The vitality of vitalism in contemporary anthropology: Longing for an ever green tree of life

Abstract

This article aims to unravel the lines that have carried the cosmological conception of ‘life’ in Western culture into our times, and to explore how this trajectory illuminates current philosophical and anthropological thought. Since the 18th-century vitalism has been a major arena of discussion about the phenomena of nature and life, in parallel with broader romantic emphases on flux, totality, dialectics, and preserving the embeddedness of nature and culture, or things and people. Distinguishing between life as the phenomenological experience of existence and the cosmological conception of the vital condition is central to my argument. I focus upon the latter dimension to show that awareness of the long-range history and present complexity of those conceptions contributes to the contextualization of the contemporary interest in life.

Keywords

Vitalism romanticism life cosmology nature

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green. (Goethe,1986 [1808])

The opposed feeling, the well-being of the tree from its roots, the happiness in knowing not to be completely arbitrary or fortuitous, but instead to emerge from the past as a heritage, bearer of flowers and fruits, and so excused, ready to be justified in its existence––this is what one can now preferably consider as the true historical meaning. (Nietzsche, 1874)

Introduction¹

During the past decade, my research concerning family, religion, and personhood has demanded a growing and systematic attention to the idea of ‘nature’. This fundamental, but diffuse dimension of modern Western culture appears under many labels in the academic organization of the humanities. Despite the enormous challenges of comparing different cosmological concepts of reality, particularly of specific ontological schemes, an ‘anthropology of nature’ has, in fact, been expanding its influence in the realm of ethnology. The idea of ‘life’ springs forth immediately when ‘nature’ is considered. The irreducible Western concern with frontiers between the inanimate and animate halves of the universe holds the key to understanding how human ‘nature’ has been constructed.

Recently, a series of publications have emphasized how crucial it is to seriously take into consideration the conception of ‘life’, which is omnipresent in daily experience just as it is in contemporary discussions among intellectuals. Two main trends have been developing. The first more sociological trend arose from Michel Foucault’s pioneering contributions on governmentality and biopolitics (Foucault, 1977, 1985; Esposito, 2011; Rose, 2001). The second phenomenological and ontological trend emerged from an ethnological concern with revising Western conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘the body’, ‘suffering’ and ‘personhood’ (Das, 2018; Fassin, 2018; Jackson, 2018; Pitrou, 2014a, 2014b; Pina Cabral, 2018; Schrempp, 2018; Singh, 2018).²

My aim here is to follow a third path. I intend to unravel the lineages that carry the cosmological status of life in Western culture down to our times, and learn how this trajectory illuminates the present state of philosophical and anthropological thought. Stemming from distant roots in the classical medical–philosophical tradition and Christian cosmology, and inflected by the relatively recent, concomitant emergence of modern biological science and romantic philosophy, the notion of life proves to be omnipresent. Consequently, clear comprehension of its long history and present complexity is difficult.

Until recently, human life was almost inevitably associated with ‘blood’. Blood was the traditional Western way to symbolically represent the physical reproduction and maintenance of animal organisms, as well as the moral condition of human experience. It concerned family, generation, morality, gender, reproduction, and identity. It denoted the ‘natural’ condition of consanguinity, the ideological basis of the Western kinship system (cf. Dumont, 1971). The substitution of ‘DNA’ for blood as the locus of life and identity is now widespread. While DNA does not embody the traditional sense of blood in the same broad way, this change is symptomatic of the influence of modern science in defining life’s conditions and characteristics. Nevertheless, modern science has not entirely deprived life of moral connotations.

The evolution of modern science started the slow decay of the magical symbolism of blood. Yet, this paralleled widespread artistic investments in established forms of expression that enmeshed blood and life in the sundry embodiments of nature (often in the guise of ‘love’ and ‘sublimity’) (Palti, 2005). Such imagery appears in portraiture, landscape, still life or genre painting, sentimental poetry or naturalistic prose, opera or instrumental music.

Science itself was not immune. Romantic thought permeated scientific developments after the end of the 18th-century. German Naturphilosophie (the romantic philosophy of nature) engaged thinkers who hoped to ally scientific endeavour with art and feeling, thus, uniting objectivity and subjectivity. The notion of life was a permanent focus of romantic science, and stimulated the early development of the modern human sciences. Marx examined human life stymied by capitalist production; Rousseau, Tocqueville or Le Bon, life erupting in revolutionary outbursts; the hermeneutic school, life from a thorough exegesis of classical and canonical texts; W. von Humboldt or Herder, life pulsating inside non-Western language and culture; Freud, life swarming up from the hidden unconscious.

One of the challenges emerging from romantic science was to conceive of ‘organic’ representations of living creatures, as opposed to the former mechanistic models inherent in materialist science. In the frontier between biology and medicine, a movement eventually known as ‘vitalism’ emerged at the end of the 18th-century. Vitalism defied, but also informed conventional materialist wisdom, even as romanticism transformed science on a broader scale. Categories such as ‘sensibility’, ‘experience’ and ‘influence’ moved back and forth between materialism and vitalism, imbuing the nascent human sciences with renewed vigour (Gusdorf, 1984, 1985). Besides containing perspectives that are strongly akin to romanticism, the history of life as a common-sense notion, a philosophical category, and a scientific concept all primarily reflect aspects of the vitalism movement.

Research about life and nature

If the anthropological interpretation of any culture must expose its characteristic complexity, tensions, and conflicts, this is even more important in the analysis of large-scale societies, ‘cultures of civilization’ or ‘world religions’. However, we must begin by remembering that the inner workings of anthropological thought depend entirely on an understanding of the inner workings of culture, where anthropology originally blossomed and where it continues to thrive (cf. Duarte, 2015). This should be considered a challenge and not an impediment.

The research about life and nature in Western culture is one of the locations where greater awareness is necessary, following the characteristic drive of an anthropology founded upon the universal comparison of all expressions of human understanding and experience. In the realms of history, sociology and philosophy, important instances of this comparative endeavour concerning complex large-scale cultures may be found including the work of Max Weber, Marcel Granet, Georges Dumézil, Jean-Pierre Vernant, or Michel Foucault. In anthropology, my inspiration comes, in that specific sense, mostly from Louis Dumont (1972) and Marshall Sahlins (1996). Among the ideological axes pertinent to my analysis of an ideological system as complex as the Western one, the opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticism is particularly important (cf. Duarte, 2004), following common sense cues systematically developed by Stephen Lukes (1973), Isaiah Berlin (1980), George Gusdorf (1972, 1982, 1985) and Louis Dumont (1991), among others.

The value of life within romantic and vitalistic thought, a concept that has been basic for the development of the human sciences, has inspired certain trends or schools more clearly than others have. It has been particularly prominent in the last few decades under a series of epithets, ranging from ‘post-modernism’ to the ‘ontological turn’. These trends share a disposition to denounce rationalism and intellectualism in favour of the lived experience from and through the perspective of the body and its affects. They deplore emphasis on extension instead of intensity, and on representation to the detriment of action, in a revival of the romantic agenda.

Most recent work on life concentrates on sociological or phenomenological dimensions that, I would say, are open to ethnography. They tackle life as ‘existence’, the concrete human experience of the world, time and space. The characteristic post-structuralist emphasis on the corporeal, material, behavioural dimensions of human experience, has inevitably resulted in a broader frontier of dialogue with the biological sciences. Growth of the new anthropologies of science and technology is symptomatic of this process, just as psychoanalysis is now facing challenges from neuroscientific ambitions.

What I propose is a typical anthropological analysis of a cultural configuration, discarding the magical resonances appropriate in the immediate living experience: invoking life as a self-explaining black box is inimical to the proper comprehension of our meaningful world. Although this looks, at first glance, like an excessively abstract and rarefied approach to Western cosmology, the conditions of use of the term ‘life’ involve all the concrete and sensory experiences of what ‘life’ should be in our societies. Life lies at the heart of all the new domains of research that delve into human immediate experience, or its biological bases.

The original vitalism

Vitalism, opposed as it is to the dead mechanisms of physical determinism, underlies romantic understandability in all its guises. (Gusdorf, 1984: 435)

When the practices and ideas eventually labelled as ‘vitalism’ emerged early in 18th-century Europe, a series of sources were associated with the movement.

The first and most basic one was the traditional background of cosmological knowledge flowing from classical antiquity. The holistic basis of the medical–philosophical tradition, sometimes called a ‘cosmobiology’, included alchemy (Pigeaud, 1981) and the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy, 1993). There was also much that issued from Christian cosmology. These aspects included the tension between flesh and spirit, the infusion of divinity into the world, and hope for the redemption of humanity through Christ’s mediation (Brown, 1982). Two mystical traditions contributed to the formulae: the German medieval mysticism of Meister Eckhart (c.1260–c.1328) (revived by Paracelsus (1493–1541) and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624)), and the Italian Renaissance mysticism of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). The physicians Van Helmont (1580–1644) and Thomas Willis (1621–1675) may be considered immediate predecessors. Spinoza and Leibniz also contributed in relation to categories such as ‘natura naturans’, ‘conatus’, ‘vis viva’ and the conception of a pan-psychism (Gusdorf, 1985).

Vitalism’s emphasis on the peculiar qualities of life within the cosmos was almost indiscernible from the basic tenets of coeval romanticism. The difference was mostly in the scope of both movements: vitalism developed within nascent modern biomedicine (albeit in an increasingly heretical position, antagonistic to mechanism), whereas romanticism developed as an encompassing systematic opposition to Enlightenment materialism and rationalism, permeating art, philosophy, and science.

Vitalism’s focus on life involved qualities of totality, of movement and flux, of experience and subjectivity, of impulse and drive. These elements were also essential to romantic conceptions of the preeminence of the whole over the part, of a cosmic permeating spirit (Geist), of an omnipresent singularizing force (Bildung and Kultur), and of an intrinsic disposition to rise and move forth (Aufhebung and Trieb) (Duarte, 2004; Gusdorf, 1982). Within Naturphilosophie these programmes operated in tandem. One of the best contemporary interpreters of vitalism, the historian and philosopher Georges Gusdorf, defined the movement as follows: ‘[G. E.] Stahl’s vitalism does not intend to deny mechanism, but only to integrate, in the domain of life, the mechanical systems in a broader reality where drives of an order specifically different manifest themselves’ (Gusdorf, 1972: 611).

In its original version, vitalism incorporated three essential foci: the state of the ‘organism’; the qualities and effects of the ‘nervous system’; and the relationship between illness and therapeutic resources. G. E. Stahl (1660–1734) was a pioneer proponent of the idea of an organism, a unit of the totality of life endowed with a certain inner disposition. Thomas Willis (1621–1675) and Albrecht Von Haller (1708–1777) developed knowledge about the brain and the nervous system, particularly the physical and the moral properties of nervous experience, in the first case, articulating a relation between mind and brain, and in the second, exploring the newly described qualities of sensibility and irritability (cf. Duarte, 1986; Figlio, 1975; Lawrence, 1979). Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) was the most systematic proponent of a therapeutic system that relied on the ‘vital principles’ of human organism and the natural world, in what came to be known as homeopathy.³

Essential in the debates of the earliest periods were polemics about ontogenetic ‘development’, which led to the emergence of modern embryology. Preformationism and epigenesis vied for preeminence as models of the transformations that foetuses underwent in achieving mature forms. Preformationism conceived of development as the gradual growth of an original microscopic model of the full organism. Epigenesis acknowledged that the source of individual life manifested gradually in relation to the conditions and experiences of the life process (cf. Canguilhem et al., 1962; Silva and Duarte, 2016). The growing perception and understanding of electromagnetic forces were also fiercely debated, and often, in that period, entangled with descriptions of life forces and processes (Gusdorf, 1985; Palti, 2005).

It is impossible to understand vitalism and romanticism without reference to the work of Goethe (1749–1832), particularly to Farbenlehre (The Doctrine of Colours, 1993 [1810]). In this work, the subjective sensorial experience of colour challenged the mechanistic Newtonian physics of light. Goethe proposed an articulation between objectivity and subjectivity in which concern with lived experience took precedence over abstract schemes.

Gusdorf’s meticulous depiction of vitalism emphasizes the broad ambitions of Naturphilosophie and Lebensphilosophie regarding the status of life in the cosmos. A medical anthropology integrated with the cosmos was basic for the movement: a science of synthesis and a synthesis of science (Gusdorf, 1985: 260). Schelling (1775-1854) proposed a ‘superior medicine’, that is, a general science of organic nature (Gusdorf, 1985: 262) dealing with the principles of irritability (Von Haller) and the organism (G. Stahl) in the workings of the ‘world organism’ (Gusdorf, 1985: 267). In K. F. Burdach’s (1776–1847) work, vitalism became a pan-spiritualism that encompassed the perception of the ‘universal organism’ and the ‘physiology of the microcosm’, in which the organism is a kind of mystical body (Gusdorf, 1985: 271).

Foucault’s sympathy towards vitalism is patent. All those predecessors, he declared, ‘foresee the great creative potency of life, its endless power of transformation, its plasticity, and the flow in which it encompasses all of its productions–we ourselves included–, in a time no one is the master of’ (Foucault, 1966: 144). Moreover, he added that ‘life’ itself did not exist until then, only ‘living beings’ organized by natural history (Foucault, 1966: 145). Thereafter, life would assume autonomy regarding natural classifications (Foucault, 1966: 225): ‘Being emerged in the permanently analyzable space of representation; life retires into the enigma of an essentially inaccessible force, perceptible only through its efforts, here and there, to express and to maintain itself’ (Foucault, 1966: 294). He continues, ‘From Cuvier onwards the living being eludes, at least at first glance, the general laws of the corporeal substance; the biological being becomes regional and autonomous; life is, in the confines of being, what is external to it, and yet manifests itself in it’ (Foucault, 1966: 295).

The dichotomies characterizing enlightened and romantic science did not impede exchanges and influences from flowing both ways, and inspiring important developments in the natural and human sciences. The emergent human sciences depended entirely on the dialogue between researchers and philosophers about the sense of life, from Naturphilosophie and Lebensphilosophie to hermeneutics and, later, to contemporary phenomenology, neo-vitalism and the ontological turn.

The contribution of Friedrich Nietzsche

Vivo, ergo cogito. (Nietzsche, 1874: 94)⁴

Nietzsche (1844–1900) is considered the main philosophical hinge between original and contemporaneous vitalism and romanticism. In opposition to devitalized thought and culture, his potent influence and critical contributions helped propel the absolute value of life into the 20th-century, as expressed in his famous epigraph above. In the Birth of Tragedy (2008 [1872]), he re-elaborated the classical dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions of Greek cosmology as a historical monument to the original powers of life embodied by the Dionysian cult. Shortly thereafter, these primal powers were stymied by Socratic irony and Christian ‘slave morality’.⁵

The first of the Untimely Considerations, dedicated to the ‘usefulness and inconvenience of history for life’, renders more clearly Nietzsche’s conception of life and skewed consequences of stifling it. For ‘antiquarian history’ degenerates when the fresh life of the present is no longer inspired by it: ‘just life, that obscure, striving, unquenchable power that longs for itself’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 30). One axis of Nietzsche’s conception of life is totality of experience, an intense embeddedness at all levels of existence in a perpetual state of self-assertion. In his terms: ‘Every living being needs an enveloping atmosphere, of a completely mysterious haze; when one deprives it of its wrapping, when one condemns a religion, an art, a genius, to spin around like a planet without an atmosphere: then one should not be surprised if it quickly becomes barren, stiff and fruitless’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 61).

In a characteristic romantic manner, that totality is also the primordial oneness, the original unity of the cosmos (Ureins) threatened by an excess of history, a lack of fresh life: ‘Under the Dionysian spell, the binding between persons is strengthened anew, and nature too, denied, unfriendly, subdued, returns to celebrate the feast of the return of the lost (prodigal) son, the man. Spontaneously, earth displays its gifts—and peacefully gathers together the beasts of mountain and desert’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 31).

Echoing the Liebestod in Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Nietzsche extols the infinite capacity of love to deepen life to its last frontiers, by abolishing individuality: ‘In spite of fear and compassion, we are the happy living ones, not as individuals, but as the living oneness, in whose procreative enjoyment we fuse into’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 102–103). Culture must not challenge nature, but comply with it, in search of plain authenticity: ‘The concept of culture [Bildung] as a new and enhanced physis, without an inside and an outside, devoid of dissimulation and convention, as a unanimity between life, thought, appearance and will’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 99).

There is an important point of connection between his philosophical considerations about life and the coeval conditions of biomedical and anthropological thought. Denunciation of the perversion of life was the basis for the degeneracy configuration,⁶ in a manner analogous to Nietzsche’s denunciation of decay and loss. The theory of degeneracy grew in importance in the second half of the 19th-century. Its basic tenet was the negative effect upon human life of a series of ‘vices’ and ‘perversions’ related to modernity, which could be inherited—in a Lamarckian manner—and transmuted into debased collective conditions. Early in the next century, it would support the growth of aggressively reactionary and racist ideologies, such as Nazism. The cult of a pure, pristine life, close to nature, was a current trait of that version of vitalism.

The word itself—degenerate—appears in Nietzsche’s texts. The reasons were not the same; but the diagnosis ran in parallel. His paean to the powers of life, systematically appearing in all his work, aggressively denounced the dangers of reason and objectified culture: ‘Fiat veritas, pereat vita’ (Nietzsche, 1874: 134). This would prove to be an enduring motto, discernible in contemporary vitalistic thought, in positive versions of the cult of life (ecological ideology, ontological anthropology, New Age movements, etc.), or in negative conservative denunciations of the destruction of ‘correct life’ values (redolent of degeneracy tenets).

Contemporaneous vitalism

Contemporary neo-vitalism consecrates the return of romanticism, not in its outdated dogmas and doctrines, but in its requirements, vowed to the maintenance of the rights of the total human phenomenon, irreducible to determinisms; whose authority it had itself conceived. (Gusdorf, 1985: 374)

One contemporary vitalistic trend, which has flourished within the ranks of hard science (or at least on its frontiers) and reverberated more broadly in its modern epistemology can be called ‘naturalistic vitalism’. Hans Driesch (1867–1941) is probably the best known modern vitalist. An important experimental biologist, his conversion to vitalism after an unexpected result in an experiment with sea urchins is often cited in vitalist literature (cf. Canguilhem,2009 [1968]; Silva and Duarte, 2016). He revived the Aristotelian category of entelechy and placed it in the centre of his morphogenetic studies,⁷ and his Science and Philosophy of the Organism (1908) spurred the restoration of vitalism in early 20th-century. Authors as different as Carl Jung (with his theories of archetypes, synchronicity or ‘anima mundi’), Johannes Reinke (with his Dominanten Theorie), Jakob von Uexküll (with his theory of the Umwelt), and Fritjof Capra (with his holist or systemic paradigm) may be considered as part of this trend, given their common allegiance to an embedded perception of life-giving phenomena.

It is possible to discern a version of vitalism in biosemiotics (as T. Uexküll labels the trend). Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who operate in the field of information theory, cybernetics, systems theory and semiology theory, express it in their theory of autopoiesis.⁸ It also occurs in the late work of Gregory Bateson, especially in what he called ‘the pattern which connects’.⁹ From rigorous training and a recognized position in conventional science, Rupert Sheldrake turned to actively researching heterodox themes within a complex theoretical scheme, centred around the ‘morphogenetic field’ and ‘morphic resonance’.¹⁰

A common trait in all these contributions is the emphasis on relatedness within some kind of whole, and on the impossibility of a clear partition between observer and observed, or of cognition in individual parts. Life is a name for this encompassing embeddedness in overarching forces or conditions.

In different guises and for disparate reasons, certain influences from vitalism and romanticism were essential for the emergence of the ‘human sciences’. It is fascinating to trace their presence in the work of K. Marx, A. de Tocqueville, E. Tylor, W. Dilthey, W. Wundt, G. Tarde, H. Bergson, M. Weber, E. Durkheim, and B. Malinowski. Each presents traits from vitalism in the formulation of certain concepts, but always in tension with standard scientific rationalism and empiricism. Here, I concentrate on authors whose presentation of vitalism is intrinsic and constitutes a ‘cultural vitalism’.

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) is a convenient point of departure.¹¹ In contrast with the work of his contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, the value of life and its key role in the analysis of most human phenomena entirely infused his work. He tried to more clearly conceptualize this ineffable totality in a series of heuristic contributions to sociological theory. His reputed antinomies between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture, or between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ individualism are clear in that respect. The superiority of the ‘subjective’ and the ‘qualitative’ is due to the presence of living qualities that are absent in their respective opposites. Subjective culture pulsates with an intrinsic and immediate involvement in human experience, while qualitative individualism allows for the development of inner qualities in modern subjects drawn towards mobility, self-expression, and creativity. In both instances, flux and change are the essential condition of the permanent modern Aufhebung.¹²

Opposition between ‘form’ and ‘life’ is the basis of Simmelian dialectics: ‘life—as a cosmic, generic, singular phenomenon—is such a continuous stream, there is good reason for its profound opposition against form’ (Simmel, 1971: 433). Although life depends on form (as the spirit [Geist] depends on the body), it is bound to transcend it, ascending in spiritual quality:

(…) life is at once fixed and variable; of finished shape, and developing further; formed, and ever breaking through its forms; persisting, yet rushing onward; circling around in subjectivity, yet standing objectively over things and over itself—all these contrasts are but instances of that metaphysical fact: the innermost essence of life is its capacity to go out beyond itself, to set its limits by reaching out beyond them, that is, beyond itself (Simmel, 1971: 431).

In Simmel, life is clearly inseparable from the spirit in a characteristic romantic manner; but his emphasis on a certain transcendence is not intrinsic to vitalistic hypotheses. As a philosopher and sociologist, he is not concerned with nature in itself, as vitalistic scientists inevitably have to be. His concern with culture/Bildung addresses the questions of civilization and modernity, the quality of unique lives developing within the forms of social cohesion and coherence: ‘the essence of life as the transcendence of itself’ (Simmel, 1971: 434).

Gregory Bateson grew up as a natural scientist, and never departed entirely from his investigation of nature. Yet, his outstanding contributions to the interpretation of social and cultural phenomena allow me to include him in the ‘cultural’ rather than the ‘naturalistic’ vitalists––although he would denounce this as a simplistic dichotomy.¹³ Totality is the paramount dimension of his thought. His formal totality involves the concepts of symmetry and beauty: ‘that wider knowing which is the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human committees’ (Bateson, 1980: 3).

Relatedness, or ‘the pattern which connects’, is the structure within that formal totality. Formality and beauty are the same phenomenon: ‘by aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects’ (Bateson, 1980: 6). The search for ‘a deeper symmetry in formal relations’ is the motto for this stern vitalism, which tries to circumvent both the traps of orthodox materialism and spiritual vitalism.

Georges Canguilhem, the philosopher of science strongly attracted by vitalism, resorts to Hegel to associate the understanding of cultural configuration with the personal attitude of the researcher towards the phenomenon of life: a history of science should be a history within life.¹⁴ His disciple M. Foucault¹⁵ came to endorse that view, transmuting it into an ethics of involvement with topics examined via his genealogical method (and direct participation in progressive social movements). In praise of Canguilhem and about life, he says:

To form concepts is a way of life, not a way of killing it. It is a manner of living in a relative mobility, not an intent to immobilize life. It is a manifestation—among the millions of living beings who instruct their environment and are instructed by it—of an innovation that may be evaluated as one wishes, minuscule or considerable: a very specific kind of information. (Foucault, 1985: 10)

Life, in this sense, engulfs theory and induces a new kind of knowledge infused with vitalistic qualities: mobility or flux, innovation or creativity, abolition of the strict frontier between observer and observed.

However, Foucault’s principal contribution to the theme of life lies elsewhere. In Les Mots et les Choses (1966), his analysis privileges the emergence, in the dawn of modernity, of three new bodies of knowledge: work; language; and life. Although they constitute a single episteme, according to the author, life hovers above the configuration, in an encompassing way. In fact, Foucault declares, ‘life’ did not exist before; only living beings, organized and studied by natural history. The episteme will be inevitable henceforth:

[I]n the same period, life assumes its autonomy regarding the concepts of classification. It breaks free from the critical relationship constituted—in the Eighteenth Century—by the knowledge of nature. Breaking free means two different things: life becomes an object of knowledge among others and exposes itself thus to all general critical analyses; it does also present, however, a resistance to this critical jurisdiction. It renders that jurisdiction its own, and projects it, in its own name, above all possible knowledge. In such a manner that, all through the Nineteenth Century, from Kant to Dilthey and Bergson, critical thought and life philosophies will have to face and confront each other. (Foucault, 1966: 225)

Coming from a very different intellectual tradition, Roy Wagner ends up endorsing the main aspects of life conceived by Simmel, Bateson and Foucault. Explicitly influenced by Nietzsche, his work involves a conception of life as creativity and invention.¹⁶ As I mentioned in another article, Wagner deals continually with an opposition similar to, even if more dialectical than, the Simmelian ‘form’ versus ‘life’.¹⁷ ‘Invention’––opposed to ‘convention’––animates the dynamic side of his dichotomy. It consists of ‘creative acts of innovative realizations’ (‘metaphor upon metaphor’, operating in ‘undetermined’ conditions), like ‘invention’ in music (Wagner, 1981: 9). About life-imbued social circumstances, he says: ‘Life as inventive sequence has a particular character, a certain quality of brilliance …’ (Wagner, 1981: 67).

Wagner adheres implicitly to Canguilhem’s and Foucault’s conception of a knowledge about life that must acknowledge being life itself. In his terms: ‘the anthropologist is forced to include himself and his own way of life in his subject matter, and study himself’. This is the key to his renowned ‘invention of culture’, in that ‘in the act of inventing another culture, the anthropologist invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself’ (Wagner, 1981: 4).

We can also trace the influence of vitalism in Bruno Latour’s work, although it is not omnipresent as it is in Wagner’s. Vitalism is more clearly elaborated in some texts, such as those dedicated to religion (Latour, 1990, 2005, 2016).¹⁸ The essential romantic, vitalistic theme, the preeminence of life over form and stasis, emerges in the shape of a eulogy of ‘presence’, the ineffable condition of immediate contact between the human and the sacred, contrasted to ‘representation’, the devitalized, detached mental substitute. Latour operates with the opposition between ‘information’ and ‘transformation’. The first process consists in the cold, inanimate, mediated transmission of the religious message; while the second involves an embedded relation between the two poles and direct influence upon the faithful’s body and existence.

Much of Latour’s vitalism lies in his concern with nature and body, even though the value of life remains implicit. His continuous denunciation of ‘purification’ processes in science, or of dichotomization between the realms of ‘things’ and ‘people’, cannot be understood without awareness of the essential embeddedness of the cosmos in a living and lively unity. A pathological jargon may emerge in contexts devoid of life: ‘I am opposing one body politic which I find unhealthy, to another one which I find more healthy, more democratic, and which will provide, in my view, a better ground rule for adjudicating claims about biopower’ (Latour, 1999: 3).

Gilles Deleuze (eventually accompanied by Félix Guattari) cultivated a sophisticated philosophical version of romantic and vitalistic thought. The influences of Nietzsche, Tarde and Bergson converged to inspire a central concern with life: ‘We always write to give life, to release life there where it is captive, to draw lines of flight.’ (Deleuze, 1990: 92). Becoming (flux), duration, intuition, virtuality, intensity, transformation, are categories associated with the ‘élan vital’. Some commentators also stress the series of romantic writers and philosophers (Naturphilosophen) evoked in his texts, as Hölderlin, Kleist, Büchner, on one hand, and F. Schlegel, G. Fechner and J. von Uexküll, on the other (cf. Duarte, 2015).

In a style of reasoning Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’, he explained that: ‘We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is no immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss’ (Deleuze,2001 [1995]: 27). An important distinction made between a life and the life. Although I cannot develop this here, it is intrinsically related to the cosmological dimension of the category.

The contribution of T. Ingold

Our alternative is to view the organism not as an individual entity but as the embodiment of a life-process. (Ingold, 1986: 153)

Tim Ingold defined life as something that ‘has to be understood not as an interior animating force but as the generative capacity of that encompassing field of forces and materials wherein forms arise and are held in place’ (Ingold, 2010: 117). To overcome the usual dualisms between individual and society, nature and culture, biology and human sciences, he took a dynamic and integrated holistic approach.¹⁹ Those interested in concepts of life should pay closer attention to his work. Given the extent of his written production, I will concentrate on only six texts (Ingold, 1986, 1990, 2007, 2008, 2010; Ingold and Descola, 2016) that express his main analytical concerns. In these works, Ingold constantly returned to the centrality of his concept of ‘life’.

His treatment of the dichotomy between ‘representation’ and ‘presence’ (Ingold, 2007: 37) is significant, as are his analyses of the difference between ‘information’ and ‘transmission’. Both cases are perfectly homologous to the opposition between ‘information’ and ‘transformation’ in Latour. As I commented elsewhere:

(…) in his fascinating Lines [2007], Ingold deals with the opposition between a world of ‘life’ (where the lines are experiential, present, transmissionary) and the ‘modern’, devitalized, world, where lines become impoverished as a mere row of informational and representational points. (Duarte, 2015: 191)

Although Ingold followed the romantic and vitalistic themes concerning life (flux, becoming, immediacy of experience, opposition to form and stasis, etc.), he, like Bateson, kept distant from traditional vitalism. In Ingold’s terms: ‘early attempts to attribute this distinction to the presence or absence of some non-material, vital force naturally compromised biology’s claim to scientific status’ (Ingold, 1990: 209).

In the place of spiritualized conceptions of life forces, he proposed the model of a permanent current or process of life, encompassing all forms (biological, psychological and social):

(…) what people have actually been talking about, in words that have been translated as ‘soul’ or sometimes ‘spirit’, is not an agency hidden inside each and every being, whence it pulls the strings of action, but the current of vitality which makes it so that the being is really a becoming, not a subject (taking the grammatical form of the pronoun) but a verb, launched in a process of endless self-creation. (Ingold and Descola, 2016: 315)

He quoted Cassirer and Bergson in order to emphasize the dynamic, mobile, condition of life, extended in ever-current processes. In this context, he was clearly on the side of epigenesis, the continual creation of life forms, and against the preformationist model of the DNA, characteristic of neo-Darwinian genetics:

Movement, then, is of the essence, whereas the stability of form is derived. We do not start with the organism as a given entity and bring it to life by setting it in motion, as one would a clockwork machine. We start instead with life as a movement which progressively builds itself into emergent structures. In short, contrary to Darwinism but with due acknowledgement to D’Arcy Thompson (…), growth is not merely revelatory, it is the generation of form. (Ingold, 1990: 215)

He also emphasized ‘creativity’, transposed from human action (as in Simmel or Wagner) to a ‘universal capacity of organisms … as the originators of their own development’ (Ingold, 1990: 224) as in Bateson or Maturana and Varela. His concern with a ‘more general theory of organisms’ that creates a ‘history of life’, lead him to strongly oppose current orthodox biology. ‘[The new biology] must be a biology that asserts the primacy of processes over events, of relationships over entities, and of development over structure’ (Ingold, 1990: 224).²⁰

The references to holism connect Ingold to a version of romantic thought strongly reminiscent of Uexküll’s Umwelt, which is particularly emphatic about its relational quality and its moving, mutant quality. This implies an epistemological attitude based upon ‘relational thought’ (Ingold, 2008: 31) able to grasp ‘systems in development’ (Ingold, 1990: 29). The ‘whole person-organism’ (Ingold, 2008: 12) demands a ‘complete perceptual system’, a ‘continuous relational field’ (Ingold, 2008: 31).

Life prevails against ‘representation’, the ominous sign of the divide between subject and object. There are no ‘objects’, only ‘things’, embedded in their meaningful meshwork. There is no transmission, only creation and improvisation, in a continuous Aufhebung (Ingold, 1990: 21). Ingold chastised hylomorphism and the equanimous version of the form versus life dichotomy, approvingly quoting Paul Klee: ‘Form is bad. Form is the end, death’, he wrote. ‘Form-giving is life (Klee, 1973: 269)’ (Ingold, 2010: 2).

Conclusions

Suppose that we focus our attention on a particular tree. There it is, rooted in the earth, trunk rising up, branches splayed out, swaying in the wind, with or without buds or leaves, depending on the season. Is the tree, then, an object? If so, how should we define it? What is tree and what is not-tree? Where does the tree end and the rest of the world begin? (…) If we consider, too, that the character of this particular tree lies just as much in the way it responds to the currents of wind, in the swaying of its branches and the rustling of its leaves, then we might wonder whether the tree can be anything other than a tree-in-the-air. (Ingold, 2010: 4)

Taking up the task of summarizing the aspects of the contemporary trends of vitalism, João de Pina Cabral (2018) proposed a tripartite model encompassing: (a) the life of organisms; (b) the life of sociality; and (c) the use of life. The two last aspects are what I consider to be a phenomenological approach: forms of life, habitus, life destinies, making a living.²¹ I am not sure about the first, but I suppose it might combine usual biological knowledge with a phenomenological disposition (perhaps in the manner of J. von Uexküll). Pina Cabral’s article, with other rich works, occupied a good part of an issue of Hau. Journal of Ethnographic Theory dedicated to the theme of life, and was quite expressive of the trend I mention here.

As mentioned in the introduction, the main challenge to this kind of work is the multivocality of ‘life’. I have chosen to illuminate here––in a position perpendicular to Pina Cabral’s summary––how the tenets of vitalism and romanticism have influenced the broader historical and cosmological meaning of the concept of ‘life’. In taking this analytical stance, my approach is epistemological. There is a clear difference between my analysis and the phenomenological and sociological studies that deal with life as the effective experience of ‘existence’, involving concrete and symbolic reproduction at all, natural, social, economic and mental levels. Contemporary examples include studies detailing life experience, life-lines, life trajectories, life histories, struggle for life, life insurance, promotion of life, sense of life, good life, end of life, life-enhancement, naked-life, life-style. These are all instances of the broad spectrum of notions related to the immediate experience of life ‘conditions’. I emphasize again that my interest has been the ideological, cosmological dimension of ‘life’, stretched along the history of Western culture for at least three centuries. These concepts are not always easily discernible or distinguishable from their sociological and phenomenological materializations. In fact, they continually depend on the effective experience of specific living societies in order to flourish or perish. Nevertheless, there is still an internal logic that propels these systems of ideas and ideals into our common present and future ‘experience’ of life.

Neither the presence of the trope––as it is ubiquitous, nor its learned usage in an academic text, are criteria for my historical model. In each case I work with the content of the category ‘life’. A rich list of ‘contents’ has been described, both in the presentation of the configuration of vitalism and in the analysis of each modern author I chose as examples of contemporary continuity. Essentially, as I mentioned earlier, vitalism may be considered as a part of romanticism. Although focused more precisely upon the phenomena of life, it shares many characteristics with this broader movement. My overview is a call to gather those threads in a more compact model, which would contain the following clusters of concepts.

The first cluster of ideas has to do with ‘totality’, or the ‘preeminence of the whole’. A holistic opposition to the emphasis on the ‘parts’ within modern scientific and political ideologies may form analytical categories such as ‘synthesis’, ‘integration’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘organism’: Canguilhem mentions explicitly the opposition between ‘atomicity and totality’. The categories of ‘embeddedness’ and ‘encompassment’ (especially prized by L. Dumont, following A. Hirschman) describe the relationship obtaining between two linked entities.

The second cluster concentrates on ‘flux’ or ‘movement’. Against what vitalism sees as the ‘dead’ options of the experimental sciences, these concepts emphasize ‘dialectics’, ‘development’, ‘plasticity’ and ‘transformation’. This processual model is accompanied by a concern with an ‘inner disposition’ that induces movement. Impulse or drive (derived from the German romantic categories, Streben and Trieb) are at the base of a ‘disposition to rise and move forth’, an instantiation of the Hegelian category of Aufhebung. This impulse carries a sense of ‘creative potency’: singularity, authenticity, invention, creativity.

A third cluster is the preeminence of ‘experience’ (personal, sensorial and sentimental). Subjectivity should never be put away by objectivity; on the contrary, no objective apprehension of the surrounding world (Uexküll’s Umwelt) is not filtered through the subjective circumstances of the phenomenon. Goethe pioneered this insight.

A permanent challenge for early forms of vitalism (and for contemporary ‘naturalistic’ followers) were accusations of animism or mysticism. As opposed to ‘reductionist’ versions of life experience, the emergent qualities of this phenomenon could easily be described as something ‘immaterial’ (eventually, spiritual). The ambiguous German category of Geist was widely used to refer to that ‘inaccessible force’, ‘permeating spirit’, ‘a kind of mystical body’. Most of modern vitalism is very keen on avoiding any hint of a transcendent condition (i.e. Ingold), even when demonstrating the uniqueness of its object.

My immediate interest has been to illuminate the embedded, relational manner in which this concept of life has been growing in the frontiers between anthropology and philosophy, while inspiring important contemporary trends in both disciplines. The mere familiarity with this concept, regardless of its historicity and immersion in the broader currents of the Western culture does not help us understand the logic, systematicity and permanent interest in knowledge pertaining to our deepest cultural drives. The history of ideas, concepts and representations is a rich path to understanding present problems and debates. My position here is a ‘representationalist’ one, as my interest is the constitution and progress of the system of ideas that supported a strong ideological focus on the intellectual developments of life. No ideas emerge from a void. There is always history and cultural soil behind each novelty. The messianic tones of recent trends suggest a historical ‘extraterritoriality’ that, on examination, becomes a meaningful illusion.

Besides the dynamic contemporary anthropological trends I reviewed before, vitalism and romanticism relate to ontologism and perspectivism.²² The ‘ontological turn’ emphasizes the fact that reality (ontology) differs among cultures (cf. Lloyd, 2019: 37). Although at first glance this seems to be an old anthropological truism, it is, in fact, a radicalization of relativism that challenges universal Western Enlightenment premises and the prevalence of Western thought (ideas and representations) in the quest for ethnological understanding. A similar diagnosis may be made of perspectivism as it adduces the ontological difference as an epistemological one. A different culture is based upon a different ontology, which must be observed from a different, internal, perspective or viewpoint. Herder redivivus, but in this radical manner: the intellectual respect for difference depends on concern with the specific life that manifests in each culture. In a sense, life seems to encompass thought, as thoughts must bend to life’s configuration. The pragmatic, immediate, bodily, affective sense of reality and life in each culture encompasses its ideas and representations. Thus, anthropological analysis must focus on endogenous practice of reality and life to the detriment of ideas and representations.

These trends result from an intellectual (and sensorial) effort to react anthropologically to different cultures on their own terms as a kind of epiphany. I have objected to this “extraterritoriality”: the drive towards important and laudable insights is just as deeply Western as former interpretations and models (Duarte, 2015), and can be found in the romantic and vitalist roots of human sciences. Were it not for claims of respect for autonomous, self-affirmative, intrinsic, life’s values, we would have remained as deaf to otherness, as other cultures and other periods of our own history have been.

Awareness of the foundations and characteristics of Western ideas and ideals is one of the best contributions of anthropology to understanding our contemporary afflictions (and any judicious appraisal or propitiatory intervention). Consciousness of the meanings of life may help anthropology recognize the vitalistic tendencies pulsating within contemporary natural sciences. The anthropology of science cannot avoid the controversies regarding the status of reality, nature and life that permeate all the natural sciences, but particularly biology and biomedicine. The permanent challenges emanating from vitalism continue to haunt orthodox reductionist biology and help to construct new projects and theories about the human condition. I think especially of epigenetics, as opposed to neo-Darwinian genetics (cf. Silva and Duarte, 2016), and of neurogenesis as opposed to the determinist neurosciences (cf. Duarte, 2018).

The present extensive efforts to describe and understand the phenomenological experience of life (as existence) in its manifold manifestations might benefit from a deeper perception of the cosmological conceptions of the vitality that pulsates behind each concrete ethnographic enigma.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks several colleagues and students who discussed the ideas of this article: in the occasion of his participation in the roundtable that took place in the IFCS/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, on ‘Life, affects and emotion’, organized by Octavio Bonet in 2017; during his Seminar on ‘Nature and Life in Western cosmology and anthropological thought’, at the Museu Nacional, in 2018; after his 2018 conference about ‘Vitalism in contemporary anthropology’, in the Department of Anthropology of the National University of Brasilia, thanks to the invitation by Carlos Sautchuk; and during the Seminar on ‘Nature and Life’ held in 2019 at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of Córdoba (Argentina), promoted by Mariana Tello. For the published version, I am indebted to the inspired and scrupulous contributions of the reviewers and editors of this journal.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was funded by the CNPq, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—Brasil (303124/2014-8–03/03/2015).

ORCID iD

Luiz FD Duarte

Notes

Luiz FD Duarte is Full Professor at the Post-Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil, PhD in Human Sciences, UFRJ, 1985, postdoctoral student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Senior Researcher of the Brazilian Council for Technical and Scientific Development (CNPq/MCTI), former Director of the Museu Nacional at Rio de Janeiro, and former member of the National Trust Commission (IPHAN). He has published extensively on the topics of personhood and nature, with ethnographical fieldwork in Brazilian urban society concerning family, religion, sexuality, sensibility and life.

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The vitality of vitalism in contemporary anthropology: Longing for an ever green tree of life

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction 1

Research about life and nature

The original vitalism

The contribution of Friedrich Nietzsche

Contemporaneous vitalism

The contribution of T. Ingold

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References

Introduction¹