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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

vitalism « Previous | |Next »
January 1, 2006

Postmodernity is usually characterised as a rebellion against the supposedly universalizing and even totalitarian hegemony of Enlightenment reason. Postmodernism is also characterised as a revolt against modernity and as a revolt against the Enlightenment. Revolt then leads to unreason, irrationality and the Counter Enlightenment.

Not exactly. Postmodernism is a reaction and critique of a particular conception of diverse national strands of the Enlightenment tradition: one that held that the language of science would one day approach perfection through knowledge of the truth and by a process of removing error, prejudice and superstitution. We can view this in terms of an underlying structures that organize these disciplines--as a regime, or what Foucault dubs an episteme; that is a deep cultural structure or a linguistic and epistemological domain that provides coherency to a particular mode of discourse.

Let me give an example.

The discursive category of science (the scientific )changed sometime between 1660 and 1730 into a universal mathematical science of nature that became a Newtonian instrumental mechanism. This was the basis of the hegemonic homogeneity of rational universalism upon the world and the critical reaction to the hegemony of Enlightenment rationality. That reaction did not start with postmodernism--it has its antecendents, especially if we think of vitalism as the notion of life that favour an idea of becoming over one of being, of movement over stasis, of action over structure, of flow and flux. Today this paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn would called it, is characterised by terms such as "self-organization," "emergent properties," "autopoesis" etc.

As Scott Lash rightly observes:

'Life', in this sense, can be understood in its opposition to mechanism. One could trace this opposition, and that between 'being' and 'becoming' back to that between Heraclitus's metaphysics of flux and Plato's predominance of form. ... There are especially important elements of vitalism in Aristotle. The primary distinction between mechanism and vitalism may be in terms of vitalism's self-organization. In mechanism, causation is external: the paths or movement or configuration of beings is determined. In vitalism causation is largely self-causation. And beings are largely indeterminate. In Aristotle there is a sort of hierarchy of self-organisation. Inorganic matter has the lowest level of self-organisation, though it also is partly self-organising. Organic matter in plants has higher levels of self-organisation; animals still higher; human beings still higher...

In late modernity you can trace vitalism as an organic philosophy of nature from the Aristotelian concepts of internal principles of change, through to Kant's distinctions between machines and organisms in the Critique of Judgement and his argument that an organized creature is more than a mere machine, because it has the power to form its parts and to transfer this formative power to the "materials," so that the parts can mutually bring one another forth. This leads to Hegel's philosophy of nature. And then Nietzsche, Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. I presume that contemporary neo-vitalism can, in many respects, be understood as Deleuzian and stands in opposition to that of Aristotle and Hegel.

But both organic strands stand in opposition to the mechanistic metaphysics of the scientific enlightenment 's mechanization of the world-picture that paraded as the Truth. It was argued that mechanistic causal explanations continued to seem unsatisfactory for understanding of purposelike things in the world, and for the forms of life that did not seem to be a mere assembly of parts. Above all the mechanistic seemed inappropriate to the investigation of organisms.

Part of the battle over mechanism has been over the legacy of Aristotle. Biology itself was founded on the classificatory insights of Aristotle, who established the distinction between form and matter and an understanding of nature based around purposiveness, or teleology, of ordered growth and development of organic form.

This kind of approach reads the philosophical tradition differently to those who argue that mechanism or physicalism defeated vitalism in the early to mid-19th century and, that with the organic banished, physicalism ruled uncontested as a scientific metaphysics. Thomas Kuhn is one who follows the latter interpretation: he assumes the vitalist demise and the physicalist victory without even mentioning them as illustrative cases of a revolution in scientific pardigms. Yet the structure of the modern scientific revolution became a physicalist one, and vitalism eventually became a term of contempt in the mind of the physicalists. It is still not credible or respectable to place physicalism into question in analytic philosophy.

Vitalism survived on the edges of philosophy and art as a minor tradition. Nietzsche is the central 19th century figure in the post- Darwinian world where no no species is immutable (including our own) and so pervasive change has replaced eternal fixity. That placed limits around the philosophy of nature in Plato and Aristotle and in Kant and Hegel. Nietzsche's turn to becoming, where objects are expression of forces, held that nature is essentially the will to power. Evolving life is not merely the Spencerian/Darwinian struggle for existence but, more importantly, it is the ongoing striving toward ever-greater complexity, diversity, multiplicity and creativity. Nietzsche's vitalism substitutes Darwin's adaptive fitness with creative power.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:31 PM | | Comments (6)
Comments

Comments

Gary, you had attributed Deleuze's empiricism to something other than "an appeal to the primacy of lived experience in phenomenology." Are you quite sure you wouldn't want to revist that connection?

I've only recently started following your blog, btw. It's a pleasure to read.

Richard Lofthouse treats this subject brilliantly in his book _Vitalism in Modern Art_--gets right to the heart of vitalism and modernity.

Robert,
thanks for that.The text appears interesting.

From what I've been able to glean fronm a google search is that the Lofthouse text challenges the previous studies on the mechanical fascinations of modernists such as the Vorticists, Lofthouse rediscovers the power of European fin-de-siecle vitalism and its trajectory far into the twentieth century.

Lofthouse's studies of Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann and Jacob Epstein disclose a new counter-narrative of the development of modern art and modernism emerges.

We have the modernist rejection of many things Victorian, associated with an embrace a vitalist, organic scientific tradition with roots in the thought of Goethe and Lamarckians rather than Darwin and Haeckel. It suggests these artists forged a new path that ignored the impact of French art; and took its bearings from Nietzsche.

It indicates that the world of science and philosophy in 1900 reflected anything but a triumph of positivist science and mechanism.

Fido,

I'm not sure. Deleuze also talks in terms of a transcendental empiricism which he sees as an alternative tradition of empiricism; one that recognizes the social and historical nature of experience.

As I understand it Deleuze's philosophy has been elaborated in open antagonism to the coeval French philosophical scene, ie., French phenomenological-existentialist thought, with particular regard to the early works of Sartre. The philosophers belonging to the Sartrean generation tended to see in the Husserlian phenomenology the correct way to get to the concrete, to the immediate data.

Deleuze's empiricism is distinguished from the phenomenological empiricism. But I'm not sure what the points of difference or the arguments are. ther eis a commonality: like phenomenology, transcendental empiricism demands that we return to the matters themselves in order todetermine their real conditions.

But unlike phenomenology this return is not the return of a
subject that would reflectively analyze the intentional structure of consciousness. That much I know.

The phrase "transcendental empiricism" has led me to the work of Levi Bryant (which you probably know). This is very exciting to me, as I haven't even opened Difference and Repetition, and hadn't thought of Deleuze as speaking to my interests. Now I will have no excuse.

Fido,

I found Difference and Repetition, hard going and I stuggle to grasp a philosophy of difference and repetition that steps out from the shadow of the identical (the same or substance), the negative and Hegel.

Still it is a key text of an influential contemporary philosopher. So I keep coming back to it and reading it a bit more.

The more I read of Deleuze the more I'm interested.