hypothetical basic notion, above auxiliary hypotheses pile up
and finally as a heavy base on top – my simple experimental results”. Even Weismann
(1893: 137) sensed the threat of Driesch’s crucial experiment for his whole Neo-
Darwinian system, questioning the reliability of the experimental method (Churchill
2015: 418). The *ad absurdum* multiplication of accessory idioplams that was needed
to match all possible morphogenetic fates of sea urchin blastomeres was definitely
*ad hoc*. Idioplams then represented the unbearable epicycles of Weismann’s system
as the new regulative phenomena seemed impossible to save.

2.3 *Driesch's Method, Axiom and Prospective Approach*

When he published his result on part formation, Driesch (1892a: 161) thought that it “exceeded yet known physical (mechanical) phenomena” but expected that “it will probably be subordinated to the mechanistic view of the whole phenomenal world.” This position, which he called “unmetaphysical vitalism,” was in line with the mechanistic heuristic<fnref n="4" /> that dominated research programmes in morphological and physiological sciences at the time. In his methodological essay for *Entwicklungsmechanik*, Driesch (1891) philosophically justified the biological quest for mechanical explanation appealing to Otto Liebmann’s Neo-Kantism. If space is a pure form of perception and geometry is its science, then any natural phenomenon first ought to be geometrically – hence mathematically – represented (Waisse-Priven and Alfonso-Goldfarb 2009: 42). Natural events must secondly be expounded in physical terms. In this view, knowledge of organic forms first requires the mathematical formulation of the problem, while the latter is only solved “*when it is [...] reduced to the laws of mechanics and represented as a consequence of these laws*” (Driesch’s emphasis, 1891: 9).

In light of part formation and other fruitful experiments such as the “compres-
sion effect” (see Posteraro, Chapter *Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation:*
*Another Look at Bergson’s Élan Vital*, in this volume), Driesch followed to some
degree this methodological order by first formulating the problem using geometrical
notions such as mathematical function – i.e. the correlation between two variables

<footnote n="4">⁴This mechanistic heuristic prohibits the insertion of a teleological cause into the *explanans* of phenomena and leads to a convincing or provisional explanation of high level regularities in terms of lower level regularities which are provided by physiology, chemistry, physics and their technical applications.</footnote>
(x=f[y]) – and location in space. In this way he started elaborating a new *explanandum* – which he will later call HES – under the formulation of this axiom: “*The relative location of a blastomere in a whole will probably determine what will generally come out of it; if it is different, it will result in something else. In other words: its prospective relation [morphogenetic fate]*<fnref n="5" /> *is a function of* [is correlated to] *its position*” (Driesch's emphasis 1892b: 39). The formulation of this axiom entails the rejection of Roux's distinction between typical self-differentiation and adaptive correlation: if the fate of the blastomeres generally depends on their relative position within the embryonic whole, then the differentiation of their future cell lineage is *essentially* correlative. If the blastomeres of some species do in fact never re-differentiate and if some do it later than others, it may be due to unknown physical obstacles, such as the consistency of their egg protoplasm (Driesch 1908: I 73). The idea of unequal transmission of hereditary determinants through cell lineages was giving way to holistic determination.

This position led Driesch to rethink the problem of the origin of developmental
manifoldness in a *prospective* way. Starting from a given visible manifoldness,
Roux was asking *retrospectively* for its causal origin; a given form was either
already implicit in the germ from the beginning (preformation) or a new formation
(epigenesis). Driesch (1894: 75–78) now sees inherited manifoldness as the mate-
rial conditions of morphogenetic *possibilities* – which he calls *prospective potency*.
The increasing restriction of these potencies takes place during development until
the morphological fate of the parts – or *prospective value* – is irrevocably defined.
The question of preformation and epigenesis then takes this form: “Is the prospec-
tive potency of each embryonic part fully given by its prospective value in a certain
definite case; is it, so to say, identical with it, or does the prospective potency con-
tain more than what the prospective value of an element reveals in a certain case?”
(Driesch 1908: I 77). For example, the regeneration of dissected sea urchin gastrulas
shows that ectodermal and endodermal cells have reduced prospective potencies
compared to the totipotent blastomeres; they also have different prospective poten-
cies because an ectodermal cell cannot re-differentiate into an endodermal cell and
vice versa. Furthermore, all (ectodermal or endodermal) cells that belong to the
same germ layer have the same prospective potency – i.e. they are equipotential –
because a whole dwarf layer can regenerate from its dissected parts. This new pro-
spective view and its related concepts played a key role in determining the holistic
properties and specificity of developmental systems. These systems were now ask-
ing for a convincing mechanical explanation. This second methodological step rep-
resented the embryologists’ greatest challenge.

<footnote n="5">⁵ Driesch (1899: 41) later specifies that the terms *prospective relation* (*Beziehung*) and *prospective value* (*Bedeutung*) both refer to the realized morphogenetic fate.</footnote>
## 2.4 Driesch's Induction Model and Its Empirical Falsification

Because he acknowledged that eggs are purposeful arrangements of complex physico-chemical relations, Driesch never tried to *immediately*<fnref n="6" /> account for part formation and other cases of re-differentiation in physical terms. In *Analytic Theory of Organic Development* (1894), he rather elaborates an explanatory model that reduces the functioning whole (the *explanandum*) to the inferred properties and activities of its parts. With his “machine theory of life” Driesch (1896) was the first to introduce the idea of cell induction as a differentiating mechanism and anticipated the embryonic field theory.

Despite the precise ordering of mitotic and meiotic figures, Driesch considered that correlative differentiation cannot rely on the internal determination of a complex nuclear structure but rather on the increasing complexity of a three-cornered inductive network between (1) centers of formative stimuli that are specifically localized within the embryo, (2) the protoplasm of each cell and (3) its nucleus (Churchill 1969; Caianiello 2019). He postulated that all nuclei are heterogeneous mixtures of ferments that contain all necessary *Anlagen* for development. However, as catalytic-like materials these ferments do not directly induce cell differentiation but only give “direction” (*Leitung*) (Driesch 1894: 88) to the morphogenetic processes that take place in the protoplasm. The latter is then far from being passively formed by the organized expression of nuclear qualities, but rather acts as a “mediator between the inductive cause and the nucleus” (81). In other words, it represents both a dynamic filter and a trigger that switches from a stimulus-specific responsive state to another depending on its current composition. Only under precise chemical conditions can certain stimuli from the extracellular environment modify these same conditions which can feed back on the nucleus by releasing specific nuclear ferments into the protoplasm; these would in turn reconfigure the protoplasm responsive state (90) allowing the reception of other external stimuli or a new differential release of nuclear ferments and so on.

This pattern explains how cells that differentiate into different tissues can have equipotential nuclei: the fate of each cell depends on the differential selection of extracellular stimuli and on the nuclear ferments that modified the protoplasm throughout the course of development. The protoplasm then becomes the core of a differentiation loop that connects the cell to the whole embryo. Driesch’s theory also replaces the highly contested heterokinesis as the best explanation for the progressive restriction of prospective potency; under determinate changes the protoplasm would become gradually and irreversibly unresponsive to specific formative stimuli and types of ferments. And most importantly, it illustrates how the production of new qualitative manifoldness is possible:

<footnote n="6">⁶Causal analysis is still considered by Driesch (1908: I 119) as an *indirect* reduction to the laws of physics, because “the full analysis of morphogenesis into a series of single formative occurrences” may one day be completed by “the analysis into the elemental facts studied by the sciences of inorganic nature”.</footnote>
Development starts with a few ordered manifoldnesses, the ones that are given in the structure of the egg; but the manifoldnesses create, by interactions, new manifoldnesses, and these are able, by acting back upon the original ones, to create new differences and so on. For each effect there is immediately a new cause and the possibility of a new specific response, namely a new specific reactivity. We infer a complex form from a simple one given in the egg [...] consequently our theory is epigenetic *with respect to the origin of form as such* (Driesch's emphasis 1894: 86).

Driesch (1914: 197) will later believe that this kind of mechanical epigenesis violates the aprioristic ontological principle<fnref n="7" /> that “the degree of manifoldness of a natural system can never increase of itself”. This is why in the presumed absence of an equivalent pre-existing structural manifoldness, Driesch (1908: II 197) will appeal to “entelechy as an intensive manifoldness”; by purposefully suspending determinate physico-chemical reactions in the course of development, this vital agent achieves, like “the ‘demons’ of Maxwell” (198), what mere physical systems could never achieve by themselves.

In 1894 Driesch was still trying to mechanically account for the fact that the prospective value of a cell that belongs to an equipotential system is a function of its position. The first issue was how cells were localized. As experiments had shown that the egg polarity and the median plane set the direction of further cleavage, Driesch (1894: 14) inferred that they constitute a geometrical coordinate system (Driesch 1899: 49) that initially localizes cells within the embryo. As the latter grows, mechanical stimuli would come from cells under physical tension (Zuginduktion) (Driesch 1894: 83) and the emission of chemical stimuli would occur most likely from determinant points (such as poles) within the boundary region of the whole. Driesch assumed that, depending on its position and current reactivity, each cell receives various inductive stimuli *differentially*. Yet because each germ layer or tissue is typically delineated, the protoplasmic response cannot be gradual; cells would then only embark on the path of (ectodermal, epidermal, etc.) differentiation when the amount of received stimuli of a certain type exceeds a definite threshold.

But the greatest issue remained: when a part of the original whole is missing, how the new whole becomes the center of development (Driesch 1899: 20)? How do cells *harmoniously* re-differentiate, i.e. how do they “work together” (Driesch 1914: 209) to develop organs in proportion with the size of the new whole? As we previously saw (Sect. 2.2), the most likely scenario for sea urchin part formation is that while closing over, half-blastulas do not lose their polar axis; yet Driesch considers that their cells nonetheless lose their needed alignment with the poles. Because his analytic theory alone cannot explain how disoriented cells are still able to develop normally, he then postulated that the cell repolarization started after the disturbing event and was physically mediated by the magnet-like effect of the electrical charge of each individual blastomere (Driesch 1894: 22).

However, new experiments including Driesch's own dissection of a sea urchin gastrula in 1895 highlighted the insufficiency of this model as the weight of new

<footnote n="7">⁷Though akin to the second law of thermodynamics, this general principle is not limited to energetic “intensities” but rather encompasses “diversity of distribution” (spatial arrangements).</footnote>
anomalies became unbearable. Driesch sliced a complete gastrula at the equator so that each half-gastrula contained the half of both ectoderm and endoderm (Driesch 1899: 9, 10); not only were the missing parts of both halves quickly restored but also the gut of each sub-product later showed a smaller but typical shape (the strict proportion between the fore-, mid- and hind-parts of the gut was strictly maintained). How this harmonious re-differentiation can happen even without one of the polar regions, which were viewed as essential parts of the coordinating system? Together with the hydra and the starfish embryo (20–24), the sea urchin embryo is a type of HES (45) that is somehow able to achieve what Driesch calls “secondary regulatory phenomena” (47), namely the prior reinstatement of a new coordinating system according to the new dimensions of the whole. And if we follow Driesch’s induction model, the healed gastrula would then have to chemically reset all the protoplasmic filters and trigger the release of inductive stimuli from newly located emission points (Churchill 1969: 182). As a result, Driesch (1899: 37) not only concluded that there was an obvious “gap” in his analytical theory, but more significantly, that it was impossible to localize the causal processes that result in these regulatory responses. So instead of trying in vain to improve a model that was based on the “false dogma” of the machine theory of life (9), he abandoned it altogether. In 1899 he then spoke of “peculiar elementary lawfulness” (70) and “vitalistic causality” (71) but his vitalistic philosophy did not find its relatively complete form before the *Gifford Lectures* in 1907.

We now clearly see that Driesch’s “metaphysical” vitalism was the consequence rather than the condition of the empirical falsification of past mechanical *explanans*. When Driesch discovered the secondary regulatory phenomena he still adhered to the “machine theory of life,”<fnref n="8" /> but no longer saw how such a theory was possible.

# 3 The Challenge of HESs and the Positive Heuristic of Driesch’s Vitalism

## 3.1 Critical Idealism and the Argument for Vitalism

Before starting his research program, Roux (1881: 229) said that the developing organism was like a music box that can learn new songs everyday while building itself. Within a decade experimental embryology however revealed the astonishing regulatory power of many invertebrates and amphibians; these could then rather have been compared with music boxes that still play the same old song even when

<footnote n="8">⁸Innes (1987) and Sander (1997) suggested that all along the 1890s Driesch was one step away from openly identify himself as vitalist because he was already acknowledging the “teleological” character of development. I think the idea that Driesch was a “closet vitalist” until 1899 is misleading. Driesch (1899: 36) clearly defines his past mechanical conception of life as “static teleology”, which only refers to the purposeful arrangement of the egg starting structure. This view was also endorsed by Roux (1881: 2), who made the distinction between purposiveness and (nonmechanical) teleology.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2** One of Driesch’s diagrams geometrically representing the HES formula. An element X can be part of the system *a b* or *a₁ b₁* or *a₂ b₂*. The prospective value of X would be different in each case. (Reproduced from Driesch 1908)</figcaption></figure>

half of their parts have been removed! But after 1899 Driesch was convinced that HESs were not mere machines and he intended to prove it, not with further experiments, but with philosophical arguments.

It was then within the framework of his “Neo-”<fnref n="9" /> vitalism that Driesch developed the more thorough analysis of HESs. He first updated the *explanandum* to demonstrate that it was really a problem which, if approached exclusively from a mechanical point of view, was unsolvable. He first added a variable that was missing from the 1892 axiom (Sect. 2.3): the prospective value of a cell X is not only a function of X relative position (*l*), but also of the absolute size (*s*) of the system to which X belongs (Fig. 2). The new mathematical equation was at this point (X) = *f* [*l*, *s*...] (Driesch 1908: I 124) but the “*E* factor” still had to account for the necessary realization of X according to *l* and *s* in every possible case. The final formula was (X) = *f* [*l*, *s*, *E*] but the exact nature of *E* remained to be clarified.

This is precisely where Driesch subtly leaves the *explanandum* for the *explanans*, as he explains why the *E* factor cannot be a self-differentiating machine:

> Every volume [*a* b, *a*₁ *b*₁, *a*₂ *b*₂, etc.] which may perform morphogenesis completely must possess the machine in its totality. As now every element of one volume may play any possible elemental role in every other, it follows that each part of the whole harmonious system possesses any possible elemental part of the machine equally well, all parts of the system at the same time being constituents of different machines [...] you may ask yourselves if you could imagine any sort of a machine, which consists of many parts, but not even of an absolutely fixed number, all of which are equal in their faculties, but all of which in each single case, in spite of their potential equality, not only produce together a certain typical totality, but also arrange themselves typically in order to produce this totality (Driesch 1908: I 140, 153).

At this point Driesch argues that the *E* factor can be nothing but *entelechy* – a non-physical agent that purposefully uses the matter of the egg during development as a mean to achieve its typical form. Driesch’s main proof of vitalism takes the logical form of the following *modus ponens*:

<footnote n="9">⁹Driesch differentiates his own vitalism from past “naïve” vitalism mostly by the fact that the former did not arise from the direct “contemplation of life’s phenomena” (1914: 19), but rather *indirectly* by first making sure that mechanical causality was insufficient to explain these phenomena.</footnote>
*Premise 1:* If HESs cannot be machines, then they are driven by an entelechy.

*Premise 2:* HESs cannot be machines.

*Conclusion:* HESs are driven by an entelechy.<fnref n="10" />

As we can see from the last quoted passage, Driesch also provides sub-arguments in support of the second premise: unlike HESs, no machine is contained in all its parts and no machine is fragmented without its functioning being impaired (Weber 1999). This of course applies to actual artefacts like “the phonograph” but also to “any sort of machine imaginable in physics and chemistry” (Driesch’s emphasis, 1908: II 81). Does the concept of “possible machine” is defined by any machine “that Driesch has [subjectively] in mind” (Conklin 1929: 30)?

In Driesch’s view, possible machines are virtually circumscribed by what he calls *singular or additive causality*, where the sum on the side of the cause corresponds to the sum on the side of the effect. The primary characteristic of mechanical reasoning is the localization in time and space of connected physico-chemical events, whereby the parts involved “are changed in themselves, irrespective of the others” (Driesch 1914: 199). Against Kant’s transcendental analysis, Driesch also intended to show the apriority of another type of causality – the *individualizing causality* – by which “a distribution of the things in one system of the form of a mere *sum* would be transformed into a distribution that would be in some sense a *unity* or *totality*, without any spatial mechanical predetermination of this totality” (200). By first insisting on the insufficiency of all possible mechanical account of HESs, he ensures that, in order to be known, these empirical objects need to be subsumed under the pure concept of individuality, which proves that this type of non-spatial causality – and therefore entelechy – exists in nature (207).

“Neo-vitalism” therefore relies on a renewed critical idealism (Bolduc *Forthcoming*). Because entelechy is viewed as the product of critical philosophy, Driesch does not personally see it as a metaphysical dogma, but as a legitimate scientific fact (Bognon et al. 2018). However, if we acknowledge the possibility of a *priori* knowledge as a metaphysical assumption, then Driesch’s vitalism is at least rationally grounded in metaphysics. In any case this does not make it scientifically irrelevant and its value as a positive heuristic remains to be determined.

## 3.2 HES: The Developmental Explanandum of the Twentieth Century

Although it was highly discussed among scientists in the first decades of the twentieth century, Driesch’s concept of *entelechy* never positively integrated the theoretical framework of embryological research programmes. While it was mostly yet not

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ My formal reconstruction of Driesch’s argument was made in part from Driesch 1908: I 119, 187.</footnote>
only criticized by the scientific community, its lack of heuristic value comes primar-
ily from the impossibility of directly falsifying or corroborating Driesch's hypoth-
esis. How could experience testify to something that is "not localisable at any point
in space-time" and "being incapable of measurement, it cannot be a form of energy"
(Needham 1936: 69)? Driesch himself conceded that is was "of quite limited appli-
cation" as "vitalism has nothing to do with the progress of zoology as a pure science
in the narrower sense of the word" (Driesch 1913).

**3.2.1 Child's Metabolic Gradient Theory**

At best, entelechy was used by biologists as a negative hypothesis to promote their
own *explanans* for HES. Even the American zoologist Charles M. Child (1915: 24),
who made relevant criticisms against the concept of HES (Sect. 3.3), thought that
new vitalistic theories represented a real advance over Weismann's theory, for they
“have at least the merit of recognizing and meeting squarely the real problem”,
namely “organic individuality” (Child 1916: 512). In Child's eyes, Driesch was
right to stress on the need for a *dynamic* biological theory of the individual that
“must deal primarily with processes, not structures, and with changes, not with
static entities” (513). And Child explicitly meant that his metabolic gradient theory
was the only plausible mechanistic alternative to Driesch's entelechy (519).

According to Child's theory, the process of organic individuation is based on
stimuli coming from specific points in the protoplasmic mass (made of one or many
cells) that increase the metabolic rate of the affected regions (these stimuli can be
inherited or emerge *de novo* from external factors). Experiments showed that the
metabolic activity resulting from points under stimulation is transmitted by axial
gradients (Fig. 3) to other regions of the whole like the spreading of a wave. The
intensity of a transmitted metabolic rate depends on the relative conductivity of the
surrounded protoplasm and on the distance that separates a given region from the
starting point (a); the energy of a gradient then relatively fades off as it is passed on

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3** Diagram
illustrating a single axial
gradient in a protoplasmic
mass. a, the stimulation
point. (Reproduced from
Child 1915)</figcaption></figure>
from one region to another. Many axial gradients coming from different stimulation
points can simultaneously act upon the same region to a greater or lesser degree, so
that the metabolic condition of the given region will result from its position in the
overlapping gradients (Child 1915: 39). Most importantly, Child's major thesis is
that qualitative differentiation comes primarily from quantitative differences of
metabolic activity (Child 1916: 515). While irreversible differentiation is first
caused by the persistence of gradients over time, changes in the stimulation pattern,
mostly at the early stages of development, can transform the morphogenetic fate of
the related parts. Child's gradients had a theoretical advantage over Driesch's first
induction model: constellations of metabolic rates are more plastic and therefore
more adaptable to new conditions than the chemical composition of cells. In sum, if
a part of a lower organism that becomes isolated from the rest of the body does not
loose the original gradient axes, the metabolic condition of its own parts will then
proportionally tune with the size of the new whole; in the opposite case new gradi-
ents will emerge from the new external conditions. In both cases the piece can
develop into a new individual (Child 1915: 46).

Because metabolic rate was in some way subject to empirical testing, Child's
system had significant experimental and theoretical success during the 1930s, high-
lighting the role of metabolism in normal and abnormal development (Huxley and
de Beer 1934/1963). Although its explanatory scope turned out to be more limited
than first expected, recent studies on metabolic gradients in response to spatial stim-
uli in cytoplasm could still lead to a better understanding of the relationship between
energetic and genetic factors in development (Blackstone 2008).

3.2.2 Hans Spemann, Organizers and Fields

Unlike Child, the German embryologist Hans Spemann openly adopted Driesch's HES concept as one of the main guiding problems of his research program (Allen 2004: 467, 468). By evolving the method of transplantation, Spemann's team was able to address the problem – first formulated by Driesch (Spemann 1938: 199) – of the prospective potency progressive restriction (epigenesis, Sect. 2.3). They, for example, exchanged a piece of presumptive neural tube from a newt young gastrula with a piece of presumptive external gills from another newt young gastrula. Each grafted piece developed not according to its origin but passively followed the development of its host (Spemann 1927: 179). These pieces were then equipotential at this stage as each one integrated perfectly into its new whole: "The development of the part is a function of its situation in the whole" (Spemann 1938: 348). Spemann also inferred that some factor was locally determining the fate of the transplanted pieces. This type of factor was famously discovered by Spemann's assistant, Hilde Mangold, when she took a piece from the upper lip of the newt blastopore and transplanted it into an indifferent region of another newt gastrula: not only did this grafted material not follow the development of its new host, but it also forced "the surrounding parts to follow its own direction" (Spemann 1927: 180), as a second embryo developed at the expense of the host material. Because it "induces a 'field
of organization” in its surrounding, Spemann named it the “organizer”. Other organizer phenomena were quickly found in echinoderms, insects, birds and mammals.

The organizer was behaving, stated Spemann, “like a harmonious equipotential system of Driesch” (183). This significant association meant more than the mere subsuming of Hilde Mangold’s outstanding discovery under Driesch’s concept: Spemann here suggests that the organizer represents the key clue to the riddle of HES. It is not “intensive manifoldness”, Driesch’s “idealistic” entelechy (Spemann 1938: 347), but rather a localized structure that induces a field of organization which is, like the field of physicists, “extensive manifoldness” (302) – a pattern that operates spatially and hence materially. As transplantation experiments also showed the existence of second and third grade organizers – e.g. the *Triton* eyeball is itself induced by the mesoderm before it organizes a lens – the whole development appeared as “composed of single processes connected by organizers” (Spemann 1927: 186). Above all, the “field action” of these organizers was not a mere physical metaphor but a tool to describe and infer empirical facts (Spemann 1938: 305): in several cases the embryonic fields exceed the limits of the organ that they induce; they often overlap and when they do, one field must win the “rivalry” (311) for induction; some embryonic fields persist throughout development and during the adult stage (regeneration) even when there is no reacting material under their influence; like Child’s metabolic gradient, the power of an induction field appears to decrease from the source towards the borders; heteroplastic transplantations (grafting a piece from a donor of another species) suggest that fields release specific “genotypic potencies” (350) that were already latent in the reacting material.

Spemann admitted that biologists had “yet no real conception of what this means in the language of physiology” and that “the equipotential system capable of harmonious differentiation still remains as a real problem” before adding: “attempts to solve this problem, partly logical, partly experimental, induced several investigators to introduce into experimental embryology the conception of the ‘embryonic field’” (347, 348, 366). This statement clearly highlights the epistemic value of Driesch’s challenging *explanandum*.

### 3.2.3 Lewis Wolpert’s Positional Information Theory

With the discovery of gene regulation in the 1960s, a convincing explanation of HESs looked within reach. By elaborating a hypothetical cybernetic model made of different regulatory and enzymatic genes, Jacques Monod and François Jacob (1961) had already addressed the problem of how embryonic cells with the same genetic code may differentiate. But according to the British developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert (1969: 4), almost no progress had been made in the area of pattern formation since the 1920s when concepts such as regulative development, gradient and field were elaborated. Wolpert, who considers Driesch as one of his precursors (Horder 2001: 121), reinterpreted these notions within the context of his positional information theory, which he inferred directly from HESs. He formalized the latter in terms of the “French Flag problem”:
This problem is concerned with the necessary properties and communications between units arranged in a line, each with three possibilities for molecular differentiation – blue, white and red – such that system always forms a French Flag irrespective of the number of units or which parts are removed [...] This abstraction of the problem corresponds quite well with experimental observations on the early development of sea urchin embryos, and regeneration of hydroids as well as a large variety of other systems (Wolpert 1969: 5).

This simple schematic illustration of morphogenetic fate specification whereby each band of colour represents a differentiated part (e.g. germ layer) displays the same property as Driesch's concept, namely "size invariant" regulation of typical patterns.

By referring to *The science of the organism*, Wolpert (1974: 674) pointed out that Driesch was the first to put forward the idea of position specification. In fact, Wolpert unprecedentedly inferred from the correlation between the position of a cell in the whole and its prospective value that: (1) there are *mechanisms* whose function is to specify the *positional value* of each cell – i.e. the position of each cell with respect to one or more points in the system; (2) these mechanisms are distinct from and operate prior to differentiation processes. Therefore, positional information is first “read-out” by a given cell and afterwards converted into molecular differentiation. The positional value of cells in HES is first specified by a set of reference points that form a coordinate system made of one or more bipolar<fnref n="11" /> axes. In Wolpert’s landmark paper of 1969, the physiological nature of these determinations remained (and in many cases still remains) to be clarified, but the author advanced that metabolic or molecular (morphogen) gradients may be involved because threshold effect, which explains reversal of polarity and field<fnref n="12" /> dominance, can rely on both. He also made it clear that the interpretation of positional information depends “on the developmental history of the cell and its genome” (Wolpert 1969: 16). The role of the genome in positional signalling has been notably demonstrated with the discovery of the *bicoid* gene (Wolpert 1989: 5), which codes for the Bcd protein in *Drosophila* embryo. The patterning of this gradient along the anteroposterior axis exemplifies how positional information contained in a “morphogen gradient is transformed into discrete and precise patterns of target gene expression” (Crauk and Dostatni 2005: 1888).

At some point advances like this one led Wolpert (1985: 358) to believe that the *E* factor of Driesch’s formula (X) = f[p, t, E] was the genetic program contained in each cell. However, in the “postgenomic” era many theorists of biology (for example Robert 2004) consider this notion just as animistic as Driesch’s entelechy. In fact, Wolpert (1989: 8) himself recognized that the original positional information theory “tried to do too much”; it is nevertheless still paradigmatic today as new versions of the French Flag model take into account the “patterning by several interacting, spatially coupled genes subject to intrinsic and extrinsic noise” (Hillenbrand et al. 2016).

<footnote n="11">¹¹“Polarity is defined as the direction in which positional information is specified or measured” (Wolpert 1969: 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²A field is constituted “when cells have their positional information specified with respect to the same set of points” (Wolpert 1969: 7).</footnote>
### 3.3 Is HES a Vitalist Concept?

The concept of HES may be “the most distinctive and novel thing” in Driesch’s doctrine (Lovejoy 1911: 77) and clearly acted as a positive heuristic in the twentieth century embryology. However, one can still argue that, although Driesch’s neologism coincides with his vitalistic turn in 1899, it is not essentially tied with his vitalistic view and the latter did not play a significant role in its development. After all, the essential characteristics of HESs had already been identified in 1892 (Sect. 2.3), when Driesch still embraced the “machine theory of life,” like Roux and other embryologists. And according to Driesch (1899: 77, 78), the distinction between describing the *explanandum*, which results from answering, “What is actually happening here?,” and finding the *explanans* – the solution to the problem “Why does this happen?” – is clearly made when the scientific method is properly followed, as Galileo and Newton have shown. Following this reasoning, one could then affirm that the concept of HES would still have been created if Driesch had kept his original mechanistic view.

This would nevertheless be a wrong conclusion mainly because Driesch did not only view HES as an *explanandum*, but above all as his crucial *proof for vitalism*: “in the theory of the harmonious-equipotential system”, he stresses, entelechy “*must necessarily be applied*” (Driesch’s emphasis 1913). As we previously saw (Sect. 3.1), in this peculiar case he blurred the demarcation between the problem and the solution as both were parts of the same argument. The formula with the “E” factor, the diagrams, the abstract regulative power: the more the behavior of HESs seemed far from pure mechanical capacity, the more the entelechy hypothesis looked convincing.

This is why HES was from the beginning a very controversial concept. As “Driesch himself remarks that it is only ‘an approximate, as it were, figurative, method of speech,’” notices the American zoologist Herbert S. Jennings, “*no such thing as an equipotential system exists* among organisms” (Jennings’ emphasis, 1918: 586). In fact, it was Child (1908: 580) who first made a highly critical analysis of Driesch’s concept, which he called an “apparent problem” (*Scheinproblem*). Firstly, he raised that material likeness does not follow from prospective equipotentiality. Driesch’s belief that the material basis of the system is a relatively formless *means* for achieving the end of entelechy makes him deny the existence of not yet visible material differences between elementary parts coming from their past histories or external conditions: the problem then falsely appears to be “the self-production of heterogeneity from homogeneity”. Secondly, parts that are isolated from the whole are in fact never equivalent, as regional differences often remain from their previous differentiation and various internal and external changes result from their isolation. Finally, size invariance of regulative development or regeneration is only achieved *approximately* and with pieces of a certain size.

Spemann significantly pointed out what may be the paradox of HESs: although they “are perhaps never either harmonious or equipotential exactly in the sense of Driesch” (Spemann 1938: 347), they are still considered as a *real* problem. By
abstracting and extrapolating essential properties from empirical events, by giving
to these properties graphical and mathematical representations and by opposing
them to existing and virtual mechanical realizations, Driesch failed to convince that
entelechy was the answer but had nevertheless a lasting impact on how organic
development was viewed and scientifically approached.

4 Conclusion

Driesch’s vitalistic thesis, whereby HESs cannot be machines and hence are driven
by non-spatial and purposeful “entelechies”, did not falsify explanatory models nor
reveal their flaws. The Roux-Weismann thesis was rather severely questioned by the
discovery of the part formation in sea urchin embryo, which was achieved by
Driesch under a pure mechanistic framework. Similarly, Driesch abandoned his
induction model for his vitalistic thinking because it was not up to the newly discov-
ered secondary regulatory phenomena. Nor did the concept of entelechy directly
serve as a positive heuristic; because it was not empirically measurable nor testable,
it could not guide insightful experiments towards the discovery of new facts.
However, Driesch’s notion of HES constituted an important positive heuristic for
developmental biology throughout the twentieth century: though Child interpreted
it as an unfaithful representation of empirical events, his metabolic gradient theory
was nonetheless presented as an answer to the problem of organic individuation as
conveyed by Driesch; among other biologists, Spemann openly considered the HES
as the ultimate *explanandum* of embryology and saw the field theory as a promising
step towards its explanation; Wolpert based his positional information theory on the
French Flag problem, which is a formalized illustration of HESs. While it is true
that the elaboration of the HES concept started with the axiom of part formation in
1892 and with the prospective approach to the problem of epigenesis in 1894,
Driesch designed the reference and most impactful version of this *explanandum* as
an essential part of his main proof for vitalism. In 1908, holistic or “harmonious”
outcomes of development were: (1) systematized and abstracted from real material
restrictions; (2) represented in persuasive diagrams and by the mathematical for-
mula with the “E” factor; (3) defined as dynamically purposeful and irreducible to
mechanical means.

I believe that these results provide further insights into the process of discovery
at least in developmental biology. They show that, despite having often been labeled
as unscientific, substantial vitalism (Wolfe 2011) can have a real scientific value;
in this case it was able to influence the way the problem of development was under-
stood by biologists and addressed within leading research programmes. As Child
suggested, the specificity of vitalistic theories may consist in recognizing the
*essence* of the problem. One reason for this may be that vitalists do not carry the
burden of offering a convincing mechanical<fnref n="13" /> solution to it. However, this study also highlights that the boundary between the *explanandum* and its *explanans* is often permeable; by aiming attention at the holistic and “purposeful” dimension of organic development, Driesch’s concept of HES leaves in the dark the complexity of the chromatic structure and the material and functional manifoldness underlying (inter)cellular activity. But in this historical case at least, vitalistic and mechanistic thinking appear to have scientifically complemented each other, insofar as the former tended to establish what organisms can do and the latter, why or how they do it.

## References

Allen, Garland E. 2004. *A Pact with the Embryo: Viktor Hamburger, Holistic and Mechanistic Philosophy in the Development of Neuroembryology, 1927-1955*. *Journal of the History of Biology* 37: 421–475.

Blackstone, Neil W. 2008. *Metabolic Gradients: A New System for Old Questions*. *Current Biology* 18 (8): R351–R353.

Bognon, Cécilia, Bohang Chen, and Charles Wolfe. 2018. *Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: The Problem of Vitalism*. *Kairos: Journal of Philosophy & Science* 20 (1): 113–140.

Bolduc, Ghyslain. 2021. *Préformation et épigenèse en développement. Naissance de l'embryologie expérimentale*. Montreal and Paris: Presses de l'Université de Montréal and Vrin.

Bolduc, Ghyslain. Forthcoming. *Logique et développement. De la morphologie fonctionnelle au vitalisme critique d'Hans Driesch*. In *Les Vitalismes. Histoire d'une équivoque?*, ed. Bertrand Nouailles. Paris: Hermann.

Caianiello, Silvia. 2019. *Mechanistic Philosophies of Development: Theodor Boveri and Eric H. Davidson*. *Marine Genomics* 44: 32–51.

Carnap, Rudoph. 1966. *Philosophical Foundations of Physics*. New York: Basic Books.

Chen, Bohang. 2018. *A Non-metaphysical Evaluation of Vitalism in the Early Twentieth Century*. *History and the Philosophy of the Life Sciences* 40 (3): 50.

Child, Charles M. 1908. Driesch's Harmonic Equipotential Systems in Form-Regulation. *Biologisches Centralblatt* 28 (18): 577–588.

———. 1915. *Individuality in Organisms*. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

———. 1916. *The Basis of Physiological Individuality in Organisms*. *Science* 43 (1111): 511–523.

Churchill, Frederick B. 1969. *From Machine-Theory to Entelechy: Two Studies in Developmental Teleology*. *Journal of the History of Biology* 2 (1): 165–185.

———. 2015. *August Weismann. Development, Heredity, and Evolution*. London: Harvard University Press.

Conklin, Edwin G. 1929. *Problems of Development*. *The American Naturalist* 63 (684): 5–36.

Crauk, Olivier, and Nathalie Dostatni. 2005. *Bicoid Determines Sharp and Precise Target Gene Expression in the Drosophila Embryo*. *Current Biology* 15: 1888–1898.

<footnote n="13">¹³Here again, “mechanism” is taken in its *causal* sense. As Roux clearly stated, mechanical explanation of development mostly involves the analysis of *complex components* – which are not yet explicable in physico-chemical terms – into more elementary causal processes (Roux 1896; Needham 1936: 20, 21). Metabolic gradients, embryonic fields and patterns related to positional information are therefore complex components in Roux’s sense and are subjected to causal analysis.</footnote>
Driesch, Hans. 1891. *Die Mathematisch-mechanische Betrachtung Morphologischer Probleme der Biologie*. Jena: Gustav Fischer.

———. 1892a. Entwicklungsmechanische Studien. I. Der Werth der beiden ersten Furchungszellen in der Echinodermenentwicklung. Experimentelle Erzeugung von Theil- und Doppelbildungen. *Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Zoologie* 53: 160–178.

———. 1892b. Entwicklungsmechanische Studien. III-VI. *Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Zoologie* 55: 1–62.

———. 1894. *Analytische Theorie der Organischen Entwicklung*. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1896. *Die Maschinentheorie des Lebens. Biologisches Centralblatt* 16 (9): 353–368.

———. 1899. *Die Lokalisation morphogenetischen Vorgänge. Ein Beweis vitalistischen Geschehens*. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1908. *The Science and the Philosophy of the Organism*. 2 vols. London: Adam & Charles Black.

———. 1913. *Philosophy of Vitalism. Nature* 2301 (92): 400.

———. 1914. *The History & Theory of Vitalism*. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Macmillan.

Dröscher, Ariane. 2014. Images of Cell Trees, Cell Lines, and Cell Fates: The Legacy of Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann in Stem Cell Research. *History and the Philosophy of the Life Sciences* 36 (2): 157–186.

Duchesneau, François. 2012. *La Physiologie des Lumières: Empirisme, Modèles et Théories*. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

Dupré, John, and Maureen A. O'Malley. 2013. Varieties of Living Things: Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism. In *Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010*, ed. Sebastian Normandin and Charles Wolfe, 311–343. Dordrecht: Springer.

Fischer, Jean-Louis. 1991. Laurent Chabry and the Beginnings of Experimental Embryology in France. In *A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology*, ed. Scott Gilbert, 31–40. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Frank, Philipp. 1932/1998. *The Law of Causality and its Limits*. Trans. Marie Neurath & Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht: Springer.

Hein, Hilde. 1972. The Endurance of the Mechanism: Vitalism Controversy. *Journal of the History of Biology* 5 (1): 159–188.

Hertwig, Oscar. 1896. *The Biological Problem of To-day: Preformation or Epigenesis? The Basis of a Theory of Organic Development*. Trans. Chalmers Mitchell. New York: Macmillan.

Hillenbrand, Patrick, Ulrich Gerland, and Gasper Tkačik. 2016. Beyond the French Flag Model: Exploiting Spatial and Gene Regulatory Interactions for Positional Information. *Plos One* 11 (9): e0163628. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163628.

Horder, Tim J. 2001. The Organizer Concept and Modern Embryology: Anglo-American Perspectives. *International Journal of Developmental Biology* 45: 97–132.

Huxley, Julian, and Gavin de Beer. 1934/1963. *The Elements of Experimental Embryology*. New York: Hafner.

Innes, Shelley. 1987. *Hans Driesch and Vitalism: A Reinterpretation*. M.A. thesis. British Columbia: Simon Fraser University.

Jennings, Herbert S. 1918. Mechanism and Vitalism. *The Philosophical Review* 27 (6): 577–596.

Lakatos, Imre. 1976. Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In *Can Theories be Refuted?* ed. Sandra G. Harding, 205–259. Dordrecht: Springer.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1911. The Import of Vitalism. *Science* New Series 34(864): 75–80.

Macbridge, Ernest W. 1913. Philosophy of Vitalism [Reply]. *Nature* 2301(92): 400, 401.

Maienschein, Jane. 1994. The Origins of Entwicklungsmechanik. In *A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology*, ed. Scott Gilbert, 43–61. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

———. 2005. Epigenesis and Preformationism. In *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epigenesis/. Accessed 10 June 2020.
Monod, Jacques, and François Jacob. 1961. General Conclusions: Teleonomic Mechanisms in Cellular Metabolism, Growth and Differentiation. *Cold Spring Harbour Symposia on Quantitative Biology* 26: 389–401.

Needham, Joseph. 1936. *Order and Life*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Normandin, Sebastian, and Charles Wolfe. 2013. Vitalism and the Scientific Image: An Introduction. In *Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010*, ed. Sebastian Normandin and Charles Wolfe, 1–15. Dordrecht: Springer.

Robert, Jason S. 2004. *Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roger, Jacques. 1997. *The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought*. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Roux, Wilhelm. 1881. *Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus. Ein Beitrag zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre*. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1883. *Über die Bedeutung der Kerntheilungsfiguren. Eine hypothetische Erörterung*. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1885. Beiträge zur Entwicklungsmechanik des Embryo. *Zeitschrift für Biologie* 9 (3): 411–526.

———. 1888/1895. Ueber die künstliche Hervorbringung "halber" Embryonen durch Zerstörung einer der beiden ersten Furchungszellen, sowie über die Nachentwicklung (Postgeneration) der fehlenden Körperhälfte. In *Gesammelte Abhandlungen über Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen*. 2, 419-521. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1893/1895. Ueber Mosaikarbeit und neuere Entwicklungshypothesen. In *Gesammelte Abhandlungen über Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen*. Volume 2, 818-871. Leipzig: Engelmann.

———. 1896. The Problems, Methods, and Scope of Developmental Mechanics. Trans. William M. Wheeler. In *Biological Lectures Delivered at the Biological Laboratory of Wood's Holl in the Summer Session of 1894*, ed. Charles O. Whitman, 149-190. Boston: Ginn.

Sander, Klaus. 1997. Hans Driesch's "Philosophy Really ab ovo", or Why to be a Vitalist. In *Landmarks in Developmental Biology 1883-1924*, ed. Klaus Sander, 35-37. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Spemann, Hans. 1927. Croonian Lecture: Organizers in Animal Development. *Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character* 102 (716): 177-187.

———. 1938. *Embryonic Induction and Development*. New York: Hafner.

Waisse-Priven, Silvia, and Ana Alfonso-Goldfarb. 2009. Mathematics ab ovo: Hans Driesch and "Entwicklungsmechanik". *History and the Philosophy of the Life Sciences* 31 (1): 35-54.

Weber, Marcel. 1999. Hans Drieschs Argumente für den Vitalismus. *Philosophia Naturalis* 36: 265-295.

Weismann, A. 1893. *The Germ-Plasm. A Theory of Heredity*. Trans. W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt. New York: Charles Scribner's.

Wolfe, Charles T. 2011. From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes. *Eidos* 14: 212-235.

Wolpert, Lewis. 1969. Positional Information and the Spatial Pattern of Cellular Differentiation. *Journal of Theoretical Biology* 25 (1): 1-47.

———. 1974. Positional Information and Positional Signalling in Hydra. *American Zoologist* 14: 647-663.

———. 1985. Gradients, Position and Pattern: A History. In *A History of Embryology*, ed. Tim J. Horder, Jan A. Witkowski, and Christopher C. Wylie, 347-362. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1989. Positional Information Revisited. *Development* Supplement: 3-12.
**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>
# A Historico-Logical Re-assessment of Hans Driesch's Vitalism

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Bohang Chen

**Abstract** Today vitalism is widely dismissed as a metaphysical heresy. For instance, Brigandt and Love (Reductionism in biology. In: Zalta EN (ed) The stan- ford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2017) claimed that “the denial of physicalism by vitalism, the doctrine that biological systems are governed by forces that are not physico-chemical, is largely of historical interest” (p. 3). Perhaps the most “infa- mous” vitalist is the German biologist Hans Driesch. However, Driesch (In Rádl E (ed) Actes du Huitième Congrès International de Philosophie a Prague 2–7 septem- bre 1934. Comité d’Organisation du Congrès, Prague, pp 10–30, 1936) himself very explicitly stated that his vitalism is “neither ‘mysticism’[...]nor ‘metaphysics’” (p. 27). So, in order to address the mismatch between the present conception of vitalism and his own, I seek to offer a historico-logical re-assessment of Driesch’s vitalism. From the historical point of view, I show that Driesch had provided long ignored theoretical reflections on the nature of entelechy (the central concept in his vitalism), especially those in relation to evolution and physics. From the logical point of view, following logical empiricists (Phillipp Frank and Rudolf Carnap), I indicate that Driesch’s vitalism should be rejected due to its lack of vital laws, at least with respect to current biology; it is an unestablished theory rather than a meta- physical heresy. Ironically, some current theoretical biologists have proposed simi- lar theories (or principles and laws) of life, even though they (incoherently) reject Driesch’s vitalism. In the end, I briefly conclude that the failure of vitalism actually alludes to the fact that even today we understand very little about the nature of life (I mean, the pure concept/phenomenon of life!) (While I cannot elaborate here, it is of extremely importance not to conflate knowledge about the pure concept/phenom-

I thank Ghyslain Bolduc, Charles Wolfe and Christopher Donohue for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

B. Chen (✉)

Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

School of Philosophy, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
enon of life and knowledge about objects predicatable of life (Ben-Naim, manu-
script, p. 281). For instance, it is common among philosophers of biology today to
cite elementary knowledge in a particular biological discipline as offering a better
understanding of life. Yet their promise fails to be delivered. At best, they are merely
relying on knowledge about objects predicatable of life (in most cases, merely
knowledge about complex organizations of matter: about heredity, reproduction,
development, metabolism, etc); but such knowledge has not been shown of any
relevance to the pure concept/phenomenon of life).

# 1 Driesch's Vitalism: Introduction

The general attitude towards vitalism today is dismissive. While there is no need for
the majority of working biologists to care about vitalism, it seems quite expedient
for philosophers of biology to dismiss rival stances as vitalistic heresies. This phe-
nomenon was summarized by Susan Oyama: "one need not be a scholar of vitalism
to know that it can be a potent instrument of abuse, albeit one that often contami-
nates by association and innuendo rather than outright accusation" (2010, p. 401).
Oyama offered a good example. As an anti-reductionist in philosophy of biology,
Oyama has been classified as a vitalist by her reductionist opponents, especially for
her enthusiasm for concepts like complexity and organization. But Oyama also shot
back. For her, some reductionists are genuinely hard-core vitalists, because they
reply on mysterious concepts such as information (Oyama 2010).

Vitalism is rejected by biologists and philosophers today because they treat phys-
icalism (or materialism) as the default stance of modern science. In the entry
"Reductionism in biology" of the *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*, Brigandt
and Love gave an exhaustive summary of metaphysical or ontological issues rele-
vant to the rejection of vitalism:

> Ontological reduction is the idea that each particular biological system (e.g., an organism) is constituted by nothing but molecules and their interactions. In metaphysics this idea is often called physicalism (or materialism), which assumes in a biological context that (a) biological properties supervene on physical properties (i.e., no difference in a biological property without a difference in some underlying physical property), and (b) each particular biological process (or token) is metaphysically identical to some particular physico-chemical process... Ontological reduction in this weaker sense is a default stance nowadays among philosophers and biologists... The denial of physicalism by vitalism, the doctrine that biological systems are governed by forces that are not physico-chemical, is largely of historical interest. (2017, p. 3)

This summary was written in 2017. In my view, it provides one of the most forceful
illustrations of how vitalism is rejected today by presupposing metaphysical/onto-
logical positions such as materialism or physicalism (also see Haraway 1976;
Mayr 1982).

Despite the dismissive attitude towards vitalism, there has recently developed a
new trend of reconsidering vitalism in its historical context, and the leading scholar
is Charles Wolfe. Wolfe started with the French Montpellier school of medicine in the eighteenth century. Deepening the points made by Peter H. Reill (2005), Wolfe emphasized that at least some forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century went “without metaphysics” (Wolfe and Terada 2008; Wolfe 2008, 2017a). In addition, Wolfe identified what we might call the doctrine of Newtonian vitalism, inspired by Newton’s conceptual innovations in classical mechanics. Importantly, Newtonian vitalism, according to Wolfe (2014), was also without metaphysical baggage. Moreover, Wolfe in another article cast doubts on the traditional dichotomy between vitalism and materialism. He identified a few vital materialists in the eighteenth century who attributed inherent vital forces to matter (Wolfe 2013). In the end, Wolfe also aimed to show that themes of vitalism were deeply embedded in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment context; vitalism was associated with issues like the continuation of the Scientific Revolution and anti-mathematicism (Wolfe 2011a, 2017b; Normandin and Wolfe 2013; for positive evaluations of vitalism, also see Lenoir 1982; Richards 2002; Zammito 2018; Steigerwald 2019).

Thanks to Wolfe's and others' efforts, now it has been confirmed that the term "vitalism" was used in many different meanings. So, it might not be incorrect to claim that there are a variety of vitalist doctrines in the history of science. Given all of these, a categorization of these different meanings and doctrines should be highly desirable. Based on his extensive works on the history of biology, Wolfe (2011b) proposed that there are three kinds of vitalism, substantial, functional and attitudinal. For the purpose of this article, only the first two will be discussed. According to Wolfe, substantial vitalism presupposes the existence of "a (substantive) vital force" (p. 212); functional vitalism indicates "an attempt to 'model' or 'describe' organic life without reducing it to fully mechanical models or processes" (p. 213). Regarding this distinction itself, my view is that it is valid, with respect to biologists' thoughts and attitudes in the history of science;<fnref n="1" /> but here for our interest, it seems that Wolfe's attempt to distinguish between different meanings attributed to the term "vitalism" has also an implicit purpose of legislating vitalism. For Wolfe, the reputation of vitalism might be saved, if it can be shown that not every doctrine of vitalism in the history of biology was a metaphysical heresy.

The purpose of legislating the term “vitalism” becomes clearer when it comes to judging Driesch’s vitalism. Since Driesch appealed apparently to entelechy as the living principle, Wolfe took Driesch’s doctrine of entelechy to be a representative of (the bad) substantial vitalism, in contrast to (the good) functional vitalism. Yet, if Wolfe tried to save vitalism by disassociating this term from Driesch’s doctrine of

<footnote n="1">¹But to emphasize, this distinction might not be valid, with respect to biological knowledge itself. In that case, biologists (arguably most in the history of biology) who made the distinction would themselves be hopelessly confused. Such confusions are already detected in Wolfe (2011b). On the one hand, as Wolfe admitted, substantial vitalism was also “scientifically studied” (p. 212). Then, does this, even in the slightest sense, indicate that substantial vitalism can be used as a heuristic tool and therefore become functionalized? On the other hand, when functional vitalism claims to capture “the uniqueness of living bodies” (p. 218), does it succeed in doing that? Maybe in order to do that, it has to advance quasi-substantial claims as well?</footnote>
thesis of descent, Driesch took facts of evolution for granted. Further, since Driesch also proposed the doctrine of entelechy, naturally he would have to face the following question: "we know that entelechy...uses material means in each individual morphogenesis...what then undergoes change in phylogeny, the means or entelechy?" (p. 295). Thus, according to Driesch, in a concrete case of organic transformation, either the same entelechy used a different mean to "construct" a new organism, or a different entelechy emerged in evolution to "give rise to" the new organism.

On this question Driesch opted for the latter, in favor of "entelechy, rather than "the means". Let us quote him in full:

> We know that entelechy, though not material in itself, uses material means in each individual morphogenesis, handed down by the material continuity in heritance. When then undergoes change in phylogeny, the means or entelechy? And what would be the logical aspect of systematics in either case?

> Of course there would be a law in systematics in any case; and therefore systematics in any case would be rational in principle. But if the transformistic factor were connected with the means of morphogenesis, one could hardly say that specific form as such was a primary essence. Entelechy would be that essence, but entelechy its generality and always remaining the same in its most intimate character, as the specific diversities would only be due to a something, which is not form, but simply means to form. But the harmony revealed to us in every typical morphogenesis, be it normal or be it regulatory, seems to forbid us to connect transformism with the means of morphogenesis. And therefore we shall close this discussion about the most problematic phenomena of biology with the declaration, that we regard it as more congruent to the general aspect of life to correlate the unknown principle concerned in descent with entelechy itself, and not with its means. Systematics of organisms therefore would be in fact systematics of entelechies, and therefore organic forms would be *formae essentiales*, entelechy being the very essence of form in its specificity. (p. 295)

For Driesch, in evolutionary history it is less probably the case that a single entelechy "gave rise to" the whole variety of organisms through different means; rather, it is more probable that in each concrete case of evolution, a new entelechy emerged to "construct" a new organism.<fnref n="2" />

However, as Driesch alluded, with facts of evolution he had a different concern with systematics. In particular, he asked for "a law in systematics" which would make a truly "rational" science. Then what did Driesch mean here? For this let us look at his discussion of vitalism and evolution in detail. To start, there is little doubt that Driesch accepted Darwin's "theory of descent" (p. 250) or "the idea of transformism" (p. 251), namely, "the hypothetical statement that the organisms are really allied by blood among each other, in spite of their diversities" (p. 251). Like us today, he agreed with Darwin that "there certainly is a great amount of probability" in "the idea of transformism" (p. 251). In particular, he classified "two different

<footnote n="2">²Yet later in 1927, Driesch frankly acknowledged the other possibility that there might be a "super-entelechy which possesses a fixed essence and does nothing but copy its essence once more into matter, and realize phylogeny in this way" (1927, p. 6). To emphasize, no matter which possibility Driesch choose, he strictly followed the logical rules. Indeed, regarding these two possibilities, Driesch concluded that with "empirical phylogeny as it is...we possess no means whatever to decide" (p. 7).</footnote>
groups of facts” as supportive evidence, “the geographical distribution of animals and plants and to paleontology” (p. 251) and “similarities and diversities” observed “in the system of animals and plants” (p. 253).

While Driesch approved of the thesis of descent, he could not consent to the claim that the descent thesis explains “the diversities of the organism” (p. 255). On this point, Driesch raised strong criticisms of Darwinism and Lamarckism in his time. Driesch took Darwinism held by his contemporaries to be “dogmatism in one of purest forms” and very far removed from “the opinion of Charles Darwin” (p. 260). And he maintained that he was “speaking against Darwinism of the most dogmatic form only, not against Darwin himself” (p. 269). Dogmatic Darwinism, according to Driesch, consisted of two theoretical parts, natural selection and “fluctuating variation” (p. 264). First on natural selection. For Driesch, it was self-evident that natural selection “always acts negatively only, never positively” (p. 262). So, Driesch continued, it could be correct to state that natural selection explained “why certain types of organic specifications, imaginable a priori, do not actually exist” (p. 262). But Driesch stressed that it was misleading to assert that natural selection explained “the existence of the specifications of animal and vegetable forms that are actually found” (p. 262). For this, Driesch turned to “fluctuating variation the alleged cause of organic diversity” (p. 264). But he remained deeply unsatisfied. In response to contemporary Darwinians in the biometric tradition, Driesch agreed with them that the concept of fluctuating variation might be useful to explain “new quantitative differences” (p. 266); yet he insisted that it was illegitimate to merely use fluctuating variation to explain “organic diversities” (p. 269, for reasons see below).

Driesch also criticized the doctrine of Lamarckism or Neo-Lamarckism. Again, Driesch emphasized that he was not against the opinion of Lamarck himself; instead he only attacked Lamarckism “in its dogmatic modern form” (p. 271). For Driesch, Neo-Lamarckism had two basic parts, the idea of the “inheritance of acquired characters” (p. 275), and “the hypothesis of storing and handing down contingent variations” (p. 282). On the first Driesch said little as he viewed it as basically an empirical question. He concluded that “not one case is known which really proves the inheritance of acquired characters”, yet it is not advisable to “deny the possibility...in an absolute and dogmatic manner” (p. 278). Driesch focused on the second part, which was open to similar objections made against the Darwinian concept of fluctuating variation. For Driesch, “the whole anti-Darwinistic criticism...may also be applied to Lamarckism with only a few changes of words” (p. 288).

Indeed, Driesch took issues with the Darwinian concept of “fluctuating variation” and the Lamarckian assumption of “storing and handing down contingent variations” for exactly the same reason. According to Driesch, Darwinism and Lamarckism in his time were similarly problematic in that they “shake hands on the common ground of the contingency of organic forms” (p. 288): Darwinism tended to explain the diversity of organic forms through fluctuating variation and natural selection, Lamarckism tried to do it by referring to contingent needs of organisms in their living environment. But for Driesch, the appeal to contingency was unacceptable in science, and “other principles (were) wanted” (p. 281). Here Driesch
requested “law(s) of systematics” (p. 295), even though he knew well that these
laws might only be available “at some future date” (p. 295).

According to Driesch, laws of systematics were concerned with “the totality of
possible forms” (p. 296). Ideally, with such laws all possible organic forms and spe-
cies could be placed into a unified system, and knowledge about then could accord-
ingly be deduced from laws of systematics. Then, what would such laws of
systematics be like? On this Driesch wrote, with an illuminating reference to phys-
ics and chemistry (and Kant!):

In physics and chemistry no perfect rational systems have been established hitherto, but
there are many systems approaching the ideal type in different departments of these sci-
ences. The chemical type of the monohydric saturated alcohols, for instance, is given by the
formula CnH2n+1OH, and in this formula we not only have an expression of the law of
composition which all possible alcohols are to follow, but, since we know empirically the
law of quantitative relation between n and various physical properties, we also possess in
our formula a general statement with respect to the totality of the properties of any primary
alcohol that may be discovered or prepared in the future. But chemistry has still higher aims
with regard to its systematics: all of you know that the so-called "periodic law of the ele-
ments" was the first step towards a principle that may some day give account of the relation
of all the physical and chemical properties of any so-called element with its most important
constant, the atomic weight, and it seems to be reserved for the present time to form a real
fundamental system of the "elements" on the basis of the periodic law by the aid of the
theory of electrons. Such a fundamental system of the elements would teach us that there
can only be so many elements and no more, and only of such a kind...we are dealing here
with some of the most remarkable properties of the so-called synthetic judgments a priori
in the sense of Kant...(p. 244)<fnref n="3" />

Further, Driesch compared phylogeny (as the study of the evolutionary history) and
rational systematics. For Driesch, in contrast to the pursuance of rational laws, the
study of the evolutionary history only attended to "actual diversities" (p. 264) of
organic forms, both existent and extinct, found in the history of nature. But impor-
tantly, according to Driesch, the study of the history did not contradict rational
systematics. Driesch wrote:

Is there no contradiction between historical development and a true and rational system...by
no means. A totality of diversities is regarded from quite different points of view if taken as
the material of a system, and if considered as realized in time. We have said that chemistry
has come very near to proper rational systematics, at least in some of its special fields; but
the compounds it deals with at the same time maybe said to have originated historically
also, though not, of course, by a process of propagation. It is evident at once that the geo-
logical conditions of very early times prohibited the existence of certain chemical com-
pounds, both organic and inorganic, which are known at present. Non the less these
compounds occupy their proper place in the system. And there may be many substances
theoretically known to chemical systematics which have never yet been produced, on

<footnote n="3">³It might be helpful to show what Driesch (and Kant) meant here by “a priori” here. Important theories in science, like Newton’s thee laws in classical mechanics and the periodic table of elements in physico-chemistry, are of course a posteriori, as empirical achievements in science; yet they are also a priori, in relation to more concrete works in classical mechanics and physico-chemistry. In sum, these are both a posteriori and a priori, but only at different levels. I thank my friend Ghyslain Bolduc for raising this issue.</footnote>
account of the impossibility of arranging for their proper conditions of appearance, and nevertheless they must be said to "exist". "Existence", as understood in systematics, is independent of special space and of special time, as is the existence of laws of nature: we may speak of a Platonic kind of existence here. Of course it does not contradict this sort of ideal existence if reality is added to it. (pp. 257-8)

Driesch's reference to the laws of systematics in chemistry (e.g., the periodic table of elements) is illuminating. For Driesch, similar to those in chemistry, laws of biological systematics in relation to evolution, if they were available, would only determine "possible forms", from which the evolutionary history would pick up "actual forms". In other words, the evolutionary history should proceed partly in accordance with a pre-determined system of possible species governed by laws of systematics.

To connect evolution with his vitalism, recall that Driesch came up with the concept of "systematics of entelechies" (p. 293). Indeed, it is clear that, in Driesch's doctrine of entelechy, the system of entelechies must be correlated with the system of all possible organic forms. To put it more explicitly, it is not incorrect to say that evolution is partly governed by the system of entelechies. Hence in Driesch's doctrine of entelechy the relation between vitalism and evolution becomes clear. He summarized this as follows:

> Thus the problem of systematics remains, no matter whether the thesis of descent be right or wrong. There always remains the question about the totality of diversities in life: whether it may be understood by a general principle, and of what kind that principle would be. As, in fact, it is most probably by history, by descent, that organic systematics is brought about, it of course most probably will happen some day that the analysis of the causal factors concerned in the history will serve to discover the principle of systematics also. (p. 258)

For Driesch, if Darwin's doctrine or even Darwinism was understood merely as the thesis of descent, then it was the most plausible answer to the question of actuality: how "organic systematics is brought about". However, the question of possibility, that is, the question of "the totality of diversities", remained entirely untouched, and here laws yielded by the systematics of entelechies must be requested.

Finally, to emphasize, it should be kept in mind that the systematics of entelechies or the systematics of all possible species or organic forms, even till today, have not been given in any rational form, i.e., as a system of rational laws. Indeed, Driesch was not the first, nor the last to envisage such rational systematics for evolution. Rather, Driesch's request of laws of systematics represents the central concern of theorists of evolution in more than two hundred years, both before and after Darwin. Before Darwin we have the great name of Kant and other German philosophers of nature such as Schelling (for more, see Chen 2019). After Darwin, as we will see later (Sect. 5), the theoretical biologist Brian Goodwin has also come up with similar research projects. Therefore, it should be clear now that the relation between vitalism and evolution envisaged by Driesch is not the product of some boundless speculations offered by a discredited biologist.
## 3 History II: Driesch on Entelechy and Physics

As in Sect. 2, I begin with Driesch's *The Science and Philosophy of the Organism* (1908a, b). We have seen that in the first volume (1908a) Driesch with much rigor discussed the relation between vitalism and evolution in detail. In the second volume, in like manner, he went on to dealing with issues in relation to vitalism and physics. In his own words, he was going to show "how our concept of entelechy as an elemental natural factor is related to those concepts of general ontology which play any part in the science of inorganic nature" (1908b, p. 153). Here Driesch demonstrated his non-trivial learning in physics, admittedly rare among biologists at any time.

Driesch first touched on the principle of the “conservation of energy” (p. 158), which is now termed the first law of thermodynamics. In relation to his doctrine of entelechy, Driesch raised the following question, “how stands entelechy to the concept of energy itself?” (p. 164). According to Driesch, some contemporary physicists such as the distinguished Wilhelm Ostwald conjectured that “in cases of morphogenesis...some unknown potential forms of energy may be at work” (p. 167) and entelechy was just vital energy peculiar to life. But Driesch endorsed an unequivocal rejection of this supposition. Two reasons were advanced by Driesch to support his rejection. First, “at least in all [functional and developmental] cases where the economic equation [the principle of the conservation of energy] is fulfilled there would seem to be no place for a ‘new’ energy” (p. 168). Second, “all energies, actually known to exist or invented to complete the general energetical scheme, are quantities” (p. 168), but “entelechy lacks all the characteristics of quantity” and it is “order of relation and absolutely nothing else” (p. 168). Clearly, Driesch, in his own words, “decline(d) any kind of ‘energetical’ vitalism” (p. 170).

Driesch next dealt with the principle of the “augmentation of entropy” (p. 158) or the principle of “dissipation” (p. 174), which is now termed the second law of thermodynamics. Unlike many physicists and philosophers who have always been producing mysterious interpretations of the second law, Driesch took it to be “a mere fact that is encountered in almost all fields of physics” (p. 174). Since this principle was merely empirical, according to Driesch, “it of course offers no special ontological problem with regard to entelechy” (p. 176). Then regarding possible functions of entelechy in relation to physico-chemical factors, Driesch came up with some rather imaginative and entertaining suggestions. According to Driesch, entelechy might be able to “suspend possible becoming” (p. 179) in physico-chemical systems. More concretely speaking, suppose a chemical reaction, with all its necessary chemical compounds ready, was about to take place; yet at this time entelechy was able to suspend the chemical reaction. On this Driesch wrote:

> ...Entelechy is able, so far as we know from the facts concerned in restitution and adaptation, to suspend for as long a period as it wants any one of all the reactions which are possible with such compounds as are present, and which would happen without entelechy. And entelechy may regulate this suspending of reactions now in one direction and now in the other, suspending and permitting possible becoming whenever required for its purposes. (p. 180)
Driesch took “this faculty of a temporary suspension of inorganic becoming” (p. 180) to be “the most essential ontological characteristic of entelechy” (p. 180). In other words, entelechy was able to interfere the principle of the augmentation of entropy in physico-chemical systems, as “the non-physico-chemical agent” (p. 180). After this, Driesch moved to speculating about the function of entelechy in organic systems. Driesch started with his famous concept of the “harmonious-equipotential system”, which he considered to be a “system of equally distributed potentialities” (p. 192). Then in the embryological process, according to Driesch, “entelechy transforms a ‘homogeneous’ distribution of given different elements and given possible reactions into a ‘heterogeneous’ distribution of effect” (p. 193). In other words, “entelechy...is capable of augmenting its diversity of distribution in a regulatory manner” (p. 192), as “an intensive manifoldness, embracing a real system of pre-existing diversities in itself” (p. 197).

According to the principle of the augmentation of entropy, the increase of entropy signifies a decrease of diversity. Given this principle, did Driesch ever consider the role of entelechy to be contradicting the entropy principle? Not at all. For Driesch, the entropy principle only held in physico-chemical systems, empirically. Then regarding a biological system, Driesch suggested, even though the entropy principle still tends to eliminate its inner diversity, entelechy, on the contrary, elevates the diversity of the system as a biological agent. As a result, being biological, “organic systems may acquire a higher degree of diversity of distribution” (p. 197), due to the presence of entelechy. In a positive formulation, Driesch could say, entelechy and the entropy principle operate simultaneously, although in opposite directions, to give rise to relevant effects in relation to the biological system. So, for Driesch, “there is no opposition between inorganic and vital phenomena” (p. 196). To summarize, in Driesch’s doctrine of entelechy, it is perfectly fine to conclude that a biological system, thanks to the presence of entelechy, might be able to overcome the principle of the augmentation of entropy only ascertained in physico-chemical systems.

More generally speaking, for Driesch, in biology entelechy gave rise to diversities not found in physico-chemistry, just like gravity did with respect to Cartesian mechanics (p. 193) and human mind did in creating artifacts from chaos in nature (p. 194). Entelechy is just a new concept, which introduces a new type of causal factors. Since the presence of entelechy was assumed by Driesch to be unique in biology, it could then justify the autonomy of biology and revive the organic-inorganic distinction “forgotten by physics and chemistry” (p. 196). With entelechy, Driesch reminded us that:

> There also was a great contrast between vital phenomena and the complete “science of inorganic or spatial becoming” that is to be written in the future. Entelechy, as endowed with the faculty of enlarging the amount of diversity in the distribution of given elements, was in opposition to that future science. (p. 225)

By the way, given Driesch’s clear formulation, no one will fail to recognize the similarity between entelechy and the famous Maxwell’s Demon. Indeed, Driesch commented twice on Maxwell’s Demon. First, regarding mere physico-chemical
systems, “of course, the empirical law of the dissipation of energy would be contra-
dicted by Maxwell’ fiction” (pp. 199-200). Second, In the case of entelechy, “the
work of the ‘demons’ of Maxwell is here regarded as actually accomplished”
(p. 225).

Driesch’s discussion on entelechy and thermodynamics, or more generally, “vital
and physical principles” (p. 198), alludes to many interesting, but long-ignored his-
torical details about vitalism. Although these details cannot be presented here due to
the lack of space, there is an important lesson to learn from the logic of science. As
I have shown, according to Driesch, even though the effects of entelechy run against
the second law of thermodynamics, it does not necessarily follow that the existence
of entelechy should be forbidden in science. Further, in no way it follows that vital-
ism should be banned as a metaphysical heresy. Then, why is vitalism still not a
scientifically valid theory? To answer this question, we must now execute a logical
analysis of Driesch’s doctrine of entelechy.

4 Logic I: The Logical (in Contrast
to the Metaphysical) Refutation

As I have shown in the Introduction, vitalism is now almost universally refuted as a
metaphysical heresy by presupposing materialism and physicalism. Sometimes it is
even used as “a potent instrument of abuse, albeit one that often contaminates by
association and innuendo rather than outright accusation” (Oyama 2010, p. 401). In
this section I first make the structure of the metaphysical refutation clear. To do this,
let us first quickly review a few negative remarks on vitalism, from contemporary
biologists and philosophers:

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. (Crick 1966, p. 99)

Both scientists and philosophers take ontological reductionism for granted. Vitalism is
dead. organisms are nothing but atoms, and that is that. (Hull 1981, p. 282)

[Vitalism] virtually leaves the realm of science by falling back on an unknown and pre-
sumably unknowable factor... (Mayr 1982, p. 52)

No “vital forces” exist, and all living phenomena consist only of chemical and physical
processes. Such an ontologic position (i.e., a stance as to what exists in the universe) is
called materialism, and it provides the basis for contemporary natural science. (Gilbert and
Sarkar 2000, p.1)

[Vitalism] faded as the mechanistic side of biology advanced. (Godfrey-Smith
2014, p. 10)

The denial of physicalism by vitalism, the view that biological systems are governed by forces that are not physico-chemical...is largely of historical interest... (Brigandt and Love 2017, p. 3).

These passages contain both “innuendos” and “outright accusations”. In sum, espe-
cially in Gilbert and Sarkar (2000), vitalism is rejected with forceful statements
asserting that vitalism violates an overarching worldview legitimized by modern
science. Hull termed this worldview “ontological reduction”, Gilbert and Sarkar
termed it “materialism”, and most recently Brigandt and Love went for “physicalism”. In spite of this terminological diversity, it is clear that vitalism today is refuted by presupposing materialism and physicalism, and it is a metaphysical refutation.

A few more remarks on the metaphysical refutation. In the first place, my impres-
sion is that scientists are more used to the term “materialism”, and they are very
inclined to accept Hull’s ontological statement, “organisms are nothing but atoms,
and that is that” (I have encountered no exception!). In contrast, philosophers prefer
“physicalism” with the intent of being more precise. From “materialism” to “physi-
calism”, on the one hand, philosophers take apparently non-materialistic concepts
(gravity, electro-magnetism, field, energy, etc.) in modern physics into account; on
the other hand, they can claim that physicalism relies on ongoing physical sciences,
rather than knowledge in physics in a particular time.

In the second place, I anticipate that some will raise objections to my character-
ization of materialism and physicalism, since today there are diverse “philosophi-
cal” doctrines of materialism and physicalism (Stoljar 2021). I cannot clarify all
relevant issues here, but I do think that such a diversity is more or less a result of
terminological confusions. Further, the essential point I want to make is that mate-
rialism and physicalism, whatever they mean, are used in this context to issue dis-
missals of vitalism. In sum, the existence of life forces, entelechies and other similar
vital entities are judged as violating the metaphysical tendency of current scientists
and philosophers, and they all receive a metaphysical refutation.

However, there is a different way of rejecting vitalism, and I call it a logical refu-
tation. This refutation was endorsed in the early twentieth century by a few biolo-
gists and philosophers (for details see Chen 2018). In this logical refutation, first of
all, vitalism is not treated as a metaphysical heresy; rather, it is received as a promis-
ing (or at least not-too-bad) scientific theory. According to the Russian biologist
Alexander Gurwitsch, “practical vitalism claims the right to be restricted in formu-
lating hypotheses only by postulates of logic and of the general theory of knowl-
edge, and by nothing else” (1915, p. 765). It is also important to notice that logical
empiricists essentially agreed with Gurwitsch. For instance, Philipp Frank wrote in
his early years:

To be sure, Driesch shows that we can assume for the living processes a specific state variable, not that we must. For it is not possible to foresee every trick that one might invent in the fiction of hidden combinations of inorganic state variables. In favor of vitalism I should like to remark that, just as I cannot force someone who regards heat as a specific state variable to consider it as a motion of particles, so I cannot force the adherents of entelechy to replace it by fictitious state variables. (Frank 1941/1908, pp. 26–7)

Frank did not refute vitalism by presupposing any metaphysical materialism or
physicalism, as present biologists and philosophers do.

According to the logical refutation, second, vitalism is defective for a different
reason. On this Carnap wrote:

Driesch did not give laws. He did not specify how entelechy of an oak tree differs from entelechy of a goat or giraffe. He did classify his entelechies. He merely classified organisms and said that each organism had its own entelechy. He did not formulate laws that state under what conditions an entelechy is strengthened or weakened... the notion of an entel-
echy does not give us new laws, it does not explain more than the general laws already available. It does not help us in the least in making new predictions. (Carnap 1966, pp. 15–16)

According to Carnap, the central defect of vitalism was that Driesch failed to give new laws after he advanced the concept of entelechy.<fnref n="4" /> Without such laws, even today, we simply have no idea about what the nature of entelechy is.

In this section I have contrasted the metaphysical refutation of vitalism with its logical refutation. I also want to endorse the view that the logical refutation is to be preferred. While there is no space to elaborate here (but see Chen 2019), the main defect of the metaphysical refutation, in my opinion, is that it relies on a rather problematic conception of matter, in which matter is treated as a Kantian thing in itself, rather than ever-changing physico-chemical principles. As a result, it has not, even in the slightest, captured the historical development of science. Indeed, in the history of science metaphysical versions of materialism and physicalism were often obstacles to scientific progress.

# 5 Logic II: Theoretical Biologists and Their Envisaged Vital Laws

In this section, I show one, arguably the most important, implication of the logical refutation of vitalism. In current biology as well as the history of biology, there have been theoretical biologists who take the metaphysical refutation of vitalism for granted and propose speculative research projects to search for principles of life. For instance, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, once influential for his general systems theory, took biological organisms to be far-from-equilibrium open systems; based on his knowledge in thermodynamics, Bertalanffy was eager to have “a thermodynamic criterion that would define the steady state in open systems in a similar way as maximum entropy defines equilibrium in closed systems” (1968, p. 151). Bertalanffy himself was not so hostile to vitalism (1933, p. 30), but he still complained that vitalism “refers...to a metaphysical or psychical factor and consequently renounces the possibility of a natural scientific explanation” (1933, p. 46). More recently, similar to Bertalanffy, the well-known theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman envisaged “the fourth law of thermodynamics” (2000, p. xi) for life. Kauffman did not think highly of vitalism, either. Obsessed with holism and emergentism, he further claimed that “no vital force or extra substance is present in the emergent, self-reproducing whole” (1995, p. 24).

Yet is Driesch's vitalism really different from Bertalanffy's and Kauffman's research projects to find either a new thermodynamic criterion for open systems or even the fourth law of thermodynamics? My view is that, there is little difference,

<footnote n="4">⁴This refutation can also be found in other contemporary authors, such as Morris Cohen (1931, pp. 253–4). I thank Christopher Donohue for this reference.</footnote>