phenotypically when we knockout genes X, Y, and Z. But biological explanations presuppose functioning organisms. And though machines exist for some end beyond themselves—they are made to produce a result—organisms are ends in and of themselves. They possess their own histories. So, causes and explanations in biology specify causal connections that biologists *induce* from concrete, living, operating individuals. In the physical sciences, identifying causation requires *deduction* of particulars from abstract logical systems (Grene 1962). Thus biology simply is exceptional: it requires a different logical scheme than physics or chemistry using a system (an organism) that has ends in itself. Geneticists might deny that *E. coli* or *D. melanogaster* has ends at all. But, according to Grene, it turns out to be crucially different to be a bacterium than to be a benzene ring and even more crucially different to be a creature that *studies* both bacteria and benzene.

By the late-1960s, a genuine “wave” of opposition to reductionism overflowed the life sciences and attracted followers in the social sciences as well. Several of these individuals collected at prominent conferences in Europe and the United States well into the 1970s, including the Theoretical Biology symposia at the International Union of Biological Sciences meetings in Italy from 1967 to 1970, the Alpach Symposium in Austria in 1968, the “Biology and the History of the Future” at Chichen Itza, Mexico in 1969, and the “Biology and the Future of Man” conference at Paris in 1974. This is as close to a “fourth wave of vitalism” as the life sciences came.

The question remains: was this “fourth wave” what Crick derided in *Of Molecules and Men*? The first two waves of vitalism in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries transitioned the theory of life from “frank spookism” to “diluted animism,” but held fundamentally to “non-materialistic points of view” (Beck 1957: 133). Hans Driesch, Henri Bergson, William MacDougall, Charles Otis Whitman, and other “third wave” vitalists early in the twentieth century continued to emphasize an ontological difference between the living from the non-living. Compared to these first three eras of vitalism, the “fourth wave,” from Commoner to Elsasser to Polanyi to Grene to attendees of the 1960s–70s symposia appears dramatically different in several respects. First of all, a larger number and broader range scientists and scholars were involved mid-century. Secondly, the “fourth wave” groups and individuals explicitly *disavowed* vitalism to a person. Even the most vociferous opponents of reductionism, Arthur Koestler (1969), for instance, did not claim to be vitalists. By these measurements, Crick’s confrontational “…what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” attacked something that was not there.

# 6 Not Vitalism; Bioexceptionalism

Still, what Crick surely sensed in the mid-1960s, even if he misidentified what it was and what it wasn't (i.e., religiously motivated) was an attack on his own simplistic reductionism. And, perhaps to defang that attack, Crick lumped under the
heading of ‘vitalist’: (1) those who were skeptical regarding his claims about the *eminent ability* to reduce the life sciences to the physical sciences and (2) those who were skeptical regarding the *desirability* of doing so. There were, by my count, at least two dozen prominent life scientists who, following Commoner, openly opposed these two points (Peterson 2016; Peterson & Hall 2020). Counting the numerous physical scientists and philosophers who also opposed these two points, that indeed could constitute a wave. And such a trend seems to have continued. In fact, some philosophers would go so far as to say the twenty-first century has produced a kind of *anti-reductionistic consensus*, at least among their peers in the humanities (Waters 1990). This is perhaps another cause of the disciplinary canyon dividing the humanities and the life sciences (Callebaut 2010; Grene 1983).

To be clear, this mid-century swell was not the fourth wave of *vitalism*, as Crick styled it. *Organicism* is an appropriate term for this twin rejection of vitalism and of reductionism simultaneously. This term has its own history as part of a longer set of anti-reductionistic explanations, though less attention has been paid to it than to the earlier fights over vitalism (Peterson 2016).

Here, though, I want to adopt “bioexceptionalism” as an even more capacious term. This term captures what were loosely defined beliefs held by a very broad, multidisciplinary group including physicists and psychologists as well as philosophers and biologists. They shared doubts about reductionism for ontological reasons (e.g., Niels Bohr, Arthur Koestler, who organized the Alpbach Symposium as “Beyond Reductionism” and espoused the concept of the “holon”) and epistemological ones (e.g., Elsasser, Polanyi, Grene, Waddington, other organicists). Bioexceptionalism also captures the attitudes of those like Commoner, who—while he may have rejected reductionism for the other reasons—feared the ecological and even professional consequences of a reductionist worldview and explicitly rejected reductionism on those grounds. Whether biology could be reduced to physics and chemistry or not, there were good ecological reasons to act as if it could not. The so-called “fourth wave,” then, was a broad collection of those who rejected the reductionistic quest Crick had embarked upon.

I still feel uncomfortable with the metaphor of a “wave,” however. A few dozen individuals pushing back against Crick might appear large. But Crick was a “cross-worlds influencer” both well positioned professionally and highly motivated to discredit those who challenged his reductionism (Aicardi 2016). As Crick’s son, Michael, revealed at his father’s 2004 memorial service:

> My thesis here today is that Francis’ driving quest was to knock the final nails in the coffin of vitalism. My father wanted to put these ideas to bed, first of all with the structure of DNA .... Francis was a man who was trying his whole life to win an argument. I never understood who he was arguing against, but he had this total conviction that he had to win this argument (quoted in Aicardi 2016: 87).

In lectures and, especially, personal relationships with younger scholars, Crick leveraged his prestige to marshal supporters across disciplines (e.g., Jacob 1970) to fiercely root out vitalism. Moreover, Crick tied his anti-vitalism to devout anti-religious beliefs. “Francis Crick was an evangelical atheist,” proclaimed two of his memorializers from the neurosciences. “He had a consistent and completely
rational world view without a need to invoke vitalism, or any non-material force” (Siegel & Callaway 2004: 2029). As Crick moved from the chemistry of the DNA molecule, to its transcription and translation, to “molecular psychology”—exemplifying his role as a “cross-worlds influencer”—he maintained the conviction expressed in *Of Molecules and Men* to squeeze religious sentiment out of all science (Aicardi 2016). That zealous leadership allowed Crick to build an “army” of followers even outside his original field of molecular biology (Siegel & Callaway 2004: 2030).

Even leaving aside the question of how much of a wave it was, how could an anti-reductionist alternative rise at all in the middle of Crick's crusade against it? Bioexceptionalism of the kind advocated by Elsasser, Commoner and others rose because, counterintuitively, the dismissive attitude of reductionists intensified, fueled by Crick and those molecular biologists who sympathized with his condemnation of “vitalism,” his suspicion of philosophy, his anti-religious fervor.

Their rejection of reductionism reaction is understandable. To have one's subject matter be reduced to something simpler feels insulting somehow—like the reducer is missing the crucial *something* about one's knowledge area. One well-known biochemist objected to that dismissive attitude by those committed to physico-chemical reduction this way:

> While Occam's Razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.... [T]his may make it very difficult for physicists to adapt to most biological research. Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sort of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean.

Ironically, this quote belongs to Francis Crick himself (1989: 138–139). Physical scientists, he complained, came into biology with the wrong sort of oversimplifying attitude. Instead of waiting to learn the methods, the way of seeing the world—acquiring personal knowledge, to use Polanyi's term—they shoved their way through using an inappropriate reductionist methodology. Perhaps as Crick aged, he came to appreciate the insistence of Commoner and others that biology really does require a method distinct from the physical sciences and equally valuable. Reductionism, as even Crick admitted alongside his detractors, is a kind of *devaluating*. And it takes a kind of hubris to do that devaluing. According to philosopher Mary Midgley (1994: 16), “When we say that any actual thing in the world ... is quite simple and needs only one sort of explanation, we are, almost unavoidably, saying that it is something fairly trivial.”

# 7 Conclusion

If there was a bioexceptionalist wave mid-century, why does Crick's reductionism seem more persuasive and closer to the heart of modern biology even now? There are at least two reasons: (1) training, and (2) utilitarianism bordering on commodification.
What Elsasser, Polanyi, Grene, and others did not fully appreciate at the time, is
that nuanced appeals to the separateness of biology from physics and chemistry
made use of philosophical distinctions—between theory and technique, epistemol-
ogy and metaphysics, *is* versus *as if* statements. This is not customarily part of train-
ing in biology. According to biologists themselves, biology is not a discipline
focused on contemplation so much as on action. For example, when, in the 1970s,
the scion of biomedicine Peter Medawar was asked whether the philosophical “atti-
tude with which a man approached biology might help him to focus on certain
problems that otherwise might be ignored,” Medawar responded with “a flat nega-
tive…it made no difference at all. A man was a good scientist, or he was not”
(Goodfield 1974: 87). Thus, as an unintended consequence, advocates for bioexcep-
tionalism asked for philosophical reflection, a skill quite alien to training in the life
sciences. Crick’s reductionism was easier, more familiar (de Chadarevian 2002).

Secondly, and perhaps more saliently, Crick expressed hope in bioengineering,
by which Crick—though he expressed it very flippantly—seems to have meant
three things: (1) the creation of new products generated by modified or completely
synthetic organisms that would enhance the human experience; (2) the augmenta-
tion of human cognition by computers; (3) the eventual replacement of our present-
day biologics, perhaps even humans, by synthetic “organisms.” We certainly do not
have to take his futurism seriously. But the history of the life sciences in the second
half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first partly comports
with the attitude Crick exemplified and that frightened Commoner. Waddington
warned that reductionism was good for a “quick (scientific) buck” (Waddington
1977). One wonders whether to what degree today’s followers of Crick still seek the
parenthetical.

8 Postscript: Why Did Crick Speak at a High School?<sup>8</sup>

"I feel I ought to say a word or two about delivering the lectures in the University Presbyterian Church," wrote Crick to Frank Thomas Watkins, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Washington, and the man who was to make arrangements with Crick to deliver the John Danz lectures. "Although I have not finally decided on the precise title of my lectures," he continued, "my tentative title is: 'Is vitalism dead?' The lectures will be concerned with the impact of biological ideas, both present and future, on our concept of the world."

It had been a rough few years for Dean Watkins. He came to UW in the
early-1960s after a distinguished career as Vice Admiral and head of the Pacific
Submarine Fleet for the US Navy. Though he spent a lot of time underwater during
World War II, he had no experience as an academic, least of all with graduate

<footnote n="8">⁸From the Crick to Vice Admiral Frank T. Watkins exchange, 14 December 1965, PPCRI/E/1/14/5.
Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.</footnote>
students and faculty at what was rapidly becoming the premier research institution in the American Northwest. The university was growing fast and, even with his experience in the military, change was difficult. Worse, on April 29, 1965, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the whole Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle area, killing several people and damaging thousands of buildings. The University of Washington lost key structures including Meany Hall, the largest lecture space on campus (Buhain 1999; Lange 2000). Crick's talk, originally scheduled to be delivered in Meany Hall, had to be postponed almost a year. Trustees and administrators wrangled over repairing or replacing the building, creating further delays. The University Presbyterian Church in Seattle stood near campus, seated nearly as many as old Meany, and the church was known for its progressive social vision (Staniunas 2016). It would be a fine substitute. Dean Vice Admiral Watkins made the arrangements.

But the English co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA was being difficult.

Crick, later described as an “evangelical atheist,” promised that his talks on the structure of DNA and vitalism would not be “militantly anti-Christian.” Still, he thought an argument against vitalism might offend “Church Authorities,” given the degree to which he was convinced that vitalism concealed religious beliefs. He had backed out of commitments before merely because they overlapped with events *sponsored* by churches, let alone actually taking place *inside* one. Maybe the Seattle Presbyterians wouldn’t like “Is vitalism dead?” Maybe they would regard his talk as “anti-Christian propaganda.” It was a telling admission. Rather than engage with the bioexceptionalist challenges articulated by Elsasser, Commoner, Polanyi, Grene, and others through the 1960s against the loose espousal of reductionism like his, Crick waved his hands at the whole thing. They were merely religious objections (Aicardi 2016). Though, he admitted to Dean Vice Admiral Watkins, “Whether this is widely true I must confess, I do not know.”

I can imagine Dean Vice Admiral Watkins clenching his jaw as he picks up the phone to begin again the hunt for a new venue. Eventually, the UW dean moved the John Danz lectures to the student's auditorium at Roosevelt High School, where, for 3 days in the winter of 1966, a Nobel laureate preached to his audience that vitalism was out there—alive.

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<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>
# Metabolism in Crisis? A New Interplay Between Physiology and Ecology

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Cécilia Bognon-Küss

**Abstract** This chapter investigates the hybrid relationships between metabolism, broadly and a-historically understood as the set of processes through which alien matter is made homogeneous to that of the organism, and forms of vitalism from the eighteenth century on. While metabolic processes have long been modeled in a reductionist fashion as a straightforward function of repair and expansion of a given structure (either chemically, or mechanistically), a challenging vitalist view has characterized metabolism as a creative, organizing, vital faculty. I suggest that this tension was overcome in Claude Bernard's works on "indirect nutrition", in which nutrition, rightly conceived as a general vital phenomenon common to plants and animals, was both characterized as an instance of the general physico-chemical determinism of all phenomena and as the sign and condition of the "freedom and independence" of the organism with respect to the environment. I propose that Bernard's theory of indirect nutrition was central in the elaboration of his general physiology and has, at the same time, underpinned a self-centered view of biological identity in which the organism creates itself continuously at the detriment of its external *milieu*. I further argue that this conception of biological individuality as metabolically constructed has since, and paradoxically, supported a view in which the organism appears as an autonomous and self-creating entity. I then contrast this classical view of the metabolic autonomy of the organism with the challenges raised by microbiome studies and suggest that these emerging fields contribute to sketch an ecological conception of the organism and its metabolism through the reconceptualization of its relationship with the environment. The recent focus on a "microbiota - host metabolism" axis contributes to shift the focus away from the classical concept of organism, somehow externalizing vitalism out of the autonomous individual in favor of an ecological, collaborative, and interactionist view of the living.

C. Bognon-Küss (✉)
Université Paris Cité, Labex "Who am I", Laboratoire Épigénétique et Destin Cellulaire,
Paris, France
# 1 Introduction: The Metabolic Roots of Living Beings

A century-long medical-philosophical tradition has associated nutrition, the opera-
tion by which organized bodies grow, preserve, and maintain themselves, with life.<fnref n="1" />
In contrast to inorganic bodies, whose preservation seems to be merely the persist-
tence of a previous material state, living organisms preserve themselves by undergo-
ing continuous change: it is by the renewal of their substance in a double movement
of composition and decomposition that they succeed in maintaining themselves.
Organized beings therefore seem to escape the alternative of identity and otherness
since, *via* the process of nutrition, it is certainly foreign constituents that penetrate
them and renew their matter, but according to specific modalities by which they
appropriate an exteriority to constitute it as their own identity. Thus, for a living
body, feeding itself does not only mean compensating for the losses suffered by
ingesting foreign matter, or circulating flows of matter and energy in its interior, but
also and above all transforming this matter into its own. Now, beyond this equation
between life and nutrition, how can we picture the relationships between a metabolic-
centered approach to life and vitalism – if the latter isn’t to be understood as a mere
heuristic initiating inquiries into the nature of the living and its distinctiveness but
also in the complexity of its historical manifestations and the diversity of its philo-
sophical commitments<fnref n="2" />? In other words, if nutrition-metabolism is pictured as an
essential organizing force, as the manifestation of life itself or at least as its main
distinctive feature, what kind of vitalist claim does this tradition endorse? Conversely,
what philosophical effects can we expect from this confrontation between metabo-
lism and forms of vitalism with respect to contemporary developments in biology?

While metabolic processes have long been modeled in a mechanistic fashion as
a straightforward function of repair and expansion of a given structure (either chem-
ically, or physically<fnref n="3" />), a challenging vitalist view, developed in the eighteenth cen-
tury, that could be labelled “structural-functional”,<fnref n="4" /> has characterized nutrition as a
creative and organizing vital faculty.<fnref n="5" /> Nutrition, far from assembling preformed ele-
ments in a preexisting structure, could come to designate processes of alterations
and syntheses that were both chemical and vital. If life partly consists in the con-
tinuous destruction of one’s own material constituents, then it has to be, simultane-
ously, a continual regeneration of one’s own bodily matter. Nutrition could then
refer to a continuous production of the living being by itself (production of

<footnote n="1">¹See Aristotle, *De Anima*, II, 4415b–25.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²For precise characterizations of varieties of vitalism both synchronically and diachronically, see Cimino and Duchesneau (1997), Wolfe (2010a), (2017a), (2019), (2021), Normandin and Wolfe (2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³For an analysis of mechanistic conceptions of nutrition, see Bognon-Küss *Forthcoming*.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴See Duchesneau (2012) [1982], Wolfe (2017b). This “structural–functional” conception involves a theoretical effort to understand the circular causality (vs. linear) between the parts and the whole and the emergentist nature of the organism’s organization.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵See de Bordeu (1752), Kant (2000), C.F. Wolff (1789), Bognon-Küss (2019).</footnote>
specialized parts – flesh, muscle, tendon, etc. – and production of new qualities – irritability and/or sensitivity) by virtue of a certain relationship to its environment (the continuous exchanges of materials and reciprocal transformations). What gradually emerged in the eighteenth century, is the possibility of thinking of life as an unstable rather than a static equilibrium, in which decomposition is less a price to pay for life than a condition for its realization. In this respect, the instrumental and technical framework in which the organism had been thought of up to the eighteenth century had to be broken down and replaced by a model in which functional integration, solidarity and self-production of the parts refer to a continuous vital dynamic. In other words, the living is defined as a specific productivity: it organizes itself by organizing foreign matter. When it assimilates, an organism produces its own substance, a new composition of its own which is not reducible to the sum of the components that enter into it. This shift in the way nutrition was understood, as a dynamic and creative process of organization, supported the elaboration of a conception of organisms as self-organized and autonomous entities, capable of producing their organization and maintaining their form beyond their continuous material renewal, due to their exchanges with their environment.

My hypothesis is that this tension between mechanistic and vitalist views was overcome in Claude Bernard's works on "indirect nutrition", in which nutrition, rightly conceived as a general vital phenomenon common to plants and animals, was both characterized as an instance of the general physico-chemical determinism of all phenomena and as the very manifestation of "life in its state of nudity", i.e. as the unification of organic destruction and creation. I suggest that Bernard's theory of indirect nutrition was central in the elaboration of his general physiology and has, at the same time, underpinned a self-centered view of biological identity in which the organism creates itself continuously at the detriment of its external *milieu*, to the extent that nutrition becomes, in the case of Bernard, the sign and condition of the "freedom and independence" of the organism with respect to its environment (Sect. 2). Nutrition obviously refers to the trivial fact that all living beings depend on other cells and on an environment for their survival, that living beings are therefore relational – to the point that this circulation of the outside into the body could indicate a possible dissolution of the organism into the world ("Man is what he eats" – "Der Mensch ist was er isst" as in Feuerbach's famous pun<fnref n="6" />). However, this intuition has been replaced by a focus on the autonomy and independence of organisms – a vision that "metabolism" as a concept for thinking about the dynamic maintenance of organisms has initially reinforced: nutrition and then metabolism rather indicated the way by which organisms dialectically construct their own boundaries and their own internal *milieu*.

But what happens to this “metabolic self” when it is confronted with recent findings in microbiology, metagenomics, or evolutionary ecology? The progressive recognition of the diversity, ubiquity, and functional capacity of microorganisms<fnref n="7" /> and

<footnote n="6">⁶See “The Mystery of Sacrifice, or Man is what He Eats” in Feuerbach (1990) 26–52.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Wu et al. (2009).</footnote>
the correlative exponential development of studies on the participation of microbes
in the vital functions of complex multicellular organisms<fnref n="8" /> have had deep impacts on
our understanding of the biology of plants and animals. They have profoundly chal-
lenged our traditional views of the physiology of nutrition, the performance of met-
abolic functions, and biological individuality itself, as they shifted the focus to the
myriad of bacteria that enable organisms to perform these functions essential to
their maintenance and survival. Therefore, what microbiome studies<fnref n="9" /> force us to
think about is a progressive decentering of a biology focused on autonomous organ-
isms towards a biology of relations,<fnref n="10" /> integrating not only microorganisms as inde-
pendent entities, but also “their theatre of activity”, i.e. the host and the environment
(biotic and abiotic) understood as ecological components of these relations.<fnref n="11" /> The
last section aims at examining how these research programs have led to profoundly
challenge the classical view of the “metabolic self” – this closed, autonomous, indi-
vidual organism, capable of constituting its identity alone and at the expense of its
food – and how they contribute to sketch an ecological conception of the living and
its metabolism (Sect. 3).

2 Metabolism, “Freedom and Independence”
or the Self-Production of the Organism

Metabolism is classically understood as the continuous transformation of matter
and energy captured from the environment in order to, for any living entity, realize
and maintain itself as a system. Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno (2013) for example
describe metabolism as a “persistent far from equilibrium dynamics of self-
construction and self-repair” and argue that metabolism is constitutive of biological
autonomy in a “dialectical way”, to the extent that the autonomy, distinctiveness,
and identity of the organism are precisely achieved through its metabolic openness:
organisms reconstruct sets of components of their own (proteins, DNA, RNA, mem-
branes...) that are not present in their environment, through processes of interac-
tion, transformation, and synthesis. Through metabolism, living systems fabricate
themselves continuously and “this is precisely what it means to be autonomous.”
This equation between autonomy, identity and self-production through metabolic
processes is the main philosophical problem I wish to address. I will question the
kind of philosophical claim that can be associated with this metabolic-centered

<footnote n="8">⁸Jones (2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹On the term “microbiome” and its history, see in particular Eisen (2015), Prescott (2017), Berg et al. (2020).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰See in particular Gilbert et al. (2012), McFall-Ngai et al. (2013), Sélosse (2012), Tipton et al. (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Whipps et al. (1988).</footnote>
view of life, and to what extent this latter grounds a self-centered conception of biological individuality as being autonomous and self-creating.<fnref n="12" />

## 2.1 Direct Assimilation and the Alienation of Organic Life

The concept of “metabolism” has gradually stabilized as a set of mechanisms linking the vital specificity of organisms to their chemical conditions of existence, and as a scheme through which self-production and the maintenance of biological identity could be apprehended in a naturalistic perspective. What is at stake in the constitution of the concept of metabolism in the second half of the nineteenth century is the establishment of a certain autonomy, independence or freedom of the organism in relation to its environment through the identification of the mechanisms that allow the organism to carry out syntheses. While post-Lavoisieran chemistry thought of animal nutrition as the absorption of preformed immediate chemical principles from digestion, any histochemical element of the animal body having its origin in the food ingested (fat gives fat, muscle substance gives muscle), in a theory of nutrition that can be called “direct assimilation”, metabolism conceives of the organism’s independence from food through the elucidation of its capacity to manufacture complex organic substances (without necessarily finding them preformed in the food). The theory of “direct assimilation” indeed relies on the general hypothesis that physiological processes are caused by a change in the proportion of the elements contained in the substances of the organism, and by a continuous exchange between the interior and the exterior.<fnref n="13" /> From this point on, physiological functions can be conceived as the maintenance of an equilibrium between the proportions of the elements that make up the animal substance: albumin, fibrin, muscle, and gelatin. This leads to the conclusion of the chemical distinction between the two kingdoms of animals and plants: plants synthesize chemical substances (nitrogen) that will after be consumed by animals.

The chemical operations carried out by animals and plants therefore appear as reversed processes: while plants are a laboratory of organic synthesis, animals carry out the analysis of their products, by extracting the nitrogen contained in the plants they consume. Animal nutrition is therefore no more than the absorption of a matter already chemically identical to that of the organism that assimilates it. A conception of nutrition is then established, certainly chemical, but which can be apprehended with two pairs of concepts: on the one hand, static vs. dynamic, on the other hand, preformation vs. epigenesis.

“Chemical statics” is the name Dumas and Boussingault gave to their approach to organized beings in 1842, centered on the preeminent role of combustion in

<footnote n="12">¹²For an in-depth analysis of the ontological implications of the concept of organism, see Wolfe (2010b).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³See for example Berthollet (1784, 120–125); Cuvier (1810, 99); Holmes (1974).</footnote>
animal physiology. It is noteworthy that this view of combustion in animals, and thus of the animal-plant complementarity, is not based on direct evidence of the processes, but proceeds from a general understanding of the elementary compositions and chemical properties of the three basic categories of organic substances: carbohydrates, fats, and nitrogenous albuminoid bodies. In these lessons, they argue that if in animals “new organic matters can be born”, these are nonetheless “always simpler matters, closer to the elementary state than those which they received” from the plants. Animals merely undo (assimilate, absorb, analyze) the organic materials formed by the plants,<fnref n="14" /> hence this lapidary chemical qualification of the animal: “animals constitute from the chemical point of view real combustion apparatuses”.<fnref n="15" />

Consequently, the histochemical elements that make up the animal substance must be a simple aggregate of ingested nutrients, whose immediate principles are selected and separated during digestion. In the end, what does the animal that feeds itself do? It separates these chemical principles according to a chemical reaction that is similar to the one theorized by Lavoisier when he studied combustion *in vitro*. The place of this reaction for these authors is the blood, rather than the tissues – simple receptacles of the principles extracted by digestion. The blood is then conceived as a liquid resulting from the dissolution of the elements that make up the nutrients and which then come to aggregate in the organism. As Claude Bernard summarizes it, in this theory “every histochemical element of the animal body had to have its origin in the food ingested”: the organism is in the end, and in a very literal sense, only what it eats, that is, on the chemical level, an aggregate of “immediate preformed principles of food or digestion.”<fnref n="16" /> Ultimately, animal nutrition, chemically conceived, turns out to be “preformationist”: the forms are no longer individual organic forms, but the chemical elements that the animal receives ready-made, and that it cannot produce. One thus understands the theoretical solidarity between the chemical *statics*, the renewed *preformationist* conception of the nutrition and finally, the *complementarity* between chemical passivity of the animals and chemical activity of the plants: “(...) it is in the vegetable kingdom that the great laboratory of organic life resides; it is there that vegetable and animal matter are formed (...), from the plants, these matters pass all formed into the herbivorous animals”.<fnref n="17" />

A strong contradiction thus emerges between the philosophical role given to nutrition at the turn of the nineteenth century and this theory of nutrition as direct assimilation. This contradiction has the spectacular effect of alienating organic life from itself, of dissociating its operations on the grounds of a chemical division of nature: the chemical complementarity of analysis and synthesis, of destruction and creation, of decomposition and composition, no longer refers to the phases of a

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Dumas et Boussingault (1842, 46).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ *Ibid.*, 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Bernard (1878, t. II, 382).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Dumas et Boussingault (1842, 6).</footnote>
single process taking place within the living being, but to operations distributed in
nature to agents that a wise economy will have cunningly arranged. This massive
discrepancy with the physiological elaboration which, at the same time, tries to
think the coexistence of composition and decomposition processes in organic life,
seemed to be a major obstacle for the elaboration of a general physiology.<fnref n="18" /> If post-
Lavoisierian chemistry thinks of the animal as the site of a continuous self-
combustion, this no longer refers to an inner conflict or to the necessary
complementarity of contradictory processes, but to a harmonious distribution of
chemical work in nature. The chemical conflict is externalized as organic life dis-
sociates from itself and as animal organization resolves itself in that of the
vegetable.

## 2.2 *Indirect Nutrition as a Means for the “Freedom and Independence” of the Organism*

We can therefore measure the distance that separates such a model from that of
metabolism, the prodromes of which can be found in the development of a theory of
indirect nutrition in Claude Bernard's general physiology. What Bernard points out,
with the complementarity of chemical destruction and creation in physiology, is the
solidarity of what will later be called anabole and catabole, i.e. the times of a cyclic
processuality that will be named “metabolism” as the articulation of these two
moments. The problem solved by this double chemical movement is, in a way, as
old as the recognition of the originality of living beings: the unity of order and con-
tinuity with constant change.

Nutrition is no longer the simple ingestion and analysis of elements already
formed, so that we would find at the end by analysis what we put in at the beginning:
it is indirect in the sense that the organism's own activity interposes itself between
ingestion and the final product to create a material specifically appropriate to the
conditions and needs in which the organism finds itself. The experiment with the
washed liver (Bernard 1855) allowed Bernard to show that an intermediate material
(glycogen), secreted and stored in the liver, could produce glucose under certain
circumstances. Thus nutrition, insofar as it is indirect, is a sign of this internal envi-
ronment, the *milieu intérieur* that the organism secretes itself, for itself. It is true
that the internal environment is a set of liquids, blood, lymph, etc., in which the cells
are immersed and which in a way buffer the variations of the environment so that the
cells remain within low ranges of value of their environmental parameters. The
relationship of the interior of the organism with the environment is therefore indi-
rect, and this clearly becomes thinkable from the moment when a physiological
function so obviously oriented towards the exterior, i.e. nutrition, turns out to be in

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Bichat for example thought of the characteristics of organic life, common to both plants and animals, as the duality of a process continually engaging opposing forces (1800, §1).</footnote>
reality indirect. More profoundly, this means that the internal constitution of the organism is not so much given by the ingestion of external elements then distributed in the organism, as by the creation, from external simulations such as food, of stocks of tissue or liquid substances from which the organism then draws the elements it needs.

The very notion of glycogen illustrates this idea that the organism is no longer dependent on the vagaries and fluctuations of glucose supply – the organism is not “at the mercy of the slightest whims and narrow necessities of food. The truth is that it is independent of it to a very large extent, and that the living machine still possesses here a kind of chemical elasticity that is its safeguard”.<fnref n="19" /> On the contrary, it creates a continuous supply and a stable source of glucose from its own internal processes. Consequently, one must conceive the inner environment not only as a set of liquids but even before that as the effect of a process of continuous constitution of this environment via chemical processes that somehow decouple the organismic inner chemical dynamics, at all levels, from the dynamics of external environment/organism relationship. If the organism includes an interior environment which buffers it with regard to the external variations, it is because it has in its processes likely to create this interior environment on the basis of the external circumstances, and the indirect nutrition is primarily one of these mechanisms.

The corollary of this conception of the internal environment directly affects the teleological conception of nature that was presupposed by the advocates of direct nutrition. To put it in a few words, if there is a teleology of life – in the deterministic framework that Claude Bernard subscribes to – it must be folded inside the organism itself, in terms that are reminiscent of Kantian teleology and its insistence on “internal purpose”. The organism is not in view of anything other than itself, it is, in a way, totally in view of itself, and it is the existence of the internal environment that proves it: “the living organism is made for itself; it has its own intrinsic laws. It works for itself and not for others.”<fnref n="20" />

In this conception of nutrition decoupled from digestion, food disappears (“In a word, one does not live on one's actual food, but on that which one has eaten previously, modified and, as it were, created by assimilation”<fnref n="21" />) to the benefit of the vital operations that allow the organism to produce its own substance, its own *milieu*, and finally its independence with regard to the external environment: “(...) the perpetual changes of the cosmic environment do not affect it; it is not chained to them, it is free and independent”.<fnref n="22" /> Nutrition is therefore an authentic organic creation, “and in this respect, everything is created in the living organism, and nothing comes to it from outside”.<fnref n="23" /> The organotrophic or nutritive phenomena are therefore the physico-chemical conditions by which the “nutritive center” (*i.e.*, the nucleus of the

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Bernard (1878, II, 382).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Bernard (1878, I, 148).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Bernard (1878, I, 122).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Bernard (1878, I, 113).</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Bernard (1867, 92).</footnote>
cell) “creates the organism” under appropriate conditions.<fnref n="24" /> Indirect nutrition thus points towards two constants: a series of conversions in which the identity of the organism is dialectically constructed at the end of chemical elaborations (composition and decomposition, assimilation and de-assimilation); the persistence of this identity through time despite the constant molecular renewal to which the organism is subjected – the organism remains itself by virtue of the constitution of this internal environment through the mechanisms of its internal secretions. In a note of the *Cahiers* edited by Mirko Grmek, Bernard castigated the chemical statics of living beings, the Stoffwechsel of the Germans, because for him it was “nothing other than metempsychosis. This is not correct (...) Individualism is the master of physiology. It is found even in digestion, and everywhere”.<fnref n="25" /> In this somehow enigmatic note, Bernard probably means that the chemical statics, which we have seen serves as the chemical basis for a theory of direct assimilation, i.e., the unimpaired passage of food into another body, is no more than a palingenesis of souls. On the contrary, nutrition, as a creative and organizing force is at the same time the cellular basis of organic individuality and the means through which the autonomy and individuality of the total organism is built.

Independence and freedom thus become the pivots around which a metabolic conception of the organism is developed, and this conception refers to a double dialectic: (1) a dialectical relation to food, since assimilation is conceived as a negation of the otherness it represents; (2) a dialectical relation to the environment, since the constitution of the organism's interiority and autonomy is achieved by this metabolic openness to the environment. What is at stake in this opposition between theories of direct and indirect nutrition, is the elaboration of a concept and a process supporting the vision of a living body that is autonomous and identical to itself over time. The constitution of this biological problem thus deploys, within the concept of organism, a new dimension of autonomy: it is by virtue of its constant exchanges with its environment that the living body can acquire a certain autonomy and individuality with respect to it.

In “The whole and the part in biological thought” Canguilhem wrote that “it would be wrong to say that Claude Bernard ignored the romantic prestige of the concept of organism, at the very moment when he was developing experimental techniques and clarifying the ideas that allowed him to break, in the field of biology, the logical circle of the whole and the part.”<fnref n="26" /> Among these ideas, I would like to add, was first and foremost the concept of metabolism: the very concept of metabolism by which organic life was reconciled with itself in the uniformity of its processes, and within which the biological individual could maintain its autonomy from cosmic conditions in spite of and by virtue of the exchanges it has with its environment, and in fact create himself. And although one should be aware of Bernard's distrust of realistic of substantial forms of vitalism, I have nevertheless

<footnote n="24">²⁴ *Ibid.*, n°218, 228.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Bernard (1965).</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Canguilhem (1968, 327–328).</footnote>
sought to show that, through the elaboration of the theory of indirect nutrition, Bernard's general physiology had at the same time sketched out the contours of a concept of organism.

## 2.3 The Dialectical Autonomy of the “Metabolic Self”

This preliminary conceptualization of metabolism provided a framework for thinking about the notion of biological identity, outlining a vision of organisms as self-organizing, autonomous entities by virtue of their relationship to the environment. This elaboration can in fact be understood philosophically within the framework of dialectics, and in particular the Hegelian dialectics, which is known to have taken a close interest in the mechanisms of assimilation in order to think about the self-determination and autonomy of living beings: “The essential point here is the process of nutrition. (...) The process of nutrition is nothing other than this transformation of the inorganic nature into that organic nature which belongs to the subject.”, writes Hegel.<fnref n="27" />

By feeding itself the animal turns to the outside world and introduces an external substance into itself – this is the moment of externality. Then the organism must overcome, or digest, this externality. Hence, through assimilation the animal returns to itself, and produces its own substance: it transforms the inorganic into its own organic nature. Although food is already chemically organized, it nonetheless represents the inorganic substance for the animal organism that aims at overcoming this alterity. Interestingly, Hegel refers to Spallanzani's experiments on digestion (Spallanzani 1783) to support his theory: the dialectical nature of nutrition is established by physiological experiments that show that nutrition is not a direct and passive process, but a process in which the organism is engaged in a series of chemical transformations which express the realization of its own essence. Through digestion and assimilation, the organism aims at realizing its own identity. In nutrition the organism does not lose its distinctiveness, nor does it dissolve into the world, but it rather imposes its own determination on what it eats.

This philosophical model, by which metabolic identity is thought of as dialectical, has been quite robust. Hans Jonas, for example, has devoted this understanding of metabolism to the constitution of an interiority, autonomy, and self-identity of the organism. In his 1966 book, the *Phenomenon of Life*, Jonas holds that it is in the dialectical relationship that organisms establish with their environment through metabolism that they realize their identity: “The exchange of matter with the environment is not a peripheral activity carried out by a persistent nucleus: it is the mode

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Hegel (2004), addition to §365.</footnote>
of total continuity (self-continuation) of the subject of life itself'.<fnref n="28" /> In this sense, the organism must be understood as the result of its constant metabolizing activity, and this activity – this capacity of building up its parts by the mediation of external matter – is precisely “its being self-centered individuality”. Not only does metabolism emancipate the form of the organism from its immediate identity with matter but it also elaborates a genuine, i.e. organic, “mediate and functional kind of identity”.

More recently, philosophers who, following Varela's work (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1982), favor metabolism in the characterization of life as an auto-poietic system, similarly insist on the dialectical character of the autonomy of organisms: while metabolism refers to processes of continuous transformations of matter and energy taken from the environment, it is precisely in this metabolic openness to the environment that organisms realize their autonomy and identity as they construct from them components that are their own as well as the organizational closure without which the system could not subsist as such (Moreno and Mossio 2015). In the formal perspective of self-organization, living beings are autonomous biological systems whose identity is described as a “circular process of reflexive interconnection, whose main effect is its own production” (Varela 1997). The metabolic relationship to the environment has the effect of this organizational closure, which is understood as circular causality (since there is a feedback loop between the boundaries of the organism, or the cell membrane, and the metabolic circuit). In this model, the coherence and sustenance of the system are therefore the direct effects of the activity of the system as such, and not those of the action of the environment (in the sense that no internal change in the system can be induced by a direct action of the environment). The auto-poietic system is certainly not a unit isolated from its environment by a protective closure, since the condition for the realization of its autonomy lies precisely in the metabolic interactions it is likely to establish with its environment. But precisely, the environment seems to be characterized as a moment in the dialectical realization of an identity: this relationship of metabolic openness to the environment is a question of constructing the delimitation or the closure that ensures the autonomy and individuality of living organisms.

How can this conception of the “metabolic self,” which I have described as self-centered, be reconciled with the reconceptualization of metabolism to which recent discoveries in biology on the role of heterospecific entities<fnref n="29" /> oblige us?

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Jonas (1966, 76).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Here I refer to cooperative associations of *heterospecific individuals*, namely collectives of biological entities of distinct species (*i.e.* with distinct genealogical, evolutionary histories) that live in close association with one another and are supposed to behave evolutionarily and physiologically as one individual, at one given timescale. For detailed discussions see for example Wilson and Sober (1989), Ereshefsky and Pedroso (2015), Pradeu (2016).</footnote>
### 3 Metabolism, Identity, and Microbiome Studies: Challenges from the Ecological View of Life

Biological identity is often held to be circumscribed by three major sets of properties, namely an adaptive immune system discriminating between self and non-self, a genome conditioning unique phenotypic traits, and, among animals that have a central nervous system, brain functions that support personality and cognition.<fnref n="30" /> One hypothesis I have defended so far is that the concept of metabolism has underpinned, in the historical complexity of its development, a strong conception of biological identity as self-determined and autonomous.<fnref n="31" />

Making sense of the concept of identity means two things: explaining how *x* is identical in the sense that it is *x* and not *y* and can therefore be consequently distinguished from any *y*; and explaining how *x* is capable of being identified as *x* in different contexts and time intervals - in particular, how *x* can last as *x*.<fnref n="32" /> I will call the first question “distinction” (Id), and the second “persistence” (Ip). In relation to biological identity, the question of “distinction” has often been framed around the general concept of information and has focused in recent decades on narratives that foreground genes and genomes; whereas the question of “persistence” traditionally mobilizes the concept of metabolism, as it encompasses the processes by which individual organisms maintain their identity over time. The question of “persistence”, i.e. the maintenance of identity over time, is often framed either in terms of multi-level selection processes (how a collective of cells is protected from selfish mutants, for example<fnref n="33" />), or in terms of self-organization, involving studies of metabolism at all levels.<fnref n="34" />

However, it can be argued that metabolism intimately links these two issues of identity, namely distinction (Id) and persistence (Ip). I underscored that the concept of metabolism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in opposition to a conception of identity maintenance as direct assimilation. The emergence of this concept of metabolism has thus provided biology with a conception of organisms as autonomous individuals (Id), capable of self-organization and maintenance (Ip) in a wide variety of contexts.

<footnote n="30">³⁰ See for example Rees et al. (2018), and for a critique Park et al. (2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Note that other metabolic views of physiological individuality have been defended from a historical perspective: see Dupré and O'Malley (2009), Gilbert et al. (2012), Godfrey-Smith (2013), Roughgarden et al. (2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Snowdon (1995), Wiggins (2001).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Michod (1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Moreno and Mossio (2015).</footnote>
## 3.1 Challenges

However, the metabolism around which this conception of identity has been reinforced is now contributing to redraw its boundaries. Indeed, if metabolism underpinned a conceptual figure where the identity of the living being could be grasped and expressed as emerging from the chemical world and the environment, new advances in biology in the field of microbiology and evolutionary biology of symbioses call into question this figure which seemed to equate identity, autonomy and closure.<fnref n="35" /> For several decades now, we have been measuring the extent to which symbiotic bacteria and organisms are intertwined. Various functions in animals and plants are carried out by symbionts or mutualists of different species: termites use bacteria to digest cellulose,<fnref n="36" /> healing processes in mammals are due to symbionts, the origin of the placenta in mammals is most probably due to a symbiosis with a virus<fnref n="37" />, and in vertebrate physiology, lipid metabolism, xenobiotic detoxification, vitamin synthesis and intestinal permeability are all functions performed by bacteria.<fnref n="38" /> And microbes themselves are now considered as heterogeneous entities: bacteria and archaea contain many viruses (bacteriophages), some of which seem to contribute to their functioning. As far as genetic identity is concerned, this means that the genome of an organism, although essential to its life, is not only the genome of the host. The notion of “metagenome” emerged in the early 1990s<fnref n="39" /> from the development of computational methods to better understand the genetic composition, activities, and reciprocal interactions of these complex communities, therefore transcending the level of the individual organism. Although the role of the microbiota in physiology and development is widely recognized, there is still no consensus on the impact it should have on our conceptions of biological identity (Id and Ip).<fnref n="40" />

The recognition of the extent of the intertwining of symbiotic bacteria and hosts has thus led to theoretical and semantic innovations: some redefine the microbiota, in a move that contributes at the same time to redefine the very notions of inside and outside of organisms, as a genuine organ of the body, constituted by a collectivity of heterogeneous organisms<fnref n="41" />; others argue, under the concept of the holobiont,<fnref n="42" /> that

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Here I focus on symbiotic associations understood as the cooperative associations of *heterospecific individuals*, see supra, n.33. In this restricted definition, symbiosis is characterized as a subclass of mutualisms, West et al. (2007), and not as a more general type of close and long-termed relation between heterospecific individuals, be it mutualistic, commensalistic or parasitic.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Breznak & Brune (1994).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Mallet et al. (2004).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Nicholson et al. (2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Handelsman et al. (1998).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Bordenstein and Theis (2015) vs Moran and Sloan (2015), Douglas and Werren (2016), Rees et al. (2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ O’Hara and Shanahan (2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Zilber-Rosenberg and Rosenberg (2008).</footnote>
the “true” biological individual is the host-symbiont unit, which is supposed to be a
unit of evolutionary processes and physiological functioning, and not the classical
concept of organism. Some philosophers have suggested that biological identity
requires conceptual clarification in light of these developments<sup>43</sup> or that the concept
of individual should be abandoned<sup>44</sup>. I propose that what is at stake in this tension
between a metabolic conception of physiological identity and the reconfiguration of
the relations between the inside and the outside, unity and plurality, identity and
otherness is less the abandonment of the notions of identity or individuality than the
way in which this contemporary crisis of metabolism forces us to deploy new strate-
gies for thinking about these concepts. Indeed, it is more a certain strong conception
of biological identity as self-determined and autonomous, a conception that has
been solidified around the concept of metabolism, that is now in crisis.

Rearranging such a conception in the light of contemporary work does not mean
having to give up defining biological identity in this context. If we are willing to
admit that nutrition and metabolism allow us to think precisely through these para-
doxes (identity in change, autonomy through openness, and these points of passage
between the exterior and the interior, the inert and the animate, the other and the
same) then they undoubtedly conceal conceptual resources that the history of the
stabilization of the concept of metabolism – as a dialectical scheme for thinking
about the autonomy of organisms – will have covered up. It is therefore less a ques-
tion of undertaking a radical critique of the concept of metabolism than of redefin-
ing it in the light of these new developments in microbiology, a redefinition that
could also be conceived as a reactivation of abandoned or forgotten scientific ave-
nues, and which should in turn contribute to drawing up a renewed conception of
biological identity.

## 3.2 Conceptual Issues: Biology of Organisms and Metaphysics of Identity

These new challenges contribute to questioning the boundaries and the very relevance of the concept of organism and its traditional equation with the idea of biological individuality: first by making the organism the unification of a plurality of heterogeneous entities; second by focusing attention on the networks of interactions between species rather than on discrete and isolated entities. The crisis of the concept of metabolism thus becomes a crisis of the concept of biological identity. The upheavals that I try to think about are therefore both internal mutations in contemporary biology and the impact of these mutations on metaphysical conceptions of biological identity and individuality.

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Hutter et al. (2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Gilbert et al. (2012).</footnote>
In terms of biology, I assume that the shift from an evolutionary biology of competition between organisms to an evolutionary biology of symbiosis<fnref n="45" /> finds its metabolic translation here in the gradual shift from an egocentric conception of appropriation to a vision centered on cooperation and the persistence of otherness. It is clear that this twofold evolutionary and metabolic shift towards plurality and interaction networks in turn disrupts the way in which we compartmentalize the entities that make up the living world. While biology has historically been built around the notion of organism and this traditionally refers to the idea of an autonomous individual with clearly discernible boundaries, it has become clear that the isolated organism is incapable of functioning properly independently. Recent work in plant physiology has shown, for example, that the metabolic, immune, and developmental functions of plants can only be achieved through their membership of a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi.<fnref n="46" /> Although nutrition initially referred to the obvious fact that all living organisms depend on other cells and an environment for their survival, and that living organisms are therefore relational, this intuition was replaced by a focus on the autonomy and independence of organisms – a view that metabolism as a concept for thinking about the dynamic maintenance of organisms initially reinforced. What these different works force us to think about is, on the contrary, this progressive decentering of a biology of organisms towards a biology of networks: in a biological world made up of interactions, can we still identify discrete and autonomous units? Can a multiplicity of bacterial species united around a metabolic function (e.g. nitrogen fixation with functional relays between different bacterial species) be characterized as a biological individual? Finally, it is our capacity to identify collective entities as functional and evolutionary individuals that is being questioned here (Bouchard and Huneman 2013).

On the metaphysical level, such a complexification of the picture of life clashes with the concepts with which we traditionally describe the objects that make up the living world. Thus, the concept of individual envelops three dimensions, epistemic and ontological: it is both that which is indivisible, i.e. that which remains at the end of processes of logical division (classically in Aristotle), referring cor relatively to the properties that make such an individual distinct from any other,<fnref n="47" /> and that which is re-identifiable as the same individual at different moments in time, i.e. that which persists or is identical to itself over time.<fnref n="48" /> While biology seems to provide paradigmatic cases of individuality - as Aristotle does in the *Categories* (2a 10–13) in relation to the definition of substance Aristotle 1963 - since “such a man, such a horse” persist in time, can be re-identified as the same man or the same horse at different intervals of time, and are indivisible in the sense that their division would not result in two distinct men or horses, it is at the same time obvious that this intuition is

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Doolittle and Bapteste (2007), Sapp (2009), Sélosse (2012), Tripp et al. (2017), Bapteste and Huneman (2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Sélosse and al. (2006), Roy and Sélosse (2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Lowe (2001).</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Strawson (1959).</footnote>
contradicted by many biological facts, in both aspects of spatial indivisibility and temporal continuity. For example, the discovery of the phenomena of organic reintegration in the eighteenth century, such as the regeneration of freshwater polyps after a longitudinal cut (Trembley), shows that two functional individuals can emerge from the division of an initial individual. Similarly, the idea of temporal continuity clashes with both the constant molecular renewal to which living beings are subject and the existence of holometabolous organisms, i.e., organisms whose development is characterized by a complete metamorphosis of states, such as lepidoptera, beetles, etc. Finally, this common preconception of the indivisibility of biological individuals classically encounters the question of compositionality and levels of hierarchy within living organisms.

This question, which is not new, can be considered as constitutive of the elaboration of the concept of organism, which classically integrates a reflection on the articulation between structures (organs, apparatuses, systems) and functions, with a reflection on hierarchically integrated levels of organization (genes, cells, organs). However, such a question has a new dimension today, since the upheavals I have mentioned - in the field of the evolutionary biology of symbioses, microbiology, or metabolic physiology - no longer only concern the mereological relations between the whole and its parts, unity, and plurality. These works shift the attention of biologists to the nature of dynamic and emergent interactions between a host and heterospecific entities, without which homeostasis, development or immunity are not possible. To confront these questions is therefore to question the relevance of the metaphysical concept of the individual for contemporary biology, or to elaborate the conditions that would be required for such a concept to be consistent.

These questions about the relevance of a concept of individual for biology are based, as one can see, on a metaphysics of identity, in such a way that it seems difficult to disentangle what, for the living, is identity and what is individuality. Indeed, as has been pointed out, the criteria for attributing individuality are indexed to both distinction (synchronic identity) and persistence (diachronic identity) and therefore imply agreement on a metaphysical concept of biological identity. However, in both respects, the focus on metabolism and the undermining of the biological topics described above pose a challenge to classical metaphysical conceptions of identity. Whether they are metaphysics of substance (what is identical is what remains under change, i.e., substance being understood as an ontologically independent discrete entity, and persistent subject of changes in accidental properties<fnref n="49" />) or of resemblance (x is the same if x resembles itself at two intervals of time), these ontologies are centered on what does not change, change being always derivative, secondary.

The consideration of metabolic processes, on the other hand, obliges us to think about the centrality of change for the living being at all levels, and therefore to elaborate an ontology that allows us to give an adequate account of biological identity, i.e., in a way that is consistent with what science describes. One of the theoretical challenges for today's philosophy is to contribute to the development of a

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Robinson (2004).</footnote>
concept of identity in which change and relationships are central, without being
subsumed by an autonomous assimilative center.

Symmetrically, the way in which we classically conceive of biological identity
along the two axes of distinction and persistence is strongly undermined here. While
the distinction of an individual is supposed to be ensured by the form, it is generally
held that persistence is achieved by the continuous renewal of the matter that com-
poses it. This dichotomy between matter and form can be called “hylomorphism”,
in a very general sense that goes beyond the content that Aristotle gave to this con-
cept. The way in which this conception was inscribed in twentieth century biology
and which refers to the hierarchical distinction between reproduction and metabo-
lism - that is to say, a genome conferring on living beings their distinction, i.e., their
form, and a metabolism ensuring the continuous material production of this form -
contributed to reinforcing a vision of living beings that is both ‘genomecentric’ and
metabolically egocentric. From this point of view, the classical question of the pri-
ority of the genetic or the metabolic, of form or matter, of distinction or persistence,
in the scenarios of appearance and history of living forms is in a way already
inscribed in the structure of the concepts since it presupposes their strict separation.
This question ceases to be relevant as soon as the dichotomy between matter and
form is blurred by the new ways of defining the concepts of organism and biological
identity that this crisis of the concept of metabolism opens up.

## 3.3 Ecologicizing Biology

The investigation of theses metaphysical questions needs to rely on a paradigm shift
in physiology, i.e. the ecologicization of its focal concepts. In light of the indispens-
ability of the microbiota for the development, functioning and maintenance of
organisms, should the microbiota be considered as an organ<sup>50</sup>? If so, should the very
notion of organ be redefined to include the contribution of heterospecific and adap-
tive elements during the life of the organism in its functional dimension? Can the
organism itself, as a community of species, then become the object of an ecological
type of analysis<sup>51</sup>?

Is the concept of holobiont relevant for thinking about this integration between
the host and the set of micro-organisms it harbors? and if so, how should it be
defined? The holobiont concept, i.e., the set of hosts and microbes designated as an
interdependent and co-evolving unit, has been proposed as an alternative to tradi-
tional conceptions of the organism as an isolated and autonomous biological indi-
viduality.<sup>52</sup> But such a conception of the living organism is not without questions:
does the whole constituted by the host and the micro-organisms constitute a

<footnote n="50"><sup>50</sup> Baquero and Nombela (2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="51"><sup>51</sup> Costello et al. (2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="52"><sup>52</sup> Zilber-Rosenberg I., Rosenberg E. (2008).</footnote>
functioning unit for physiology? Whether the holobiont is a unit of selection or not, as evolutionary theorists debate, one must ask what kind of integration between these different organisms would be required for the holobiont to be characterized as a functioning unit. The focus on the metabolic processes carried out by the interaction patterns between host and microbes leads to question the robustness of a conception of identity built on the collaboration between discrete entities. Therefore, some even propose to go beyond the holobiont concept in that it conceptualizes interactions between species from autonomous and separate entities and enshrines boundaries to the detriment of considering networks.<fnref n="53" />

From this perspective, it is the processes themselves, rather than the individuals who carry them out, that seem robust.<fnref n="54" /> Indeed, although there is great diversity of species and strains in the bacterial taxonomic groups present in the gut microbiota, the essential functions performed by these organisms remain remarkably stable.<fnref n="55" /> Bacteria of different species participate in metabolic cycles, converting nutrients into metabolites that are used by other bacteria to produce other metabolites, which in turn are used by the host. These functional steps can be carried out by a multiplicity of strains present in the gut, so that these cycles can continue regardless of the identity of the organisms carrying them out. This contrast between the stability of metabolic processes and the diversity of the actors that carry them out in some way doubles the complexity of organisms. The compositionality of living organisms cannot be thought of in the mode of a swarm of bees since, in such a model, already appreciated by eighteenth-century vitalists, the discrete entities that make up the whole are identical to each other, just as the multiple bees are genetically equal. Conversely, the holobiont model requires us to think not only of the heterogeneity of the parts, but also of their lack of stability in the execution of metabolic processes. As Falkowski et al. express it: “in essence microbes can be viewed as vessels that ferry metabolic machines through strong environmental perturbations into vast stretches of relatively mundane geological landscapes. The individual taxonomic units evolve and go extinct, yet the core machines survive surprisingly unperturbed.”

To acknowledge the functional inclusion of heterospecific entities in any organism, to conceive their irreducible relevance for its physiological functioning, to integrate ecological concepts of interaction to analyze the very dynamics of the organism and to redefine its health: if these research directions prove robust and consistent, they prompt the substitution of the metaphor of the bee swarm classically used to represent the organism (the parts all serving the whole, the division of labor between food and reproduction instantiated by castes...) with a metaphor of the organism as an ecosystem.<fnref n="56" /> Yet, to what extent is this simply a metaphor? Is there an ontological significance to the assimilation of the organism to an ecosystem of individuals of

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Simon et al. (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Doolittle and Zhaxybayeva (2010), Falkowski et al. (2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Doolittle and Booth (2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Van Baalen and Huneman (2014).</footnote>
different species in mutualistic, predatory and competitive relationships? If the trend in classical community ecology initiated by Clements (1916) and often labeled organicism, has been criticized for its overly metaphorical assimilation of ecosystems or ecological communities to organisms with metabolism, do not contemporary approaches to the organism evoked in this project allow us, on the contrary, to think of organisms as ecosystems, seeing this “like” less as an analogy than as an ontological identity? If there is to be a scientific metaphysics of the organism and its identity, it cannot do without questioning the metaphorical character of the organism/ecosystem analogy that we see unfolding today in physiology, evolutionary biology or even cellular biology (Scadden 2014 speaks of the “cell niche”).

# 4 Conclusion

If we were to map the stakes of a philosophical reflection on biological identity informed by a genealogical study of the constitution of the concept of metabolism in which this problem crystallized for general physiology and therefore post-Bernardian biology, we would have to distinguish what we would call the traditional self-centered vision of identity, where identity is based on metabolism as a process justifying a constitutive homogeneity of the organism while integrating foreign substances. There are, of course, theoretically varieties of this egocentric vision, depending on whether they focus on thermodynamics, organic chemistry or kinetic chemistry as frameworks for formulating the requirements required by any metabolism, and whether they focus on integration into the body or cell self-maintenance, as key objectives of the metabolic process.

To this self-centered view, we would oppose an alternative, relational view in which identity is the result of the cooperation and conflict of organisms of different species that compose an organism – what the concept of holobiont tries to grasp. Such a vision would integrate the theoretical contribution of the evolutionary biology of symbioses or the metagenomics of cellular activity, but I argue it would struggle to accurately reflect the limits of identity, namely the distinctions between all those microbes, viruses that contribute to the identity of a given living organism. It contradicts the traditional equation between metabolism and biological identity, but at the same time requires a renewed understanding of metabolism.

To what extent does each aspect of the self-centered view prevent the development of processes in which heterogeneous elements – organisms of other species, such as bacteria or fungi – perform or contribute to a vital function? In particular, which aspects of the complex meanings of the concept of metabolism are most problematic in integrating the role played by heterogeneous elements into an inclusive account of biological identity? These are the questions that would probably emerge from taking into account this new frontier of the metabolic concept that is being built today by the renewed knowledge of heterospecific contributions to the biological construction of identity, or by the ecological turn in physiology.
What then becomes of the question of the relations between metabolism and vitalism with which I opened this chapter? In other words, what does this movement of the concept of metabolism, from the elaboration of the self-centered individual to the consideration of networks of interaction, do to vitalism as such? While vitalism traditionally served as a foil for both biology and philosophy, being attached to metaphysical and nondeterministic claims, i.e. the hypothesis of nonmaterial forces governing the generation, development and vital functions in living beings, I recalled that vitalism should be understood in the diversity of its historical manifestations and philosophical presuppositions. Minimally, vitalism can be depicted as the commitment to the existence of irreducible vital properties or dispositions, a commitment that seems to have constantly been challenged – and threatened – by the possibility to reduce biological processes to a set of physico-chemical reactions. To Foucault<fnref n="57" /> vitalism plays “an essential role as an indicator in the history of biology”: an indicator of problems to be solved (what constitutes the originality of life without constituting an independent empire in nature?), an indicator of reductions to be avoided (emphasizing the pervasiveness and necessity of concepts of preservation, regulation, adaptation). Interestingly, in the space of these complex relations between the biological and the inorganic, it appeared that the understanding of nutrition as an indirect process of self-organization had, at the same time, contributed to sketch the contours of the concept of organism. With this crisis of metabolism that I have briefly outlined, however, it is not so much the physico-chemical reductions that seem to threaten the integrity of the self-centered individual, than its openness, the dissolution of its boundaries, or its decentering. What is being questioned then in this interplay between vitalism and metabolism is no more the dualism between the organic and the inorganic, but rather the reassuring dualism between the organism and the environment, the very existence of an autonomous and self-creating “milieu intérieur” that delimited the boundaries and independence of the organism from its environment. To this extent, this progressive decentering and complexification of metabolism is at the same time a call to overcome a dialectical conception of the interactions between organisms and their environment and an appeal to externalize vitalism.

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<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>
# Vitalist Arguments in the Struggle for Human (Im)Perfection: The Debate Between Biologists and Theologians in the 1960s–1980s

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /></figure>

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Victoria Shmidt

**Abstract** In this chapter, I explore and offer critical reflections on the widespread practice of attributing negative value to “vital forces” in debates on health and disease, as the direct result of the extensive dissemination of genetics and its implications since the late 1960s. This historical reconstruction focuses on the most heated debates in popular science periodicals and editions, having the longest-lasting public “echo,” which have shaped an intergenerational continuity in the reproduction of vitalist arguments in discursive practices regarding health, disease, and their genetic factors.

Mapping attacks on vital forces as various forms of negation addresses three different debates in the historically interrelated repertoire of potentially rival approaches to health, disease, and their genetic components: (1) the attribution of negative value to primal instinct as an obstacle to the progress of human civilization; (2) the normative vitalism mainly associated with French philosophers George Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze; and (3) the movement for the deinstitutionalization of health care within the negative theology presented by Ivan Illich.

The reproduction of vitalist arguments in the each of the three realms is seen as a historical continuity of the medical vitalism that appeared in the Enlightenment and that produced a less monolithic and more conceptually coherent continuum of the positions regarding health, diseases, and their causes. In line with the Lakatosian division into internalist and externalist histories of science, I focus on the multiple functions of vitalist arguments: as a main force in the contest among rival theories regarding health and disease (as a part of the internalist narrative); as a signifier of the boundary work delineating science and not-science, whether labeled as theology or as “bad” science aimed at legitimizing science (as a part of externalist history); and as an ideological platform for bridging science and its performance in policies concerning reproduction.

<footnote>V. Shmidt (✉)
SOEGA, University of Graz, Graz, Austria
e-mail: victoria.shmidt@uni-graz.at</footnote>
**Keywords** Vitalism · Internal and external histories of biology · Reproduction · Georges Canguilhem · Ivan Illich

# 1 Introduction

In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, the classical epistemological status of vitalist powers as “extra-causal agents powering the living body” (Wolfe 2008, 461) began to be transformed through reinforcing epistemo-logical skepticism as a driving force for reproducing vitalist arguments (Benton 1974, 18,20). Observing that physiological functions as “too intimately intertwined to be quantified according to purely mechanical laws of force and motion” (Wolfe and Terada 2008, 552), this launched the “systematic negation of strictly linear causality in explaining health and disease.” (ibid) The shifting ontological status of vitalist arguments determined the split in accepting the potential (and indisputable) cognizance of vital phenomena and claiming the necessity of such argumentation as a “covering law.” (Osborne 2016) Vitalism began operating as “an intermediate, pragmatic position located in between two metaphysically rigid extremes,” (Wolfe and Terada, 2008 543) namely, mechanism and animism.

The “irreducibility of the knowledge about vital forces to a nomothetic explanation” (Huneman 2008 619) became a shared assumption for the various movements within medical vitalism, which fixed its role for the next generation of thinkers who theorized health and pathology in the contexts of evolutionary biology and genetics. Moreover, the animal economy, a defining concept of medical vitalism (Wolfe and Terada 2008 548), introduced the active language of function and of usage, which was opposed to the static, atemporal character of purely anatomical approaches (ibid 549).

Along with focusing on the complexity of the connection between actions and efficient causality, medical vitalism started differentiating irritability and sensitivity, which not only assisted in avoiding reference to a soul in the debates about the causes of mental diseases (Huneman 2008 617), but also precipitated a transition from a rationally devised vision on the developing organism to the investigation of an irrationally developed entity (Benton 1974 22,35). In terms of agential thinking (Okasha 2018 18), this trend nurtured a powerful platform for attributing to vitalist forces both negative and positive value to an organism.

The established interconnection between a skeptical vitalist view of explaining disease and the ascendency of a “cautionary” view on vital forces as potentially dangerous may be viewed as the primary tool for the survival of vitalist arguments and their conceptual continuity (Shan 2020 138) in theorizing health and pathology in the twentieth century. This text brings into focus the strong historical connection between the arguments introduced by medical vitalism, and their applications, and the arguments developed by biologists and theologians in the 1960s and 1980s.

In the late 1960s, ascribing destructive value to vitalist forces operated as a central assumption in different views on health and pathology and their role in human
evolution. Anne McLaren (1968), one of the most publicly recognized reproductive biologists in the late 1960s, underscored in her preliminary article for the special issue of *Contact*, a journal affiliated with the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology that :

> Even after millions of years of evolution, frogs return to the water to spawn; seals return to dry land to breed. Although most people seem reasonably content with the way in which we reproduce our species at present, recent advances in biological understanding make it certain that we shall soon be able to exercise much greater control over the processes of reproduction. (McLaren 1968 13)

Georges Canguilhem (1988), a philosopher and physician, asserted: “In distinguishing biological variety from negative vital value, we have, on the whole, delegated the responsibility for perceiving the onset of disease to the living being itself.”<fnref n="1" /> Ivan Illich (1974), a philosopher and priest, challenged such a view: “[We] adapt to the stress of the second industrial revolution and over-population …this kind of survival with fear adaptability is also a heavy handicap: the most common causes of disease are exacting adaptive demands.” (Illich 1974 83)

I explore and offer critical reflections on the widespread practice of attributing negative value to vital forces in debates on health and pathology, as a direct result of the extensive dissemination of genetics and molecular biology and its implications since the late 1960s. The migration of genetics into the practice of reproductive politics on national and global levels had played a central role in reinventing the well-known debates from the interwar heyday of eugenics in the twentieth century about the criteria for health and disease, normality and abnormality. These debates around the dichotomy between the individual and the social space put into question the future of humanism and consequently the future of religion (Deane-Drummond 2012, 29). The exchange between scientific and theological arguments regarding heredity became a leading forum for shaping the variety of views on eugenics and its measures, as in the early 1930s. Since the 1960s, along with the flourishing of human genetics and its recruitment to various policies, these debates began to involve the most prominent representatives of both camps and to be widely disseminated. While Wolfe and Terada have called for attention to the recurring features of vitalism as non-doctrinaire, and the coherence that occurred in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Wolfe and Terada 2008, 542), this text aims to provide a philosophically informed historical reconstruction of vitalist arguments since the 1960s, as a construction mobilized for solving multiple issues concerning genetics and its social and ethical implications. These debates between theologians and biologists reflect the most significant turns in the resurrection of vitalist arguments after the Second World War.

<footnote n="1">¹Georges Canguilhem (1991) *The normal and the pathological* p. 155, cit. in Stuart Elden (2019) *Canguilhem* Cambridge Polity p.25.</footnote>
## 2 Methodology

This text focuses on the most heated debates published in popular science periodicals, which have the longest-lasting public “echo,” and which have shaped intergenerational continuity in the reproduction of vitalist arguments in discursive practices regarding health, disease and the contribution of genetics. It addresses three streams of debates at the international level that focused on vital forces as decisive risks for humanity and its collective health between the late 1960s and 1980s: (1) the denial of “quasi-animal” reproductive patterns of “backward” people and societies, which connected human genetics with the longue durée of developmental idealism, and reinforced the division between doctrinal (systematic) theology and various theo-logical interpretations of genetic arguments and their implications; (2) the deconstruction of the binary opposition between the norms of health and pathology in the approach invented by Georges Canguilhem and his successors, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and (3) the rejection of genetics as a part of modern medicine in the movement for deinstitutionalization spearheaded by Ivan Illich and his supporters. The historical reconstruction of these debates provides the methodological grounds for answering the question: “How did the argument stemming from ascribing negative value to vital forces operate and develop in different cultural and political contexts?” Such reconstruction is motivated by the mission to move from the general and almost non-historical concept of “knowledge circulation” to a philosophically informed historization of medical science.

I reconstruct the history of vitalist arguments through a Lakatosian division of the history of science into internalist (“repertoires of thought, action, and technique, that shape the organisation of scientific inquiry”) (Knorr-Cetina 1999) and externalist (social, cultural, economic or political conditions make scientific progress possible) narratives (Lakatos 1970). The scientific “career” of vitalist arguments is embedded in the struggle of medical science for its legitimacy, often sought by rearranging of the dichotomy between holism (or organicism), and mechanistic models of explanation.

This struggle cannot be attributed wholly to either the internalist or externalist history of medical science. In the 1960s, the rapid rise of human genetics confronted an increasing contest between Mendelian and Lamarckian explanatory schemes to integrate the role of the environment in development and evolution (Koonin and Wolf 2009). This struggle included a whole range of possible arguments, including a long-lived theoretical and empirical rivalry between major research programs in human genetics (the internalist history, in Lakatosian terms), as well as various efforts aimed at rearranging the boundaries between genetics and eugenics in favor of legitimizing genetics (the wholly externalist history). Introducing vitalist arguments into this contest diversifies the models that explain the interconnection between nature and nurture. I connect the arguments for ascribing negative value to vital forces (internalist history) to their operation in the debates between geneticists and theologians that addressed the societal role of genetics (externalist history). The
reproduction of vitalist arguments in these debates fixes the multifunctionality of
such arguments.

The Bhaskarian taxonomy of negation into “real” (which creates a distance between animals and humans in their patterns of reproduction), “transformative” (which reconstructs the pre-existing binary opposition of health and disease into a scale for measuring the degree of normality and pathology), and “radical” (which welds biology with a well-disseminated, exceptionally positive view on human adaptability as a driving force of institutionalizing medical assistance in favor of overcoming such dependency) types, which maps *the internalist narrative* of ascribing negative value to vitalist forces. Mapping the attacks on vital forces as various types of negation joins different debates in the historically interrelated repertoire of potentially rival approaches to health, pathology and the genetic contribution to health and disease.

This continuum connects the operation of vitalist arguments with their transformation in the nineteenth century and the challenges produced by rooting genetics in various practices of demographic policy since the 1960s. Since Bhaskar accepts *real negation* as the necessary ground for developing transformative and radical negation, the continuum of these approaches is seen as a reflection of the dialectics of a skeptical vitalism, which “takes an opportunity to develop to a systematic methodology aimed at testing the new facts and implications by multiple criteria.” (Benton 1974 18–20) Rather than being separate efforts in negating vital forces, their interconnection had become of the grounds for adaptation, for example, in the countries of Eastern Europe.

The imperative to revise the social and political contexts of genetics, or its *externalist history*, will be explained as a feature of the “control society,” a social order recognized as predominant, and which has replaced the previous “disciplining society” since the 1960s. Technoscientific development, including the achievements of biomedicine, a core driving force of the transfer to a control society, had shifted from the previous practices of forming individuals through placing them into institutional spaces of confinement by “modulating” certain “individuals,” to defining individuals as a part of “samples, data, markets or “banks”” (Patton 2018 205).

Playing a significant role in establishing the first biopolitical strategies of the eighteenth century, medical vitalism had populated the models that problematized the division between the “normal” and the “pathological” through various arguments targeted at the criteria and signifiers of health and disease (Rabinow and Rose 2006). The transfer from a disciplining society to a control society that called for rearranging the boundaries between genetics and eugenics began to be viewed as an agent of control society. The non-scientific production of knowledge provided an argument for or against a control society in which “tacit assumptions about the contents of science are forced to become explicit.” (Gieryn 1999 24) Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (2006 211) underscore that “contemporary biopolitics operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die.”

Thus, I trace the role of vitalist arguments in the boundary work engaged by
biologists and physicians on the one side and theologians on the other. The goal is
to learn “where they may not roam without transgressing the boundaries of legiti-
macy” (Gieryn 1999 16) of their position regarding the control society. I explore the
operation of vitalist arguments in various forms of boundary work<fnref n="2" /> through decon-
structing multiple analogies between organism and society or, more generally,
through connecting vitalism and naturalism as signifiers for specifying the contexts
of adapting vitalist arguments within societies that experienced various degrees of
geopolitical dependence.

3 The Longue Durée of Developmental Idealism: In Search of the Best Path Toward Human Perfection

Since the end of the eighteenth century, recognizing reproduction as a “conservative pattern for all [that is] vital” (McLaren 1968 13), produced a particular view of human beings. It did so through the lenses of controlling reproduction and the ability to engage in the self-control of reproduction as the next stage of evolution toward becoming more human: “If conception were to become a deliberate act in its own right, it would less often be undertaken irresponsibly. Perhaps conception might then be awarded the same moral status as birth and death receive at present.” (ibid 15).

During the interwar period, the dissemination of eugenic ideas and politics aim-
ing to distance people from “backward” reproductive patterns attained the function
as a sustainable supra-national ideology for establishing a global agenda of repro-
ductive politics. These ideas and practices received their “second wind” in the 1960s
within “genetic demography,” an interdisciplinary program for applying the achieve-
ments of human genetics to reproductive policies.<fnref n="3" /> Along with the revision of the
genetic causes of disease, health, and fertility, genetic demographers struggled with
the inevitable stigmatization of their explanatory schemes (and of themselves) due
to the close connection of those schemes with eugenics.

Managing the stigma of eugenics utilized various methods for reestablishing the
boundaries between “good” and “bad” science, from the blatantly ahistorical oppo-
sition of “sober” eugenics and “perverted” *Rassenhygiene* among the geneticists
who cooperated with German scholars, including the most prominent members of

<footnote n="2">²Vitalism had already taken on a primary role in boundary work in the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, when psychiatry appeared during the systematic rearrangement of the boundaries among
medical, religious, and judiciary approaches to insanity. See more in Philippe Huneman (2008)
Montpellier vitalism and the emergence of alienism in France (1750–1800): the case of passions.
*Science in Context*, 21 (4), pp.615–647: p.616.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³The rise of scientific warnings regarding reproduction had started in the early 1960s and was debated within a few conferences: Man and his future (G. Wolstenholme, ed.) Ciba Foundation Symposium, 1962; Control of human heredity and evolution (T. M. Sonneborn, ed.) MacMillan, 1965; and Biological aspects of social problems (Meade and Parkes, eds.) Plenum Press, 1965, which document many other ideas and references to primary literature.</footnote>
NSDP (Koch 2004 317), to attempts to reform eugenics as a useful tool for bringing together the social and biological realms of degeneration as processes important to understanding the vicissitudes of evolution (Ramsden 2006 7). This boundary work aimed at distinguishing genetics from eugenics as “the less reliable, less truthful, less relevant source of knowledge about natural reality.” (Gieryn 1999 16) This interpretation of eugenics did not mean to label it “ersatz,” but sought to extend its frontiers.

Such an *expansion of scientific boundaries* resonated with the evolution of the complicated history of eugenics as an agent of the disciplining society and its very palpable presence in the history of institutional violence against disabled people and minorities, to the more refined methods of control over reproductive behavior offered by genetic demography where, “Limiting population in the interests of national economic prosperity does not operate according to the biopolitical diagram of eugenics, and is not the same as purification of the race by elimination of degen- erates.” (Rabinow and Rose 2006 210) The duality of this evolution was reflected in the two paradigms of genetic counseling: “genetic cleansing” and “informed choice” (Clarke 1997), which were disseminated with the aim to regulate reproductive behavior among less socially responsible societies that needed to remain under sur- veillance and more advanced social groups that required intermediate forms of social control that avoided the centralization of government (Dean-Drummond 2012 106).

The growing controversy over nature vs. nurture added to the role of vitalist arguments in revising the connection between genetics and eugenics and their implications. In his publications for the public, Joshua Lederberg called for reintro- ducing vitalist argument in the name of saving progress and avoiding its risks. Lederberg recognized in the mechanistic understanding of heredity (though the inevitable output of the progress of molecular biology) the threat of a monolithic and sophistic rationalization of fundamental human policy and the decay of medi- cine wisely dedicated to the welfare of individual patients (Lederberg 1966 519). The solution offered by Lederberg and his prominent colleagues was “euphenics”, an explanatory scheme that sought to rival both eugenics and Mendelian biology. Constructing disease as “any deficit relative to a desired norm” adherents of euphen- ics relied upon epigenetics to produce “the healthy genotype as the product of com- municating between environment and humans.” (ibid 521)

The mission of euphenics would be to maximize the efforts aimed at treating individuals affected by genetic diseases through all possible means for ameliorating genotypic maladjustment. Bringing forward the role of adaptability in coping with genetic diseases brought this question to the fore: “How to identify the most adapt- able genotypes now living and what is the price, to the detriment in special skills of this adaptability?” (ibid)

Euphenics relied on the “match of pragmatic expectations of the milieu of the individual and his descendants.” (ibid 524) Generally, euphenics was seen as a rem- edy for all the applications that totally failed within the framework of eugenics, such as genetic counseling. Even more, prioritizing euphenics should prevent the “grave danger that the minority view will lead to a confusion of the economic and social
aims of rational population policy with genocide.” (ibid) Remarkably, the main concern regarding the risk of abusing genetic implications was “a disastrous impediment to the adoption of family planning by just those groups whose economic and educational progress most urgently demands it.” (ibid 530)

Despite the constant rivalry with eugenics, euphenics functioned as a kind of developmental idealism, a concept used as an umbrella notion for the complex of ideas, politics, and practices, including population genetics, which directly link the ideal of “modern industrial and urban society with high levels of education, wealth, and health” (Thornton et al. 2012) and proper demographic policy, “considered under four headings: decrease, increase, improvement and substitution.” (McLaren 1968 15) The negation of primal instinct as insufficiently human for progress and its risks achieved all the qualities of real, basic, negation in terms of the Bhaskarian approach. It attacked the absence of consciousness regarding primatal instinct and launched the process of distancing from uncontrolled reproduction (Bhaskar 1993). Negating primal instinct as vital but destructive became one of the main responses to the duality of attributing to humans the immanent qualities of social life, especially culturation and biological evolution. Duality in understanding humans as both animals and God’s children has shaped the Christian version of developmental idealism.

Developmental idealism, a secular Enlightenment paradigm arising from the European religious context (Nickolson 1990), has been accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, despite the rhetoric of the geneticists who often opposed scientific collective responsibility to the selfish individualism of Christian mercy regarding those individuals considered “useless.” Well-known Scottish geneticist Patricia Ann Jacobs (1968) simplified the complicated history of the relation between genetic and theological arguments in favor of achieving efficient control over human reproduction:

> In discussions on suffering and the love of God, there is a traditional view that we need our weak brethren to develop our attitudes of compassion and thus become spiritually refined. To many scientists, such a view seems of monumental and repulsive selfishness... Many ethnic groups have exposed their defective babies after birth, but now genetic knowledge can predict and detect many such children in good time and take remedial action. (Jacobs 1968 20)

Along with the proliferation of eugenic movements since the end of the nineteenth century, those associated with Christian churches embraced a wide range of positions in relation to the debate over strict control over reproduction. While the attempts to resist eugenic movements from the side of Christian associations and clergy were fragmented and based upon ethical concerns,<fnref n="4" /> the acceptance of eugenic ideas among theologians, priests, and, even more, elite clergy established an

<footnote n="4">⁴An entirely ethical argument against sterilization in the United States and euthanasia in Nazi Germany stemmed from the idea of “natural rights” and violation of such rights through applying negative eugenic measures; see more in Leon, S. (2004). “A Human Being, and Not a Mere Social Factor”: Catholic Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s. *Church History*, 73(2), 383–411.</footnote>
intersectionality between theological arguments and eugenic ideas that transformed Christian epistemology. Despite the historically controversial bifurcation of negative and positive eugenics between Protestants and Catholics (Gillette 2014), Christian epistemology tied together the various driving forces that determined the wide range of strategies to put together religious and genetic arguments in favor of humanity as an exceptional quality, to be protected from the barbarity of those who remained more animal than human.

Opposing humans and animals fit well with the racial hierarchies that often included the distance between a particular “race” and the ideal of humanity as an argument to justify negative eugenics: “The races are different and, measured against certain ideals, may be more or less capable of striving towards these ideals.”(Muckermann 1934 29) Agostini Gemelli and Hermann Muckermann, two Catholic priests and prominent eugenicsists, embraced mutually polar positions regarding forced sterilization (Dietrich 1992),<fnref n="5" /> but both consistently developed an argument in favor of limited dynamic and vital racial “intermixtures,” in contrast to widespread negative opinions concerning intermixture with “aliens,” which were perceived as dangerous to the interest of “domestic raciality” (Heimrassigkeit) or Italian “purity” (Turda and Gillette 2014).

This motive dovetailed with the prioritization of improving the health of the nation. Muckermann explained the necessity to introduce forced sterilization, defined by him as “un-fertilization” (*Unfruchtbarmachung*), by referencing the vital interests of the German people: “Ethical concerns are therefore out of the question, because consideration for the common good requires this addition to the existing measures to maintain the health and work endurance of the people.” (Muckermann 1934 124) The mission to prevent hereditary diseases (*schweren Erbleiden zu verhüten*) inclined Muckermann to weld together not only neo-Lamarckian and Mendelian explanatory schemes for pathologies, but also to also label hereditary factors as given by Mother Nature (ibid 135), all in favor of stressing the impossibility of preventing so-called malformation in ways other than forced sterilization.

Remarkably, he built this argument through the division of families into “unnatural large families” (*unnatürliche Großfamilie*), “unnatural dwarf-families” (*unnatürliche Zwergfamilie*) and “true-to-nature normal families” (*naturtreue Normalfamilie*) (ibid 136). Only the last category was acceptable, able to bring religion and eugenic arguments together in mutual accordance in favor of a sustainable practice of health (ibid 157).

Blurring the boundaries between genetic and religious arguments for promoting developmental idealism had become a long-term trend, along with the regular attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to reestablish Christian views on reproduction and the ways to intervene in it. Between 1930 and 1995, the Catholic Church issued three different Encyclicals aimed at limiting the dissemination of

<footnote n="5">⁵Donald J, Dietrich (1992) Catholic Eugenics in Germany, 1920–1945: Hermann Muckermann, S.J. and Joseph Mayer Journal of Church and State, 34 (3): 575–600.</footnote>
eugenics and genetics-based politics.<fnref n="6" /> Nevertheless, the preparation of these documents was accompanied by debates among Catholic experts that blurred the unity of the Catholic position regarding the regulation of reproductive policy. For the Catholic Church, the argument developed by the Methodists and accepted by Catholics (Ramsey 1970), shifted slightly from the non-acceptance of eugenics and genetic improvement as a dangerous practice of “playing God,” to moderate acceptance of the idea which posits “ourselves as in some sense co-creators with God.” (Deane-Drummond 2012 30) Seeing humans as “created co-creators” (Hefner 1993 37) reinforced the view on genetic medicine as a possible ally in the struggle by the Church for healthy “normal” families, putting the Roman Catholic Church in the position of “theologian interrogation of genetic science or conversation partner.” (Deane-Drummond 2012 29). In his salutary exhortation to the participants of the Twentieth International Conference on “The Human Genome,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán claimed:

> [W]e will start from the consideration of the genome as the structural element that organizes the human body in its individual and hereditary dimensions; it involves the set of genes, but it goes further to embrace all the other elements that together with genes constitute the original energy to develop through all existence and which signify the key mystery of human life. (Barragán and Lozano 2005)

This fundamental dualism, “which also positioned the Roman Catholic Church unconditionally on the side of the good,” was reinforced in a UNESCO report on culture and development (1995), which claimed “religion appears to be a resurgent force in human affairs today.” (Sjørup 1999 389)

One of the most visible outputs of this trend has been reestablishing the mission of Catholic Church (Deane-Drummond 2012 46) to balance the priority of the truth of scientific knowledge with the ideal of humanity as dependent on God. Since the late 1960s, in scientific and Catholic versions of developmental idealism, the uncontrolled instinct toward reproduction began to be viewed as similar to the risks of nuclear war and other ecological hazards directly linked with population growth (Castel 1973; Ornstein and Lederberg 1967).

In 1968, the editor of *Contact* wrote in an introduction to a special issue aimed at shedding light on the contest between scientific progress and the threat of non-civilized reproductive patterns that, “If we fail to control population size we may expect not only increasing dangers of famine and damage to our natural environment but a far-reaching erosion of privacy and self-respect.” (Contact 1968 13) The eschatological theme stemming from this non-doctrinal theology was balanced by the new official Catholic rhetoric on the interpretation of the sexual act as “a performance of love and dignity, valued and irreplaceable part of harmonious parenting and family life,”<fnref n="7" /> part of the systematic “transformation of natural law under the

<footnote n="6">⁶Encyclical Casti Connubii, 1930, by Pius XI, opposition to eugenics especially forced sterilization; Humanae Vitae, 1968, by Paul VI, the regulation of birth, reproductive technologies; Evangelium Vitae, 1995 by John Paul II, sanctity of human life.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷See development of the argument in Evangelium Vitae, 1995.</footnote>
new idea of love” (Deane-Drummond 2012 32) begun in the 1970s. This started the process of “develop(ing) theologically informed ethics which would be accepted by people.” (ibid 35)<fnref n="8" />

This framework continues to underpin developmental discourse on religion, in contrast to a situated knowledge about religion “which is not blurred by Eurocentric universalist epistemologies.” (Sjørup 1999 406) But what are the options for negating these epistemologies for those who implement them? George Canguilhem and his colleagues focus on the binary oppositions of health vs. disease and norms vs. pathology in order to transform the approaches to the human individual and space in favor of balancing the interests of society and individuals, and medicine as a mediator between them.

## 4 Normative Vitalism: Transformative Negation of Medically Proven Imperfection

In his critical reflections concerning the strict opposition between health and disease in Western medicine, Georges Canguilhem aims at deconstructing the accusations of medical professionals concerning the faults in theories and the institutional violence resulting from such faults: “Is this a question of biology or parasitism of biology?” (Canguilhem 2009 72)<fnref n="9" /> This question stems from the personal experience of Canguilhem, who had participated in the French Resistance and who grasped the interrelation between European medical traditions and Nazi medicine. Canguilhem introduced the concept of “scientific ideology” in order to reconnect internalist and externalist histories of sciences, or more precisely the history of medicine, to clarify the interrogation between science and society. To him, scientific ideology operates as “aligned with an already instituted science whose prestige it recognizes and whose style it seeks to imitate” (Canguilhem 1988 44), but generates its own norms of “scientificity” (Elden 2019 132). Science remains connected to and infiltrated by one or another scientific ideology.

Through his historical inquiry, Canguilhem traces the interrogation between science and scientific ideology to elucidate the role of global societal changes in shaping the research agenda for biology. Canguilhem explains the acceptance of the Malthusian view on population politics by Darwin through the transformation from

<footnote n="8">⁸The dramatic struggle between the adherents of sexual pessimism as the only suitable position for the Roman Catholic Church and the promotion of authentic love as the only reason for sexual relationships remains beyond the aims of this chapter, but it is remarkable that sexual pessimism did not prevail in this rivalry due to the systematic rejection of biological miracles typical for the cults of Mary and other streams that shaped the agenda of sex as a performance of God’s love. See more in Uta Ranke-Heinemann *Eunuchen für das Himmelreich Katholische Kirche und Sexualität* Hoffmann und Campe Verlag Hamburg 1988.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Here and further all references to the writings by Canguilhem are derived from Stuart Elden (2019) *Canguilhem Polity Press*.</footnote>
agrarian capitalism to industrial capitalism, as the main historical context for the scientific ideology of the “struggle for life,” with its imperative of free competition (Canguilhem 1988 100). Other remarkable examples of the interconnection between biology and scientific ideology include a class-based explanation of division into neo-Lamarckism and Mendelism that Canguilhem had brought into focus. He underscores that Lysenkoism was correct to suggest that it was possible to change the hereditary constitution of the organism, but he does not accept the political arbitrariness with which the authorities dealt with geneticists who were labeled as the enemies of the Soviet people. In a quite provocative way, Canguilhem defines Mendel “as the head of retrograde, capitalist, and idealist biology.” (Canguilhem 2009 149) Expressing such an extreme view on the division into neo-Lamarckism and Mendelism reflects not only Canguilhem’s political affiliation, but also his intention to support an explanatory scheme that remained in the shadows for political reasons.

It is plausible to argue that Canguilhem accepted the call to emancipate biology from wide range of scientific ideologies as a way towards the *protection of autonomy*: a “kind of boundary-work results from efforts of outside powers, not to dislodge science from its place of epistemic authority, but to exploit that authority in ways that compromise the material and symbolic resources of scientists inside.” (Gieryn 1999 17) The task to emancipate biology from scientific ideology is complicated, according to Canguilhem, because “biology has taken concepts from politics, and it may be that here politics is simply taking them back.”(Canguilhem 2009 98)

Gieryn compares the efforts of scientists to prevent science from becoming “a hand-maiden to political or market ambitions” with establishing “interpretative walls to protect their professional autonomy over the selection of problems for research or standards used to judge candidate claims to knowledge.” (Gieryn 1999 17) The bulk of Canguilhem’s reflections can be interpreted as a kind of wall-building aimed at emancipating biology from one of the pillars of developmental idealism, the overarching contradiction between health as the norm and disease as pathology. The role of science in the appearance and disappearance of scientific ideologies remains a primary framework for critical writings by Canguilhem, with vitalism as a driving ontological assumption that would redraw boundaries between what medical scientists do and “consequences far downstream – the possible undesired or disastrous effects of scientific knowledge.” (ibid) As an alternative to “the susceptibility of medicals to ‘error’, sickness and pathology,” (Osborne 2016) Canguilhem redefines the processual dimension of human life because life itself invents and invests in norms.

Canguilhem may be aligned with the long and extended tradition of French naturalism, namely, providing analogies between physiology and medicine on one side and sociology and social science, more broadly speaking, on the other. Even more, Giuseppe Bianco (2013) explains the transfer of Canguilhem from rigid, rational, and mechanistic Cartesianism to a particular kind of vitalism through his involvement in the contest between two rival traditions informed by vitalism, the
philosophy of concept and the phenomenological subjective analysis of experience. But which of these traditions prevailed in Canguilhem's thought? It is noteworthy that the answer varies depending into which philosophical and historical contexts Canguilhem is situated.

Bianco focuses on the role of Alain's philosophy in Canguilhem's devotion to vitalism to highlight his critical response to the tradition of French naturalism and specifically to the multiple analogies between the human body and the body of the state, since both practice a hierarchy of obedience to certain social laws, which, in turn, obey biological laws. Canguilhem's position is described as only partially accepting of such parallelism, operating "as an instrument devoid of an intrinsic teleology but with a teleology given to it by man (Bianco 2013 265)." Pasquinelli (2015), who claims that German *Lebensphilosophie* and the catastrophe of Nazi *Staatsbiologie* is the only context for understanding the intransigent position of Canguilhem against norms, recognizes that "Canguilhem is keen to deny any dominant function by a superior power and he recognizes the logical primacy of the abnormal over the normal." (ibid). Exploring the normative vitalism by Canguilhem as *transformative negation of destructive vital sources* can add nuance to this debate.

Canguilhem's rejection of violent intervention in biological laws by the means of social norms stems from the intention to "not change the powers, but rather render them rational" (ibid 260), and perfectly aligns with the core of transformative negation, namely, negating the source of the existential incompatibility between the elements of the totality, but not the totality itself (Bhaskar 1993 58). Since transformative negation often considers previously established stratifications as giving rise to internal contradictions, it seeks to transform not the whole subject of negation but that particular element in which change is decisive for overcoming the contradiction (Creaven 2002 86).

Canguilhem seeks to transform the opposition between health as a "normal" status and disease as a manifestation of pathology into a more refined scale of health/disease statuses, which he considers a demandable tool for the progress of medical knowledge and its implications. Canguilhem embedded this task in the mission to revise the impact of physiology producing knowledge of the body as a machine, as one of the primary grounds for institutionalizing medicine (Bianco 2013 256).

In this way, he follows the doctrine by Francois Broussais, whose systematic critique of the nosological viewpoint of Canguilhem, together with Michel Foucault, recognized the grounds for the systematic deconstruction of an essentialist view on health and pathology (Williams 1994). Canguilhem first developed his argument in 1943 in his MD thesis, *The normal and the pathological*, in the late 1960s. He revised his text as a critical reflection on the growing influence of developmentalist agenda of medical science. Apparently, Canguilhem used all the dialectical tools
available to him to resolve the internal contradiction<fnref n="10" /> between accepting all that is vital and attributing negative value to some of its manifestations, such as well-known diseases from Broussais’ time (Williams 1994 169).

In line with the Broussainian holistic intention to view “human beings in the lack of absence of health” as a performance of variation, Canguilhem directly defines biological normativity “as a response on the absence of impossibility of [biological] indifference.” (Canguilhem 1991 105) The idea of normativity serves the dynamic concept of health significant to Canguilhem, who rejects perfect health in favor of understanding health as organic well-being.

Instead, through two extremes, norm and pathology, Canguilhem divides anomalies into varieties (minor deviation), structural defects (deformations of a more significant kind), “heterotaxy” (complex structural shifts that nonetheless do not impede function), and monstrosities (both complex in appearance and serious in impairment) (ibid 109). This scale not only prevents thinking about anomaly in terms of general ideas on harmful or, even more, mortal deformities, but also separates extreme cases of monstrosity and places them in opposition to anomalies. While deviations are seen within normativity, the monstrous “holds to a different logic, a chaos of exception without laws, an imaginary, murky and vertiginous world.” (Canguilhem 2009 184)

Ascribing monstrosity with rarity reverberates with Canguilhem's expectations that medical scientists and practitioners describe phenomenon in objective terms, as well as the impossibility to pass judgment based on a purely objective criterion: “only varieties or differences can be defined with positive or negative vital values.” (Canguilhem 1991 200) Lorna Weir (1998) explores the strengths and weaknesses of this conceptualization for prenatal diagnosis and achieving more sensitivity toward the needs of mothers.

While, according to Weir, Canguilhem's approach “serves as a corrective to ideological criticism of the life sciences which fails to have a concept of cultural differentiation,” it fails with regard to “the understanding of the interactions between scientific and non-scientific culture.” (Weir 1998 256) Weir observes that biomedical rationality absorbs and subdues cultural contexts, instead of individualizing medical judgement in favor of the autonomy of patients, through the claims of physicians and scientists shaped by the concurrent medical ideology.

Claude Debru explains that there exists an antinomy between normativity and autonomy and the inevitable development of disease through which normativity and the dynamic concept of health have ceased to matter (Debru 2011 7). Ivan Illich had

<footnote n="10">¹⁰According to Bhaskar, “internal contradiction” refers to a double bind or self-constraint because of mutually excluded expectations of the systems in which subject tries to perform. (Bhaskar, Roy. Philosophy and scientific realism. In *Critical realism: Essential readings*. ed. M.Archer et all, 16–48. London: Routledge.) Due to his negative view on possible institutional violence within medicine, Canguilhem could not accept real negation of any vital force, even as it posed a threat to further human progress. Moreover, he remained unpersuaded regarding the totality and polarity of life, which excluded any opportunity to evaluate particular vital forces either negatively or positively.</footnote>
offered a more fundamental explanation for the loss of autonomy by contemporary people: “[Modern] man is the animal who has lost his instinct and it desperately dependent upon such extra-genetic, outside-the-skin control mechanism without which human behaviour would be ungovernable.” (Illich 1974 88)

## 5 Vital Human Imperfection: Unending Vulnerability vs. Lethal Adaptation

Ivan Illich, one of the most radical critics of the institutions of modern society, starts attacking the submission of medical science to the task of controlling people immediately after developing his campaign for “deschooling” people whom he saw as “the victims of an effective process of total instruction and manipulation once they are deprived of even the tenuous pretense of critical independence.” (Illich 1970 11)

Illich recognizes medicine as another agent of “paralyzing life” - through impeding people “to search perfect health” (Illich 2017 287).<fnref n="11" /> Historian Barbara Duden explains the intervention of Ivan Illich with the debates regarding human health and disease through a particular moment in history when one agency, namely medicine, achieved a monopoly over the social construction of bodily reality (Duden 2002 222). Illich caustically suggests that all Christians would complete their daily prayer by saying: “Lead us not to succumb to diagnosis, but deliver us from the evils of health.” (Illich 2017 290)

His call for demedicalization may be recognized as an *expulsion*, boundary work that opposes “orthodox science against heterodox, mainstream against fringe, established against revolutionary.” (Gieryn 1999 17) For Gieryn, expulsion does not aim to challenge or attenuate the epistemic authority of science itself, but rather to deny privileges to the space of science. Illich aims to deny the monopoly of medicine in ordinary life in favor of “autonomous confidence in biological vigour, the wisdom of traditional rules, and the compassion of neighbors.” (Illich 1974 92) The initial argument against medicine, an inevitable transformation of “the human being who needs healthcare in a subsystem of the biosphere, an immune system that should be controlled, regulated and optimized, as ‘a life,’” (ibid 107) moves far beyond the traditional opposition of mechanism vs. vitalism and rearranges the already mentioned positions regarding health, disease, and human perfection.

In contrast to mainstream Christian theology and aligned with the Kierkegaardian tradition of negative theology, Illich places the complicity of the human and animal nature of “man” as a product of civilization at the center of his argumentation. For Illich, the fundamental distinction between animal and human health is the positioning of pain, impairment, and death as a gift of human culture (Illich 1974 90). He explains the unique role of pain in the human experience by its function to give rise

<footnote n="11">¹¹*The obsession with perfect health* was written in the early 1980s but translated into English and published recently.</footnote>
"to a cultural program whereby individuals could deal with reality in those situations in which reality was experienced as inimical to the unfolding of their lives." (ibid 94) Besides the anxiety over the nature/culture boundary, personal attention and shared interpretation equip the individual to make pain tolerable, sickness understandable, and the life-long encounter with death meaningful. Illich focuses on the social and political functions of facing and experiencing pain to set limits on humanly constructed abuses when these became intolerable. However, "the modern cosmopolitan medical civilization denies the need for man's acceptance of pain, sickness and death." (ibid 90)

Illich explains the sustainable struggle of medicine against pain with the intention to gain power: "Pain only the part of human suffering over which the medical profession can claim competence or control."(ibid 96) By ceasing to conceive pain as a "natural" or "metaphysical" evil in modern society, medicine had become, for Illich, a main driving force of separation from self-regulation through emotions: "grief, guilt, sin, anguish, fear, hunger, impairment, and discomfort." (ibid) Replacing personal responsibility for pain by medical control triggers an atomization of the social order: "Compassion turns into an obsolete virtue. The person in pain is left with less and less social context to give meaning to the experience overwhelming him." (ibid 96) The efforts of medicine to present pain, impairment, and death as abnormal make people dependent on seeking medical treatment.

This pessimistic view on modern medicine is exemplified by another of Illich's key stances on becoming human, through discovering "a particular program ...to conduct themselves in their struggle with nature and neighbor." (ibid 105) This entirely ironic paraphrase of the Darwinian "struggle for life" is reinforced by the no less ironic elucidation of the stance that "people are more the product of their environment than of their genetic endowment." (ibid)

Indeed, the binary opposition of nature vs nurture, one of the main concerns for biology and genetics, is viewed by Illich as only meaningful for medicine itself but not for ordinary people. However, Illich abandons his irony regarding "the weapons and the rules and the style for the struggle...supplied by the culture in which [people] grew up" at the moment he starts to discuss the "main achievement of human evolution," namely, adaptation: "Mankind has so far shown an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. Man has survived with very high levels of sub-lethal breakdowns." (ibid 89)

While Illich agrees that "[M]an, unmodified by a particular place and companionship, simply does not exist," (ibid 82) breaking with the underlying, unchanging normative type of the human as the formal object of scientific enquiry. He proves his stance by opposing the "natural man" generated by Enlightenment anthropology and the "consensual man" introduced by classical anthropology. This division leads Illich to an internal contradiction between his negation of "given genetic make-up, given history, given geography," (ibid) the whole range of attributions impeded by progress, and the obvious acceptance of individual development through personal experience, described by Illich as a two-sided process. He concludes, "In determining their health, people create their physical being, just as, more generally, by determining their culture, they create themselves." (ibid 93) He tries to solve this
contradiction by the systematic opposition of culture as system of meanings vs. civilization as a system of techniques.

Culture, a necessary “cocoon” for people’s ability to cope, determines their competence to live with their own recollection of past injuries and their certainty of unending vulnerability. Illich returns to pain as a key signifier in differentiating culture and civilization: “Culture makes pain tolerable by integrating it into a meaningful system, cosmopolitan civilization detaches pain from any subjective or inter-subjective context in order to annihilate it.” (ibid) Using the attitude to pain as a signifier for differentiating culture and civilization can be explained by Illich’s multiple affiliations with various theories regarding civilization, but probably one of the key connections is represented by his intention to reinvent the mission of socialist-Christian medicine to move beyond the individualist focus of human physiology to the level of the collective. (Williams 1994 218) Clearly, Illich opposes the authentic collective sympathy that turns pain “into a political issue which gives rise to a snow-balling demand on the part of anaesthesia consumers for artificially induced insensibility, unawareness, and even unconsciousness.” (Illich 1974 94)

Illich does not indicate a specific date for the transition from culture to a “cosmopolitan civilization,” but introduces a criterion for determining whether medicine works in favor of culture or serves civilization: “Human survival rather than disease; the impact of stress on populations rather than the impact of specific agents on individuals; the relationship of the human niche in the cosmos to the species with which it has evolved rather than the relationship between the aims of people and their ability to achieve them.” (ibid, 82) Civilization transforms “the concrete person into a resource fostering and legitimizing the proliferation of agents and services of high-tech biomanagement.” (Duden 2002 227) Health within civilization “designates a cybernetic optimum. It is conceived as an equilibrium, between the socio-ecological macro-system and the population of its human-like subsystems. By submitting to the optimization process, the subject denies himself.” (Illich 2017 288) This negation of adaptation as a vital force that started operating on the verge of mechanization follows the logic of negating primal instinct as compatible in its destructive potential to “technogenic” catastrophes in developmental idealism.

The aim to deconstruct the technogenic science-attributed and self-inflicted body, an output of civilization, would require *radical negation* of adaptation as a vital force coopted by civilization for alienating people from their subjectivity. Radical negation involves the auto-subversive overcoming of a previous vision and consciousness, and, for Bhaskar, performs the dialectic life of consciousness. (Bhaskar 1993 57) The demand of this negation for Illich is of highest priority because of his radical critical position regarding the role of the Catholic Church which, to Illich, had become a part of the new cult of civilization, an idol of life, and “increases of the distinction between Him who in the Gospel said that He was ‘the life,’ and the abstract fragment which today in biomanagement is called a life.” (Illich 2017 288) Illich recognizes in the united efforts of the Church and medicine to transform each human being into “a life” “an implicit denial of the one who said to Martha, ‘I am the life.’” (Duden 2002 227)
Along with distancing himself from the official position of the Church, Illich consistently differentiates his line of arguments from the transformative mode of negation. He calls for accepting all diseases as a socially created reality and recognizes the inconsistency in the partial destruction of medical norms in the anti-psychiatry movement and the other implications of Canguilhem's approach (Illich 1974 117). Illich rejects the option to transform the existing order of medical care through refining the notion of disease and health: "[T]his is a true crisis because it admits of two opposing solutions, both of which make present hospitals obsolete. The first solution is a further sickening medicalization of health care, expanding still further the control of the medical profession over healthy people. The second is a critical, scientifically sound, de-medicalization of the concept of disease." (Illich 1974 116)

Criticizing medicine for the separation of the mental faculties from actions and decisions, another feature of the socialist-Christian medicine presented in Illich's theorizing, and the call for medical knowledge that would be "engaged, relational, and pragmatic," (Williams 1994 220) gains new motives. Illich chooses genetic counseling to illustrate his thesis concerning the ambiguous power of medicine which had achieved incredible control but remains unable to help:

> In these meetings [with genetic counselors], you shift from information on fertilization and a summary of Mendel's laws to the drawing up of genetic family trees, up to inventory of risks and a walk through the garden of "monstrosities." Every time a woman asks if something could happen to her, the doctor replies: "Madam, we cannot exclude it with certainty." But, for sure, such an answer leaves its mark. For this ceremony possess an inevitable symbolic effect: it forces the pregnant woman to take a "decision" by identifying herself and her unborn child with a probability configuration. I am not talking about the decision for or against the continuation of her pregnancy, but the obligation of the woman to identify [that] she is forced to take an oxymoronic decision, a choice that one pretends to be humane but which, on the contrary, reduces her to a mere, inhuman number. (Illich 2017 289)

Like Canguilhem, Illich calls for studying the history of medical ideologies, but limits the timeline of such historicizing to current ideologies in order to understand "the degree to which we are prisoners of the medical ideology in which we were brought up." (Illich 1974 117) Defining this prison as "a suffocating void" Illich urges people to fill it with new meaning through historicizing health "as the reverse of salvation, as a societal liturgy serving an idol of life that extinguishes the subject." (Illich 2017 288) This argument is deepened by Duden, who sees the history of the body as aimed at understanding "how each historical moment is incarnated in an epoch-specific body and how we can decipher the body of subjective experience as a unique 'enfleshment' of an age's ethos." (Duden 2002 223)
## 6 Conclusion

The reproduction of vitalist arguments within the debates between theologians and biologists since the 1960s has added new forms of coherence and underscores the eclectic forms acquired by vitalism between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historicizing vitalist arguments in the debate between biologists and theologians introduces new contexts for interpreting the progress of human genetics as a science and the source of influential expertise for population policy. The attribution of negative value to primal instinct as an obstacle to the progress of human civilization not only united different camps of geneticists but also forged bonds between them and many of those affiliated with Christianity as main agents of developmental idealism. The ongoing expansion of boundaries between scientific and theological vitalist arguments in favor of a strong opposition between health and disease predisposes a kind of public consensus regarding the necessity to practice surveillance over reproduction.

While this societal context has increased the public legitimacy of medicine, and especially genetics, it has generated multiple contradictions in the epistemological grounds of medicine and genetics in particular, which has led to their critical revision.

Two main movements, the so-called ‘normative vitalism’ mainly associated with French philosophers Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, and the movement for the deinstitutionalization of health care within negative theology presented by Ivan Illich, have launched two different epistemologies of medical knowledge to address the question of transforming or deconstructing the opposition between health and disease in favor of sustainable individual autonomy. Like developmental idealism, normative vitalism and the deinstitutionalization of medicine rely on the revision of vitalist arguments. Normative vitalism replaces the opposition between health and disease with a refined scale of anomalies and pathologies that would provide the grounds for thoughtful separation between objective description and subjective judgement regarding health. Deinstitutionalization attacks various practices of modern medicine aimed at submitting vital forces to the aims of adaptation.

Both approaches have introduced the historicization of medicine as a prerequisite for its emancipation from medical ideologies, including developmental idealism. If normative vitalism focuses on the emancipation of medicine from medical ideologies as an ongoing process of creating the internalist history of medicine and its progress, deinstitutionalization focuses on the various practices of alienating people from their corporeality and expropriating individual experience through medicine. Both strategies of historicization underscore the unique role of vitalist arguments in connecting internalist and externalist narratives of medicine in order to prevent a misreading of the history of medicine.

Further development of the type of historical reconstruction undertaken in this chapter is relevant to exploring issues that address the task of remapping the composition of driving forces and actors in at least three ways: (1) the transfer from
eugenics to genetics in different regions and the exploration of intercountry coop-
eration through the lenses of adapting various modes of ascribing negative value
and the strategies of boundary work to vital forces; (2) the history of deconstructing
Nazi medicine (more generally, the history of professions and institutions in struc-
tural violence) and embedding this historicization into the debates regarding race,
the limits of bioethics, and the role of medical science in historical justice; and (3)
the role of theological arguments and their agencies in developing medical science
and the dissemination of its implications.

**Acknowledgments** The author is grateful to Christopher Donohue and the members of the Philosophy of Biology Circle for the valuable comments and general support in developing this text. The research for this chapter was sponsored by the FWF Austrian Science Fund (2674-G28) as part of the project 'Die Rassenkunde: Unentdeckte Macht des Aufbaus der Nationen'.

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# What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?

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Cat Moir

**Abstract** Does vitalism inherently imply a specific politics, and if so, what is it? In this chapter, I aim to offer at least some possible answers to this question by examining historical and contemporary discussions around the politics of vitalism. In so doing, I offer an account of what vitalism is as a set of scientific and philosophical ideas about the nature of life and its status as an object of study. It is precisely because vitalism is concerned with the question of life that it implies political considerations from the get-go. However, some of the more problematic political consequences of what has often been referred to (sometimes erroneously or confusedly) as vitalism stem, I argue, from the attribution of vital powers to the non-living. This infusion of vitality into everything may seem egalitarian in its apparent levelling out of differences between forests, objects, spirits, the dead, and whole societies. Yet if everything is living, then the specificity of the living, the living itself, disappears. Whatever equality may or may not be purchased from this perspective, then, I argue that it can no longer properly be called vitalist.

On 1 January 2019, US magazine *Commune* published the manifesto of a group calling itself the Vitalist International. Entitled ‘Life Finds a Way’, the manifesto—referencing the slogan of the indigenous-led protests against the Dakota pipeline project, *mni winconi*, ‘water is life’—called for a revolution in the name of life itself. The vitalism invoked by the International emphasises unity between all forms of life against the ‘great structures of power—race, gender, private property, the state’, which are viewed as ‘the guarantors of separation’. In naming the ‘resonance between the rivers, the trees, and the forests’, the vitalism invoked has predictable ecological overtones. However, in its identification of resonances between ‘objects, spirits, the dead and those banished to social death’, with its demand for ‘the coordination of human bodies with bodies of thought, bodies of water, with bodies of buffalo charging at police, of life forms with art forms’, the political force of vitalism envisaged here is also seen as extending far beyond the unity of the living (Vitalist International 2019).

<footnote>C. Moir (✉)</footnote>

<footnote>University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia</footnote>
*Commune* is a magazine of the political left that emphasises aesthetic experience and popular participation as the levers of a necessary revolution.<fnref n="1" /> Its publication of the vitalist manifesto nevertheless aroused suspicion on the part of other leftists, who view vitalism as an ideological tributary of fascism. Josie Sparrow, writing in *New Socialist* in March 2019, took such a critical line in her piece 'Against the New Vitalism,' where she identified the manifesto as part of a growing trend on the left to rehabilitate a vitalism seen as not only *historically* tainted by 'political genealogies' connecting it to fascism, but also compromised by intrinsic 'ideological continuities' with the latter. Sparrow argues in this respect that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Klages and Heidegger are connected to historical and contemporary forms of ecofascism by 'the positing of some deep, trans-temporal/ahistorical force or power' that supposedly underpins and supersedes the reality of social structures (Sparrow 2019).

The manifesto and Sparrow's response raise important questions for considering the political reception of vitalism. For although forms of vitalist philosophy have undoubtedly been historically allied with right-wing agendas, they have also, as Sparrow notes, been invoked in the service of emancipatory forms of politics, whether by Gilles Deleuze, or more recently feminist new materialist thinkers such as Jane Bennett and Rosi Braidotti. The question of whether and to what extent these self-declared progressive or left-leaning invocations of vitalism are *successfully* progressive or emancipatory bears on the deeper issue of whether vitalism does, as Sparrow suggests, display elective affinities with reactionary political ideologies. Does vitalism inherently imply a specific politics, and if so, what is it?

Here, I aim to offer at least some possible answers to this question by examining historical and contemporary discussions around the politics of vitalism. In so doing, I offer an account of what vitalism is as a set of scientific and philosophical ideas about the nature of life and its status as an object of study. It is precisely because vitalism is concerned with the question of life that it implies political considerations from the get-go. However, some of the more problematic political consequences of what has often been referred to (sometimes erroneously or confusedly) as vitalism stem, I argue, from the attribution of vital powers to the non-living. This infusion of vitality into everything may seem egalitarian in its apparent levelling out of differences between forests, objects, spirits, the dead, and whole societies. Yet if everything is living, then the specificity of the living, the living itself, disappears. Whatever equality may or may not be purchased from this perspective, then, it can no longer properly be called vitalist.

<footnote n="1">¹ Cf. https://communemag.com/about/. In 2020, the magazine was involved in a controversy over rape allegations against a member of its editorial collective, with statements from other leftist groups and a petition calling for its dissolution on account of a supposed failure of processes within the organization to address the allegations.</footnote>
# 1 Vitalism and Its Avatars

The matter of definition is one of the basic problems of engaging with the politics of vitalism. Vitalism is all too often rather loosely defined, so that it becomes indis- tinguishable from related but not co-extensive concepts, particularly holism (the privileging of wholes over parts), hylozoism (the idea that all matter is alive), *Lebensphilosophie* (the philosophical posture according to which life and its affir- mation should be the primary object of philosophy), and biopolitics (the underpin- ning claim of which is that biological life is the ultimate object of politics).<fnref n="2" /> As I aim to show here, some of the objections made against theories that describe themselves or are described as forms of political vitalism are actually criticisms of one or more of these related positions.

I agree with Charles T. Wolfe when he suggests that “‘vitalism” be restricted to theories in which the difference between “life” and “nonlife” (living matter and nonliving matter, living bodies and dead bodies, bodies and machines, biology and physics, etc.) is crucial, however this difference is detailed and laid out’ (Wolfe 2021: 2). When the discourse of vitalism emerged in the late eighteenth century, it was predicated on the idea that life could not be explained purely in terms of mecha- nism or mathematics; that the laws of life were not reducible to the laws of the exist- ing sciences of physics and chemistry. Thus, although it would later be sharply distinguished from biology as an unscientific, even supernaturalist, approach to the study of life, in fact the discourse of vitalism emerged in the context of the institu- tion of the life sciences with figures such as Kant, Blumenbach, and Buffon (Steigerwald 2013: 51–76; Wolfe, *Forthcoming*). The specificity of life as compared with non-life, then, is the fundamental tenet of vitalism.

In many respects, vitalism's meaning thus defined covers both what might be considered more modest claims for the necessity of a special science—biology—to describe the laws of life, and the more ambitious, metaphysical forms of vitalism that seek to explain life's specificity by positing the existence of some kind of *élan vital* or vital principle. Though these two claims are connected, however, they are not the same. The first can be seen simply as a version of the claim to what Lovejoy (1911) calls ‘scientific autonomism’, which asserts or implies the logical discontinuity of scientific laws. Lovejoy classically made this point by arguing that if the basic premise of mechanism is that ‘the explanations of organic processes can eventually be found in the laws of some more “fundamental” science whose generalizations are more comprehensive than those of biology’—in other words if biological laws could be shown to be special cases of chemical or physical laws—then the vitalist counter-claim would be that, even given complete empirical data concerning the inorganic processes involved in organic processes, the latter cannot be reduced

<footnote n="2">²In Sparrow’s critique, *Lebensphilosophie* and vitalism are taken to be literally synonymous, a trend that can also be observed in the English translation of Georg Lukács’ *Die Zerstörung der Vernunft*, where the German term *Lebensphilosophie* is given simply as vitalism. For more on the conceptual history of *Lebensphilosophie* and its relation to vitalism, see Bianco 2019.</footnote>
to or deduced from the laws of the inorganic. Here, the specificity of life is asserted without making any grand claim for a vital principle. An extrapolation from this position occurs when it is asserted that living organisms not only adhere to unique laws of their own, but that these laws cannot even be stated without positing the existence of special forces or agents—Bergson's élan vital, Driesch's entelechy—that animate living beings. Wolfe (2011) has distinguished between these forms of vitalism as ‘functional’ and ‘substantival’ respectively.<fnref n="3" />

To some extent, vitalism's political valency has always hinged on this assertion of an invisible power animating life. Peter-Hans Reill (1989) has argued that the shift in the eighteenth century from mechanistic theories of force to vitalistic theories of active power lent scientific credence to a new worldview that broke with traditional theological conceptions according to which power originated from an omniscient ruler dominating an inert, material nature. The dynamic conception of nature that accompanied what Wolf Lepenies (1976) has called the ‘end of natural history’ became associated, as Reill explains, with the idea that power ‘is fluid [...] and hence cannot be associated with any solid, static body’. When translated into political language, this clearly challenged the idea that power was the preserve of an established elite. Thus, eighteenth century vitalism became the political correlate of ‘action and freedom of individual choice’ (Reill 1989: 212). Reill thus associates the political connotations of early vitalism with the emergence of what might be called liberal individualism, over against the conservative associations of both an earlier, mechanistic view of nature, and the quasi-mystical biologistic holism with which vitalism became associated in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Reill 1989: 208).

## 2 Ernst Haeckel's Monism Between Mechanism and Vitalism

The association of a loosely defined vitalism with the reactionary politics of the nineteenth century can be found in Daniel Gasman's classic study *The Scientific Origins of National Socialism* (Gasman 2004 [1971]: 64; 78). There, Gasman argued that the zoologist and populariser of Darwin in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, helped to lay the groundwork for the emergence of Nazi ideology by popularising a crudely biologistic worldview called monism, which combined elements of social Darwinism with mystical ideas of an invisible force animating matter and world history. For Gasman, Haeckel's tacit embrace of vitalism was a crucial element of his worldview, and helped to pave the way ideologically for German fascism by valorising nationalistically inflected concepts of natural wholeness and vitality. Yet apart from being the teacher of Hans Driesch, whose contribution to the history and

<footnote n="3">³Wolfe also argues for a third form of vitalism not dealt with here, which he calls ‘attitudinal’, and associates primarily with Georges Canguilhem.</footnote>
theory of vitalism is undisputed, Haeckel is much more commonly associated with mechanism or materialism than with vitalism (Freyhofer 1982; Normandin & Wolfe 2010: 8; Gregory 1971: x).<fnref n="4" /> Questions thus remain as to what extent and in what way Haeckel can be considered a vitalist, and what role vitalism plays, if any, in the direct or indirect political uses of his ideas.

Certainly, rhetorically speaking, Haeckel was no vitalist. Throughout his career, he dismissed vitalism as an outdated, mystical and unscientific approach to the study of life and evolution. He explicitly rejected the idea of pluralism in the sciences, arguing that all of nature could be understood according to the laws of mechanical causation that govern the disciplines of physics and chemistry. In his early work *Generelle Morphologie der Organismen* (1866: XIV-XV), Haeckel aimed to bring biology, ‘the whole science of developed and emerging forms of organisms to the same level of monism in which all other natural sciences have sooner or later found their steadfast foundations’, namely on the basis of ‘mechanical-causal justification’ (*ibid*.). He explicitly rejected any recourse to notions of a teleological ‘vital principle’ or a ‘Bauplan’ governing the functioning of organisms, as well as the idea that the ‘force’ supposedly responsible for life is substantially distinct from chemical and physical forces (Haeckel 1866: 97).

Even in this early work, however, and despite Haeckel’s own avowed intentions, aspects of a metaphysical vitalism can be perceived. For though he shunned the idea of a special ‘Lebenskraft’, Haeckel *did* claim that all biological life was deeply connected by an underlying substance. Though Haeckel was a self-proclaimed Darwinist, his orthogenetic vision in fact drew heavily on pre-adaptive, progressive theories of evolution—that is, on paradigms that appear more teleological-vitalistic than causal-mechanistic. Lamarck and, above all, Goethe—the originator of the idea of a *Bauplan*, whom Haeckel frequently quotes—feature as centrally in Haeckel’s theoretical framework as Darwin. The biogenetic law Haeckel puts forward in the *Generelle Morphologie*, according to which each stage of an embryo’s development represents the adult form of an evolutionary ancestor, implies a form of empirically imperceptible organic memory—similar to Richard Semon’s later theory of engrams—that is difficult to reconcile with his formal rejection of teleology and metaphysical vitalism.

In Haeckel’s later work, the influence of vitalism is more pronounced. Insisting in *Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben* (1917: VIII) on ‘the fundamental unity of all natural phenomena’, Haeckel attributes features usually only associated with living beings to inorganic nature. Specifically, he argued that crystals are a form of ‘inorganic life’ possessing inner feeling states and even sexuality. With reference to crystals, Haeckel claimed that his monism broke down ‘the artificial boundaries between inorganic and organic nature, between life and death [...]. All substance possesses life’, he argued, ‘inorganic and organic; all things have a soul, crystals just as organisms’. Haeckel’s claim here that ‘all substance possesses

<footnote n="4">⁴Frederick Gregory does not include Ernst Haeckel in his study of nineteenth-century German materialism, partly on political grounds: he argues that the mechanical materialists were more sympathetic to the German liberal tradition and could not stomach Haeckel’s anti-Semitism.</footnote>
life' is hylozoist rather than strictly speaking vitalist: he attributes life to matter in general, rather than distinguishing between living and non-living beings. Needless to say, hylozoism is far from functional vitalism, and it is not identical to, though it comes close to, substantival or metaphysical vitalism, which, like its functional counterpart, maintains the specificity of the laws of life and/or the life sciences. In seeking to explain this specificity, however, substantival vitalism has recourse to a speculatively posited life force, in which it is distinguished from hylozoism only in the fact that the hylozoist sees the vital force operative in all matter.

In Haeckel's late work, therefore, his monism does come close to a form of vitalism in this specific respect. For if functional vitalism is associated with scientific autonomism and a pluralism among the laws governing the objects of the distinct sciences, whereas mechanism is conceived as monistic, proposing the possibility of an explanatory 'reduction' of biological and other phenomena to causal-mechanistic laws, it is surely too simple to align vitalism solely with pluralism and mechanism with monism. Although Haeckel continued to insist that life was ultimately expli-cable in terms of the same laws as the rest of non-living nature, rather than seeking to explain life in physico-chemical terms—in 'reductive' mechanistic fashion, as it were—Haeckel increasingly projected biological and psychological characteristics onto pre-organic nature. As such, his monism arguably comes much closer to a form of vitalist holism than to mechanist materialism. In fact, Haeckel's monism is symp-tomatic of a *decline* in the currency of materialistic and mechanistic paradigms in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was correlated with the gradual triumph of evolutionary theory and the dynamic view of the natural world that it implied (Holt 1971: 267).

The political implications of Haeckel's monist worldview have been the subject of vigorous debate. There is little doubt that Haeckel himself saw monism as entail-ing such implications. His first target in this respect was traditional religion; little wonder, perhaps, given that Darwin's theory of evolution, which Haeckel broadly and at least rhetorically supported even if he did not follow Darwin on all points, refuted traditional religious teaching concerning the origin of human beings and their place in the cosmos. The organisation Haeckel founded, the Monist League, aimed to combat vitalism precisely because it saw it as a form of 'intellectual and political reaction' linked to outdated views of a natural world infused with divine spirit (cited in Holt 1971: 269). Far from rejecting religion, however, Haeckel saw monism as capable of connecting religion and science. He argued in this vein that

> 'A broad historical and critical comparison of religious and philosophical systems...leads as a main result to the conclusion that every great advance in the direction of profounder knowledge has meant a breaking away from the traditional dualism (or pluralism) and an approach to monism' (Haeckel 1894: 15).

Haeckel's claim that profounder knowledge in both religion and philosophy—and by extension, science—moves towards monism is consistent with his belief in the unity of the sciences, which as we saw above is often associated with mechanism rather than vitalism. However, when Haeckel concludes from this insight that 'God is not to be placed over against the material world as an external being, but must be
placed as a “divine power” or “moving spirit” within the cosmos itself’, we can see
once again that his own position appears rather as a more extreme, expansive ver-
sion of vitalism than as a rejection of it (ibid.). Whereas the vitalist in Haeckel’s
view merely sees the living world as moved by some invisible, divine force, for
Haeckel the whole of reality is thus moved—by something that in the last instance
appears as a kind of quasi-Spinozist God-as-matter. As he argues further in his writ-
ings on monism as a bridge between science and religion, ‘all the wonderful phe-
nomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only the products of
one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the same primitive
matter’ (Haeckel 1894: 16). That Haeckel identifies a mysterious evolutionary vital
force in all matter rather than only in living matter makes it no less a vital force for
the fact.

As we have seen, Haeckel extended the idea of an orthogenetic evolution also to non-organic nature, such that for him there was no mystery concerning the origin of life, which he claimed was a recurrent argument of the vitalist (Haeckel 1894: 93). He also extended these laws into the social and political realm, however. As Todd H. Weir (2012: 2) has pointed out, for Haeckel, Darwinian evolution was a ‘master theory that explained not only the multiplicity of biological life, but also developments in human consciousness and civilization, and linked them all together into a single meaningful totality’. Haeckel (1916: 116) articulates this idea explicitly in his essay ‘Eternity: World-war Thoughts on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution’, where he claims that ‘Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life’. Elsewhere, he makes it plain precisely what political flavour he believed Darwinism has when applied to the social world. In a piece responding to his contemporary the scientist and politician Rudolf Virchow, who had denounced Darwin’s theory of natural selection as dangerously socialist in orientation, Haeckel argues that ‘Darwinism is anything but socialist! If one wants to attribute a particular political tendency to this English theory—which is entirely possible—this tendency can only be an aristocratic one, not at all democratic and least of all socialist!’ (Haeckel 1908 [1878]: 68).

To the extent that Haeckel saw evolutionary forces at work in the social world, it
is fair to call him a social Darwinist. In his *Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte* (1889),
for instance, Haeckel represented the human species according to a racial hierarchy
that has caused many commentators to present him as a forerunner to National
Socialist ideology (Gasman 2004; Weikart 2004). Indeed, Haeckel argues that the
group he calls the ‘Midlanders’, which he claims includes the ‘caucasian’, ‘basque’,
‘hemosemitic’ and ‘indogermanic’ sub-groups, of which he sees the indogermanic
as the most advanced, ‘surpassed all other [human] races and species in the struggle
for existence thanks to its more advanced brain development, and now its web of
dominance extends across the entire planet’ (Haeckel 1889: 739).<fnref n="5" /> However, as we
have seen, Haeckel’s evolutionism was far from straightforwardly Darwinist, and
indeed some of the non-Darwinist elements of his evolutionism—his belief in

<footnote n="5">⁵See 726–727 for the visualisation of Haeckel’s racial hierarchy.</footnote>
progressive development, and morphological hierarchy—were most problematic when applied to the human world. If he invokes the classic social Darwinist refrain of the ‘struggle for existence’ in an attempt to justify indogermanic supremacy, his position on race was at least as much the result of the specific combination of holism and progressivism at the heart of his hylozoistic monist philosophy as it was of any Darwinian concept of adaptation. It was by erasing the distinction between life and non-life that Haeckel could argue that everything from crystals to human societies operated in accordance with ‘natural’, transhistorical evolutionary laws.<fnref n="6" />

The objections against the political implications of Haeckel's monism thus can-
not be levelled at him as a vitalist, strictly speaking, if vitalism is defined by the
distinction between the living and non-living realms. In fact, Haeckel's projection
of the laws of life *beyond* their biological domain of application can largely be seen
to be responsible for the political consequences on account of which his monism has
been criticised. Haeckel saw all material things as imbued with life, though not
equally complex; he saw evolution as progressive, though not straightforwardly
continuous. It was on this basis that he claimed some human races were less intel-
ligent than many higher animals, just as he argued that a crystal could be more
complex than some simple organic life forms (Richards 2008: 157–158).

Though there are undoubtedly genealogical connections between Haeckel's
work and fascist ideology, it is important to remember that reception does not neces-
sarily imply retroactive culpability. Moreover, even if some monists adopted a
nationalist stance before the First World War (despite his avowed pacifism, both
Haeckel and his contemporary, the chemist and fellow monist Wilhelm Ostwald,
signed the statement of ninety-three intellectuals defending militarism as a means of
protecting German culture), there were also strong links between monism and paci-
fism in this period (cf. Holt 1975). Although many monists espoused eugenic theo-
ries and some were influenced by the chauvinist right in the early decades of the
twentieth century, a majority supported pacifism and the ideas of the moderate and
radical left (Dickinson 2001: 225). Many monists, such as Helene Stöcker, were
also feminists and advocates for women's rights. Even if pacifism and eugenicism,
including in its explicitly racist forms, were not mutually exclusive among monists
and others, the position of the Monist League was strongly anti-Nazi: throughout
the 1920s, the monists repeatedly insisted that Darwin was a liberal, pacifist, and
internationalist, warned of the rise of racism and superstition, and denounced anti-
Semitism as unscientific.<fnref n="7" /> In 1933, when many German organizations strategically
aligned themselves with the Nazi regime, the Monist League disbanded rather than
submit to *Gleichschaltung* (Holt 1975:37).

<footnote n="6">⁶See Rupke 2019 for more on the ways in which Darwin's and Haeckel's theories became gradu-
ally nationalized largely as a result of political enmities arising from the First World War, and then
in the context of National Socialism when Haeckel's evolutionary heroes such as Goethe and Kant,
and also Haeckel himself, received an enthusiastic reception from Nazis.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷For more on the relation between pacifism and eugenics, see Weikart 2003: 273–294; for exam-
ples of monist denunciation of racism and anti-Semitism, see the appeals in *Die Stimme der
Vernunft* 17 (1932): 1, 54, 93, 169 and 18 (1933): 57–58.</footnote>
### 3 Hans Driesch's Vitalism and the Politics of Holism and Occultism

If Haeckel represents a borderline case for the problems of vitalism and its possible attendant politics, that of his student Hans Driesch is surely clearer cut. Driesch can be considered a vitalist in both the functional and substantival senses. Driesch's early experimental work on embryology challenged the prevailing mechanistic theories of August Weismann and Wilhelm Roux, supporting the argument that biological processes were subject to specific laws of their own. The non-mechanical causal force that he believed underpinned life processes, which he called entelechy, was, however, a highly speculative construct that resembled in important respects the psychoid force that Haeckel saw animating matter. Driesch's concept of entelechy was, however, more obviously vitalist in the sense that he restricted it to the realm of organic life.

Driesch first became acquainted with Haeckel's evolutionary ideas as an adolescent attending lectures at the newly opened *Kosmos Institut* in Hamburg where he grew up. At that time, he was convinced by Haeckel's account of evolution and made up his mind to study zoology with Haeckel at university (Innes 1973: 29). However, thanks to his thorough Gymnasium grounding in mathematics and physics, Driesch soon began to question Haeckel's approach to biology. For instance, he later claimed that he failed to follow Haeckel's proofs for phylogenetic trees, because they did not resemble the deductive proofs he had learned in mathematics (Innes 1973: 30). Far from concluding, however, that his failure to follow Haeckel's proofs was evidence of their inaccuracy, Driesch believed that he must not yet be advanced enough to follow Haeckel's reasoning, a decision that led him to study in the first instance not with Haeckel in Jena, but with August Weisman in Freiburg. His education with Weisberg was significant, not least because his theory of entelechy as he articulated it in relation to embryological cell division was a direct response to the mechanistic Roux-Weisman theory of cell division. As Innes notes, however, Driesch's decision is also revealing because it indicates that even if he doubted the accuracy of Haeckel's more speculative claims about evolutionary forces, he was still open to the possibility that such explanations could be plausible (ibid.).

The aim of Driesch's dissertation, which Haeckel supervised, was to analyse the different methods of colony formation in two species of freshwater hydroids. Driesch's concern with what constitutes an individual organism, which he would articulate in more detail later in his lectures on *The Science and Philosophy of the Organism*, is clear already here, and reveals the influence of Kant's conception of organism on his thinking. One of Driesch's main concerns in the dissertation was how the morphology of individual hydroids functioned relative to the interests of the colony, and how the definition of the boundaries of the individual could affect the perception of that relationship. Driesch argued that since different individuals have different functions in the colony, such as feeding or reproduction, the development of form in the individual could only be understood with reference to its