from the logical point of view. Recall Driesch's discussion on how entelechy might function in the physico-chemical world; in its very least, the search for either a new thermodynamic criterion or the fourth law of thermodynamics can be read as an attempt to give laws to capture the effects of entelechy. In other words, these are just vital laws envisaged by Driesch. Therefore, despite a shared but actually unfounded metaphysical superiority, their research projects, from the logical point of view, can be received as disguised forms of vitalism. Meanwhile, needless to say, like Driesch's search for vital laws, so far Bertalanffy's and Kauffman's ambitious proposals have not found anything even close to a new thermodynamic criterion or the fourth law of thermodynamics.<fnref n="5" />

In addition to Bertalanffy and Kauffman, another theoretical biologist with interest in a general or universal theory of life is Brian Goodwin. Goodwin stood out among theoretical biologists as a rare admirer of Driesch (Webster and Goodwin 1981, pp. 5–6). In his research project, Goodwin not only proposed “biological field theory” (1982), he also made essential use of the analogy between the system of possible biological forms and the periodic table of elements: “(we need) a theory of organismic form analogous to the theory of atomic structure” that is, “the universal laws or constraints which define what is possible” (1982, p. 45). Like Driesch, Goodwin wrote:

> The rational taxonomy which could emerge from a logical classification of these forms would be quite independent of the actual historical sequence of appearance of species, genera and phyla, just as the periodic table of the elements is independent of their historical appearance, and is compatible with a great variety of possible sequences. (1982, p. 51).

In Goodwin's rational morphology, every possible biological organization is a dynamic whole governed by its own unique (morphogenetic) field equations. Then, all these unique field equations are further unified into a common scheme. For all these, Goodwin's project cannot fail to remind us of Driesch's “systematics of entelechies”. In addition, it is clear that Goodwin's proposed “biological field theory” correspond to Driesch's envisaged vital laws.

Finally, to emphasize, vital laws envisaged by Driesch, like Goodwin's biological field theory and Bertalanffy's and Kauffman's new thermodynamic principles, have never been obtained till today. Indeed, Driesch's claim that his concept of entelechy must be invoked to explain embryological phenomena is untenable. On this point Carnap's criticism of vitalism is temporarily adequate. However, Driesch would not be wrong, if he merely proposed to look for vital laws. As a matter of fact, if vitalists could offer such vital laws, Carnap's criticism of vitalism would fail (and he would acknowledge this, for sure) and vitalism would consequently be as valid as any respectable theory in science. While it might not be very promising to attain such vital laws even in future biology, but the possibility of such vital laws can never

<footnote n="5">⁵To emphasize, this is not to dismiss other important but more concrete contributions made by theoretical biologists. Yet, it is also important to understand that those more concrete contributions so far have not given any genuine theory of life. Driesch also had genuine contributions in theoretical biology; however, those did not help his doctrine of entelechy, which in its essence tends to be a theory of life (see below).</footnote>
be denied decisively. The validity of vitalism relies on vital laws, and this is a logical point. As we have seen, a lack of clarity on this point misleads some theoretical biologists (e.g., Bertalanffy and Kauffman) to envisage theories and principles with fancy names, which, from the logical point of view, turn out to be scarcely different from Driesch's vital laws.

# 6 Conclusion: Entelechy and Life

The logical refutation shows that at least in current biology vitalism is invalid. In other words, the statement that “the organism is governed by its entelechy” should be viewed with suspicion. Due to the lack of vital laws, this statement cannot be treated as a serious piece of biological knowledge. But now consider a different statement, “the organism is alive”. Indeed, even though this statement is treated as trivially true, its logical status is similar to that of the previous statement about entelechy. Unfortunately, due to a lack of principles or laws of life (in Bertalanffy’s and Kauffman’s words), the statement that “the organism is alive”, although presupposed, is of little real use in biology. It stands very isolated from all other well established biological statements. As a matter of fact, it seems possible to treat the two previous statements as synonymous (but note that vitalism is still invalid, since to explain life by appealing to entelechy amounts to nothing but a tautology), and the invention of entelechy can be read as a desperate and failed attempt to explain life (I mean, the pure concept/phenomenon of life). Nevertheless, such a failure should also remind us of the gloomy fact: even in current biology our knowledge about life does not go beyond our knowledge about entelechy, because both amount to almost nothing (for an elaboration of this point, see Chen 2019).

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# “A Mountain of Nonsense”? Czech and Slovenian Receptions of Materialism and Vitalism from c. 1860s to the First World War

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Christopher Donohue

**Abstract** In general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on *materialism qua materialism* or vitalism *qua vitalism* in eastern Europe.

The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.

C. Donohue (✉)

National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

e-mail: donohuecr@mail.nih.gov
In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.

In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín Lenz (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with "bestiality" (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with "parliamentarianism" and "democracy." There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.

Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was "Too bad" that Zarnik "tackles" the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not "successful". Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by 'nationality' but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

**Keywords** Vitalism · Materialism · Pantheism · Neovitalism · Eastern Europe · Slovenia · Czechia
Although a rich historiography attends the histories of vitalism and materialism in Western Europe, to my knowledge there have been no systematic attempts to discuss vitalism and anti-materialism in eastern Europe (or more properly east central Europe, according to recent scholarly conventions). The reasons for this are puzzling and can only be partially explained in the context of this paper. A significant reason, I suspect, is presentism. Charles Wolfe has been instrumental in providing a number of contexts and contextualization for vitalism and materialism in Western Europe (Normandin and Wolfe 2013; Wolfe 2016, "Canguilhem and the Logic of Life", see also this volume) and arguing that the histories of vitalism and materialism add to our "philosophical technology" (my term) for understanding contemporary science and more importantly, the implications of those life sciences now undergoing (one may argue). Vitalism in "Eastern Europe" or "East Central Europe" has been in English language literature more or less ignored or exoticized (Chirot 1991). Marius Turda has likewise referenced "Balkanism" and "Orientalism" (2011).<fnref n="1" />

This is due in part to what I have recently called “occidentalism” (Donohue, 2020) in which Eastern Europe is placed outside of the development of Western science and culture and onto the path of an alternative or “backward” modernity. Even for very recent scholarship somewhat more responsible in the anglophone world, “science” in Czech speaking lands is science in the “German” language and, according to Michael Gordin, reducible to physics, where writing in the Czech language was the consequence of “linguistic purism” and a “dilemma” (Gordin 2020: 219). Those who identified as “Czechs” were conflicted over the use of German or Czech in their scientific publications. Although Gordin’s work is here singled out, such almost ethnographic accounts of Czech-language intellectual output are widespread in the field.

Although the processes of transformation of the scientific languages of the Czech and Slovenian speaking lands are not the central focus of this paper, the subsequent material discussed will illustrate that many Czech especially and Slovenian writers were quite comfortable moving between their native languages, French, German and even occasionally English. It is also worth noting that Gordin as a historian of physics, is focused on physics journals in Central Eastern Europe, and thus would not necessarily be aware of journals in the biological, theological and sociological sciences such as *Ceska mysl* (Czech mind) begun in 1900 as an international pedagogical review in the social and the biological sciences, with articles in the physical sciences as well.

<footnote n="1">¹A key issue in the literature on the national awakening was to what degree it was particularistic versus universal. Based on a Cold War framework, nationalist movements in the nineteenth century were divided into “ethnic” and “civic” varieties, with civic nationalists being those of the “West” (the classic case being France, the failed exemplar being German state unification) with states and peoples in “Eastern” Europe being subject to a vague kind of exclusionary belong which made universalism impossible. In the Soviet period and afterwards, the strength of ethnicities and “tribal loyalties” has supported a consistent narrative of “backwardness.” This helped to explain the embrace of Communism as well as the rather uneven pace of modernization throughout most of the twentieth century. On this see among others (Chirot 1991; Gerschenkron 1965).</footnote>
Magazines such as *Czech Mind* as well as a number of theological periodicals discussed below used a number of languages which showed Czechs critically engaged with a number of European intellectual currents. As importantly, while Czech physics was attempting to migrate into the German language, Czech biology, social sciences and theology remained intermixed with languages and a reception to pan-European and American intellectual currents. Incidentally, the Habsburg influence on Catholic theology in Czech speaking lands lead to some interesting vocabulary differences between the predominately Catholic areas of Moravia and the “standard” Protestant version of literary Czech used in the universities in and around Prague see (Bartoš 1905).

Vitalism itself has only recently been subject to sustained critical analysis. For a generation of scholars, particularly after the Second World War, vitalism was synonymous with irrationalism and political messianism and among the progenitors of the Nazi racial state and of the Holocaust or Shoah. Many years ago, Emile Brunner wrote bluntly that “National Socialism springs from a view of man which may be described as vitalism” (Brunner 1947, 56.) “Vitalism” has also not fared particularly well in the work of the past generation of intellectual historians (and intellectuals) who sought to understand the ideas driving the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the eras of fascism. Georg Lukács, commenting on Ludwig Klages in his *Destruction of Reason*, noted that the philosopher and physiologist Klages “transformed vitalism into an open combat against reason and culture” (Lukács 1981, 248). Roger Griffiths locates Mussolini’s “ethical revolution” in “Fascist vitalism” which would “lift the apathetic, cynical individual...into a new spiritual orbit” (Feldman and Griffin 2008, 8). Various efforts have been made more recently to connect various kinds of vitalism with French fascism for example in the work of Maurice Barrès (Soucy 1972), and the varieties of Spanish fascism (Priorelli 2020) and the elitist and eugenic political theory of vitalism and ‘life-force’ in George Bernard Shaw (Linehan 2000).

Moir (“What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?”, this volume) underscores that the links between fascism and vitalism in the twentieth century are often tenuous and vitalism itself is often unfairly conjoined with totalitarian and other forms of political and social reaction. Oftentimes, Moir argues, it was not vitalism itself, but conceptions often viewed as closely related to vitalism, such as holism in the case of National Socialism, monism or animism. Today, vitalist understandings of the distinction between life and non-life (properly defined) often lead to precisely the kinds of pluralistic politics and anti-reductionistic accounts of social life and of the person which work against totalitarianism and its brethren. Vörös (in the chapter “Is There Not a Truth of Vitalism? Vital Normativity in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty”, also this volume) underscores that vitalism- even in the work of its skeptics or opponents- amounts to an openness to complexity and to spontaneity where vitalism is capable of both establishing as well as transcending norms.

Materialism from the second half of the nineteenth century to the First World War in the Czech-speaking lands especially, enjoyed the same dubious reputation of being connected with unsavory forms of politics and social life. Vitalism in both Czech and Slovene contexts was viewed, as I will show in the following pages, was
a complex, perhaps a bit frustrating alternative to materialism by both secular and religious intellectuals in the Czech case (discussions of the Slovene case will be more limited). The relative openness to vitalism (of all kinds) and to understanding vitalism in their late nineteenth century present as a historical development of scientific inquiry in the Czech case, especially, allows for a discussion of the richness of international conceptual inquiry. As importantly, the virulent reaction of Czech writers to materialism, from the very mainstream of the literary and cultural 'national awakening' and national literature, as well as the unity of Catholic religious opinion from the 1840s and 1850s to the First World War presents a reasonable explanation for the openness of Czech writers from the 1840s to the First World War to sophisticated accounts of vitalism. As importantly, there is a never articulated sense that materialism was connected (at least in the latter portion of the nineteenth century) with "Hapsburg" or "Germanness," and this cultural eversion, while not sufficient, perhaps contributed.

A full study of anti-materialism in Catholic thought in so-called "Eastern Europe" remains to be written. If anything, the rather colorful language used to describe materialism and its social, political and spiritual consequences would provide resources for rhetorical analysis and its function in scientific polemic. To take one example, perhaps the most important Polish Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century, Piotr Semenenko (1814-1886) described philosophical materialism as an "enemy" (nieprzyjaciel) "who is in our houses" who uses his "poisoned sorcery" to make the faithful believe it was not God who created the world out of nothing. Materialism, he continued, which Semenenko often conflates with pantheism, was "a bad taste, a rotten consolation" (zgnila pociecha) "which does not dare come to an honest tongue, but lives there in a despondent heart" (Semenenko 1885: 116-118). On 'materialism' Semenenko is somewhat vague. Materialism and pantheism were "that unhealthy science" "mainly from Germany" "smuggled to us mostly through France" (Semenenko 1885:119). Regarding materialism (most probably Büchner's), Semenenko underscored that modern materialism (as opposed to the materialism of the Greeks) is much more "audacious" or "brash" (zuchwaly) as it "combines atoms and motion, matter and force into one...thereby abolishing the core difference between what is passive and what is active in itself, the most intrinsic and aboriginal difference of all" (ibid, 124.)

For Semenenko, "Materialism wanted to derive the whole world from atoms" and in order to do so, according to Semenenko, it "begins with a core intellectual contradiction" which "endows atoms with motion, and makes passive things active without any reason or law" (żadnej racyi i prawa) only because the materialist wishes it. According to Semenenko, a body cannot have the properties of matter and force at the same time; it is either matter or force, not both. He declared: "If the materialist chooses the active atom, [it is] a motion endowed by itself....it is motion (ruch), it is force, it is a center (srodek) of force, but it is not atoms!" (ibid, 129.)

Czech writers were no less sparing and colorful regardless of religious observance. Josef Durdík (1837-1902) was among the most important philosophers of the natural and the biological sciences in the nineteenth century. He produced, among other texts, one of the first history of philosophy in the Czech language in
1870, the “Historical Outline of Modern Philosophy” (Dějepisný nástin filosofie novověké). He observed in his “On the progress of the natural sciences” that Darwin was “as little a materialist as all men who have faced the truth...matter is a mystery, therefore materialism does not explain anything” (Durdík 1874: 232). Durdík understands modern materialism as emerging in part from the “naturalism” of Ludwig Feuerbach (or more accurately Feuerbach exemplifies for Durdík the naturalism of the day). This “war over the soul” with Rudolf Wagner struggling against Karl Vogt, and Moleschott against Liebig. But for Durdík, materialism was exemplified by its “Bible” Buchner’s *“Kraft und Stoff”* (Síla a hmota) (Durdík 1876: 25).

Durdík responded to the work of the materialist philosopher George Stiebeling. Stiebeling wished to refute Hartmann’s “philosophy of the unconscious” and to a certain extent, to promote “realism” in philosophy. Durdík observed that Stiebeling’s work *Natural Science Against Philosophy* made the intentions of materialism clear, to conflate natural science and the scientific method with materialism. Durdík contended that this was not true (as many branches of science did not depend upon materialism) and many scientists were not themselves materialists (Durdík 1876). As importantly Durdík also observed that Stiebeling when discussing philosophy had a very narrow account of philosophizing in mind, namely, the philosophy of Hartmann and the dialectic of Hegel. Durdík underscored, contra Stiebeling, that “Philosophy is broader,” containing not only the metaphysics of Hegel but others (albeit equally problematic). Stieberling, moreover, constructs his own system, in many ways equally obtuse. Durdík observed that Stieberling “mechanizes a view of the world, and zealously upholds it, glorifying it as a panacea for future prosperity” as have many philosophers of a “lesser order” (Durdík 1876: 12).

Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) was a Moravian church historian and social philosopher. In his rather polemical work for high school students (approved by his colleague and close collaborator Antonín Lenz (1829–1902) whom I will say more about below) he opened: “In our times, materialism makes brazen attacks on the fundamental truths of religion, an odd enlightenment forgetting of spirit for matter, an unwillingness to believe anything that they can not see, hear, or taste; (materialism) wages war (brojít) against the teachings of the Church about God, about creation, about man, about redemption....” Of materialism itself Procházka complains that the doctrine is (literally) “full of resistors” (plno odporů). He continued that “Materialists” (such as Vogt) claim that “atoms are eternal (without transformation), that they do not have certain properties, but that they are different from each other, that they are unconditional in themselves, and yet that they co-condition, that is, they are conditioned” (Procházka 1876: 9).

For Procházka, as for Lenz, materialism was the doctrine not only attacking the Catholic faith, but the ideology confronting both the political order as well as the order of nature. For Procházka, materialism was synonymous with Darwinism and liberalism. He declared that “odd liberalism” (*lichý liberalismus*) “is holding the scepter of government” and where materialism has “reached its zenith” it has begun “terrorizing in an imperial tone all naturalists and other writers in other fields of science, proclaiming all scientists as idiots and fools who do not yet proclaim:
Omnia in majorem Darvini gloriam!" and whom do not "wish to venerate the golden calf of matter" (se klaněti zlatému teleti hmoty) but to recognize the existence of a higher world (Procházka 1876: 17).

Materialism too according to Procházka could not explain the basic phenomena of life and consciousness. He observed "by what right can materialists just style mere movements or brain tremors (záchvěje mozku) thoughts?" What was the connection, Procházka asked, between thought and "brain matter"? How was it possible that a "mere physical process at once and immediately be transformed into a spiritual process, so that mere movements of matter can be transformed immediately into movements of spirit, i.e. into thoughts, feelings, and desires?" What, Procházka asked, was occurring in this transformation, in which for him, the cause of this transformation from matter into spirit was also its effect? (Procházka 1876: 328–9).

But what was as concerning as the political, Darwinian, and reductionistic dimensions was materialism's theological connotations. Against the "murderous attacks" of materialism against the Catholic faith, Procházka and others such as Lenz had written a number of works. Just how disturbing Procházka believed materialism to be was revealed by his catechismal discussion of the Book of Genesis where he described in a long footnote how materialism led to pantheism and bestiality. Footnoting a discussion of how God himself created the world "by the freest will" (nejsvobodnější vůlí), Procházka argued that materialism and its close corollary pantheism were both equally pernicious. Procházka wrote that while "ancient teaching" sought to "elevate man", the school of pantheism and materialism "drives him directly into bestiality (zvířeckosti)" (Procházka 1876: 3, 35).

The association between "bestiality" and materialism was a serious association for Catholic theologians in Czech speaking lands. Their furor came from two sources: theological and political. On the first, according to Lenz, a materialist could not philosophically believe in the miracle of transubstantiation or in the divinity of the person, of in life after death. Materialism then threatened for Czech Catholic theologians (and others) both sacramentology and philosophical anthropology. According to Lenz, "Man is a compound ex materia et forma", he is not simply matter but whose "essential form" was an "intellectual or immortal soul." And it was this immortal soul which is the principle of a "a living, psychic, and spiritual human life." The doctrine of materialism and the materialist does not make a real, substantial difference between things and beings (mezi věcmi a bytostmi) or between a plant, an animal and a human being" (Lenz 1889: 28).

Because of the lack of distinction between these elements, materialists could not believe in the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the eucharist, whereby theucharistic wafer and wine becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. As Lenz explained, it was through transubstantiation that the bread and wine are changed "on the altar" (na oltáři) into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. On the altar, the bread and wine underwent a change in substance (where the accidental features of the bread and wine itself remained unchanged) where "a new essence arises after the change" while the matter, the material of the bread and wine stay the same. This was very different, according to Lenz, than a transformation of the bread and of the wine as it enters our blood, and there was a great distance between a natural change
and a miraculous one (Lenz 1889: 28–9). According to Lenz, it was this kind of fundamental change which the materialist could not understand nor could his philosophy address. Drawing on the trope which connected materialism with bestiality too when turning to the political, Lenz thundered that any adoption of the materialist doctrine and acceptance of its “lies” “would lead to…atheistic and rationalistic stupidity [and] barbarism, which seeks to drive humanity to the troughs (žlebům, old Czech koryto,) of beasts and cattle” (Lenz 1878: 11).

Lenz, again discussing the political implications of materialism, commented on the syllabus of Pius IX “on errors” promulgated in 1864, underscored that materialism, pantheism, liberalism, atheism will all “unite…” against “the dogmatic, social, moral and political direction of the Church.” Lenz continued that there was a “war of Christian civilization against materialism” in which Darwinism and atheism, along with materialism “have no truths in themselves.” All of these doctrines, along with various political and philosophical systems (including the systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which had nothing to do with materialism but were viewed, by Lenz and others as introducing a naturalistic and then a pantheistic view of the world) according to Lenz were to be rejected because they either “rejected the Divine Being” or imposed on God Himself qualities which he cannot possess (Lenz 1889: 37–38). For writers such as Lenz and Procházka any stance towards nature which was either materialist, atomist, “dynamist”<fnref n="2" /> was a stance towards politics and immortality.

For Lenz, as for Procházka, there was also an intimate connection between materialism, atheism, and political liberalism. For Lenz, both liberalism and nihilism were “modern heresies” and intimately connected to the reformation of Martin Luther (who according to Lenz paved the way for all other modern revolutions). For Lenz materialism, Lutheranism, and nihilism were all political-theological heresies, such as those which bedeviled the early Church, presenting views of nature and of politics which were untenable to Catholic dogma, insofar as it reduced soul and consciousness to base matter and motion, and could not admit any change of substance without fundamental change in accident (Lenz 1889, 5). Discussing in detail Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors”, published in 1864, now infamous for its condemnation of liberalism, modernism, secularization and other modernizing forces, Lenz underscored that materialism and liberalism were “incompatible with the Christian” (Lenz 1891: 3).

For both authors, if one did not believe in the “miracle” of the Eucharist, or in the immortality of the soul, then one was radical and subversive politically. In the case of both authors, theology, politics and morality were intertwined. For both authors, whose rhetoric underscored their convictions, materialism was a philosophy (or

<footnote n="2">²“Dynamism” was, for Czech writers, a kind of materialism, or at least a doctrine “that stood entirely on materialistic grounds” Dynamism referred to the tendency of materialist authors to use “mere matter and forces” to explain mental life and consciousness spiritual or mental “being” through recourse only to atoms. For a rather general and polemical definition see (Pospíšil 1885, 344).</footnote>
even ideology) which not only exhibited an untrue view of the natural world, but
which also would lead to moral depravity and bestiality.

The association between materialism, pantheism and "bestiality" was not merely
a connection made by Catholic theologians. The Czech politician and writer, one of
the founders of the Czech "national awakening," František Palacký, whose work and
writings have influenced generations of Czech writers and statesmen (including
Thomas Masaryk), also conjoined, as it was then understood, "bestiality"
(zvířekosti), materialism in order to denigrate his opponent Alfons Šťastný (Baár
2010; Trencsenyi et al. 2018; Baran-Szoltys et al. 2020).

Šťastný was a writer and political theorist who supported the agrarian movement
in the Czech lands, meaning that he was a political and economic liberal, e.g.
demanding a reform to agricultural laws and customary duties, education for farm-
ers, and the relaxation of property regulations (Miller 1999: 19). Šťastný's
"Concerning Salvation After Death" (O spasení po smrti) was part of a larger pro-
gram which combined elements of materialism and a philosophical anthropology
which attempted to ground man as a reasoned and thinking being without any refer-
ence outside of the human self (as he explained in his "Concerning Intellectual
Morality" (O mravnosti rozumove- Über die Verstandesmoral)) Drawing upon
Spinoza and others, Šťastný attempted to articulate an account of morality in the
nineteenth century which did not depend in any way upon the external notion of
salvation.

Paraphrasing Spinoza, Šťastný declared that “Man can only want his own good and he cannot wish for his own doom, assuming a man of common sense and sound reason.” He argued that morality and reason could both exist without the immortal- ity of the soul or without life after death (Šťastný 1874: 5, 6). Šťastný wanted to construct a morality based on entirely common-sense and empirical foundations, based upon his supposition that any reform of government and of society would have to begin with an account of man that did not depend on any theological structures.

Šťastný too believed that the God of Christianity was too anthropomorphized
(echoing in many ways Feuerbach). Šťastný reasoned that if God created man and
the world out of his own beatitude, rapture or blessedness (blaženost), then there
was a fundamental contradiction between the attributes of God or a deity and his
works, as a thing with needs could only be something which is mutable, changeable,
and alive. As God had no needs this fundamentally pointed to a higher being, if he
existed, which possessed the characteristics of non-life rather than life (není života
nýbrž neživot) (Šťastný 1874, 90)

For this František Palacký accused Šťastný of not only political and social radi-
calism but amoralism and “bestiality.” Palacký accused Šťastný of “denying every-
thing that mere reason does not understand” not wanting to know “God as a personal
being” nor giving humanity a “moral vocation.” Šťastný ‘s teachings and the school
of materialism “drives man directly into bestiality (zvířekosti)”.“

Šťastný immediately objected that it was not at all true that materialism and pan-
theism lead to bestiality, rather pantheism and materialism lead not to “bestiality”
nor to atheism, but to “humanity”, in the sense of humane feeling of
togetherness, brotherhood and humanity (*lidskost*). Pantheism as such was for Šťastný “a safe harbor or haven (*útulek*) for those who can no longer defend God as a being, but who wish to have God in name at least” (Šťastný 1874: 91, 92).

Very different was the reception of vitalism in the Czech context. In a 1906 issue of “Czech Mind” a review of Driesch’s *Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre* was favorable, although it complained of Driesch’s obtuse style. The reviewer approvingly described Driesch’s “entelechy” (which incidentally had normal declension rules and was thus part of the accepted Czech scientific vocabulary, there was addition of a Latin or German word in order to clarify the scientific meaning, and the word appears to have a normal declension pattern, which suggests wide usage.) The “entelechy” was a self-regulating, autonomous (*svézákonnost*) body, meaning the “autonomy of living bodies” where the entelechy “in the broadest sense” was a “real elementary natural agent that appears in living bodies.” The entelechy was moreover a “constant,” “an elementary constant” and “as such is (fundamental) element of natural extended reality.” As such “vitalism has a place of honor in the history of the natural sciences.” The reviewer continued that entelechy must be subject to the “general principle of causality” and was in the broadest terms “a real, natural, elemental agent which appears in living bodies” (Čáda et al., 1906: 455).

For the reviewer, however, “Nothing definite could be said about the relation of the entelechy to the theory of descent.” Nonetheless, the reviewer observed that “vitalism has a place of honor in the history of the sciences” having both roots in antiquity and a new phase called “neo-vitalism.” The older vitalistic tradition, of which its very first representative was Aristotle, “culminated in Blumenbach” and ended with the work of Johannes Müller. For the reviewer, the vitalistic tradition found new life in the critique of Darwin (Čáda et al., 1906: 456).

“Neo-vitalism”, while having some roots in “older vitalism” was nonetheless a new movement. Able representatives of this new inquiry were scientists like Bunge, Hartmann and Otto Liebmann. Edmund Montgomery deserved particular mention for his solving “of the problem of the self and of individual organization, where Montgomery, approvingly turns against “any theory of mechanism”” (ibid, 558).

The reviewer continued that so called “neo-vitalism” had “overcome the era of materialism” and could serve as a critique of Darwinism. This was among the most favorable attributes of vitalism in the years before the First World War. The reviewer continued that of the major problems which attracted the attention of neo-vitalists (such as Driesch, Fritz Noll, Eugen Albrecht) was the “psychological and organization problem of integration.” The reviewer concluded that Driesch’s work was “the best work on the nature of vitalism and its historical development” and although it was not appropriate for a general audience, for naturalists this was “an essential text” (Čáda and Krejčí 1908: 457–8).

For the physiologist and philosopher František Mareš, vitalism was a specific antidote to both materialism and the various kinds of mysticism (spiritualism) which had propagated in the years before the First World War. For Mareš (1857–1942) there was a great “mystery” to life which was not appreciable by our external senses. As thinking, feeling beings we were only able to understand the phenomenon of life by appealing to our “inner sense” (Mareš et al. 1897: 165). He declared, “Naturalists
cry out: old mysticism, old vitalism is returning to physiology. No gentlemen. The nature of these phenomena cannot be determined empirically. It is only possible to describe the phenomena and determine their lawfulness, empirical exactness is no longer possible (Mareš et al. 1897, 167).

Mareš noted elsewhere, referring to the controversy that his writings on vitalism inspired, that the magazine "Life or Liveliness (Živa) wanted him to conclude that life was nothing more than a "very complex chemical process." Now Mareš was more than happy to admit that certain aspects of metabolism could be reduced to chemical analysis, and such analysis was essential for the science of physiology. However, Mareš quipped "even the world's physiologists are also living bodies, and I don't think they would recognize themselves as mere chemical processes." Mareš continued that "The living entity (zivá bytost)" while approachable and cognizable to physio-chemical analysis, "is also as yet something more." The analysis of the "living being" while of course belonging to physio-chemical research, cannot proceed only through physio-chemical analysis (Mareš 1904: 11).

Mareš also observed that "Mechanical-causal beliefs have dominated biology for the past half-century, and only in the last decade has there been strong opposition to it in the form of vitalism." Moreover, the dispute (spor) between mechanism and vitalism "was coming to an end" with the numbers of supporters of vitalism increasing, where, in the last few years supporters of vitalism outnumbered proponents of materialism and mechanism (Mareš 1904: 12).

Mareš specifically singled out the work of Wilhelm Roux. Roux was a celebrated anatomist but who according to Mareš "also places great emphasis on inorganic experiments as explanatory analogies of life-forming processes." Roux "rejects vitalism" and like all other mechanists and materialists, "based [his] beliefs not on scientific facts" since according to Mareš, "not the slightest process of life has been explained physio-chemically, or mechanically," not even the "circulation of blood" for example.

Mechanists, according to him, based this rejection of vitalism on the simple logical error that there is no action which is not "physio-chemical" and no action which is not "mechanical." However, in the natural world "concepts such as: power, action, cause, and so on, are vitalist in nature." The neo-vitalism of the present, according to Mareš, understood that physio-chemical explanations were indeed needed, but that mechanism and materialism did not capture all of the happenings (dění) of life such that "...life demonstrated its own specific laws, which are not in inanimate nature" (Mareš 1904: 12).

The better-known (than the other Czech figures discussed here) philosopher and historian of biology Emanuel Rádl (1873–1942) was discussed by Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem underscored in his discussion of vitalism, with reference to Rádl, "that vitalism was an imperative rather than a method and more of an ethical system, perhaps, than a theory" (Delaporte 1994: 292). This is certainly true, but Canguilhem's discussion reduced the depths of Rádl's engagement with vitalism. Rádl, in his discussion of the history of vitalism from Leibniz to Stahl, observed that there was a great difference between "organism" and "mechanism" where movements occur upon a mechanism, while upon an organism, those movements happen
within an organism and are due to its own cause (*způsobovány*). This corresponded for Rádl to the distinction between *facere* (something else doing or making) and *efficere* (agent-activity working out, causing to occur). The latter is willed while the former is not as the latter supposes an agent which is doing, making, producing, or carrying out (Čáda and Krejčí 1905: 264).

For Rádl, this conforms to the Kantian account of the organism whereby anything which is “caused” in the domain of the organism “does not make sense in and of itself, but only makes sense for the purpose for which it takes place” (Čáda and Krejčí 1905: 265). Because of this presence of purposefulness which is intrinsic to the organism, the sciences of physics and chemistry “obscure (zastírá) the true essence of biology.” Physics as well only addresses “the most general descriptions of matter, and these abstractions only cover only a few real phenomena.”

Physics, unlike biology does not address “the true and active causes (*pravé a činné příčiny*) of these phenomena.” Rádl wrote that “today’s physics places its emphasis on matter...but it ignores movements, forces and actions....the intensity of these movements and their changes” (Čáda et al. 1906: 265). He observed that the old adage of “where the physicist ends, the doctor beings” should be supplemented with the observation that today the physicist “does not care” where at the “very least” they would do well to tell us how the body “could be damaged (*poškozeno*) at all” (Čáda and Krejčí 1905, ibid).

In a similar way, Rádl noted that “it was not possible to build a general theory of life on chemistry, as there existed foundational differences between chemical processes and life processes.” Living bodies, he continued, “are never sustained for an unlimited amount of time (*po neomezenou dobu*)” (ibid.) Living bodies moreover sustained themselves much longer than predicted by the chemical elements which compose them and while chemical processes in inorganic nature only depend on the chemicals themselves, in living organisms there was a process of regulation to keep the organism alive and “in its entirety” (*a ve své celosti*) (ibid, 266).

Writing a bit later in 1909, Radl observed that after 1880, the most current form of vitalism underscored that “the purposefulness of life is a phenomenon *sui generis*” which “cannot be explained as the result of a summation of chance effects.” The organism, according to Radl, “is quite different in kind from any inorganic substance.” The organism is “not an aggregate...but it is a unit which exerts definite control over the actions and reactions between itself and its environment.” Radl wrote that Driesch, reacting against the “decline of naturalism” and the rise of materialism and the mechanistic account of life, came into the view that “life ‘is a law unto itself.’” Rádl, mirroring Mareš’ language, noted approving that Driesch rejected that view that life “is only a very complicated chemico-physical process” and that he underscored the “autonomy of living processes” (Rádl and Hatfield 1930: 356–7, 382).

Continuing with Driesch and contemporary vitalism specifically, Rádl underscored that Driesch went further and was more successful than other vitalists. Driesch was ignored, according to Rádl, because of his opposition to Darwinism. Rádl is quick to observe later that Driesch adhered to the same critique of Darwinism
as that of Otto Liebmann. For Liebmann, fundamental error of Darwin's theory was that although it served as a theory of development, such a theory of development, the concepts of reproduction, heredity and variability, upon which that theory is based "are completely unclear" (*jsou úplně nejasny*) (Rádl 1908: 35).

Driesch commanded Rádl's respect because he conducted his own experiments and also examined the philosophical consequences of his work (Rádl 1908: 36). Rádl underscored that in his break with Roux, Driesch first attempted to explain living phenomena only through reference to physics and chemistry, but eventually had to abandon that scheme and then, in his articulation of vitalism opposed "the whole of modern biology" (*proti celé moderní biologii*).

In opposition to other vitalists (Bunge and Crossman) whose doctrines he calls "static teleology," Rádl underscored that for Driesch biological phenomena needed both causal and teleological explanations, and in this sense Rádl believed Driesch to be greatly indebted to Kant, although this indebtedness changed throughout his career (Rádl, 1908: 37). For Driesch, although some of life's processes could be explained through recourse to physics and chemistry, many organic phenomena are subject to "a special, pure vital lawfulness and demonstrate the autonomy of living actions" (ibid, 38.) Empirical evidence from among other subjects, sea urchins, underscored for Rádl the correctness of Driesch's "dynamic vitalism" which among other characteristics, yielded the specific qualities by which living organisms differ from non-living entities.

Driesch's dynamic vitalism was also defined by his attempt to describe those laws which only pertained to living processes (ibid, 39.) For example, for Driesch (and Rádl) the organism was itself a constant, and as such, the organism had differing properties than the inorganic. Rádl noted that as a developing entity, the chicken egg (and later chick, and then adult chicken) had not only a capacity to respond specifically to external stimuli, but also as a developing organism, could change its reactions over time. This was unlike inorganic matter, which exhibited the same reactions to environmental changes, i.e. an iron always becomes hot in the presence of heat (ibid, 40.)

Among the most important ideas that Driesch articulated was the principle of holistic organization. Driesch compared an organism to an army (*armade*) and understood that both the organism and the body have a hierarchy which followed a strict chain of command for organization, movement, and other activities. Driesch viewed the soul as a kind of "commander-in-chief" of the organism, in the same way that a commander is at the top of the chain of a particular army. The organism in its functions was controlled by a number of entelechies, some higher and some lower, some very specialized (though some are governed by merely mechanical processes, i.e. the action of the lens in the eye) (ibid, 41.)

Methodologically, Rádl noted that Driesch was against induction. For Driesch, conceptual analysis and science made progress by being against induction. Like Kant, Driesch wished to exclude all 'metaphysics' and to place science on a true foundation. However, such a stance against metaphysics and in support of Kant made the move back to Aristotle more surprising.
This was the case since, for Rádl, Driesch’s “Naturphilosophie” (*naturphilosofie*), a kind of metaphysics,<fnref n="3" /> represented the progress of a philosophy of development. For Rádl, Hegel understood development in too metaphysical a sense, divorced from experiment and from empirical data. Darwin understood life in too mechanical a way, and too materialistically (Rádl here was at odds with Durdík). Because of this, Driesch took the “radical step back to Aristotle” passing through *Naturphilosophie*. Because Driesch represented the culmination of the doctrine of development, it would “have great consequences for the future” (ibid, 123–124). This was the case since Driesch was able to develop an account of development which was neither dialectical nor metaphysical, rooted in empirical data, but against induction. In this way, Rádl believed that Driesch’s vitalism had been purified through its overcoming of the prior limitations of numerous systems of thought and inquiry, made possible through a return to the Greeks. This is a challenging account of Driesch’s work which almost presumed a Heideggerian turn.

Rádl’s vitalism, and his appreciative, detailed glosses on Driesch make more sense if one considers Mareš and Rádl as working within a nineteenth and early twentieth century space (which was appreciative of vitalism as an inquiry, and for the autonomy of biology as subject to its own specific laws). Both men’s vitalism underscored, some rhetoric aside, that while mechanism and physics and chemistry were able to explain some organismal properties, there was an additional modality to life and to the organism which could not be explained through reference to phys- ics and chemistry alone.

Both Rádl and Mareš’ hostility to mechanism and materialism and their insis- tence on the autonomy of organism, biology and physiology is rendered more expli- cable when it is understood that there exists a tradition against materialism in Czech philosophy and theology. As discussed above there was a continual emphasis placed on the supposed connections between materialism, liberalism, barbarism and besti- ality. This was fertile soil for vitalism in Czech and Slovene speaking lands.

Josef Durdík and Rádl (though writing a bit later) differed in their reception but not in their engagement with Darwin, both were united in their understanding of life as not subject to materialist explanations. For Durdík, the inquiry into man and organic nature was moving further and further into a knowledge of the whole. He declared that as these sciences become more refined “the more they realize the detail does not destroy the whole.” He continued that “life, organism, development” have been met with similarly spectacular social and political developments (Durdík 1876: 21).

For Durdík, Darwin’s theory and the theory of evolution, was unlike the rest of the natural sciences, for he understood Darwin’s theory as an aesthetic and artistic one as well, as opposed to other explanations of the modern world. For Darwin not only depicted an animal form as a naturalist, but also much like a painter or a poet, ensured that the specific features of the horse are well-represented in their

<footnote n="3">³The connections between Driesch and *Naturphilosophie* have been outlined in more detail by (Rosenstock 2017).</footnote>
distinctiveness. The horse, or any creature, will be considered more beautiful the more it was distinctive (Durdík 1876: 38). It was much the same with man, where man, especially in the realm of Darwinian theory, was both an aesthetic as well as a biological subject. It is worth noting here that the union of aesthetics and nature, art and biology was one of the main premises of Kant's *Critique of Judgement*.

Durdík's statement that "materialism explains nothing" was quite like Matěj Procházka's famous observation that materialist theories were a "mountain of non-sense" (Procházka 1876). Perhaps most importantly, Czechs believed themselves to not be Germans (or more correctly Hapsburgs) and rejecting "German materialism"; this is clear in the writings of Jaroslav Goll (1897) and in the writings of Palacký.

The writings of Slovenian theologians and intellectuals were not as colorful as Piotr Semenenko's, and their discussion of vitalism was more subdued than their Czech counterparts, but with a discussion of both there appears to be a pattern of acceptance of vitalism in "eastern Europe" for reasons that remain a bit mysterious. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) writing in "Čas" (The Times) observed in his review of Boris Zarnik's "Concerning the Essence of Life" (*O bistvu življenja*) that the choice in modern times really was between mechanism and vitalism. Ušeničnik, after surveying the discussions of vitalism and materialism since Aristotle, observed that vitalism must have some power to it, otherwise it would not keep returning to the surface (*površje*). Scientists like Driesch are to be commended, he continued, are to be commended because they are not simply "rechristening" older scientific worldviews.

Life cannot be understood, except according to a "super-mechanical principle," that is, according to other principles than the "mechanical." Vitalism was then in many ways a negative concept based on its embrace of non-mechanical explanation. Vitalists were correct, Ušeničnik observed, that living beings do indeed have something quite unique "that is nowhere to be found in inanimate matter." Life, Ušeničnik continued, and living organisms had individuality, while "inanimate substance is indifferent." Life itself, according to modern science, is highly organized at the level of even the most simple cell, "it has different parts with different functions, all of which are in the service of the whole." (Ušeničnik 1914: 140–144). But for all of his agreements with vitalism Ušeničnik was clear that when vitalism morphed into a kind of pantheism, "where all nature is one", as it did in the writings of Zarnik, then the philosophy was "charlatanism" (Ušeničnik 1914: 152).

One of the consistent frustrations in the history of science is the limitation of science to one kind of practice (physics or chemistry) and to limit locality. Existing narratives which depend on a truncated account of "Europe" or the "West" or science itself tend to obscure the complex realities of those intellectual movements outside of self-imposed scholarly boundaries. The Czech and Slovene literature on vitalism is rich and especially illustrative, not least because it mirrors those debates going on elsewhere in Europe and the United States at the same time.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Czech theologians especially were concerned with "materialism from Germany" which must be understood not only with the European-wide debate for and against modernizing forces but meshed with
developing Czech national consciousness which was anti-German (and anti-Habsburg).

This intersected, in Czech speaking intellectual circles, with a deep understanding of German philosophy and a reliance on the German language itself as a medium of international philosophical communication. Slovenian theologies were certainly engaged in the same work against modernism, liberalism and secularism, as well as Darwinism and atheism, but this anti-German element (because of the particularities of language, culture, and history) was less strong than in the Czech case.

In the case of Czech intellectuals such as Durdík, Rádl and Mareš there was undoubtedly a reception of eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophy, but as in the Slovenian case, vitalism and the critique of materialism, the rejection of modernism and liberalism, was in a clear sense an effort to develop a specifically Slovene or Czech intellectual life and scientific program. Although the reception of Darwinism was mixed in the Czech context, Rádl's suspicion of Darwinism melded well with Driesch's own anti-Darwinian stance. The combination of the critique of mechanism and Darwinism provided fertile soil for vitalism in Czech intellectual and scientific circles.

This stance towards vitalism melded with tradition not in the reductive sense, but with the very individual opinions of Czech and Slovene intellectuals at the time. Vitalism and the critique of materialism not only had deep roots in the Czech and Slovene cases, but also allowed for a specifically Czech and Slovene philosophical contribution, which melded well with social and political commitments. In an era were politics and philosophy and theology were indistinguishable, the position against a doctrine or ideology was also productive (i.e. anti-Darwinism) insofar that a position against Darwinism or against materialism, was also for vitalism or for a particular view of life. Thus, intellectuals in "Eastern Europe" were not merely reactive but developed those reactions into a positive program which developed alongside full expressions of scientific and philosophical systems, which had their roots in the many enlightenments of Europe, the many romanticisms and the many industrial revolutions.

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# The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer's Philosophy of Science

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M. Chirimuuta

Spinoza would not have spent so much time considering a
drowning fly if this behavior had not offered to the eye
something other than a fragment of extension; the theory of
animal machines is a "resistance" to the phenomenon of
behavior. Therefore this phenomenon must still be
conceptualized.

Merleau-Ponty *The Structure of Behaviour* (1942/1967, 126–7).

But we cannot deny that the equation between these two
Weltanschauungen has not yet been found, even though it would
provide us with all that we are striving for in the relationship
between thought and reality. Perhaps it is erroneous to search
for a stable balance between them; maybe it characterises the
actual rhythm and formula of modern life that the boundary
between the mechanistic conception of the world and the
Goethean – whether we term that metaphysical, artistic or
vitalistic – remains in constant flux. Simmel Kant and Goethe:
on the History of the Modern Worldview (1906/1916).

**Abstract** This chapter surveys Ernst Cassirer's responses to the vitalist and holist/ organicist movements in biology during the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that examination of the combination of Cassirer's enthusiasm for holism, and rejection of vitalism, puts into relief many themes and preoccupations that are consistent across Cassirer's philosophical career, and aids the interpretation of his philosophy of symbolic forms. I propose that it is useful to read the third volume of the *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* as a critical response to anti-rationalistic tendencies in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and other proponents of *Lebensphilosophie*. Hence the availability of holism, as a purportedly less obscure alternative to vitalism, suits this broader agenda. At the same time, Cassirer's acceptance of holism depends on a commitment to the autonomy of biology which is at odds with the

M. Chirimuuta (✉)

Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

e-mail: m.chirimuuta@ed.ac.uk
physicalism of the Vienna Circle, but consistent with Heidegger's favourable response to holism in comparison with vitalism. Yet, in the end we are left with an interpretative puzzle about how Cassirer proposes to avoid the encroachment of physicalism into theorising in the biological and human sciences while maintaining his view that progress in science is the result of increasing quantification.

# 1 Introduction

In the recent outpouring of works examining Ernst Cassirer's contributions to philosophy of science, far less attention has been paid to his writings on biology than to his numerous publications on mathematics and physics.<fnref n="1" /> However, as I aim to show in this chapter, Cassirer's reflections on the science of biology and the phenomenon of life offer an interpretative perspective which affords a unified view of many of the features of Cassirer's philosophy that would appear otherwise disconnected. Another lesson of my study is that the influential view of Michael Friedman's (2000), of Cassirer as a philosopher holding an intermediate position between the logical empiricism of Carnap and the phenomenology of Heidegger, is questionable when one takes into account Cassirer's philosophy of biology – a topic not reviewed in Friedman's otherwise valuable book.

The quick statement to be made on the topic of Cassirer and vitalism, is that the philosopher rejected vitalism and endorsed holism or organicism.<fnref n="2" /> The quick explanation for the choice of this position is that Cassirer, staying true to his neo-Kantian heritage, reacted negatively to the ontological inflationism of vitalism in biology – the positing of *entelechies*, etc.<fnref n="3" /> – and to the anti-intellectual tone of vitalism in philosophy, exemplified in the writings of Henri Bergson. Yet, as I propose here, Cassirer's position deserves a more nuanced and involved account than this, and it is worth the trouble constructing it, because of the way that vitalism and the issues around to it – holism, the autonomy of biology, the very notion of vital phenomena – link together some of the disparate, but consistently held motivations for the philosophy of symbolic forms.

<footnote n="1">¹But see Paci (1973), Krois (2004), and Stjernfelt (2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²For the purposes of accounting for Cassirer's opinion, it is not necessary to distinguish between these labels, except to say that 'holist' is a term applicable to a range of scientific disciplines (e.g. Gestalt psychology and field theory in physics), whereas organicism is more specific to biology. I will say more about them in Sect. 3. I classify as vitalist those theories that posit some kind of non-physical vital force, and hence the irreducibility of biological to physical laws, and as organicist/holist those theories that assert the autonomy of biology through the positing of irreducible biological concepts of the whole, structure, or organism.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³For a more positive assessment of Driesch see the chapters in “On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism” and “A Historico-Logical Re-assessment of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism” this volume by Bolduc and Chen.</footnote>
In Sect. 2 I discuss Cassirer's engagement with *Lebensphilosophie* – the modish (according to Heinrich Rickert)<fnref n="4" /> philosophy of life of the first decades of the twentieth century. Bergson is often (inaccurately) classified as a vitalist in the same manner as Driesch, as well as a philosopher of life.<fnref n="5" /> Given that the culminating third volume of the *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Phenomenology of Knowledge)* begins with a rejection of Bergson's guiding notion of the immediate intuition of life, one might deduce that Cassirer's rejection of vitalism is conditioned by his setting this major philosophical project against Bergson, and *Lebensphilosophie* more generally. However, that would be to ignore the many ways that the agenda of the *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* is continuous with the currents of *Lebensphilosophie*, especially the work of Georg Simmel who was once Cassirer's teacher in Berlin.

Section 2 compares Cassirer's response to the controversy between mechanism, vitalism, and organicism, with that of three philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle and/or logical empiricism – Rudolph Carnap, Philipp Frank, and Ernst Nagel. Vitalism and organicism are both positions that express the autonomy of biology, as opposed to a mechanism consistent with the proposal that the natural sciences be unified under a physicalist standard where observation and linguistic report in biology are carried out under the same terms as in the sciences of non-living nature. As we see in Sect. 3, Cassirer's rejection of physicalism, and support for the autonomy of biology, are unsurprising given the high rank of Goethe in Cassirer's pantheon, and Cassirer's serious engagement with Kant's third *Critique*.

Section 3 also addresses the question of why Cassirer favours organicism over vitalism. Again, I show that the origins of this position can be found early in Cassirer's professional life – in the uptake of holistic principles on display in the 1910 book *Substance and Function*. The attachment to holism is persistent, and the story of the rise of holism in contemporary science is again told with approval in some of Cassirer's last publications. The more unexpected finding is the convergence of Cassirer and Heidegger in their specific arguments against Driesch who, it is claimed, did not sufficiently differentiate the causal mode of explanation proper to the physical sciences from the a-causal mode that begins with the sui-generis *phenomenon of life*.

The role, for Cassirer's philosophy of biology, of the notion of the basic phenomenon of life, brings up the question of whether the supposedly most “primitive” symbolic form, the *expressive function* has an ineliminable role to play in the mature natural science of biology. I argue in Sect. 4 that an equivocation on this very question is a symptom of a deeper tension between a radical pluralism and Enlightenment rationalism that each find various outlets within Cassirer's extensive reflections on scientific thought.

<footnote n="4">⁴See Schnädelbach (1984, 139).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵Peterson (2016, 6). Bergson (1907/1944, 48) is careful not to align his philosophy with Hans Driesch – see Posteraro, Chapter “Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation: Another Look at Bergson’s *Élan Vital*”, this volume.</footnote>
## 2 Cassirer's Engagement with *Lebensphilosophie*

One could even say, as Cassirer did of Aristotle (Krois 2004, 282), that the “centre of gravity” of Cassirer’s philosophy is in the examination of living and not inorganic phenomena. This claim appears arresting, if not straightforwardly false, under consideration of the fact that the bulk of Cassirer’s output in the history and philosophy of science was allocated to the physical sciences. Cassirer wrote three monographs on the philosophy of modern physics but none on contemporary biology. The depiction of the advance of knowledge offered in the *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* vol. 3 is the story of the development of mathematical physics. Correspondingly, the secondary literature on Cassirer’s philosophy of science has made physics central to his thought. However, a different picture is obtained as soon as one considers that symbolic forms are *living forms*<fnref n="6" /> – that Cassirer’s mobile version of Kantianism is one in which the forms (erstwhile categories) of human thought grow and develop out of one another in an organic fashion; indeed, that the forms of the human mind are an outgrowth from a more comprehensive living order. Furthermore, it is the naturalist, Goethe, who contributes to the notion of living form, and whose influence on Cassirer’s philosophy is pervasive. Cassirer is, in his own way, a philosopher of life, even though his writing places itself in deliberate opposition to the current that runs from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to Bergson and Ludwig Klages.

We can follow Schnädelbach in describing *Lebensphilosophie* as, “a philosophical position which makes into the foundation and criterion of everything something which essentially stands *opposed* to rationality, reasons, concepts or the Idea – life as something irrational” (1984, 141).<fnref n="7" /> Since this is a chapter on vitalism, I will concentrate first on a thinker who has been classified both as a vitalist and a philosopher of life, and with whom Cassirer directly engages – Henri Bergson. On the vitalism side, Bergson maintains that a fundamental vital impulse (*élan vital*) courses through the development of organic beings, rendering them unknowable by our disclusive intellect – a mode of thought which must fall back on mechanistic explanations aiming at practical outcomes. Yet life is susceptible to a different form of intuitive knowing, whose basis is the insight disclosed in our own experience, since we are all living beings with an inner life. In particular, the true nature of

<footnote n="6">⁶The notion of “lebendige Gestalt” is discussed by Möckel (2005, 138–9), with reference to Cassirer’s 1916 book, *Freiheit und Form*; and is deployed in *Feeling and Form* by Langer (1953), a book dedicated to the memory of Cassirer. A key feature of living forms is that they are unified wholes, not mere aggregates of parts (see Sect. 3). For Cassirer, both biological and cultural forms are wholes in this sense (Ferrari 1996, 109–10).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Krois and Verene (1996, xi) point out that Cassirer associates the term *Lebensphilosophie* with a broader range of philosophers than is common now, applying it to the work of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as Heidegger. See Skidelsky (2009, chapter 7) on Cassirer’s response to *Lebensphilosophie*. Of course, Cassirer does not share the anti-rationalist tendencies of this movement.</footnote>
temporality, *durée*, is revealed to intuition but never to the intellect.<fnref n="8" /> The anti-intellectual tenor of this last point is, alternatively, something praised and condemned in Bergson's philosophy.<fnref n="9" /> At the same time, Cassirer argues, the recourse to a notion of immediate intuition of metaphysical truth puts Bergson in the ancient tradition of metaphysicians (Cassirer 1923/1955, 112). Indeed, Cassirer took *Lebensphilosophie* to be the modern manifestation of metaphysics (Krois and Verene 1996, xi).

Cassirer's rejection, but partial incorporation, of Bergsonian ideas, brings to light two of the major impulses that give coherence to the philosophy of symbolic forms: the renunciation of the metaphysician's ambition of *immediate* knowledge, in favour of the examination of symbolic mediacy; and the attempt to resolve the apparent conflict between human culture ("Geist") and the realm of natural life ("Leben") – a clash much lamented within the *Lebensphilosophie* of Weimar Germany. Schnädelbach (1984, 148) writes that,

> It was above all the influence of Henri Bergson's philosophy of the *élan vital* ..... which introduced temporality as a fundamental dimension into the 'Absolute' of life-philosophy. The Heracliteanism of the ontology of life-philosophy was thus given a quasi-epistemological justification. It is astonishing to what degree even those positions which explicitly attacked life-philosophy were affected by it. In the neo-Kantians, Kant's talk of the 'manifold' of sense became a 'heterogeneous continuum', which was founded in the 'immediacy and irrational intuitiveness' of 'experienced life'.<fnref n="10" />

While we should not attribute these particular pieces of “neo-Kantian” terminology to Cassirer, the general claim is apt: that Cassirer’s shaping of an alternative to the metaphysical philosophy of life utilised tropes of temporality and vitality congenial to that tradition.

On the first of these impulses – the renunciation of aspiration to immediate knowledge – we may take the introduction to *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* vol. 3 as a long argument to the point that the “paradise of immediacy is closed to philosophy” (Cassirer 1929/1957, 40).<fnref n="11" /> This piece seeks to reveal the inherent flaws within various iterations of the philosopher’s quest for immediate knowledge, including the attempts of Berkeley and Mach to “return to the primal stratum of sensation and its pure facticity” (p. 25). Bergson’s proclamation, from the “Introduction to Metaphysics” that, “La métaphysique est la science qui pretend se passer des symboles” (quoted, Cassirer 1929/1957, 36) is the culminating point in this account – it

<footnote n="8">⁸This summary is based on “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (Bergson 1903/1912) and *Creative Evolution* (Bergson 1907/1944). See essays in Burwick and Douglass (1992) on Bergson and the vitalism debate.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Compare James (1909/1936) with Russell (1912).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Indeed, one comes across the rhetoric of *Lebensphilosophie* in unexpected places. The final sentence of the “manifesto” of the Vienna Circle is: “*Die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung dient dem Leben und das Leben nimmt sie auf* [The scientific world-conception serves life, and life elevates it!]” (Carnap et al. 1929).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Cf. Cassirer (1923/1955, 113): “To philosophy, which finds its fulfilment only in the sharpness of the concept and in the clarity of ‘discursive’ thought, the paradise of mysticism, the paradise of pure immediacy, is closed.” See discussion in Ferrari (1995, 814).</footnote>
is “perhaps the most radical rejection of the value and justification of symbolic formation in the whole history of metaphysics” (p. 36).

The Kantian roots of the replacement of a philosophical methodology resting in intuition, in favour of the examination of the forms of cognition and culture, are unmistakable.<fnref n="12" /> It is just as important to see how Cassirer’s matching of the Goethean to the Kantian allows him also to make use of the tropes of temporality and livingness. In contrast to Simmel’s essay on Goethe and Kant,<fnref n="13" /> Cassirer’s writing on these two figures emphasises their points of similarity over their differences. Both, for instance, show how one can and must be satisfied with the mediacy of our knowledge of nature:

> And the Kantian modesty was also quite congenial to his [Goethe’s] thought. He was satisfied with the ‘colored reflection,’<fnref n="14" /> and was convinced that in this colored reflection we possess life itself. ‘We live amidst derivative phenomena,’ he says, ‘and do not know how to arrive at the ultimate question.’<fnref n="15" /> This negation of ‘absolute’ knowledge meant therefore no loss to him, and it set no determinate limits to his way of inquiry. (Cassirer 1945a, 96)<fnref n="16" />

In addition, it is Goethe who points the way to a cognition of life that is not the deathly, abstract one which repulsed the post-Kantian Romantic philosophers, but is a cognition, through the medium of symbols, nonetheless (Möckel 2005, 82–3).<fnref n="17" /> Goethe’s scientific methodology depends on an adequacy of perceptual capacities of the researcher (perception of “facts” being, for Goethe, also a mode of theorization)<fnref n="18" /> to the metamorphosing forms of nature. Nature, for Goethe, is not the formless churn of the (stereotyped) Heraclitean flux, but a continual turnover of

<footnote n="12">¹² Cassirer (1923/1955, 113) points out Kant’s betrayal of his own programme when he entertains the notion of the “intellectus archetypus” in the third *Critique*.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Simmel (1906/1916) – and see remarks in Sect. 4 below.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Hadot (2006, 258–9) relates that Faust, near the beginning of Part 2 of the play, “is forced to turn his back to the sun that blinds him, but he looks in ecstasy at the waterfall, where he sees the light of the day-star reflected in a rainbow: ‘In the colored reflections we have life.’”</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Cassirer refers to Goethe *Maximen und Reflexionen* no. 1208.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Cf. Cassirer (1945b, 76): “Kant was able to exert this influence on Goethe because at bottom the two agreed about dogmatic metaphysics.”</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Cassirer (1930/1949) tells us that contemporary *Lebensphilosophie* is the direct descendent of the philosophy of romanticism, e.g. Schelling. Of additional relevance here is Cassirer’s presentation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature in *The Problem of Knowledge* vol. 3, which Cassirer praises to the extent that it overlaps with Goethe’s (1920, 23–270).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ “The highest thing would be to recognize that all fact is already theory” (Goethe *Maximen und Reflexionen* no. 575; quoted in Cassirer 1929/1957, 25 and 1996, 193).</footnote>
forms that we can aspire to apprehend “if we ourselves remain mobile and supple”.<fnref n="19" /> As Hadot (2006, 254) relates, “Form” for Goethe “is not *Gestalt*, an immobile configuration, but *Bildung*, formation or growth.”

Bergson contrasts the immediate intuition of life, with the mere “intellection” of it through the distorting medium of *rigid*, lifeless concepts:

> This empty and immobile space which is merely conceived, never perceived, has the value of a symbol only. How could you ever manufacture reality by manipulating symbols?

> But the symbol in this case responds to the most inveterate habits of our thought. We place ourselves as a rule in immobility, in which we find a point of support for practical purposes, and with this immobility we try to reconstruct motion. We only obtain in this way a clumsy imitation, a counterfeit of real movement, but this imitation is much more useful in life than the intuition of the thing itself would be. Now our mind has an irresistible tendency to consider that idea clearest which is most often useful to it. That is why immobility seems to it clearer than mobility, and rest anterior to movement. (Bergson 1903/1912, 52–3)

Cassirer, on the other hand, offers us “mobile” symbols, living forms – and concepts with open-ended extensions that do not elide the individuality of particulars but somehow set them in order with respect to one another.<fnref n="20" /> There is a debt to Goethe, and to Georg Simmel (Ferrari 1996, 98–99).

Also Goethean is the hope that the relation of mind to life is not inherently adversarial; but I suspect that on this second impulse there is a more direct line of influence from Simmel. The case for the enmity between the intellectual “Geist” and life, or soul, is implicit in Bergson, and explicit in Klages, whose central work is entitled *Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele* (The Spirit<fnref n="21" /> as Adversary of the Soul). Klages contends that, “life and spirit are two completely primary and essentially opposed powers, which can be reduced neither to each other nor to any third term” (1929, p. vii, quoted in Schnädelbach 1984, 149).<fnref n="22" /> In contrast, Cassirer’s position is that we should take Geist – understood here as the formative capacity of human thought and culture – as somehow having grown out of life, and therefore not inherently opposed to life. This claim is subject to extended treatment in the papers published as volume 4 of the *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* (Cassirer 1996).

<footnote n="19">¹⁹Goethe *Zur Morphologie: Die Absicht eingeleitet*, quoted in Hadot (2006, 254). The holistic quality of human knowledge is a point at which Cassirer himself alludes to a happy alignment of mind and nature:</footnote>

<footnote>> Knowledge is ‘organic’ insofar as every part is conditioned by the whole and can be made ‘understandable’ only by reference to the whole. It cannot be composed of pieces, of elements, except to the extent that each part already carries in itself the ‘form’ of the whole (Cassirer 1996, 193).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰I discuss the significance of Cassirer's account of concept formation elsewhere (Chirimuuta 2020a, section 3).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹I follow the conventional translation of “Geist” as “spirit”, though it must be appreciated that the German term does not have the “spiritualist” connotations of the English word.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²²For Cassirer’s discussions of Klages’ writings see (1929/1957, 80–81; 1930/1949; 1996, 24ff).</footnote>
physical language (Carnap 1931/1995, 66) and that with this single language in
place, the division amongst the sciences disappears, such that a true *unity of science*
is established (Carnap 1931/1995, 96). There is an immediate tension between the
doctrine of the unity of science, and views that assert the autonomy of biology,
social sciences and psychology. Whereas mechanism is consistent with physicalism
and the unity of science, proponents of vitalism and organicism assert that biology
is in some sense autonomous from the physical sciences – that it relies on its own
laws or concepts, lacking correspondence to ones stateable in the physical language.<fnref n="24" />

The project of the philosophy of symbolic forms is tied to a pluralism about the
ways that objectification and knowledge-making occur. The different departments
of human thought and endeavour make use of sui generis symbolic forms, which
amounts to their having different “languages” – in the broad sense of symbolic sys-
tems. This is not consistent with the elevation of the physical as a universal language
(cf. Krois 2004, 280). Thus Cassirer argues for the autonomy of the human and
biological sciences, and not for the unity of science in its physicalist formulation. In
the next section I will account for why Cassirer opts for organicism/holism over the
vitalist construal of the autonomy of biology. In the remainder of this section I will
review arguments against both vitalism and holism, set out by three logical empiri-
cists (Carnap, Philipp Frank, and Ernst Nagel) as these offer an important contrast
class against which we will compare Cassirer’s case.<fnref n="25" />

In the “manifesto” of the Vienna Circle, published collaboratively in 1929, we
encounter a rejection of Driesch and Reinke’s vitalism on the grounds that it is
“metaphysical” (Carnap et al. 1929). It is asserted, however, that there is an “empiri-
cally graspable kernel” to vitalism, which is the claim that the laws applicable to the
processes of organic nature are not reducible to physical laws – in other words, the
thesis of the autonomy of biology. Carnap (1931/1995, 68) informs us that the,
“Viennese circle is of the opinion that biological research in its present form is not
adequate to answer the question” of reducibility, though the tentative expectation is
that reduction will occur (p. 69). But, importantly, Carnap takes the view that the
irreducibility of biological laws is *not inconsistent* with physicalism. Physicalism is
only threatened by biology having its own *concepts* that cannot be defined in terms
of “physical determinations”. However, Carnap hastens to add, any such concepts
would be metaphysical and ‘nonsensical’, in any case (p. 70). Thus Carnap rules out
vitalism and organicism on the same grounds – both of these doctrines posit biologi-
cal concepts, e.g. *entelechy* for vitalism, the concept of the ‘whole’ and ‘organism’
for organicism, which evade non-metaphysical construal.

Philipp Frank wrote at greater length than Carnap on foundational issues in biol-
ogy. In a 1908 publication “Mechanismus oder Vitalismus?”, Frank searches for a

<footnote n="24">²⁴E.g. Driesch (1908, 143) writes, “What we have proved to be true has always been called *vital-ism*, and so it may be called in our days again. But if you think a new and less ambitious term to be better for it, let us style it the doctrine of the *autonomy of life*....[I]n our phrase autonomy is to signify the *being subjected* to laws peculiar to the phenomena in question.”</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵Chen (2019) provides a more comprehensive account of logical empiricist arguments against vitalism.</footnote>
precise formulation of this question, especially in the light of the neo-vitalism of Driesch. Frank is even-handed in this paper: he criticizes both litigants for adding to the confusion, while taking the choice between mechanism and vitalism to be currently under-determined by empirical evidence. Only its track record of high heuristic value recommends mechanism over vitalism (Frank 1908, 408). The chapter, “Causality, Finalism and Vitalism” in the 1932 *Causal Law* book takes quite a different tone. Whereas the 1908 paper emphasizes the analogy between explanations positing vital “constants”, and ordinary quantitative explanations in physics, the later book puts weight on the finalistic and spiritualistic aspects of Driesch’s vitalism, which Frank takes to be a lightly veiled version of “ancient animism” (Frank 1932/1998, 112). Frank is here no more sympathetic to the organicist and holist alternatives to mechanism and vitalism, in spite of the fact that two organicist biologists, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and John Henry Woodger, were associated with the Vienna Circle (Hofer 2002). Frank’s view is that the notion of the “whole” (beyond mere aggregate of parts) has no cognitive content, but “states something meaningful only about the emotional and volitional attitude of the claimant” (Frank 1932/1998, 129).<fnref n="26" /> As we will see in the next section, this is a point at which Cassirer turns out to be in agreement with Heidegger, and misaligned with the logical empiricists, in spite of his apparently greater kinship with the philosophy of science of the latter group.

More involved arguments against the claim of organicists to be offering a meaningful alternative to both mechanism and vitalism are presented by Nagel (1951a, 1961). I mention this because it pertains to Nagel’s fairly unsympathetic review of the *Problem of Knowledge* vol. 4²⁷ – the book that includes Cassirer’s most extensive writing on the history and philosophy of biology, with organicism presented as a dialectical synthesis superior to both mechanism and vitalism (Cassirer 1950, 212). Nagel diagnoses Cassirer’s misplaced acceptance of organicism as due to a tendency to “overrate Goethe as a thinker” (1951b, 149) and to be too much in thrall to the Sage of Königsberg:

> [Cassirer] finds merit in holism because it confirms in a significant manner Kant's conception of biological form as a heuristic rule. Opinions on the importance of holism as a philosophy of biology vary even among professional students of living organisms; but in this reviewer's judgment Cassirer certainly exaggerated its virtues. (Nagel, 1951b, 150)

In the next section I basically concur that the reach of Kant and Goethe is not to be discounted in the explanation of Cassirer’s adherence to holistic approaches to

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Compare the 1934 Prague congress paper of Schlick:</footnote>

<footnote>> he presented an entire lecture, 'On the Concept of the Totality,' in which he claimed that while the distinction between totalities and aggregates might be linguistic or pragmatic, it was not a substantive distinction: there was no whole over and beyond the sum of parts. (Galison 1990, 744)</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Nagel seems to find Cassirer a wooly-headed thinker, who tries to mask his deficit in logical sharpness with an excess of scholarliness (1951b, 151).</footnote>
biology. But we will also see that in this Cassirer is also prompted by concerns he
shared with the phenomenologists.

In his critical discussion of Carnap (1931/1995), Cassirer writes, of the problem posed by physicalism, that its solution, “can be attained only by a phenomenological analysis.” The task, Cassirer goes on to say, is “to understand each sort of language in its uniqueness – the language of science, the language of art, of religion, etc. We must seek to determine what each contributes to the building up of a ‘common world.’” (1942/1961, 97). He gives the example of the contemplation of a painting which may be taken, under the determined attitude of the physicalist, as being merely a canvas with flecks of coloured paint on it. However, this would be to exclude from phenomenological examination, without justification, the “meaning” of the work, “which is not absorbed by what is merely physical, but is embodied upon and within it; it is the factor common to all that content which we designate as ‘culture.’” (p. 98). We will see that an analogous consideration is at play in Cassirer’s philosophy of biology: to apprehend living organisms in only physicalist terms is to *lose the phenomenon* – to neglect the way that living beings are first manifest to us in experience – in favour of a theoretically-motivated, unfaithful reconstruction.<fnref n="28" />

## 4 Holism Over Vitalism

It is not to be discounted that Cassirer had close personal connections with two prominent scientists associated with holism: the neurologist Kurt Goldstein, who was his cousin, and the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, a colleague at the University of Hamburg.<fnref n="29" /> However, the case presented in *The Problem of Knowledge* vol. 4,<fnref n="30" /> for the validity of organicism over vitalism makes more appeal to the authority of Goethe and Kant (of the *Critique of the Power of Judgement*) than to any contemporary figure. For instance, Cassirer criticizes Driesch for not, as claimed, staying true to the insights of Kant, but treating purposiveness as a fundamental power instead of a “point of view” (Cassirer 1950, 197–8); and he praises von Uexküll for following Goethe in his recognition that *morphology* (the study of form, structure) is the proper domain of biology as an autonomous science (pp. 203–5).<fnref n="31" />

The “Vitalism” chapter in *The Problem of Knowledge* vol. 4 starts with some recounting of the longer history of vitalism in the nineteenth century. More discussion is then allocated to Driesch’s urchin experiments and the arguments for vitalism based on them. Like Carnap, Cassirer does seem to be bothered by the way that

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1942/1967, 126–7), quoted at the start of this paper.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ The intellectual connections with Goldstein and von Uexküll are examined in Chirimuuta (2020a) and Stjernfelt (2011), respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ First published in 1950 (in English translation), but drafted around 1940.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ It should be noted that von Uexküll is often classified as a vitalist – as Cassirer (1950, 199) does. Stjernfelt (2011) observes that Cassirer tends to overplay the differences between von Uexküll and Driesch.</footnote>
the positing of *entelechy* – something neither existing nor acting within space – takes Driesch beyond science and into metaphysics.<fnref n="32" /> But unlike Carnap, Cassirer praises Driesch for isolating the singular problem posed by biological knowledge, as distinct from the science of the physical world:

> however one may regard his theory or disagree with its metaphysical implications, there is no denying that through his experiments and the questions that he raised in connection with them, Driesch contributed greatly to defining the characteristic methodological *principle* and *problem* of biology. (Cassirer 1950, 197)

According to Cassirer, von Uexküll's methodology provides a surer basis for the autonomy of biology, than Driesch's, because the starting point is anatomy rather than physiology (1950, 199). As he puts it, "[w]hile Driesch in his conception of entelechy wanted to demonstrate a specific autonomy of function, Uexküll started from the autonomy of *form*" (p. 200). This means that the biologist can avoid confrontation with the dynamical-causal explanations proper to physics, and take the study of biological structure as its own independent territory. This being possible because *form*, here, is not of the material sort studied in physics, but something more analogous to the ideal figure in geometry:

> Structure is not a material thing: it is the unity of immaterial relationships among the parts of an animal body. Just as plane geometry is the science not of the material triangles drawn on a blackboard with chalk but of the immaterial relationships between the three angles and three sides of a closed figure. (von Uexküll, quoted in Cassirer 1950, 200)

Uexküll's positing of a biological concept, *form*, not definable in terms of physical determinations raises his biology above the bar set by Carnap for scientific autonomy; of course it would also raise Carnapian suspicions of being hopelessly meta-physical – but those are not worries shared by Cassirer over this notion.

That Cassirer is open minded about this concept of *form* is probably due to his consistent endorsement of holistic notions across the sciences. As we saw in Sect. 2, Frank and Schlick shared an incredulity towards claims that organisms or social groups comprise wholes which hold some ontological or explanatory status independently of their parts. In contrast, we find in Cassirer (1910/1923, 333–4) an early endorsement of the claim of Gestalt psychology that, “[n]ot only the parts as such, but also their whole complex always produces definite effects upon our feeling and presentations”, an endorsement reiterated much later in the *Logic of the Cultural Sciences* (1942/1961:170–2). In a late paper, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics”, Cassirer describes how physics, like psychology, broke away from the “classical tradition” and availed itself of the notion of the field which has ontological priority over material parts:

<footnote n="32">³²“With these propositions [regarding the entelechy] Driesch wanted to establish biology as an independent fundamental science. But as we read them we get the impression that he has gone far beyond anything that science could establish and prove” (Cassirer 1950, 196).</footnote>

<footnote>The ‘entelechy’ is abstracted from the realm of spatial existence; it is something not sensible but supersensible. (Cassirer 1950, 198)</footnote>
The electro-magnetic field – in the sense of Faraday and Maxwell – is no aggregate of material points. We may, and must, indeed, speak of parts of the field; but these parts have no separate existence. The electron is, to use the term of Hermann Weyl, no element of the field; it is, rather, an outgrowth of the field (‘eine Ausgeburt des Felds’). It is embedded in the field and exists only under the general structural conditions of the field. (Cassirer 1945b, 101)

Given that the concept of form most relevant to organicist biology is the notion of the *whole organism* whose maintenance physiological processes appear to be directed towards,<fnref n="33" /> it is not surprising that Cassirer treats it as irreducible to collections of component parts.

Indeed, Cassirer takes the notion of wholeness in biology to be a metaphysically non-committal replacement for the old ideas of teleology and purpose:

> To employ a teleological method in the study of living organisms means only that we examine the processes of life so as to discover to what extent the character of preserving wholeness manifests itself. (Cassirer 1950, 213)

> The expression ‘wholeness’ has the advantage of being completely free from hypothesis. It contains nothing psychic, nor does it assert that the events of life must always proceed in such a way as to achieve the highest degree of purposiveness. (Cassirer 1950, 213–4)

The other advantage of the version of autonomous biology that is based in the structural concept of the whole is that it allows for a division of labour between structural and causal explanation, with the latter being left to physics.<fnref n="34" /> Here the acausal notion of the whole, or form, replaces the *final cause*. Two passages illustrate this move, the first with reference to Uexküll, the second building up to an appreciative discussion of Bertalanffy’s 1932 book, *Theoretische Biologie*:

> In Uexküll’s opinion physics is entirely correct in seeking to explain all connections in the world in terms solely of causality, but quite wrong if that means banishing every other mode of thinking from science. ‘For causality is not the only rule at our disposal for construing the world.’” (Cassirer 1950, 203)

> Modern biology has not followed Driesch. But neither has it reverted to the ‘machine theory of life.’ It has avoided both extremes while concerning itself more and more with the purely methodological significance of the problem. For it, the primary question is not whether organic forms can be *explained* by means of purely mechanical forces; instead the emphasis falls on the fact that organic forms cannot be *fully described* through purely causal concepts. In demonstrating this it invokes the category of ‘wholeness.’ (Cassirer 1942/1961, 168)

The second passage is part of an argument that the cultural sciences (humanities) must take the lead from biology in seeking their autonomy from the physical

<footnote n="33">³³E.g. “There is no sense in trying to deny the maintenance of wholes in organic phenomena; the correct procedure is first to discover this maintenance and then to explain it” (Bertalanffy, quoted in Cassirer 1942/1961, 170).</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴And we might add, to the special sciences when constructed in a physicalist manner – such as the mechanistic biology of Loeb and others.</footnote>
sciences via the study of sui generis forms.<fnref n="35" /> The doctrine of physicalism, and the Unity of Science movement of which it was a part, was an attempt to dispense with the much discussed division between human and natural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften) (Carnap 1931/1995, 31–32).<fnref n="36" /> It is noteworthy that Cassirer, in order to resist physicalism, places biology, alongside the humanities, as a science of form, shifting it from its traditional place alongside the natural sciences of the non-living world.

We now come to the comparison of Cassirer and Heidegger on the matter of vitalism. Both of these philosophers drew heavily from von Uexküll’s notions of the organic, animal life and the formation of experiential worlds.<fnref n="37" /> Both are critical of Driesch’s vitalism. Where it goes wrong, they say, is in offering explanations of life that hypostatize vital forces conceptualized in the manner of physical forces – by treating life as explicable via causal principles, but of a different sort from causal-mechanical laws. This could not be more different from Frank’s (1908) account, which takes no issue with Driesch treating vital forces in the manner of physical ones, but does not find a compelling enough case to be made for positing them. Driesch’s physics-inspired methodology is a positive attribute, for Frank, not a liability; though subsequently, Frank (1932/1998) expressed objections to Driesch’s attempts to emulate the pattern of physical explanation.

Cassirer draws from the third *Critique* the lesson that biological explanation must go beyond causation. Kant, he writes,

> insisted that these causal laws alone cannot enable us to *become even acquainted with that special realm of the phenomena* confronting us in organic nature, to say nothing of completely ‘explaining’ them. Here is the role of that other principle of order, which we call purposiveness. (Cassirer 1950, 198 emphasis added)<fnref n="38" />

Hence Driesch is criticised for his divergence from Kant. Likewise, Heidgger objects to the rush for causal explanation of distinctive properties of organisms, namely, self-production, self-regulation and self-renewal:

> The facts clearly do not allow us to doubt what has been said. What we have said also gives us a pointer to the peculiarity proper to the organism as against the machine, and thus also

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Cassirer (1942/1961, 172): “The ‘scientific’ study of the humanities can abandon itself to consideration of *its own forms* and *its own structures* with greater freedom and less restraint than heretofore as a consequence of the fact that the other fields of knowledge have become more mindful of their own very real problems of form. The logic of research is able now to assign each of these problems to its rightful place. Form-analysis and causal analysis are now seen to be orientations which, instead of contending with each other, complement each other, and which necessarily require each other in all knowledge.”</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Cassirer (1942/1961, 88–92) discusses versions of the distinction, including the proposals of Windelband and Rickert.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ See Part 2 of Heidegger (1995) *Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics*, derived from a lecture course of 1929–30. Krois (2004, 279) maintains that it was Cassirer who introduced Heidegger to Uexküll’s work during the 1929 Davos lectures and debate. See also Gordon (2010) on Davos and the discussion of Uexküll.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ See Cassirer (1918/1981, chap. 6) for his interpretation of the *Critique of the Power of Judgement*, discussed by Ferrari (1996, chap. 3).</footnote>
to the way in which organs belong to the organism as against the way in which machine
components belong to the machine. And yet this pointer is still dangerous because it can,
and repeatedly does, lead to the following conclusion: If the organism possesses this capac-
ity for self-production, self-regulation and self-renewal, then the organism must contain an
effective agency and power of its own, an entelechy and a vital agent which effects all this
(a 'natural factor'). But this conception simply eliminates the problem, i.e., it no longer
allows one to arise. Thus the real problem which is involved in determining the essence of
life cannot even be seen because life is now handed over to some causal factor. (Heidegger
1995, 222-3)

What both find problematic about the encroachment of causal explanation is that it
threatens appreciation of the unique *phenomena* of life. As Cassirer relates from
Kant (in the quotation from the previous paragraph), the exclusive causal treatment
“cannot enable us to become even acquainted” with those phenomena. This is how
Heidegger makes a similar point, but without any explicit reference to Kant:

Thus Driesch was driven by his experiments to adopt his biological theory, known as a
neovitalism, which is characterized by the appeal to a certain force or entelechy. This theory
is repudiated in large measure by biology today. As far as biological problems are con-
cerned, vitalism is just as dangerous as mechanism. While the latter does not allow the
question of purposive behaviour to arise, vitalism tries to solve the problem too hastily. But
the task is to recognize the full import of this purposive striving before appealing to some
force which, moreover, explains nothing. (Heidegger 1995, 262)

As mentioned at the end of Sect. 2, a feature of phenomenologists', like Merleau-
Ponty and Heidegger's, writings on biology is a concern not to "lose the phenome-
non" in the midst of in-apt physicalistic descriptions that do not relate the features
of living beings as they occur to us, irreducibly, in experience. It is telling that
Cassirer concurs with them on this point, and that he takes it to be a lesson learned
from Goethe:

The fundamental reality, the Urphänomen, in the sense of Goethe, the ultimate phenomenon
may, indeed, be designated by the term ‘life.’ This phenomenon is accessible to everyone;
but it is ‘incomprehensible’ in the sense that it admits no definition, no abstract theoretical
explanation. We cannot explain it, if explanation means the reduction of an unknown to a
better-known fact, for there is no better-known fact. (Cassirer 1942/1979, 193–4)

While not attempting “explanation”, in drafts written around this time Cassirer
(1996, Part II, chap. 2) himself deploys the notion of “basis phenomena” beginning,
of course, with an analysis of Goethe.<fnref n="39" />

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Cassirer (1996, 137) states, relatedly, that basis phenomena are “the ‘originär-gebenden’ [pri-
mordially giving] intentions in Husserl’s sense.” See also note 43 below on this text.</footnote>
# 5 An Interpretative Puzzle

In this final section I spell out one implication of my examination of Cassirer's response to vitalism for broader issues in the understanding of his philosophical project. The larger matter is the way that Cassirer attempts to uphold a progressivist narrative about the advance of science through the increasing mathematization of natural phenomena, while at the same time acknowledging concerns about the depersonalised character of the scientific worldview which attends this development. Cassirer's support for the autonomy of biology is not, strictly speaking, consistent with his progressivism. This leads to an unacknowledged tension within Cassirer's writings about the relative status of the non-scientific ("expressive") and physical-quantitative modes of apprehending nature, as I will now show.

In the second chapter of *Logic of the Cultural Sciences* Cassirer contrasts “perception of things” with “perception of expression”, finding here the basic grounds for the distinction between natural and human sciences. In *expression-perception* we observe the world “as if it were something ‘like ourselves’” – a bearer of subjectivity (1942/1961, 93), lacking causal determinacy (p. 94). In *thing-perception*, “we observe it [the world] as a completely spacial [sic] object and as the sum total of temporal transformations which complete themselves in this object” (p. 93); it is prerequisite for theoretical explanation and causal discovery (p. 94). Given that Cassirer rests the autonomy of biology, like that of the humanities, on the idea of an acausal knowing of form or structure (see 1942/1961, chap. 4), should we infer that for Cassirer, expression-perception is requisite for observation in the science of biology, for apprehension of the basic phenomenon of livingness, as well as for the appreciation of cultural objects like works of art? The interpretative puzzle is that Cassirer does not give us an unambiguous answer to this question.

There are passages that support an affirmative answer in Part 1 of *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* vol. 3, where the notion of expression perception gets its first lengthy exposition.<fnref n="40" /> For example:

> the reality we apprehend is in its original form is not a reality of a determinate world of things, originating apart from us; rather it is the certainty of a *living efficacy* that we experience. Yet this access to reality is given us not by the datum of sensation but only in the original phenomenon of expression and expressive understanding. (Cassirer 1929/1957, 73 emphasis added)

And also he writes of the “expressive function”, which is dominant mindset of the “mythical world” that it,

> can never wholly enter into this form [of physical causal relations] and never be submerged in it – for if it did so, not only would the mythical world of demons and gods disappear, but the fundamental phenomenon of ‘livingness’ as such [das Grundphänomen des ‘Lebenden’ überhaupt] would vanish. Thus we see that the basic motif of consciousness

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Cassirer’s debt to Klages in this text, and to another philosopher of life, Max Scheler, is not to be discounted.</footnote>
which we have recognized as the actual organon of the mythical world intervenes at a decisive point in the structure of empirical reality (Cassirer 1929/1957, 88)

But a problem with this first interpretation – that the biologist’s apprehension of the basic phenomenon of life depends on an employment of expression-perception – appears in a third passage from the same exposition of the expressive function:

> there is a kind of *experience* of reality which is *situated wholly outside this form of scientific explanation and interpretation* [naturwissenschaftlichen Erklärung und Deutung]. It is present wherever the being that is apprehended in perception confronts us not as a reality of things, of mere objects, but as a kind of presence of living subjects [Art des Daseins lebendiger Subjekte]. (Cassirer 1929/1957, 62 emphasis added)

The issue is that this “perception of life” is reported as lying “wholly outside.... scientific explanation and interpretation.”

This lays ground for a negative answer to our question, one supported by some passages in the *Logic of Cultural Science*, where Cassirer describes the increasing de-personalisation of the worldview (dare we say, disenchantment) that has accompanied the development of natural science. He writes that,

> Natural science, as such, should and must be free to determine its way to the attainment of this goal. Not only does it seek increasingly to suppress all that is ‘personal’ it strives toward a conception of the world from which the ‘personal’ has been eliminated. It achieves its true aim only by disregarding the world of self and other. (Cassirer 1942/1961, 103–4)

Lest we think that an exception might be made for biology, Cassirer adds that,

> Even biology must not hold back; even for it, the dominance of ‘vitalism’ appears to have come to an end. Thus life is not only expelled from the inorganic, it is also banished from organic nature. Even the organism is subject to the laws of mechanics, the laws of pressure and impact, and without qualification.

> All attempts to oppose this radical ‘devitalization’ of nature with metaphysical arguments have not only miscarried but have compromised the very cause they have sought to serve. (1942/1961, 104)

And he goes on to describe the failed project of Gustav Fechner to resist this tendency. It is significant here that “vitalism” is equated with the attempt to retain a personalized view of organic nature, and mechanism is depicted as the inevitable outcome of scientific development.<fnref n="41" /> The connection between vitalism and personalization makes sense of the linkage between the perception of subjectivity and the perception of life that is on display in the passages quoted above.

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Cassirer (1942/1961, 105–6) writes, “the mechanical theory has never tired of reducing to ‘tropisms’ all the phenomena in which Fechner sought to find proof of psychic life in plants; these can themselves be explained by means of known physical and chemical forces. According to the mechanical theory, heliotropism, geotropism, and phototropism are sufficient to account for the processes of plant life. The modern founders of tropism theory have not hesitated to extend the theory to animal life. In doing so they have regarded themselves as having established strict empirical proof for Descartes’ theory that animals are automatons.” And on this last point reference is made to Loeb’s *Dynamics of Living Matter*.</footnote>
Yet curiously, later in the same book, organicism is championed as the alternative to both mechanism and vitalism, and a path to the autonomy of biology (p. 168, quoted above).

Given that we find passages *within the same text* that support either the affirmative or negative answer to our question, we cannot put the problem down to Cassirer changing his mind over time. A plausible explanation is that the equivocation over the role of expression-perception in the natural science of biology is symptomatic of an underlying and unacknowledged tension in Cassirer's philosophy. There are two fundamental commitments in Cassirer's worldview that seem to jostle for supremacy. On the one hand he is a deep pluralist, endorsing the validity of a multiplicity of a symbolic worlds, each generating objects on their own conceptual terms; on the other he is a proponent of the commonplace narrative, associated with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, of mono-directional human progress towards the form of thought perfected in the exact sciences. As Carus (2007) relates, the philosophy of Carnap is one late occurrence of this Enlightenment project. The grand narrative structure of the *Phenomenology of Knowledge* is, likewise, in keeping with this tradition, where human thought is described as emerging from a “primitive” state, governed by mythological ideas, towards an “advanced” mindset that allows for the achievements of mathematical physics.

On the monotonic, progressivist narrative there should be no special role for “primitive” expression perception in biology, insofar as it is a ‘mature’ natural science. Yet without a distinct mode of perception for living beings, Cassirer has no principled grounds to reject a physicalism that denies the autonomy of biology. Cassirer’s deep pluralism does allow for an autonomy of biology, and a view about the irreducible nature of living phenomena that is close to that of phenomenologists such as Heidegger. But unlike the phenomenologists, Cassirer declines to package these ideas with a generalised criticism of scientism within philosophy and wider culture.<fnref n="42" />

Therefore, it appears not that Cassirer is an *intermediate* figure between Carnap and Heidegger (as Friedman 2000 would have it), but that his philosophy is liable, like the Necker cube, to an aspect switch, depending on whether his pluralism or his progressivism is seen to be standing in the foreground. When the pluralism juts out, one finds a Cassirer closer to the phenomenologists;<fnref n="43" /> when the progressivism projects forward, the philosophy of the Vienna Circle is not far away. This chapter begins with a quotation from Simmel who describes the modern condition as one

<footnote n="42">⁴² In another essay I discuss the organicism of Kurt Goldstein in relation to the criticism of certain methods of abstraction within science, presented by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Chirimuuta 2020b).</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ I say “closer” but not “identical” to. In Heidegger’s review of the second volume of *Philosophy of Symbolic Forms*, on mythical thought, we find the criticism that Cassirer, adhering to the neo-Kantian epistemological interpretation of Kant, is not sufficiently aware of the depth of the difference (the “abyss”) between the mythical and other modes of understanding</footnote>

<footnote>an interpretation of the mythical understanding of Being is much more labyrinthine and abysmal than is suggested by Cassirer's presentation. (Heidegger 1928/1997, 189)</footnote>
experiencing a kind of nervous oscillation between worldviews, alternately “mechanistic” (and, we may add, physicalist) or “vitalistic”, Goethean and “artistic”. Cassirer’s vacillation on the role of the expressive function in the modern science of biology seems the perfect example of this:<fnref n="44" /> it is not mere logical inconsistency, or lack of systematicity on Cassirer’s part, but suggestive of something more deeply felt in Cassirer’s response to the problem posed to philosophy by the apparent directionality, the semblance of a telos, manifest in the historical trend named modernity.

**Acknowledgements** I am very grateful to Bohang Chen, Philip Honenberger, and Charles Wolfe for their encouragement and comments on this work.

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<footnote n="44">⁴⁴In the unpublished text “On Basis Phenomena” we have an indication that Cassirer was self-conscious about attempting to reconcile Simmel’s two “worldviews”. The key passage is Cassirer (1996, 136), which begins with the conflict between Goethe’s resting place in “primary phenomena” and the demands of critical, reflective thought, dwells next on the Geist/Leben “opposition”, and ends with the question,</footnote>

<footnote>Can we preserve respect for the primary phenomena, without acting in opposition to the critical spirit, without becoming guilty of sinning against the mind, which occurs when we deny its original right – its autonomy – so that we treat it as something foreign, an intruder (*l'intrus*)?</footnote>
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# Canguilhem and the Greeks: Vitalism Between History and Philosophy

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Brooke Holmes

**Abstract** In this essay, I examine the role of ancient Greek medicine and philosophy in Georges Canguilhem's analysis of vitalism at the intersection of history and philosophy in his essay "Aspects of Vitalism" in light of larger questions about the historicity of "life" as a concept in the history and philosophy of science and contemporary biopolitical theory. Vitalism, for Canguilhem, is not a proper object of the history of science. But nor is it a philosophy that exists outside of historical time. I show how Canguilhem embeds vitalism both historically and trans-historically by threading each of its three "aspects" in the essay through ancient Greece. Canguilhem distinguishes his own understanding of both life and vitalism from that of the "classical" vitalists of the eighteenth century by refusing to read ancient Greece as romantically naïve or pre-technological and instead locating a dialectic between vitalism and mechanism already in antiquity. I argue for a critical re-reading of Canguilhem's own conjunction of vitalism and Hellenism that resists its figuration of ancient Greece as the place where the human qua species first comes to take itself as an object of knowledge. I instead propose reading ancient Greek medical and philosophical texts that are read and reread in debates about the nature of human life

I'm very grateful to Charles Wolfe for all the excellent feedback on multiple versions of this paper. Thanks are due as well to Christopher Donohue and the other participants and audience members in the vitalism workshop at the National Human Genome Research Institute in July 2019, as well as to the participants and audience members at the "Ancient Holisms" conference at University College London, and above all to Chiara Thumiger, who, together with an anonymous reviewer, also offered invaluable comments on the written version; and to the audience at SUNY-Buffalo in November 2019, especially Kalliopi Nikolopoulou and Rodolphe Gasché. The audience at the virtual version of this talk in the "Critical Antiquities" network helped with final revisions, and I thank Tristan Bradshaw and Ben Brown for the invitation to present in such a stimulating setting. I also want to thank Colin Webster for his incisive questions on an earlier version, which much improved the paper; Stefanos Geroulanos for generous and helpful comments on the final version; and Paul Eberwine for careful editorial assistance. All remaining errors and shortcomings are, of course, my own.

B. Holmes (✉)

Department of Classics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

e-mail: bholmes@princeton.edu
and the life of Nature over millennia as part of a milieu that shapes how contempo-
rary thinkers theorize life in the interest of human flourishing.

The Greeks haunt life as an object of historical and philosophical inquiry. The field named biology—a science (*logos*) of *bios*, one of the Greek concepts of life—has been around for a little more than two centuries. But the prefix *bio*— has been proliferating in continental philosophy, critical theory, and political theory since the turn of the millennium under the auspices of biopolitics. Biopolitics is not synonymous with a history or philosophy of biology, even less so with the cluster of philosophical positions on “life” associated with vitalism. Yet the intensification of theoretical concern with life as an object of political, economic, and social control over the past few decades has produced a series of dominant narratives about the history of “life” as a concept deployed with material effects within networks of power. Within these narratives, both historiographical and philosophical, the Greeks tend to be positioned in one of two ways.

The first strategy consigns the Greeks to obsolescence in the face of modernity's appropriation of life as an object of scientific and medical knowledge and state management. Michel Foucault famously declared in 1966 in *The Order of Things* that life as an object of knowledge does not exist prior to the nineteenth century; only, rather, “living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.”<fnref n="1" /> Historians of the life sciences have pointed to the emergence of biology as an autonomous academic discipline around 1800 as a critical turning point in the modern conceptualization of life. Even more important to the periodization of “life” for biopolitical theory is Foucault’s claim in the final section of the first volume of the *History of Sexuality* that a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached “when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies.” “For millennia,” Foucault continues, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”<fnref n="2" /> Foucault himself marked the form of power emergent on the threshold of modernity with the neologism “biopower,” a term that is now largely superseded by biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus, on this version of a Foucauldian line, essentially modern. And biopolitics, in turn, defines modernity.

The historicity of “life” in relationship to the Greeks in Foucault is complicated by his late work on *bios*.<fnref n="3" /> But it is not Foucault’s Greeks who have been primarily responsible for keeping Greek “life” alive in biopolitical theory for the past two decades. Far more consequential has been Giorgio Agamben’s ubiquitous claim that ancient Greek life is divided at its core into *bios* and *zōē*. On Agamben’s analysis, *bios* defines life in the robust sense of the life lived by the proper political subject, whereas it falls to *zōē* to designate what he calls “natural life” or “bare life.” Far from lying outside of politics, *zōē* marks a state of exception within the political,

<footnote n="1">¹Foucault 1970: 139.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²Foucault 1978: 143.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Holmes 2019.</footnote>
where life is wholly vulnerable to the power of the sovereign. Agamben thus uses *bios* and *zōē* not only to articulate the foundational structure of Western politics but to establish politics itself “as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized.”<fnref n="4" /> Agamben has his own understanding of a biopolitical modernity in the Nazi camps. Yet he invests a semantic split in Greek “life” with far-reaching structural-conceptual implications for metaphysics and politics in “the West.” In so doing, he enacts another familiar way of conjugating “the Greeks” with life. They are there at the origins of the West and at the foundation of Man.

Here, then, are the choices on offer for the relationship of “the Greeks” and life. Either Greek life is obsolescent; or it survives, ghostly but powerful. Either modernity should be read in terms of autogenesis, or we should tell an ancient origin story. From one perspective, I find the choice easy enough: the ancient Greeks matter to how we historicize “life.” More specifically, I think that the history of the concepts of life, nature, and the body elaborated in ancient Greek texts produces, over the course of multiple readings in multiple reception communities not limited to Western Europe, philosophically interesting puzzles that we are still grappling with.

Yet from another perspective, this choice commits us all too easily to an origin story that brings with it problems bound up in the entwined histories of modern vitalism, Philhellenism, and European theories of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Donna V. Jones has shown how constitutive racialism is of philosophies of life in this period; Alexander Weheliye has critiqued the dominant theories of biopolitics for misconstruing “how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human.”<fnref n="5" /> In conjunction with these critiques, I suggest we should also think about the ways in which vitalism meets Philhellenism, in particular, not only in explicit arguments for a racial biopolitics committed to purity and health, but also on the terrain of universal humanism.<fnref n="6" /> It is in line with this commitment that I reject Agamben’s account of *bios* and *zōē* not only on philological grounds, but also philosophical ones.<fnref n="7" /> But it cannot just be a question of correcting an error. For doing so would leave intact the move Agamben makes—namely, the plotting of “bare life” as *zōē* at the primal scene of Aristotle’s *Politics* as a performance of linguistic and hermeneutic expertise that claims for itself the petrifying authority of “the classical.” For Agamben’s philological practice traffics in a species of revealed truth that secures the totalizing reification of “the Western tradition.” If we are to think more critically with both “the Greeks” and the concepts of “life” in which they are entangled, we—historians and philosophers alike—need something better than ancestral,

<footnote n="4">⁴Agamben 1998: 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵Jones 2010; Weheliye 2014: 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶On Philhellenism and a racialized biopolitics of health and purity, see Holmes 2019, with further references. Martin Bernal’s arguments about the formation of modern Classics in the crucible of European racism in the first volume of *Black Athena* (Bernal 1987) have become newly urgent in disciplines focused on the study of the ancient Greek and Roman world: see Rankine 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷For more detailed critique, see esp. Brill 2019: 7–16. See also Dubreuil 2006; Finlayson 2010; Holmes 2019; Miller 2020.</footnote>
mystified Greeks and self-generated moderns. I hope this essay makes a small con-
tribution to this larger critical project and the question of how to imagine the rela-
tionship of ancient Greek texts addressed to the question of “life” and contemporary
problems in vitalism and biopolitics.

The challenge is that history at a scale that encompasses Greek antiquity while
also trying to answer to the present is always at once philosophical and mythical.
The mythic aspect of “the Greeks” is one reason why they do not go away. It is not
the only reason, though. For the history of (what in standard academic terms is
called) science, medicine, and philosophy unfolds for millennia along axes of read-
ing and rereading ancient Greek texts. These texts are recursively embedded in radi-
cally diasporic multitudes of thought that cannot be neatly described as Western or
European but span the globe. This multiplicity is another reason why the Greeks do
not go away.

The challenge that I have just outlined is especially acute when the question concerns *life* as an object of philosophical and scientific knowledge within historical time. One of the most challenging and exciting twentieth-century engagements with this question is the vitalism of the historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem. For Canguilhem, the blurred zone of passage between history and philosophy is vitalism. In this chapter, I aim to show that this passage is facilitated by “the Greeks” in Canguilhem’s work in ways that have been neither fully articulated nor critically examined. I pursue this claim through a close reading of the role of the Greeks in his influential and difficult paper “Aspects of Vitalism,” first presented as one of three lectures at the Collège philosophique in Paris in 1946–1947 and then published in 1952 in Canguilhem’s second book, *The Knowledge of Life*.<fnref n="8" />

Although the role the Greeks play for Canguilhem across his writings is more
complex than what I can show for “Aspects of Vitalism,” the essay is important
insofar as it is the only one that Canguilhem devoted specifically to vitalism.<fnref n="9" />
Moreover, the essay’s complicated staging of the Greeks at the intersection of phi-
losophy, history, and myth sheds considerable light on why antiquity matters deeply
to Canguilhem’s larger vitalist project. Pressing Canguilhem’s use of the Greeks in
“Aspects of Vitalism” thus brings to the surface difficult but persistent questions
about the science of life as a privileged expression of human nature versus a set of
circumscribed practices of knowledge associated with “the West”; the origins of
these practices; the work of racism, colonialism, and fascism in the stories that have
been told about these origins; life as a “natural” object of systematic conceptualiza-
tion in science and philosophy; and, finally, the temporality of biopolitics and the
historical status of “life” as an object of control figured as *technē*. In closing, I sug-
gest that by critically interrogating the way in which the Greeks mediate between

<footnote n="8">⁸The other two lectures, “Machine and Organism” and “The Living and Its Milieu” (Canguilhem 2008: 75–97 and 98–120, respectively), should be read alongside “Aspects of Vitalism.”</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹For the observation that “Aspects” is the only article that Canguilhem devoted exclusively to vital-
ism, see Etxeberria and Wolfe 2018: 58. On Canguilhem’s vitalism, see further Geroulanos and
Meyers 2012: 4–5, emphasizing Canguilhem’s “negative vitalism”; Wolfe and Wong 2015; Wolfe
2017; Geroulanos 2018: 79–90</footnote>
history and philosophy for Canguilhem in light of his approach to history as an expression of life, we can get clearer about what is at stake in the stories we choose to tell about life as an object of philosophy across historical time and work to craft them more critically and constructively.

***

Born in France in 1904, Canguilhem was educated as a philosopher, a historian of science, and a physician. In 1955 he took over from Gaston Bachelard as Director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et Techniques at the Sorbonne, which he led for over 15 years in addition to supervising the examinations and training for philosophy. For both institutional and intellectual reasons, Canguilhem exercised a formative impact on a number of postwar French philosophers, including Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, and Gilles Deleuze. But his relationship with Foucault was especially important.

In his definitive essay on Canguilhem's legacy, Foucault identified the marking of discontinuities as critical to Canguilhem's method in the history of science.<fnref n="10" /> Canguilhem's views on method were themselves shaped by Bachelard's historical epistemology, which understood science as proceeding along a path pitted with "epistemological obstacles" to be surmounted.<fnref n="11" /> These obstacles decisively fragment time's continuum, creating a *history* of science. In his fidelity to Bachelard's method Canguilhem was unsparing of his criticism of those historians of science who would seek out precursors—that is, those figures who ostensibly begin projects that are only finished at a later moment in history, at which point genuine progress is achieved. The precursor, Canguilhem argues in his essay "The Object of the History of Sciences" (2005), is a "false object" of the history of science that endangers its status as *historical*.<fnref n="12" /> In making a historical figure a precursor, the historian cuts him off from the very conditions (social, cultural, intellectual, material) that determine his horizon of possibility, thus recasting time as empty space that can be traversed first one way, then another.<fnref n="13" /> The ancient Greeks—Aristarchus, Hippocrates—function in the essay as paradigmatic cases of what Canguilhem calls, after J. T. Clark, "the precursor virus." We smile, he says, at those who invoke them to explain Copernicus or Harvey. We know better.

In insisting on the irreversibility of history, Canguilhem echoes the most important tenet of his best-known work, *The Normal and the Pathological*. All organisms, he argues there, follow a path of irreversible development that is coextensive with life itself. Health is always a dynamic state, changing in relationship to disease and

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Foucault 1991: 13–15. On the necessity of discontinuity in “effective” history, see Foucault 1977: 154.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹On Bachelard’s method, see Rheinberger 2010: 19–34.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Canguilhem 2005: 206.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³Canguilhem 2005: 205–206. By contrast, Canguilhem does allow anticipation, but “the facts that authorize it and the paths to its conclusion must be of the same order as those that impart to a theory its truly transitional reach” (2008: 38–39).</footnote>
individuated by the organism's unique, contingent passage through time and by its relationship to what Canguilhem calls its “milieu.”<fnref n="14" /> The relationship between the life of the organism and science as it unfolds historically is not merely one of analogy for Canguilhem.<fnref n="15" /> For the discontinuities within the sciences express what Canguilhem sees as a fundamental axiom about life: life has a creative relationship to error, which is itself a product of the organism's ongoing interactions with its environment. The endless but irreversible “auto-correction” process of the sciences, the history *in* science, must be read, then, through Canguilhem's understanding of the relationship between knowledge and life.<fnref n="16" /> On this understanding, knowledge is not opposed to life. It is, rather, a fundamental aspect of life's situatedness in its milieu. The transhistorical collective of scientists performs a continuous testing of life as an object of knowledge in a process that, because of the very nature of life as it is enacted by living subjects, is necessarily marked by discontinuities, ruptures, and shifts of knowledge. The “knowledge of life”—this is the title of the book in which “Aspects of Vitalism” appears—is at once knowledge that is made by life (and so belongs to it as the knowing subject) and knowledge of life insofar as life is understood as an object of knowledge.<fnref n="17" />

Canguilhem's approach to the history of the life sciences is therefore shaped by his understanding of the relationship between knowledge and life. But here we arrive at a paradox. On the one hand, Canguilhem insists on discontinuity within the history of science. It is because time is fragmented that the history of science is a history of discontinuity. On the other hand, by understanding the knowledge of life as not only the knowledge that life science gains of life but also the knowledge that belongs to life, we seem to have moved beyond the boundaries of history (though not of time), precisely because discontinuity is now read through a theory of life itself. In light of the problem, it is tempting to differentiate formally between the orientation of the philosopher and the work of the historian as two separable modes of inquiry. But the situation of Canguilhem's method is more complex, difficult,

<footnote n="14">¹⁴Canguilhem 1991. On the milieu, see also Canguilhem 2008: 98–120.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵As Foucault 1991: 21–24 observes.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶There are, more precisely, two processes of knowledge production and auto-correction that Canguilhem sharply distinguishes: science (as historical process) and the history of science. Each has its own object. Nevertheless, like science, the history of science is also subject to an ongoing reworking of its stories about the past due to its entanglement with the shifts of science in its own present, as Rheinberger 2005: 191–93 emphasizes.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷There is therefore more continuity between the subjective genitive and the objective genitive for Canguilhem than there is for Bergson, who drew a harder line between intuition and scientific knowledge: see Sholl 2012: 115–16; Wolfe and Wong 2015: 68–71.</footnote>
and, in many ways, irresolvable.<fnref n="18" /> Canguilhem himself insisted he was doing both together in a practice he called “epistemological history.”<fnref n="19" /> History and philosophy are stubbornly implicated in one another in Canguilhem’s work. Their knotting can be seen most clearly at the dense core of Canguilhem’s philosophical commitment, on which his claims about knowledge and life are founded—namely his vitalism.

Canguilhem makes it clear at the start of “Aspects of Vitalism” that vitalism attracts him as a *philosophical* position. He argues there that vitalism differs from other objects that a historian of science might take up, such as phlogiston or geocentrism. For unlike those erstwhile scientific objects and theories, vitalism can never be overcome. Rather, vitalism is “a certain orientation of biological thought,” one that, “whatever the limited historical resonance of the name given to it, will be seen to have a significance greater than just that of a stage in biology’s development.”<fnref n="20" /> It is “a permanent exigency of life within the living” and not a method; an ethics, not a theory.<fnref n="21" /> Its timeless counterpart is mechanism. If vitalism resists all attempts to disprove it, it’s because it’s not something that *can* be disproven.

Yet Canguilhem still inscribes vitalism *within* history, in two important ways. First, vitalism is a label that has been claimed by or applied to particular thinkers in the history of the life sciences and medicine: the seventeenth-century Belgian “chemical” physician Jan Baptist van Helmont, for example, or the nineteenth-century “father” of histology Xavier Bichat, or the twentieth-century theorist of the organism as a whole, Kurt Goldstein. It is true that the meaning of vitalism in this context is constrained by its “limited historical resonance.” But the very recurrence of vitalism as a historical phenomenon still points to something crucial about its larger meaning. Second, vitalism occupies a privileged moment within history because it is the product of a historical process through which life becomes an object of knowledge. “A philosophy that asks science for clarifications of concepts,” Canguilhem writes, “cannot remain uninterested in the construction of this very science.”<fnref n="22" /> The founding of a science of life, in Canguilhem’s view, transforms the

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Méthot, for example, pushes back against decomposing “historical epistemology” into its constituent parts: “in my view, the real interest of the concept of historical epistemology is precisely that *it* indistinctly links the history and philosophy of science together in a single, coherent project” (2013: 117, emphasis original). See also Wolfe and Wong 2015: “in a very real sense one cannot distinguish between a historical claim and a philosophical claim in Canguilhem’s ‘history of vitalism’ or ‘vitalism’ (72); Wolfe 2017: 35–41. The entanglement of history and philosophy suggests a more complicated relationship between discontinuity and continuity in Canguilhem’s thinking about the history of science. I thank Stefanos Geroulanos for drawing attention to this point.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Méthot 2013: 116–17.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Canguilhem 2008: 60. He there strongly contrasts a scientific view on vitalism from a philosophical one.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Canguilhem 2008: 63. For this reason, vitalism escapes the standard games of truth, as Foucault suggests when he describes vitalism as an “indicator” in the history of the biology: on the one hand, a “theoretical indicator of problems to be solved” and, on the other hand, a “critical indicator of reductions to be avoided” (1991: 18).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Canguilhem 2008: 60.</footnote>
nature of what humans qua organisms generate in their interaction with their world. It is only within this new realm of activity that vitalism itself makes sense.

It is at this point in the argument that Canguilhem turns to the ancient Greeks. They surface as the critical point of passage at which Man's natural tendency, qua living being, to produce knowledge of life produces life as a formal, "scientific" object of knowledge. Aristotle occupies a crucial place here, but so does Hippocrates. The importance of the Greeks does not mean that Canguilhem neglects the boundary of modernity—far from it. To the extent that the boundary is operative, it separates a history of the philosophy of the living from a history of biology proper (in "Knowledge of Life," the Greeks appear in the section labeled "philosophy," not "history," which comprises only the essay on cell theory).<fnref n="23" /> Yet because vitalism recurs within the history of the life sciences across a field of discontinuities, it points to the entanglement of the philosophy of life within the timebound "construction" of the life sciences. This entanglement points to the transhistorical persistence of the Greeks, blurring any strict boundary between antiquity and modernity.

The final sentence of "Aspects of Vitalism" reads, "In the end, to do justice to vitalism is simply to give life back to it."<fnref n="24" /> Canguilhem implies that the work of the historian who thinks vitalism in time is instrumental to making this gift. But what kind of historical time do the Greeks, in fact, occupy? What does it actually mean to historicize—an act we usually associate with contingency and denaturalization—an orientation towards life that Canguilhem describes as "the expression of the confidence the living being has in life, of the self-identity of life within the living human being conscious of living?" In the essay itself, Canguilhem isolates out three aspects of vitalism: first, the *vitality* of vitalism; second, its *fecundity*; and third, its *honesty*. Each of these aspects offers not only a different facet of vitalism; each also offers a different perspective on antiquity, which recurs throughout the essay in a discontinuous yet insistent fashion, thereby performing, as it were, its own vitality. I turn now to examine each of these three aspects in detail.

***

Canguilhem begins his inquiry by suspending the question of whether vitalism is true from a scientific perspective. Instead he asserts that it is true "historically." The fact that it keeps making comebacks is its "vitality," the first aspect of vitalism Canguilhem discusses. But precisely because it eludes any one historical period,

<footnote n="23">²³At Canguilhem 1989: 546, Canguihem adopts Foucault's position on the invention of a modern concept of life. This essay on "vie" comes more than four decades after "Aspects," but it isn't incompatible with the distinction already operative in the division of sections in *La connaissance de la vie*, which distinguishes between life as an object of philosophy (=vitalism) and as an object of a modern science. As in the later Foucault (e.g., Foucault 2017: 39–42 on paganism as an object of historical study bound up in romanticism), Canguilhem's periodization is itself shaped by a sense of how later receptions of Greek vitalism frame our reading of Greek "life," without assuming that the latter is only a product of modern projection.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴Canguilhem 2008: 74.</footnote>
vitalism's vitality is a problem for the philosopher rather than for the historian. Nevertheless, even if we are within the remit of philosophy, we are not talking about an expanse of time coextensive with life itself. Rather, we are talking about the beginnings of *a* history, the history of biological theory, which “reveals itself to be a thinking that throughout its history has been divided and oscillating.”<fnref n="25" /> These oscillations move between not only what Canguilhem calls Discontinuity and Continuity (on the problem of the succession of forms) but also Preformation and Epigenesis (on the problem of development), and Atomicity and Totality (on the problem of individuality). Each of these oscillations, Canguilhem proposes, expresses a dialectical process that life produces in thought once it has emerged as an object of a science of life. What this means is that the “life” at stake in vitalism is always already defined by a science of life. And as Canguilhem makes immediately clear in this essay, this science of life is given as Greek. It’s the “Hippocratic” expression of trust in *vis medicatrix naturae*, the idea, that is, that nature possesses its own healing power, or Platonist-Aristotelian-Galenic views on universal sympathy.

Yet from another perspective, the life expressed in (Greek) vitalism precedes it. For vitalism turns out to express a more basic, “instinctual” distrust of the power of technology (*technique*) over life. In other words, it translates something internal to life itself, described by Canguilhem as “the expression of the confidence the living being has in life, of the self-identity of life within the living human being conscious of living”; he goes on to describe this, as we have seen, as “a permanent exigency of life in the living (*une exigence permanente de la vie dans le vivant*), the self-identity of life immanent to the living.”<fnref n="26" /> Life, in other words, always expresses a need, a demand (connotations of the French word *exigence*). But it is also confident in its fundamentally agonistic relationship to its milieu. This agonism with the external world will eventually take shape as vitalism’s counterpart, mechanism. But before mechanism, the living human being has an attitude towards life that Canguilhem glosses as the “cunning of reason.” The phrase calls Hegel to mind. But Canguilhem is also playing with the sense of “stratagem” present in the Greek word for “machine,” *mēchanē*, as we will see further. Suffice to say here that mechanism “as a scientific method and as a philosophy” is already *implicit* in the human use of tools.<fnref n="27" />

The human *tout court* is constituted here by a fundamental push and pull. Canguilhem emphasizes the point by turning to the Czech biologist and historian of science Emanuel Rádl for his claims about the two ways in which the human being considers nature. Either “Man” sees himself as its (or her, in keeping with the unmarked but gendered Man and the feminization of Nature) child, feeling a sentiment of belonging and subordination to Nature; or Nature is held before him as a

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Canguilhem 2008: 61.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Canguilhem 2008: 61.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Canguilhem 2008: 63.</footnote>
"foreign, indefinable object."<sup>28</sup> Part of the vitality of vitalism is therefore secured by a polarized definition of the human being in relationship to Nature: kinship and sympathy (this is the position of the vitalist) or by a sense of distance and mastery (mechanism). The polarity of human nature produces the permanent oscillation of biological theory. This means that vitalism's "vitality" ultimately points to the irrepressibility of life's faith in itself. Nevertheless, this faith comes to be mediated in human beings by historically situated forms of vitalism. And as we have seen, the first of these forms is Greek. Life latches onto history in the guise of vitalism through Greek names: first Hippocrates, then Plato, Aristotle, and Galen.

In truth, the nature of historical emergence as it takes shape in the essay is more complicated than the account I have just offered for reasons that challenge any simple linearity in the history of vitalism. Although Hippocrates is the first to be named in the essay, Canguilhem introduces him in the context of a vitalist tradition already defined by the eighteenth-century Montpellier physician Paul-Joseph Barthez. The guiding principle of this tradition is the "Hippocratic" principle of *vis medicatrix naturae*. For Canguilhem, the principle represents "the biology of physicians skeptical of the constraining power of remedies" and distrustful "of the power of technique over life." By introducing Hippocrates via an eighteenth-century "spirit of Hippocratism," Canguilhem initially frames it as a reaction to mechanism and, more specifically, Cartesianism.

Yet the appeal to a *vis medicatrix naturae* can be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus and, more specifically, to a passage from *Epidemics* VI on "untaught nature" that was taken up by Galen as foundational for the philosophy of nature in the texts that he ascribed to Hippocrates: "The body's nature," the passage runs, "is the physician in disease. Nature finds the way for itself, not from thought."<sup>29</sup> This Hippocratic vitalism thus "gets behind" Cartesian mechanism to claim historical priority. But what kind of priority should we accord ancient vitalism, if it is, by definition, *already* a translation of something else, namely, life's faith in itself? What mechanism motivates *this* translation, so far removed from the Cartesian moment?

The difficulties inherent in such a question will become clearer when Canguilhem turns to the second aspect of vitalism. But they are already evident in his invocation of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, names given as examples of the attitude towards Nature that Rádl had defined in terms of sympathy and in opposition to an attitude that views Nature as a "foreign, indefinable object" to be mastered. Rádl's theory is a philosophical anthropology: there are two timeless options. But Canguilhem frames the sympathetic attitude of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen as *already vitalist*,

<footnote n="28"><sup>28</sup> Canguilhem 2008: 63.</footnote>

<footnote n="29"><sup>29</sup> The text where the idea of "untaught nature" first appears, *Epidemics* VI, is dated to the mid fourth-century BCE (see [Hippocrates] *Epidemics* VI 5.1 [Littré 5.314]). For Galen's reception of the idea of "untaught nature" and his pitting of the atomists against continuum theorists, see esp. *On the Natural Faculties* 1.12 (2.26–30 Kühn) and Jouanna 2012. The concept of *vis medicatrix naturae* makes a complicated comeback in debates in biology in the 1920s and 1930s, which form the backdrop to Canguilhem's engagement with it: see Geroulanos 2018: 161–206, 292–315, esp. 298–302.</footnote>
already inside a science of life. What this means is that their vitalism has to have
been shaped by the prior emergence of the machine or technique as an obstacle
to life.

It is worth emphasizing that, for Canguilhem, all life is agonistic vis-à-vis its milieu and creative in its strategies for survival. The use of technology is “a universal biological phenomenon,” as he writes in “Machine and Organism.”<fnref n="30" /> Fundamentally, technology is not opposed to life. Rather, it is an extension of life into the milieu. For human beings, tools and machines are the expression of this extension of life.<fnref n="31" /> At the same time, it is in humans’ use of tools that we find the seeds of mechan-ism. Here I suggest that Canguilhem’s double translation of the Greek word mēchanē as “machine” and “cunning” shows its own cunning. In a basic sense, the mēchanē is always double-sided. On the one hand, as “machine” or “tool,” it’s an extension of (human) life into the milieu. On the other hand, as “cunning,” it represents a disposition towards its object, that is, Nature—namely, as a foreign, hostile object to be hunted, captured, and controlled, precisely because Nature is seen as the source of obstacles to (a) life.

This double-sided quality of the mēchanē is doubled again in Canguilhem’s choice of the Greek lexeme, which he allies with the figure of Ulysses. With mēchanē, we also capture a relationship that is at once “permanent” and historical. It is in the use of tools among humans that we find the seeds of mechanism. But the Greek of the lexeme, together with the appeal to Ulysses, also signals the *historical* potential of the dialectic between Man and Nature held within the Greek term mēchanē. And this is crucial, because it is only within a historical process by which Nature is objectified as an object of control that vitalism can express the opposing sentiment—namely, that Man is one with Nature. So the mēchanē expresses not just the doublet “machine/cunning,” but the beginnings of a historical process through which the use of machines produces an attitude of mastery vis-à-vis Nature—a trust in tools and forms of epistemic capture, and a corresponding definition of the world they act on as inert and passive—that will eventually transmute into mechanism and trigger, in turn, the formation of vitalism.<fnref n="32" /> In short, the mēchanē enables the transition from the universal nature of Man into the history of science on the quasi-mythic terrain of ancient Greece. Canguilhem does not explicitly locate the Greeks within a historical process here. Rather, the mēchanē and Ulysses hover in the space of mythic time, on the cusp of the transformation of life into vitalism. They stand behind vitalism proper. When we turn to the second aspect of vitalism, however, we do find the Greeks being invoked in historical terms through Canguilhem’s critique

<footnote n="30">³⁰Canguilhem 2008: 96.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹The machine is a “work of man” and an organ “of the human species” (Canguilhem 2008: 76, 87).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³²“But is one not then justified in concluding that the theory of the living machine is a human ruse
that, if taken literally, would nullify the living? If the animal is nothing more than a machine, and
the same holds for the whole of nature, why is so much human effort expended in order to reduce
them to that?” (2008: 63). The very effort required of mechanism to corral its object becomes a
symptom of its misprision of that object.</footnote>
of modern vitalism’s “return to antiquity.” I turn now to consider how Canguilhem’s imagination of the Greeks as historical actors produces his own “unclassical” vitalism.

***

Canguilhem calls the second aspect of vitalism its “fecundity.” What Canguilhem wants to address with “fecundity” is whether vitalism is *productive* within the history of biology, or whether it is an obstacle to progress that has to be discarded for biology to make real discoveries. After all, vitalism could be vital and still sterile. It could persist not because it is rooted in some truth about life but because it is an especially tenacious and pernicious illusion. At the start of the essay, Canguilhem had set aside questions of truth. He now shifts back into the mode of historical epistemology to reframe the question of vitalism’s vitality in terms of Bachelard’s “epistemological frontier.” Is this vitality, he asks, only a symptom of mechanism’s historically contingent limits? If that were true, then vitalism merely marks the (ever-shrinking) territory that mechanism has yet to conquer. To argue otherwise would only be to refuse mechanism “the time it needs to complete its project.”<fnref n="33" /> Canguilhem’s position here looks even harder to defend today, with the advances in biotechnology casting life as “no more ontologically interesting than stardust,” as Jones writes.<fnref n="34" /> But as Jones goes on to argue, vitalism is tenacious. It is unlikely that Canguilhem would have ceded its ground even today.

Canguilhem takes different tacks in responding to the charge that vitalism is a scientific dead-end. He first lists the contributions of vitalists to the history of biology. But he quickly runs into the problem that whatever the import of these contributions to biology, the concepts produced to explain them (e.g., vital principle, entelechy, hormé) seem to indicate neither progress nor discovery. Rather, in their (re)generation of Greek concepts, they seem to signal regression: “vitalism’s fecundity appears at first glance to be all the more contestable in that...it always presents itself as a return to antiquity,” whether one considers the return to Aristotle against Descartes in van Helmont or in the Montpellier vitalists, or the return of Renaissance humanists to the Plato of the *Timaeus* over an Aristotle who had become “overly rationalized” in medieval scholasticism.<fnref n="35" /> The return to the Greeks only seems to confirm vitalism’s sterility. Canguilhem thus, like an organism in the face of an obstacle, changes course. His new strategy pivots on a split in vitalism. On one side is what Canguilhem calls “classical vitalism,” by which he is referring primarily to the vitalists of the eighteenth century who become conflated with “Hippocrates.” On the other is his own vitalism. He elucidates this split by differentiating two ways of “returning” to the Greeks.

<footnote n="33">³³ Canguilhem 2008: 69.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Jones 2010: 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Canguilhem 2008: 66.</footnote>
The return to antiquity, Canguilhem argues, need not be about revalorizing concepts that are worn out. Rather it is about going back to the sources, fueled by “a nostalgia for intuitions ontologically more original and closer to their object.”<fnref n="36" /> What are these intuitions? Not vitalism itself, at least as it is defined according to the “Hippocratic” spirit of the Montpellier vitalists. Rather, these intuitions pertain to a dialectic within the science of life as it is played out in historical time *already in antiquity*. Here Canguilhem proposes mechanism as a philosophical position historically realized in fifth-century Greece: Aristotle’s vitalism responds to Democritus’ mechanism; Plato’s finalism responds to Anaxagoras’ mechanism.<fnref n="37" /> Canguilhem is spelling out what was only hinted at earlier. Insofar as the first named vitalists are Greek, they are responding to the emergence of historical mechanists like Democritus and Anaxagoras in a space that was already opened up by a mythic *mēchanē* in the discussion of vitalism’s first aspect.

Canguilhem’s decision to name Greek mechanists at this point turns out to be critical for his own definition of vitalism. For he is subtly but surely taking his distance at this point from what he calls “the vitalist’s eye,” a product of eighteenth-century Hippocratism.<fnref n="38" /> The vitalist’s eye offers only a naïve vision of the past as pre-technological and pre-logical, “a vision of life anterior to tools and language, that is, to instruments created by man to extend and consolidate life.”<fnref n="39" /> Canguilhem aims to see both the history of (ancient) vitalism and life itself differently.

We can now better understand Canguilhem’s earlier conflation of “Hippocrates” with *vis medicatrix naturae*. He is not interested in going back to the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus as a site for the very dialectic that interests him. His lack of concern makes little sense from a historical or even philosophical perspective. After all, the theorization of medicine as a *technē* is a guiding thread of the writings in the “Hippocratic” Corpus, and medicine, in turn, was the paradigmatic *technē*, especially vis-à-vis- the mastery of (human) nature, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.<fnref n="40" /> Indeed, the principle of *vis medicatrix naturae* appears late in the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, perhaps as a response to the dominance of “technical”

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Canguilhem 2008: 66.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Cf. Canguilhem 2008: 79–80, where there is a relationship of mechanism and vitalism within Aristotle, because he has a notion of the automaton. This claim enables Aristotle to precede and also subsume Cartesian mechanism (85). On Canguilhem’s shifting engagement with Descartes in the 1930s and 1940s, see Geroulanos 2018: 83–87.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Canguilhem 2008: 67.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Canguilhem 2008: 67.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ There is plenty of evidence of “technological optimism,” e.g., [Hippocrates] *On the Technē* 11 (Littré 6.18–20 = 237, 6–14 Jouanna). See also, e.g., [Hippocrates] *On Ancient Medicine* 24 (Littré 1.636 = 153, 16–19 Jouanna), though this text, *On Ancient Medicine*, is more complicated in its famous (“vitalist”) argument in Chap. 9 that the practice of medicine will always be probabilistic. See Lonie 1981, which reads strands of mechanism and vitalism in the Hippocratic Corpus through the lens of Friedrich Hoffmann’s iatromechanism in a way that both accepts the anachronism of the categories and does not reduce them to Hoffmann’s terms. See also Holmes 2014 on the problems of positing a vitalist “sympathy” in the Hippocratic Corpus; Holmes 2010: 192–227 for medicine as a model *technē*.</footnote>
intervention in the earlier writings of the Corpus, much as Canguilhem's account here would predict. In other words, an argument can easily be made, appropriating Canguilhem's notion of a dialectic within biological theory, that the principle of "untaught nature" is itself a response to certain strains of technological optimism, conditioned by the valorization of *technē* as the source of medicine's power and authority, in fifth- and fourth-century BCE medical writing. But if Canguilhem is unconcerned with whether Hippocratic "vitalism" might itself already be embedded in the dialectic that he identifies elsewhere, it is because he is using the name of Hippocrates to label the "emic" expression of classical vitalism. He does this even as he recognizes that this expression is properly an effect of the reception of "Hippocrates" from Galen to the revival of Hippocratism in the Montpellier vitalists.

In other words, Canguilhem uses Hippocrates strategically to name the eighteenth-century vitalist's refusal to cede *any* ground to mechanism. It is because the so-called "Hippocratic spirit" believes nature has no need of technique—in later writings, Canguilhem treats "Hippocratic" medicine as non-interventionist, even "contemplative"—that it can produce the naïve vision of pre-technological Man.<fnref n="41" /> In negotiating the apparent obsolescence of vitalism, Canguilhem thus appropriates Hippocrates to designate both the refusal to acknowledge the entanglement of life and technique *and* a false origin for later vitalists. These vitalists mistakenly use Hippocrates to prove the possibility of medicine before or without technique, rather than recognizing that vitalism and mechanism go hand in hand already in classical antiquity.

The wrong kind of vitalist "return to antiquity" is therefore implicated in the "classical"—that is, eighteenth-century—vitalist's misunderstanding of the relationship between life and technique. Canguilhem accordingly needs to correct both aspects of the classical vitalist's error. When he looks to the relationship between Democritus and Aristotle for philosophical clarity on the problem of vitalism, he is looking to a different antiquity. This antiquity is viewed not from within the classical eighteenth-century vitalist perspective, which posits Hippocrates as a purer, pre-technological figure. Rather, Canguilhem is adopting the perspective of a different vitalism, what we could call an "unclassical" vitalism, a vitalism that is nevertheless still oriented towards classical Greek antiquity. Let us see what this looks like for Canguilhem.

Canguilhem's own vitalism takes shape in his last defense of vitalism's fecundity. This defense requires the outright rejection of classical eighteenth-century vitalism. Discussing Bichat, he identifies classical vitalism's "philosophically inexcusable fault" as its designation of an "empire within an empire" (that is, Spinoza's

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ See Canguilhem 1994: 130–31 where he opposes contemplative ancient medicine to activist modern medicine (though he admits this is an oversimplification). To the extent he commits to this view, there would be no true dialectic between vitalism and mechanism until the modern period, at least in medicine. In later essays, Canguilhem explicitly rejects the “Hippocratic” dictum of the “healing power of nature” (*vis medicatrix naturae*) under the influence of his resistance to the anti-medicine and anti-psychiatry movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s: see Canguilhem 2012: 25–33, with Geroulanos and Meyers 2012: 13–15.</footnote>
*imperium in imperio*) in order to secure the specificity of the biological against the laws of physics.<fnref n="42" /> Far from erring in its ambitions, classical vitalism is too modest, Canguilhem declares. His argument builds on his philosophy of the organism and is developed at greater length in the lectures that followed “Aspects,” “Machine and Organism” and “The Living and Its Milieu.” His strategy throughout these lectures is to nest mechanism within vitalism. “To live,” he writes in “The Living and Its Milieu,” “is to radiate: it is to organize the milieu from and around a center of reference, which cannot itself be referred to without losing its original meaning.”<fnref n="43" /> The very behavior of “man as technician and scientist” therefore demands an explanation that privileges life.<fnref n="44" /> In this way Canguilhem claims a priority for life vis-à-vis reason or mechanism that is at once logical and historical. In place of the classical vitalist’s naïve vision of pre-technological Man, he offers a vision of Man whose use of tools and concepts is as rooted in life as is the vitalist resistance to technique.

Nevertheless, vitalism itself is a specific translation of the permanent exigency of life, enmeshed in the analogous mechanist “translation” of a more fundamental *mēchanē*. As such, it falls back into history, and history returns us to Greek origins. Canguilhem attributes an even more powerful historical priority to the ancients, with the promise of originality and purity such priority entails, in his explication of the third and last aspect of vitalism: its honesty.

***

Canguilhem's defense of the “honesty” of vitalism shows him grappling with a charge against vitalism that is more damning than that of obsolescence or error—namely, the charge that it is politically reactionary, counterrevolutionary, or something even more toxic: complicit in the horrors of the Holocaust through the Nazi appropriation of vitalist biology for a racist biopolitics.<fnref n="45" /> These charges were not abstract to Canguilhem, who fought in the French Resistance. It is worth remembering, too, that the lectures date to 1946–1947. But he refuses to accept the charges against vitalism on the grounds that politics borrows from biology what it has already lent it. The blame for Nazi biology, he insists, lies with the moral and philosophical failures of Nazi biologists.

If you are going to be persuaded of vitalism's innocence, these arguments would seem sufficient. But Canguilhem goes a step further, seeking to exculpate vitalism due to the innocence of its origins: “If we look for vitalism's meaning in its origins and for its purity at its sources, we will not be tempted to reproach Hippocrates or

<footnote n="42">⁴² Canguilhem 2008: 70.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Canguilhem 2008: 113–14.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Canguilhem 2008: 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ On the political problem of vitalism in the years after the war, see Bianco and de Beistegui 2015: 3–5. The charges against vitalism arising from Nazi appropriations have not gone away. See, e.g., Braidotti 2010, repudiating the “new vitalism” of Jane Bennett and others. Cf. Weinstein and Colebrook 2017 on “critical life studies.”</footnote>
the Renaissance humanist for the dishonesty of their vitalism.”<fnref n="46" /> Why does Canguilhem feel compelled to make this move? We could read it as a final encounter between the historian’s understanding of vitalism and the philosopher’s. For Canguilhem goes on to acknowledge that it is in part true to see behind the twentieth-century resurgence of vitalism the workings of political economy and, more specifically, bourgeois society’s crisis of confidence in capitalism—a reading of vitalism’s attraction that could no doubt be developed with even greater force in the early twenty-first century. But Canguilhem is generally impatient with externalist explanation. So he sets aside historical materialism to return to the space in Greek antiquity where history transmutes into an expression of life itself—and, indeed, an expression of life’s resistance to technique: “the rebirths of vitalism translate, perhaps in discontinuous fashion, life’s permanent distrust of the mechanization of life.”<fnref n="47" />

Yet the nostalgic longing for the “purity” of vitalism’s sources is itself implicated in a different kind of history in which the Greeks represent an innocent origin. History in the mode of nostalgic mythmaking feels decidedly impure in light of another -ism that became complicit in the formation of Nazi ideology—namely, German Philhellenism in its attachment to a lost Greek homeland.<fnref n="48" /> Does politics borrow from Philhellenism what it has already lent to it? Do these transactions take place across a sharp border? Has the love of the Greeks ever been innocent? Surely, as Nietzsche at his most critical would insist, the answer must be “no.”<fnref n="49" /> If we need a critical vitalism, can we pursue this end without also thinking critically about the Greeks? So what can we say about Canguilhem’s Greeks? What can we do with them?

By this point, I hope to have demonstrated how thoroughly the Greeks permeate Canguilhem’s reading of vitalism as at once historical and philosophical in “Aspects of Vitalism.” They occupy consequential roles in each of the three aspects of vitalism: vitality, fecundity, honesty. I have tried to show how, on Canguilhem’s account, the Greeks produce the first historical articulation of vitalism. Hippocratism is thus the form in which life asserts itself, and keeps asserting itself, within the repeatedly renegotiated terms of life science. So as long as we remain within a science of life, vitalism as recursion has to be read vis-à-vis a Hippocratic origin if its vitality is to be fully appreciated. But the “Hippocratic” vitalism of the eighteenth century also failed to comprehend the dialectic between vitalism and mechanism out of which it was created. This ancient dialectic, Canguilhem argues, can and must therefore be read in terms of his own vitalism, which repairs vitalism’s ancient history in order to repair its philosophy. Within Canguilhem’s terms, the oscillation between vitalism and mechanism in biological theory is part of a much longer, continuous, and

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Canguilhem 2008: 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Canguilhem 2008: 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ See Goldhill 2000; Fleming 2012: 109–17, with further references; Chapoutot 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ See Porter 2019.</footnote>
indeed non-human story of life's exercise of technique. But it is also the result of a
critical *rupture* in the relationship of (human) life to knowledge. Canguilhem's own
theory encompasses the philosophical position that life by its very nature distrusts
mechanization, even as it uses tools to evade obstacles. It also encompasses the
historical position that once Greek vitalism emerges it becomes the template for
life's knowing, conscious rebellion against science that is retraced in vitalism's later
rebirths. In the third part of the essay, this template is revisited as vitalism's inno-
cent origin.

Greece thus mediates between history and philosophy in “Aspects of Vitalism.”
It enables Canguilhem to fold his philosophical argument about the relation of
(human) life and knowledge into history as the expression of a recurrent but still
timebound phenomenon: vitalism. It is therefore impossible to grapple with the
entwinement of history and philosophy in Canguilhem without also thinking about
how he approaches the history of philosophy in ancient Greece. At the same time,
Canguilhem is not exactly doing the history of philosophy or biology in “Aspects of
Vitalism.” If he invokes the agonism between Democritus and Aristotle, it is not
with the aim of analyzing or even documenting a philosophical debate. Rather, he
surgically deploys that dynamism as a historical fact against the naïve vitalist’s view
of history and in the service of his own theory of life and its history. Canguilhem can
do this because he takes for granted the place of classical Greece as the spatio-
temporal zone where life consequentially crosses into history as the object of both
mechanistic control and vitalist care.

By attending to the function of the Greeks in “Aspects,” we can see that the essay
is, at a fundamental level, addressed to the question of *what it means to historicize
a permanent exigency of life*. It is worth recalling the warped temporality created by
Canguilhem’s introduction of Hippocrates via the Montpellier vitalists. The blur-
ring between “Hippocrates” and “the Hippocratic spirit” implies that Canguilhem is
well aware that his ancients are mediated by post-Cartesian vitalism as it flourished
in France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even as he reads the Latin
*vis medicatrix naturae* as the Greek of “Hippocrates.” He is committed to the view
that organismic time is irreversible. But still, the Greeks cannot be contained within
this modern reception. If they’re imbricated in Canguilhem’s “history of the pres-
ent,” to borrow a term of Foucault’s, it is precisely because they exceed modernity.<fnref n="50" />
What exceeds the eighteenth-century reception is something like the “life” that
fuels Canguilhem’s own vitalism. Philosophy and history are mixed up because the
Greeks are inside and outside of history.

I will try to be more precise. We could take up ancient Greek vitalism and its
reception from a historicist perspective. The history of the life sciences has been
shaped by various “returns” to “the Greeks,” and especially Hippocrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and Galen. Problems concerning the mastery of the nature of living things

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰Geroulanos and Meyers 2012: 12–13 (the phrase first appears in Foucault’s *Discipline and Punish* [1975]).</footnote>