function in the colony. In other words, structural features could only be understood
as a function of the whole (Innes 1973: 32–33). Thus, one can find traces even in
Driesch’s early work of the holist dynamics that underpinned Haeckel’s monism,
even if Driesch was clearly less afraid of teleological explanation than Haeckel.
Indeed, one of the central principles of Driesch’s vitalism was that there are also
laws of wholeness and finality in nature, i.e. not only purely causal connections.
Unlike Haeckel, Driesch placed finality on an equal footing with causality
(Driesch 1939).

Although Driesch’s vitalism is sometimes seen as representing a break with his
early experimental work, one can find evidence of both functional and substantial
forms of vitalism even in his earliest theoretical writings. In 1890, just a year after
Driesch published his dissertation, he wrote a short paper called ‘The System of
Biology’ in which he criticised the separation of biology into two separate faculties
in German universities, each of which emphasised different approaches to the study
of life. Driesch’s argument is that medical faculties emphasised physiological ques-
tions as they relate to the practice of medicine, and was based on an experimental
method, while the more philosophical faculties teaching botany and zoology focused
on morphological questions, which were explained with historical-comparative
methods. Yet Driesch believed that organisms must be studied from both physiolog-
ical and morphological perspectives, i.e. as a totality. Driesch’s argument that insti-
tutional isolation prevents the formulation of heuristic scientific questions may
seem ‘monist’ in its implications, but in fact the unity Driesch aimed at here was a
unity of biology as a discipline that operates according to distinct, internally coher-
ent principles.

According to Driesch, the only researchers in Germany currently studying the
organism as a totality in this way were those associated with the programme of
developmental mechanics (Entwicklungsmechanik) advanced by Wilhelm Roux at
one of the state-sponsored research institutes that operated outside the traditional
university faculties and departments (Innes 1973: 33–34). Developmental mechan-
ics was concerned with functional differentiation in organisms. At the embryonic
stage, this concerned the question of how specific cells came to form specific organs.
Roux supported a mechanistic view known as the Roux–Weismann mosaic theory,
because the same idea had also been proposed by the cytologist and evolutionary
theorist—and Driesch’s former teacher—August Weismann. The mosaic model
claimed with each cell division hereditary units were apportioned in such a way that
each cell generation received increasingly specialized particles. By the time differ-
entiation was complete, each cell type (muscle, nerve, skin) contained only the par-
ticles determining that cell’s specific characteristics (Allen 2005: 270). In order to
test this hypothesis, the developmental mechanists attempted to influence the
sequence of normal embryonic developmental stages using mechanical
interventions.

In his account of this research programme in ‘The System of Biology’, Driesch
insisted, contra the developmental mechanists, that a teleological element is built
into the theory of the development of form from the outset. ‘The essential feature of
life’, he argues there, is the typical order of specific differentiated forms; there is
absolutely no sense in which one could talk about such and such an amount of “eagle” or “lion” or “earthworm””. However, if this observation led him to reject the concept of a ‘life substance’, he replaced the latter with that of ‘entelechy’, which was supposed to explain the ‘mechanism’ by which an organism becomes what it is as a whole (cited in Innes 1973: 35). Unlike the force that Haeckel saw animating all matter from the inside, as it were, Driesch imagined entelechy as in itself an immaterial factor primarily acting on matter from outside.<fnref n="8" />

Driesch further developed his idea of entelechy in dialogue with some of the developmental mechanists’ experimental observations. One prediction of the mosaic hypothesis was that if one of the first two blastomeres—the first two cells formed by the cleavage of the fertilized ovum—was killed or removed, it would result in half-larvae, since half the determiners for the cell’s specific function had already been parcelled out into each daughter cell. Roux tested this prediction by puncturing one of the first two blastomeres of the frog egg with a hot needle and raising the subsequent developing larvae as far as they could develop. The results fitted Roux’s predictions, with some half-embryos developing. This supported the thesis that differentiation could be explained as a mechanical process resulting in an adult mosaic organism, with each cell type containing only the active determiners for its special characteristics (Allen 2005 270–271).

In 1891, Driesch, working at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, performed a series of experiments similar to Roux’s using sea urchins. Instead of killing one of the first two blastomeres of the sea urchin embryo, Driesch separated them by

<footnote n="8">⁸This is an important and insufficiently recognized point in relation to Driesch’s theory of entelechy, which is often conceptualized only as an internal forming force. Driesch classically defined entelechy as a non-spatial, intensive, and qualitative force that governs morphogenesis (Driesch 1908: 144: 226). He described it as an ‘intensive manifoldness’ that produces manifoldness in space. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that many commentators on Driesch have interpreted entelechy as a force that drives morphogenesis from within the organism. When Freyhofer argues that ‘all organisms seem to follow a master plan, a shared entelechy’ (1982: 35), he implies that entelechy is something that works from within organisms, a claim that is reiterated later when he argues that Driesch’s entelechy ‘regulates, causes, manifests, acts…in material nature’ (48). Similarly, Innes argues that entelechy is ‘a specifically teleological construct which refers to the principle by which the parts are constructed in reference to the whole’ (1973: 36), implying, since it is the construction of organisms that is the issue here, that this principle forms organisms from the inside out. Moving Driesch’s concept of entelechy closer to Aristotle, as a form of ‘being-at-work’, Armando Aranda-Anzaldo identifies entelechy with the specific way in which organisms are at work in the act of morphogenesis (2011: 337). Recent appropriations of Driesch also posit entelechy as an internal forming force. Jane Bennett (2010: 71), for instance, sees entelechy ‘animating matter’, working as a ‘driving force’ from within on the bodies of organisms. Normandin and Wolfe are quite explicit that entelechy is ‘a teleological nature in living things’ (2013: 8, emphasis mine). Certainly, Driesch discusses entelechy in such terms; however, entelechy also has another function, working on matter from outside. In *The History and Theory of Vitalism*, for instance, Driesch speaks of entelechy as ‘suspending possible change and relaxing suspension’, and states that entelechy ‘allows that to become real which it has itself held in a state of mere possibility’ (Driesch 1914: 204–205). This perspective sees entelechy as working rather *on* living things from *outside*—not that these two functions are mutually exclusive. For more on this, see (Moir 2020: 143–145).</footnote>
vigorously shaking. If Roux's mosaic principle were true, Driesch predicted that he should also see half-embryos develop. In fact, however, he found that the separated sea urchin blastomeres each developed into a complete, though smaller-than-average sized embryo. Driesch interpreted the results as contradicting Roux's mechanical model. The sea urchin embryo acted as what Driesch called a 'harmonious equipotential system', and for the next 7 years he carried out experiments in an attempt to understand the causes of this phenomenon. When, by the early 1900s, he had failed to find a mechanistic, physico-chemical explanation, he concluded that embryonic development was guided by what he had already designated as entelechy, 'an organizing, directive force that consumed no energy, was immaterial, but was the factor that distinguished living from non-living matter' (Allen 271). Even if Driesch's refutation of the Roux-Weisman mosaic theory would later be proven more rigorously by Hans Spemann (whose concept of the 'organizer' is another 'vitalistic' concept in modern biology, cf. Peterson 2016), his commitment to vitalism was always highly controversial among his colleagues in academic biology.<fnref n="9" /> Even erstwhile collaborators like Jacques Loeb, who had esteemed Driesch's work despite being the arch-reductionist of his time, saw Driesch's vitalism as a form of metaphysics unacceptable in natural science (ibid.).

Indeed, Driesch eventually abandoned experimental natural science altogether to work on the philosophy of vitalism and on parapsychology, the study of occult phenomena such as telekinesis, clairvoyance, and telepathy. If Driesch conceptualised entelechy as an immaterial force in contrast with Haeckel's self-animating matter, he nevertheless followed Haeckel in attributing 'psychoid' characteristics to this force. Driesch conceived of entelechy as having two components: while the forming entelechial force worked on matter from the outside, Driesch also saw the reaction-determining factor in actions as a type of entelechy, which he called 'psychoid', or even 'soul', and located inside the organism. For Driesch, 'psychoid' or 'soul' was 'the name given to the entelechy of an organism, insofar as its actions are subject to it' (Driesch 1939: 269). Organisms, according to Driesch, therefore had a dual character: on the one hand, their form was the result of the action of entelechy in its externally shaping mode, while their action was the result of psychoid side of entelechy, which occupies something like the place of a psychological unconscious.

The broader concept of the 'soul' encompassed for Driesch both the unconscious, entelechial moment of organismic action, and the conscious moment in which the soul 'illuminates itself' (Driesch 1939: 271). Driesch saw this conception of the organism's dual character resulting in a form of 'psycho-physical parallelism, which is admittedly something quite different from the old psycho-mechanical parallelism, which wanted conscious experience to be the "other side" of brain mechanics'. He perceived a 'causality between entelechy and ego-being' in the way that the psychoid dimension of entelechy interacted with the conscious part of the soul. And if he denied that there could be a direct causality between mind and matter ('entelechy is always the mediator here'), he nevertheless believed that 'parapsychological

<footnote n="9">⁹Thanks to Charles T. Wolfe for the Peterson reference.</footnote>
facts' such as 'telepathy and thought transmission, speak of a direct causal relation-
ship between different ego-beings' (ibid.). Driesch pushed these arguments further
in his 1925 work *The Crisis in Psychology*, where he claimed that psychology and
biology were—and should be—moving away from the mechanistic paradigm and
towards 'totality concepts' such as soul and entelechy, and called on psychology to
take seriously the investigation of parapsychological phenomena.<fnref n="10" /> Driesch's inter-
est in the occult and in parapsychology not only saw his vitalism discredited scien-
tifically—in the 1930s, the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, claimed that his
adversary Driesch had ‘gone over to the spiritualists’—it has also led to associations
of his vitalism with fascist politics (cf. Harrington 1996: 124).<fnref n="11" />

There is no doubt that Driesch personally opposed fascism. As a pacifist and a member of the League for Human Rights, Driesch opposed both world wars and despised racism and anti-Semitism: ultimately, Driesch's pacifism and support for Jewish people saw him forced from his position in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The question here, however, is not so much whether Driesch personally opposed Nazism as whether his vitalism can in some sense be seen to lend itself to Nazi ideology. On closer examination, it is clear that it is not strictly speaking Driesch's vitalism that is aligned with reactionary, totalitarian, and ultimately fascist politics—certainly not if we define vitalism functionally as the insistence that life and the life sciences are subject to distinctive laws that cannot be reduced to those of physics and chemistry. The elements of Driesch's project that *are* supposedly politically problematic are rather occultism and holism, neither of which are coextensive with vitalism.

Concerning the occultist point, Horst Freyhofer (1982: 158) has observed that the decline in material living conditions in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s (whether this was construed nationalistically, in terms of Germany's defeat in the First World War, or socially, as a failure of revolution and/or welfarism), 'seemed to demonstrate that men were subject to forces either unknown or less known than claimed by many, or that they were subject to these forces to a greater degree than thought so far'. Fascists, in particular, argued that these forces were not the forces of reason—not Kantian categories or Marxian laws of history—but those of will, the unconscious, or the historical teleology of destiny.

Certainly, the substantial vitalist claim that life is driven by invisible forces can be seen to lend itself to extrapolation in an occultist direction. As Freyhofer writes, '[v]italists and fascists both affirm the existence of a transcendental, autonomous, and capricious force that controls all life, most apparently the life of men. And both think that some people can know and handle these forces better than most people' (Freyhofer 1982: 161). For Driesch the vitalist parapsychologist, these 'elite' initiates were the experimenters, mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists who mediated

<footnote n="10">¹⁰For a succinct account of Driesch’s *Crisis in Psychology*, see Allesch 2012.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹In a critical review of Harrington's book, Jüri Allik and Wolfgang Drechsler claim that Harrington's association of holism with fascism relies on a methodologically clumsy whig-historical account of the history of ideas, similar to the problems that beset the Sonderweg thesis. Cf. Allik and Drechsler 1999.</footnote>
between individual souls and the collective dimension of the psychoid; for fascists, the elite intermediaries were the *Führer* and his hierarchy. The political criticism of vitalism can thus be seen to be valid to the extent that, in its metaphysical form, vitalism does indeed claim that life is driven by unconscious, largely or wholly empirically unavailable forces that transcend history and are therefore outside of human control.

Yet some of Driesch's own claims contradict Freyhofer's assertion that, for fascists, 'elites constitute the ultimate source of authority in all matters of human existence' whereas for vitalists 'the ultimate authority remains with the transcendental forces themselves' (ibid.). In his autobiography, written between 1938 and 1940 but only published posthumously, Driesch denies the Nazi claim that what he calls the 'despicable pogroms of winter 1938' were a case of the 'popular soul' 'boiling over' against the Jews. Rather, Driesch argues that the pogrom was 'deliberately ordered' by the Nazis, an accusation that he recognises could land one in a concentration camp if uttered publicly (Driesch 1951; cf. Krall 2015: 111–112). Driesch's attribution of responsibility ('authority') for the pogrom to the National Socialists themselves does not make him a fascist; rather, it demonstrates a deflationary attitude on his part vis-à-vis the role of spiritual forces in human history. Clearly, for Driesch, the vitalist claim that life is shaped and driven by unconscious, immaterial, only indirectly observable entelechial and psychoid factors did not translate into an apology for political atrocity as the effect of some vaguely defined transcendent power.

That National Socialists *did* invoke occultism in support of their programme (albeit with an intensity and enthusiasm that varied according to the moment and the personality: Hitler was well-known to be less committed to the incorporation of occultism into Nazi ideology than Rosenberg, for instance) makes it no less true that the almost causal association between occultism and Nazism is largely a post-war historiographical narrative. As Heather Wolffram (2003) has argued, the focus on irrationalism as an explanatory factor in the rise of National Socialism was popularised as part of the German *Sonderweg* thesis by writers such as George L. Mosse and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.<fnref n="12" /> Reassessing this history, Wolffram claims that 'far from being an irrational and politically conservative backlash against modernity, occultism was often the site of complex negotiations over religion, politics, and scientific knowledge, which aimed not only at critique, but also at reform' (2003: 150). In this context she emphasises that 'for Driesch, as for a number of European scholars, parapsychology provided scientific validation of a belief in the naturalness of liberalism and pacifism' (ibid.). With this in mind, any straightforward association between Drieschian vitalism and fascist politics appears highly tenuous.

The holistic dimension of vitalism, too, has been claimed to harbour politically questionable implications. There is certainly reception-historical evidence for this point, as Anne Harrington has shown. She points to a number of Nazi figures and

<footnote n="12">¹²For recent accounts of the genesis and course of the German Sonderweg debate, see Everett (2015), Kocka (2018), and Walser Smith (2008).</footnote>
sympathisers who explicitly hailed Driesch as laying the groundwork for a holistic view of society and cosmos that they believed accorded with their own ideology. The philosopher of biology, Adolf Meyer-Abich, who played an active role in defining the significance of holistic biology for National Socialism, declared in 1935 that "‘Holism stands . . . on the shoulders of [Driesch’s] vitalism’". In *Das Weltbild der Biologie* (1941), Arthur Neuberg wrote that Driesch instilled in the era the conviction that '[n]o part exists preformed . . . everything can become anything and the whole determines the function that the part must undertake'. Meanwhile, in a 1936 letter to Driesch, the philosopher Paul Gast told his friend that his (Driesch’s) terminology ‘had been adopted in some National Socialist discussions of the Volk as a vital, biological whole’. Some were arguing, Gast reported, that "‘Driesch’s vitalistic, holistic-philosophy would be a splendidly appropriate scientific underpinning for National Socialist terminology’" (Harrington 1996: 190).

Harrington eschews the idea of some intrinsic connection between holism and fascism, arguing that ‘the Nazification of German holism’ occurred ‘not through some process of intellectual determinism, but because people—both opportunistic and out of conviction—came to “see” and argue that certain political conclusions must be drawn from the antimechanistic impulses of the interwar years’ (Harrington 1996: 189). As she acknowledges, Driesch sought to make ‘the language of wholeness and vitalism serve, not a fascist ideology, but a pacifist, democratic, humanist politics’ (Harrington 1996: 190). Significantly, the way in which Driesch did so reveals a distinction between his vitalist holism and a more expansive form of holism that sees vital principles applied simplistically to the social and political spheres.

The Nazi application of biological laws to human society is one ground for associating vitalism and/or holism with fascism. Yet if the application of biological laws beyond biology is certainly holist, it is not vitalist, as the case of Driesch’s criticism of his friend and collaborator Jacob von Uexküll’s 1920 book *Staatsbiologie [Biology of the State]* makes clear. In *Staatsbiologie*, Uexküll conceptualised the state as a living organism and aimed to diagnose certain pathologies that threatened the functioning of a healthy state. Much like Haeckel’s conclusion that the political orientation of Darwinism was aristocratic, Uexküll advanced the anti-democratic argument that the healthiest form of organization of the state was monarchy. In a quietly critical review of Uexküll’s book written in 1921, Driesch declared that Uexküll’s central claim that the state is properly understood as an organism was untenable. For Driesch, any particular empirical state could not, by definition, be considered a true biological whole because states possessed no independent, creative entelechy. Indeed, the only ‘super-personal’ organismic entity that Driesch was prepared to recognize—and, even here, only cautiously—was a concept of mankind that recognized no national or völkisch boundaries (Harrington 1996: 61). Driesch reiterated this idea of human unity in his autobiography, where he argued, contra the Nazis, that ‘racially determined differences, both physical and mental, are of almost no significance in comparison with what all human beings share in common’ (cited in Krall 2015: 112). Driesch’s assertion here of what Marx called the species-being of humanity is certainly vitalist in that it emphasises the unity and
totality of the life form. However, by rejecting the validity of projecting the laws of life into the realm of the social, Driesch opposes a vitalistic form of holism to Uexküll's more expansive and—on Driesch's account—*non-vitalist* holism.

If Driesch rejected Uexküll's extension of the laws of life itself to the social and political realm, he nevertheless did see the ultimate unity of all humankind beyond differences of race and culture as entailing political consequences. In *Die sittliche Tat* (1927), Driesch reflects on the political form most appropriate to this conception of human unity, and it is decidedly anti-nationalist. Influenced by the experience of the First World War, he writes that

> ‘There should be one state only, for there is only one mankind. But since historically states did not develop as they should have, but through violent acts of a few individuals or groups, we now have many empirical states. Every person should see to it that the many states become one state....But the best that could happen to the one state, and therewith to each particular empirical state, is that it would dissolve itself...that anarchy would become its “constitution,” because it needs no constitution. But this presupposes that “by nature” all men always act in accordance with the good which unfortunately is not the case. Still, while working toward the one state everyone must work toward obsolescence of the “state” as legal institution: the ultimate “goal” of the state is its own dissolution’ (Driesch 1927: 98).

If Driesch’s claim that states ‘did not develop as they should have’ might at first sight be seen to echo the Haeckelian idea of an orthogenetic law governing not only (in)organic nature, but also ‘civilization and the life of nations’, this impression is quickly dispelled by Driesch’s insistence on the role of human agency in constructing the socio-political world. Not only does Driesch see his vitalist conviction in the unity of human life as ultimately necessitating some form of single-state globalism on the political plane; unlike the National Socialists, whose application of the laws of life to the social world was associated with the idea of the rule of the strongest and with war between nations, Driesch’s political vision involves an explicitly anar-chic component.

One can challenge the fundamental association of holism and fascism on a number of grounds. Among other things, there are at least three distinct, perhaps related, but certainly more and less maximalist versions of holism. From the perspective of the political instrumentalization of holism, it presumably makes a difference whether one departs from the idea, which Lovejoy identifies with mechanism, that all phenomena can ultimately be explained in terms of causal physico-chemical laws, or from the attribution of the laws of life to the whole of natural and social reality as in the case of Haeckel’s monism, or from the more restrictive vitalist claim that living beings can only be understood as self-contained wholes. If all vitalism is holist in the latter sense, not all holisms are vitalist, such that even if holism can be said to display an elective affinity with fascism (or perhaps better, totalitarianism, which in the Soviet context is usually associated with mechanism rather than organicism/vitalism), an intrinsic connection between fascism and vitalist holism remains to be shown (see Ash 1995 and, especially, Joravsky 1961 for more on mechanistic holism in the Soviet context).
## 4 Afterlives of Political Vitalism

Let us return in conclusion to Sparrow’s critique, which does indeed posit something like an intrinsic connection between vitalism and fascism. There, historical figures including Driesch, Heidegger, Klages, Nietzsche and others sit beside contemporary thinkers and activists: the Vitalist International, but also new materialists such as the political theorist Jane Bennett. In her book *Vibrant Matter* (Bennett 2010), Bennett develops a theory of matter itself as inherently vibrant or lively, imbued with power and agency in ways that blur the boundary between life and non-life. She encourages us to see both non-human and non-living material things as imbued with life and agency, capable of making things happen. For Bennett, political theory has for too long been focused on human agency, forgetting that we too are matter, and that matter itself is in some sense alive or at least possess creative capacities that are not entirely within our ken or control.

The stakes of Bennett’s project are thus highly political. Questions of ecology and racial justice, in particular, depend in Bennett’s view on an appreciation of thing-power.

She sees the ‘figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter’ as ‘one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption’ (2010: ix). Encouraging us to see the natural world, including in its inorganic facets, as alive may, she suggests, foster a more sustainable environmental politics.

In relation to matters of social justice, Bennett makes the following argument (2010: 13):

> ‘If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such.’

Yet despite its self-declared investment in the project of an emancipatory politics, Bennett’s vitalism—or vital materialism—comes in for criticism on account of what Sparrow, following feminist theorist Nikki Sullivan, calls ‘white optics’. Bennett’s explicit distinction of thing-power from ‘Flower Power, Black Power [and] Girl Power’ serves, Sparrow claims, to ‘belittle and diminish both feminist and Black liberatory movements’. She cites Sullivan’s (2019: 310) point here that new materialism relies on the ‘appropriation of both the (bad) feminist other [or Black, or any other so-called “cultural” identity that resists the flattening binary of human/nonhuman], and the (good) non-human other’ as a means of ordering and classifying the world towards certain ends, a process that paradoxically reasserts colonial power.
The white optics of Bennett’s vital materialism according to Sparrow thus stem
from the fact that it is what has often been called a flat ontology: it ‘creates a flat-
tened image of the monolithic “human”, and then works to performatively disavow
it.’ She continues:

*'Humanity', in these discourses, is always the white settler-subject: the consumer, the pol-
luter, the extractor; the creator of an "inauthentic" culture that is both reviled and mobilised
by those doing the reviling. Attempting to escape this contradiction, vitalists and new mate-
rialists alike must posit a more authentic realm of individual entities that, in their with-
drawnness, resist the relational assimilation of culture. It is not in their interest to consider
differences *within* the category of "human".'*

It is on this basis that Sparrow argues Bennett's revival of vitalism harbours an implicit connection to ecofascism understood as the positing of a romanticized and/or idealized natural state of life to which we must return or perhaps which we must still attain in order to achieve social and ecological equality qua harmony.<fnref n="13" />

To take another example of a form of contemporary new materialism inspired by vitalism, we might turn to Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of the posthuman. Braidotti argues for what she calls a ‘Zoe-centred egalitarianism’ as ‘a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.’ The key notion, she continues, ‘is embodiment on the basis of neo-materialist understandings of the body, drawn from the neo-Spinozist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but re-worked with feminist and postcolonial theories. Embracing their version of vital bodily materialism, while rejecting the dialectical idea of negative difference, this theoretical approach changes the frame of reference’ (2013: 22). Braidotti’s reference to ‘zoe-centred egalitarianism’ calls to mind Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical distinction between bios as a particular mode of life, i.e. the life of a citizen in a given society with certain rights etc., and ‘bare life’ (zoe), or life in its brute physicality, without (whether prior to or deprived of) any sense of social belonging or rights (cf. Agamben 1998: 8). Braidotti distinguishes her ‘positive’ account of zoe from Agamben’s formulation (2013: 121), her use of the term signalling the politicization of what from an Agambenian perspective might be seen as the pre- or extra-political: living beings in their very existence as such are considered equal in this vision, outside the realm of ‘anthropos, that is to say bios’: outside the constructed realm of society and culture.

Yet Braidotti’s posthuman perspective looks not only beyond the human to ani-
mal and plant life, but also to inorganic nature, which is seen here too as inextricably
connected to life. ‘The posthuman predicament’, she argues, forces ‘a displacement
of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories,
for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured,
flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems’ (2013: 89). Here
the boundaries between the living and non-living become blurred, if they do not

<footnote n="13">¹³ Bennett’s attribution of agency to all matter does tend to work against her rhetorical commitment to the Deleuzian principle of ontological one-ness but formal diversity (cf. p. xi).</footnote>
disappear, such that the power, certainly of non-human creatures but also of things, is considered equal to that of living (human) beings. Here the parallel with Bennett's vital materialism is clear. For Bennett (2010: x), not only are 'stem cells, electricity, food, trash, and metals...crucial to political life (and human life per se)', but 'dead rats, bottle caps, gadgets, fire, electricity, berries, [and] metal' are also living agents (2010: 107).

The naturalisation of bodily—and in relation to inorganic non-living phenomena, perhaps also evental or existential—equality opens up an interesting philosophical problem: if the premise of vitalist materialism is that all things are ontologically equal (positive difference), and that it is (negative) difference and inequality that are historically/socially constructed, then social equality, where and to the extent that it exists, must also be seen as historically constructed, i.e. fought and won. What, then, is the status of the relation between ontological equality/positive difference and historical inequality/negative difference? That is a question that new materialism is yet to answer.

The same problem, however, can be stated in more practical political terms, as Sullivan and Sparrow do: if equality is simply naturalised—which is to say that all things are considered naturally equal, thus equality is considered to exist already, at least at an ontological level—this threatens to erase the reality of very real historical struggles for social equality, and perhaps even to imply that no such further struggles are necessary. The question as to the implied political consequences of Bennett's and Braidotti's vital materialisms—as opposed to the avowed political positions of the authors themselves—is arguably more legitimate than the same question is when put to the philosophy of someone like Driesch, whose primary object was not the political per se.

One can take these criticisms of Bennett's vital materialism as valid and still pose the question as to whether they are in fact criticisms of vitalism, as they claim to be, or rather of some other philosophical position. Certainly, Bennett and Braidotti both invoke vitalism in defence of their positions, and describe those positions as in important respects vitalist. Yet this is not a vitalism concerned with 'the difference between “life” and “nonlife” (living matter and nonliving matter, living bodies and dead bodies, bodies and machines, biology and physics, etc.) [...] however this difference is detailed and laid out' (Wolfe 2021: 2). For Braidotti (2013: 60), a 'vitalist approach to living matter displaces the boundary' between bios and zoe. Vitalism in this sense stands for a 'generative vitality' (ibid.) that bears more resemblance to Haeckel's monistic extension of living power to the realm of non-living matter than to Driesch's life-specific—if immaterial—entelechy. In other words, applied to Braidotti, the objection the equalization of power making human action equivalent to that of rivers, trees, and forests—to return to the formulation in the *Vitalist Manifesto*—is a criticism of holism and/or hylozoism in Braidotti, not of vitalism. The sale can be said for Bennett. Like vitalists such as Driesch, Bennett posits 'the presence of some kind of energetic, free agency whose spontaneity cannot be captured by the figure of bodies or by a mechanistic model of nature' (Bennett 2010: 61). Yet if, from the perspective of this form of vitalism, 'matter seemed to require a not-quite-material supplement, an elan vital or entelechy, to become animate and
mobile', Bennett—claiming to follow Deleuze and Guattari in this respect—insists that 'materiality needs no animating accessory. It is figured as itself the 'active principle' (ibid.). Here again, if matter itself is alive, then the characteristic vitalist distinction between life and non-life falls away. Thus again, the critique of the levelling out of power relations between living and non-living things is no longer a critique of vitalism, but of a monistic hylozoism or perhaps better in this case, animism.

Braidotti and Bennett's common reference to Deleuze and Guattari is telling. Certainly, the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari were vitalists is not itself straightforward (cf. Ansell-Pearson 1999: 4). To be sure, Deleuze refers to his own work as vitalist and vitalistic at isolated points in his oeuvre, perhaps most notably in a 1988 interview often quoted in this context, where he states: 'Everything I've written is vitalist, at least I hope it is' (1990: 196). The context in which Deleuze makes that assertion, though, has little to do with theorizing the specificity of living beings, whether in terms of Drieschian entelechy or other (cf. Protevi 2012: 247). Rather, Deleuze is discussing the temporality of life versus art in terms that arguably bring his project close to a philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) that seeks to defend what Braidotti calls 'generative vitality' as a subject of philosophical reflection and to theorise it in terms that seek to escape from the strictures of sterile, commodified academic discourse. But as we have seen, Lebensphilosophie is not vitalism, despite frequent confusion. Lebensphilosophie seeks to affirm life philosophically, not to define it scientifically. Though the status of vitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is not my main concern, it is perhaps helpful to note, as John Protevi (2012: 247) has, that what is central to 'Deleuze's notion of vitalism is the "life" that encompasses both organisms and "non-organic life."' It should, then, be clear that Deleuze—nor Braidotti nor Bennett, to the extent that they follow him—is no vitalist in the sense intended here.

Theories and philosophies of vitalism are concerned with the distinction between life and non-life in some form. Given this emphasis, vitalism always has political stakes: where the boundary between life and non-life is drawn is, as theorists of biopolitics have shown, a supremely political matter; as perhaps is the will to draw it, though in scientific terms there are very good reasons for seeking to do so. Historically, vitalism has been associated with conservatism and fascism in ways that are sometimes genealogically defensible, sometimes only with difficulty or not at all. Conceptual confusion also complicates the task of onto-political critique. The political objections that have been made against new materialism (cf. Moir 2020)—that by levelling agency it denies the specificity of the historical—may be valid, but they are not critiques of vitalism. If anything, it is the extension of the attributes of life to the realm of the non-living that raise the political problems so often associated with vitalism.
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# Index

## A

Abiotic, see Biotic

Agamben, Giorgio, 108, 109, 256

Anti-Cartesian, see Canguilhem, Georges; Descartes, Rene

Anti-science, 1

Aristotle, 76, 79–81, 88, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118–120, 123, 126, 164, 207, 209, 249

See also Biology; Hylomorphism; Teleology

Asimov, Isaac, 183, 184

Autonomy, 5, 10, 12, 16, 17, 23, 58, 76, 78–80, 86, 87, 92, 93, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 137, 141, 142, 181, 195–197, 201–203, 205–207, 228, 230, 231, 235

Autopoetic, 132, 133, 135, 143

Autopoetic “actively self-produced”, 135
See also Canguilhem, Georges

Autopoiesis, see Autopoetic; Maturana, Humberto; Varela, Francisco

## B

Bachelard, Gaston, 111, 118

Baer, Karl von, 29

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 10, 23

Bennett, Jane, 240, 249, 255–258

Bergson, Henri, 3–5, 10, 11, 13–24, 86–89, 91, 125, 154, 173, 179, 186, 242

Bernard, Claude, 132–135, 141, 142, 146, 195, 198–202

Bertalanffy, Karl Ludwig von, 61–63, 94, 97

Berthollet, Claude Louis, 197

Bhaskar, Roy, 229, 230, 233

See also “Critical realism”

Bichat, Xavier, 113, 120, 146, 199

Bildung (formation or growth), 91

See also Gestalt; Lebensphilosophie

Bioexceptionalism, 5, 174, 181, 186–189

See also Vitalism

Biological identity, 5, 195, 197, 202, 204–206, 208, 209, 211

See also Identity

Biological individuality, 13, 23, 133, 147, 196, 197, 206, 209

Biology, 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 28, 30, 42, 44, 50–53, 58, 59, 61–63, 70, 77–81, 86–88, 92–103, 108, 113, 114, 116, 118, 121, 123–126, 132–145, 155, 174–189, 194, 196, 201, 203–212, 218, 219, 221, 223, 227, 228, 232, 236, 241, 243, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253, 257

See also Aristotle; Crick, Francis; Heredity; Teleology

Biopolitics, 108–110, 121, 125, 221, 241, 258

Biopower, 108

See also Biopolitics; Foucault, Michele

Bios, 108, 109, 256, 257

Bios (life as lived by a “proper political subject”), see Zōē

Biotic, 196

See also Abiotic

Blastomere, see Biology; Cell division; Cell lineage; Development; Embryo; Generation; Heredity; The Organism; Zygote

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 76, 241

Bohr, Niels, 181, 184, 187
Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste, 197, 198

Braidotti, Rosi, 121, 240, 256–258

*See also* Post-human

Buytendijk, F.J.J., 157

C

Čáda, František, 78

Canguilhem, Georges, 5, 77, 108–127,
144–147, 153–171, 201, 219, 220,
227–230, 234, 235, 242

*See also* Anti-Cartesian; *The Knowledge of Life; Mēchanē; Materialism; The Normal and the Pathological; Vitalism*

Carnap, Rudolf, 1, 2, 28, 60–62, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 102

*See also* Vienna Circle

Cartesian, 2, 58, 116, 119, 123, 124

*See also* Descartes, Rene

Cassirer, Ernst, 5, 86–103, 134

*See also* *The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms*

Catholic Church, 226, 233

Cell division, 29, 30, 247, 248

Cell lineage, 33

Chabry, Laurent, 30

*See also* Teratology

Child, Charles M., 28, 39–41, 43, 44

*See also* Driesch, Hans; Gradient theory

Cohen, Morris, 2, 61

Commoner, Barry, 183–190

*Creative Evolution*, 19, 21, 89

*See also* Bergson, Henri

Crick, Francis, *see* Biology; Genetics; Vitalism

“Critical realism”, 72

*See also* Bhaskar, Roy

*Critique of the Power of Judgement*, 95, 98

*See also* Kant, Immanuel

D

Darwin, Charles, 52–54, 56, 72, 76, 79, 80, 124, 133, 134, 147, 180, 227, 242–246

*See also* Darwinism; “Struggle for life”

Darwinism, *see* Neo-Darwinism

Debru, Claude, 230

Delbruck, Max, *see* Crick, Francis; Vitalism

Deleuze, Gilles, 111, 220, 235, 240, 256, 258

*See also* Lebensphilosophie; Vitalism

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), *see* Biology;
Crick Francis; Molecular biology

Descartes, Rene, 118

Anti-Cartesian

de Teilhard Chardin, Pierre, 179, 182

Development, *see* Biology; Darwinism;

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA);

Embryology; Genetics; Lamarckism;

Neo-Darwinism

“Developmental idealism”, 220, 222–228,
233, 235

Dialectic, 72, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 163, 166, 168, 201, 202, 221, 233

*See also* Hegel, G.W.F.

*Die Zerstörung der Vernunft* “The Destruction of Reason”, 241

*See also* Irrationalism; Lukács, Georg;
Nazi Germany

Digestion, 197, 198, 200–202

Driesch, Hans, 2–5, 10–13, 23, 27–45, 52–59, 76, 78–82, 86, 87, 92–99, 173, 186, 242, 247–255, 257, 258

*See also* Entelechy, Entelechies; Roux,
Wilhelm; Vitalism

Durdík, Josef, 71, 72, 80–82

Dynamism, *see* Materialism

E

Ecology, 194–212, 255

*Élan vital* (a “virtual” tendency), 10–24, 88, 89, 155, 174, 181, 241, 242

*See also* Bergson, Henri

Elsasser, Walter M., 178–182, 184, 186–190

*See also* Crick, Francis

Embryo, 12, 29–31, 34–36, 40, 42, 44, 243, 249, 250

Embryology, 4, 29, 36, 41, 43, 44, 178, 247

*See also* Development; Generation

Embryonic induction model, 28

*See also* Driesch, Hans

The Enlightenment, 3, 4, 51, 72, 87, 102, 224, 232

*See also* Rationalism

Entelechies, 27, 28, 35, 37–39, 41–44, 51–63, 76, 79, 86, 93, 96, 99, 118, 133, 146, 155, 179, 181

Entelechy, 2, 5, 12, 23, 242, 247, 249–251, 253, 257, 258

Entwicklungsmechanik or developmental mechanics, *see* Roux, Wilhelm

Epigenesis, 29, 33, 35, 40, 44, 115, 197

*See also* Driesch, Hans; Preformation;
Roux, Wilhelm

*Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological*, *see* Canguilhem, Georges
Eugenics, 70, 219–226, 236, 246

*See also* Catholic Church; Euphenics; Forced sterilization; *Rassenhygiene*

Euphenics, 223, 224

Evolutionary ecology, 195

Evolutionary history, 19, 53, 55, 56

*See also* Phylogeny

*Explanans*, 28, 29, 36, 37, 39, 43, 45

*See also* Heuristic

## F

Fascism, 1, 70, 110, 240, 242, 251, 253–255, 258

*See also* Irrationality; National Socialism; Nazi Germany

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 72, 75, 195

“Fluctuating variation”, 54

*See also* Darwinism; Transformism

Forced sterilization, 225

*See also* Eugenics; *Rassenhygiene*; *Unfruchtbarmachung*

Forms, 2–5, 10–12, 17–20, 22, 23, 31–33, 35–39, 42, 51, 53–57, 62, 70, 73, 77, 78, 80, 86–98, 100–102, 108, 115–117, 122, 125, 137, 139, 140, 144, 162, 163, 165, 168, 170, 184, 194, 195, 198, 201, 203, 209, 222, 223, 235, 239–244, 246–248, 250, 252–254, 256–258

*See also* Gestalt; Goethe, Johann; Wolfgang von

Foucault, Michele, 108, 111–114, 123, 136, 212, 220, 229, 235

*See also* Biopolitics; Biopower

Frank, Philipp, 1, 2, 28, 60, 87, 93, 94, 96, 98, 145, 147

*See also* Vienna Circle

## G

Gast, Paul, 253

Gemelli, Agostini, 225

*See also* Eugenics; Roman Catholic Church

Generation, 17, 19, 23, 70, 75, 118, 170, 180, 181, 184, 212, 218, 248

*See also* Embryology

“Genetic demography”, 222, 223

Genetics, 4, 5, 40–42, 124, 138–140, 178, 181, 205, 209, 218–226, 232, 234–236

*See also* Eugenics; Mendel, Gregor

Genome, 42, 204, 205, 209, 226

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 241

Germ plasm, 16, 17

*Gestalt*, 91, 158, 167, 251

Gestalt psychology, 86, 96

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 103, 243, 246

Goldstein, Kurt, 95, 102, 113, 136, 137, 145, 146, 157–159, 161

Goodwin, Brian, 56, 62

Gordin, Michael, 69

Gradient theory, 28

Greeks, 5, 12, 71, 80, 108–127

Grmek, Mirko, 201

Guattari, Felix, 256, 258

## H

Haeckel, Ernst, 134, 242–250, 253, 254, 257

*See also* Darwin, Charles; Nazi Germany

Hans, Jonas, 202, 203

Harmonious-equipotential system (HES), 41, 43, 58, 250

Hegel, G.W.F., 14, 15, 72, 74, 80, 115, 155, 168, 202

*See also* Dialectic

Heidegger, Martin, 80, 86–88, 92, 94, 98, 99, 102, 240, 255

Hellenism, 125, 126

Heredity, *see* Development; Embryology; Generation; Genetics

“Heterospecific individuals”, 203, 205, 208, 210

Heuristic, 10, 27–45, 94, 145, 194, 248

*See also* *Explanans*

Hippocrates, 111, 114, 116, 118–121, 123

Holism, 4–6, 61, 70, 86–103, 126, 137, 145, 181, 220, 241, 242, 244, 246–254, 257

*See also* Gestalt; Irrationalism; Nazi Germany; Organicism; *The Organism*

Holobiont, 205

*See also* Individuality; *The Organism*

Hylomorphism, 209

*See also* Aristotle

Hylozoism, 241, 244, 257, 258

*See also* Holism; *Lebensphilosophie*

## I

Identity, 16, 142, 194, 196, 201–211, 255

*See also* Biological identity

Illich, Ivan, *see* Negative theology

“Immanent finalism”, 20

Individuality, 11–13, 15–17, 23, 24, 38, 39, 81, 91, 115, 140, 201, 203, 206–208
*Intelligent Man's Guide to Science*, 183

See also Asimov, Isaac; Crick, Francis

Internalist/externalist distinction (Lakatos, Imre), 220, 227, 235

Irrationalism, 70, 252

Irrationality, 1

J

Jacob, François, 41, 132, 133, 138–142, 144, 147

Jennings, Herbert S., 43

K

Kant, Immanuel, 11, 14, 15, 55, 56, 79, 81, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 133–136, 141, 142, 147, 194, 241, 246, 247

Klages, Ludwig, 70, 88, 91, 100, 240, 255

*The Knowledge of Life*, 110, 112, 133, 161

See also Canguilhem, Georges

Koffka, Kurt, 157

See also Gestalt

Köhler, Wolfgang, *see* Gestalt; Gestalt psychology

Kosmos Institut, *see* Driesch, Hans

L

Lakatos, Imre, 28, 217, 220

See also Research program(s)

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 54, 243

Lamarckism, 54

See also Biology; Darwinism; Development; Genetics; Neo-Darwinism

League for Human Rights, 251

See also Driesch, Hans

*Lebensphilosophie*, *see* Cassirer, Ernst; Klages, Ludwig

Lederberg, Joshua, 223, 226

See also Eugenics; “Euphenics”

Leibniz, G.W., 12, 14, 15

Lenz, Antonín, 72–74

See also Dynamism; Materialism; Mechanism

Liberalism, *see* Darwinism; Materialism; Mechanism

Life, 1–6, 10, 11, 13–15, 17–23, 34, 36, 43, 51–53, 56, 57, 60–63, 69–71, 73–82, 86–92, 97–99, 101, 108–127, 132–148, 154–156, 159–171, 174–177, 180–187,

189, 194–212, 224, 226, 228, 230–234, 239–249, 251, 252, 254–258

Logical positivism, *see* Carnap, Rudolf; Frank, Philipp; Nagel, Ernest; Vienna Circle

Lovejoy, A.O., 241, 254

Lukács, Georg, *see* Die Zerstörung der Vernunft “The Destruction of Reason”

M

Mach, Ernst, 89

Machine, 34, 36–38, 43, 44, 97–99, 115, 117, 121, 132, 144, 146, 185, 186, 200, 210, 229, 241, 257

“Machine theory of life”, *see* Driesch, Hans

Malthus, Thomas, 227

Mareš, František, 76–78, 80, 82

Materialism, 3, 4, 10, 50, 51, 59–61, 69, 71–78, 80–82, 122, 243, 244, 255–258

Maturana, Humberto, 5, 133, 135, 138, 141–143, 147, 203

See also Varela, Francisco

Mēchanē, 115, 117, 119, 121, 125

Mēchanē “ruse”, 117

See also Canguilhem, Georges; Machine; Materialism

Mechanism, 2, 4, 10, 13, 28, 34, 45, 76, 77, 80–82, 87, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102, 113, 115–122, 124–126, 134, 142, 178, 218, 231, 241–246, 249, 254

See also Machine; Materialism

Medicine, 4, 51, 110, 113, 119, 120, 132, 133, 146, 159, 220, 223, 226–236, 248

Mendel, Gregor, *see* Crick, Francis; Genetics

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 95, 99, 102, 137, 145, 147, 153–171

See also *The Structure of Behavior*

Metabolic gradient theory, 39–40, 44

See also Child, Charles M.

“Metabolic self”, 195, 196, 202–203

Metagenomics, 195, 211

*Milieu*, 112, 115, 117, 121, 124, 126, 127, 132, 135, 144, 147, 153, 155, 158, 159, 161–164, 166, 168–170, 195, 200, 223

*Milieu intérieur*, 142, 199, 212

See also Bernard, Claude

Mind, 10, 13, 14, 17, 21, 38, 56, 58, 69, 72, 76, 88, 91, 92, 102, 115, 125, 126, 154, 155, 165, 166, 168, 169, 177, 247, 250, 252, 256

Molecular biology, *see* Crick, Francis

Monism, 70, 242–246, 248, 254

See also Mechanism
Monist League, 244, 246

See also Haeckel, Ernst

Morphogenesis, 34, 37, 53, 57, 249

See also Biology; Development; Embryo

Mosaic theory, 30, 248, 250

Muckermann, Hermann, 225

See also Catholic Church; Eugenics;
Forced sterilization

Muller, H.J., 76, 175

See also Eugenics

"Multiplicity of perspective", 167–168

See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

N

Nagel, Ernest, 1, 2, 87, 93, 94

See also Logical positivism

Nägeli, Karl Von, 29

See also Heredity

National Socialism, 70, 242, 246, 252, 253

See also Nazi Germany

Natural selection, 54, 139, 141, 175, 176, 178,
179, 245

See also Darwinism

Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte “The History
of Creation”, 245

See also Haeckel, Erns; Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany, 224

See also National socialism;
Staatsbiologie; von Uexküll, Jacob

Negative theology, 231, 235

See also Illich, Ivan

Neo-Darwinism, see Darwinism

Neo-vitalism, 76, 77, 93

See also Vitalism

Neuberg, Arthur, 253

Neurath, Otto, 89, 93

See also Logical positivism; Vienna Circle

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88, 122, 125, 136, 145,
240, 255

*The Normal and the Pathological*, 111, 136,
154, 212, 229

See also Canguilhem, Georges

Normal/pathological distinction, see
Canguilhem, Georges

Nutrition, 194–202, 206, 207, 212

O

"Objective medicine", 159

See also Canguilhem, Georges

*Of Molecules and Men*, 175, 177, 178, 182,
186, 188

See also Crick, Francis

Ontological reduction, 50, 59

Organicism, 1, 4, 86, 87, 93–95, 102, 126,
147, 148, 187, 211, 220, 254

*The Organism*, 5, 12, 13, 15–17, 19, 27, 29,
42, 54, 57, 63, 78, 79, 98, 99, 101, 112,
113, 121, 132, 134–137, 139, 146, 147,
155, 157–163, 195–203, 206, 209–212,
228, 247–250

See also Biological individuiduality;
Goldstein, Kurt; Holobiont;
Individuality

Ostwald, Wilhelm, see Monism
"Ouroboric thought", 5, 170–171

P

Palacký, František, 75, 81

Pearl, Raymond, 182

“Peking Man”, 179

See also de Teilhard Chardin, Pierre

Phenomenology, 86, 87, 92, 102, 137,
146, 154

*The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms*, see
Cassirer, Ernst

Phylogeny, 53, 55

See also Evolutionary history

*Physical Foundation of Biology: An Analytical
Study*, 180

Physicalism, 50, 59–61, 87, 92–95, 98, 102

Physiology, 41, 77, 80, 96, 133, 135, 159, 164,
194–212, 228, 229, 233

Pluralism, 87, 93, 102, 243, 244

See also Mechanism; Monism; Vitalism

Polanyi, Michael, 185–190

Positional information theory, 28,
41–42, 44

See also Wolpert, Lewis

Post-human, 256

See also Braidotti, Rosi

Preformation, 12, 33, 115, 197

See also Epigenesis

Procházka, Matěj, 72–74, 81

Pseudo-science, 1

See also Anti-science

Purposiveness, 11, 13–18, 22, 36, 95,
97, 98, 134

See also Teleology

R

Rassenhygiene, 222

See also Eugenics
Rationalism, 87, 171

*See also* The Enlightenment

Reductionism, 5, 10, 50, 59, 174, 179, 181–183, 185–190

Reichenbach, Hans, 92

Reinke, Johannes, 93

*See also* Vitalism

Research program(s), 29, 36, 40, 138, 196, 220

*See also* Lakatos, Imre

Roman Catholic Church, 224–227

*See also* Eugenics; Forced sterilization; Muckermann, Hermann

Roux, Wilhelm, 28–33, 36, 43–45, 77, 79, 247–250

*See also* Mosaic theory; Roux-Weismann theory of mosaic development; Weismann, August

Roux-Weismann theory of mosaic development, 30, 248, 250

S

*Science and Philosophy of Organism*, 11

*See also* Driesch, Hans

Sea urchin, 12, 30–33, 35, 36, 42, 44, 52, 79, 249, 250

*See also* Driesch, Hans

Semenenko, Piotr, 71, 81

Simmel, Georg, 87, 90–92, 102, 103

Snow, C.P., 175

Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 202

*See also* Hegel, G.W.F.

Sparrow, Josie, 240, 241, 255–257

Species, 19, 20, 22, 30, 33, 41, 55, 56, 62, 108, 109, 162, 166, 168, 205–207, 209–211, 219, 233, 245, 247

Spemann, Hans, 28, 40–41, 43, 44, 250

*See also* Driesch, Hans

*Staatsbiologie*, 229, 253

*See also* Nazi Germany; von Uexküll, Jacob

Stöcker, Helene, 246

*The Structure of Behavior*, 154, 155

*See also* Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

“Struggle for life”, 228, 232

*See also* Darwin, Charles; Darwinism

Substance, 10, 11, 16, 17, 31, 55, 61, 73, 74, 78, 81, 87, 183, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 207, 208, 211, 243, 249

Sullivan, Nikki, 255, 257

T

Teleology, 15, 36, 79, 97, 124, 126, 134, 200, 229, 243, 251

*See also* Biology; *Critique of the Power of Judgement*; Kant, Immanuel; Purposiveness

Teratology, 30

*See also* Chabry, Laurent

Theory of descent, 53, 76

*See also* Darwinism; Transformism

Transformism, 52, 53

*See also* Darwinism; Driesch, Hans; *The Organism*; Theory of descent

U

*Umwelt* (plural: *Umwelten*) “surroundings” or “environment”, 132, 158, 162, 166

*See also* Milieu; *The Organism*; Uexküll, Jakob von

*Unfruchtbarmachung* “unfertilization”, 225

*See also* Eugenics; Forced sterilization

V

Varela, Francisco, 5, 133, 135, 138, 141–143, 147, 203

*See also* Maturana, Humberto

Vienna Circle, 1, 2, 4, 5, 87, 89, 93, 94, 102

*See also* Carnap, Rudolf; Frank, Philipp; Logical positivism; Vitalism

“Vital bodily materialism”, 256

Vitalism, 1–6, 10–13, 17, 18, 23, 24, 27–45, 50–63, 69–71, 76–82, 86–103, 108–127, 132, 133, 137, 140, 142–148, 153–171, 173–190, 194–212, 218, 219, 221, 222, 227–231, 235, 239–258

*See also* Bergson, Henri; Driesch, Hans; Élan vital; Entelechy; Entelechies; Fascism; Neo-vitalism; Vienna Circle von Uexküll, Jakob, 95–98, 132, 253

W

Waddington, C.H., 138, 177–180, 182, 183, 187, 189
Weismann, August, 16, 28–31, 39, 44, 247, 248

*See also* Roux-Weismann theory of mosaic development

Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich Freiherr von, *see* Gestalt

The whole and the part, 201

*See also* Biology; Canguilhem, Georges; Kant, Immanuel; Physiology

Wightman, William, 125

Wigner, Eugene, 177

Wolpert, Lewis, 41, 42, 44, 179

*See also* Driesch, Hans; Positional information theory

Z

Zarnik, Boris, 81

Zōē (“bare life” “natural life”), 108, 109, 257

*See also* Bios

Zygote, 16