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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 junked « Previous | |Next »
March 16, 2006

This book review of Richard Doyle's (2003) Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (2003) by Stephen Dougherty has some bearing on vitalism. Dougerty says that Doyle interested is in the emergence of the postvital body, that is the body that comes after the vital body, after 'life' in the sense of a mysterious life force (vitalism) has been evacuated from the organism.

He says:

As Michel Foucault explains in The Order of Things, nineteenth-century biology understood this life force as a 'sovereign vanishing point within the organism'(quoted in Doyle, 1997: 10), and as such, life could 'reveal' itself only insofar as it remained a mystery. It retreated, disappeared, into the depths of the body, and from there it exerted a strong shaping force on modern thought. From the nineteenth-century biological perspective, being was the epiphenomenon of life, a mysterious force beyond the powers of science (or other hermeneutical practices) to tease it out. But contemporary molecular biology does precisely that. It turns the organism into the output of the DNA code, eschewing in the process the binarisms that have helped to constitute modernity: surface and depth, being and living.

I interpret the 'mysterious life force' as referring to vitalism, understood as advocating a nonphysical force in order to distinguish animate from inanimate matter. This conception of vitalism---"life exceeds known physicochemical laws" ---- is conventionally regarded as an evolutionary has-been because of Darwinism. Vitalism is seen as the philosophical (metaphysical) baggage of science---whose ontological assumptions have been examined and found wanting.

Richard C. Lewontin states why vitalism has been eradicated from an analytic ontology of biological science.

He says:

Darwinism is a population-based theory consisting of three claims. First, there is variation in some characteristics among individuals in a population. Second, that variation is heritable. That is, offspring tend to resemble their biological parents more than they do unrelated individuals. In modern Darwinism the mechanism of that inheritance is information about development that is contained in the genes that are passed from parent to offspring. Third, there are different survival and reproduction rates among individuals carrying different variants of a characteristic, depending on the environment inhabited by the carriers. That is the principle of natural selection. The consequence of differential reproduction of individuals with different inherited variants is that the population becomes richer over generations in some forms and poorer in others. The population evolves
.
Ever since the nature of DNA had been revealed, biomedical science has been grounded in the belief that the structure, function and health of an organism is directly or indirectly regulated by its genes. This has led to the concept of the primacy of DNA, the belief that our physical and behavioral traits are controlled by genes. It is molecular biology that undermines and displaces vitalism in biological science, since molecular biology turns cells into computers that store genetic memory and run programs---turning organisms, in other words, into informational processes, and bodies into transparent sites of coding.

So where does that leave Bergson and Deleuze? Rethinking vitalism and a philosophy of biology tha is distinct from current philosophies of science that are mainly oriented on modern physics.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:56 PM | | Comments (0)
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