Vitalism

Vitalism is the doctrine that living organisms are distinguished from non-living things by possessing a force, principle or impulse of their own that cannot be reduced to known physical and chemical laws.

Its roots reach back to ancient ideas that attributed bodily functions to an animating principle present in every living being, such as the pneuma of Greek philosophy and of Galen's medicine. In early modern Europe, vitalism took shape partly as a response to Cartesian mechanism, which seemed unable to account for the distinctive character of the organic. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was an influential position in medicine and biology, with advocates such as Georg Ernst Stahl, Xavier Bichat and Johannes Peter Müller, and in chemistry, where Jöns Jacob Berzelius held that organic matter required a regulating force.

Vitalist writers generally drew a sharp line between the living and the inert, and regarded death not as a mere mechanical breakdown but as the loss of that vital impulse. Some identified the force with the soul or a spiritual principle; others, like Carl Reichenbach, conceived it as an energy permeating living things. Henri Bergson made the phrase élan vital widely known in 1907, and in the twentieth century Hans Driesch defended a neovitalism based on his experiments with sea urchin embryos.

A classic example shows the debate: when an early embryo is divided in two, each half can develop into a complete organism, which Driesch took as evidence of an organization that mechanisms alone could not explain. Yet Friedrich Wöhler's synthesis of urea in 1828 and the growth of biochemistry weakened the idea of a special force unique to life, and most biologists now regard vitalism in this sense as a superseded theory.

The term nonetheless retains current uses. In philosophy it is invoked as a critique of reductionism, and a vitalist sensibility is attributed to Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset or biosemiotics, which stress the autonomy of organisms and the importance of meaning. In a looser sense it also names the defence of life in ecological, animal-rights or pacifist movements, although here the concept no longer implies any specific physical or metaphysical force.