A vitalist, I would venture to suggest, is a person who is more likely to ponder the problems of life by contemplating an egg than by turning a winch or operating the bellows of a forge.
Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist
“To understand the vitality of vitalism is to engage in the search for the meaning of the relationship between life and science in general, life and the science of life more specifically.” (Canguilhem 2008, 61) It is this relationship that concerns us most, between a methodology of inquiry and an object itself, neither of which are easily corralled into definitions. At the crudest level, this is apparent in the core term itself: even a decade into the twenty-first century, we lack a clear definition of “life,” despite over two hundred years of its study in the guise of modern biology. This problem is more than just the challenge of handling the fascinating and seemingly endless occupants of the fringes, although these often receive undue attention; it is instead central to the question. We do not know what it is that qualifies us as being alive: the best we can do is describe the condition, accept it as a shared universal among a recognizable group of species, and quickly move on, hoping that nobody presses us too deeply on the answers.
There are two issues in play here. The first is how we recognize life outside of ourselves; and the second is what meaning is ascribed to that recognized life. These are tightly intertwined, and are perhaps best seen as inseparable—while it is certainly
theoretically possible to isolate the biological question of life as an independent, detached inquiry, doing so removes it from engagement with the wider cultural work that forms our focus. More importantly, the question unravels into an undisciplined mess as soon as it is
examined: we lack a satisfactory definition of life from a scientific point of view and so are left only with the culturally created criteria for judging and interpreting it. Once these additional concerns are admitted, we are faced with qualities of life, with different strata among the living: the question of what is alive has turned to what does it mean to be alive, a question that ultimately becomes closely intermeshed with decisions regarding what boundaries are placed around the category of human.
Both of these—the living and the human—have, after a period of tightly controlled restriction, seen their boundaries expand. This is easily seen in the matter of life: as a basic rule, the more we learn about the non-human, the less trustworthy our traditional biological categories prove to be. From the movement of crystals to the development of fungal
colonies covering thousands of square miles to the symbiotic presence of thousands of micro-organisms in your gut, many of the qualities heretofore used to identify the living (movement, directed growth, the presence of clearly delineated bodily boundaries) leave us with the option of either abandoning their use or expanding the domain of the animate.
This proves confusing in many ways: we intuitively insist that we are different from mushrooms and crystals, but it is very hard to pinpoint exactly what that difference could possibly entail, let alone what meaning could be derived from it.
We will spend quite some time in chapter four with James Lovelock, but his observations on the meaning of life bear strongly enough on this question to warrant their inclusion here. Lovelock’s interest comes from his constant use of the adjective “alive”
with regard to our small blue planet.
Friendly scientists often ask me: Why do you keep on talking about the Earth as alive? This is a good question, and there is no rational answer; indeed to some of
my friends my suggestion that the whole planet is alive is not only “scientifically incorrect,” it is absurd. In reply I say that science has not yet formulated a full definition of life. Physicists and chemists have one definition, biologists another, and neither are complete.
…
Thus the physicist, Schrödinger, in his remarkable small book What Is Life?
suggested that a long-sustained dynamic reduction of internal entropy distinguishes life from its inorganic environment; and this thought has been echoed by other physicists, especially Bernal and Denbigh. Biologists simply say a living thing is one that reproduces, and the errors of reproduction are corrected by natural selection. Neither of these definitions is helpful. The physicist’s answer is too broad and would mean that I, a grandmother, or a Lombardy poplar tree were dead, since we cannot reproduce. (Lovelock 2009, 192–3)
More on life, biology, and Lovelock’s ability to reproduce later. For now, this is merely a succinct summary of the difficulties in what initially appears a simple query.
The history of defining the human is marked by extraordinary violence and aggression: a constant rationale for slavery and slaughter is that they do not qualify for membership in the ranks of humanity, and therefore our behavior towards them is not constrained by the same ethics as towards members of our own community. This attitude surfaces in less obviously bloody registers as well, for example in the paternalism shown in international development efforts through much of the latter half of the twentieth century.
While these claims are harder to make on a global scale now than as recently as a few centuries ago, it is important to recognize that they are still being made and they do still serve as motivation for much oppression and bloodshed. Even for people who accord all homo sapiens a similar status, however, the boundary between the human and the non-human has become harder and harder to maintain, both biologically and culturally. While it seems that genetic determinism—and here I am referring not to the cultural phenomenon but rather to the claim that all biology is reducible to identifiable genetic behavior—is, at
the very least, under attack even in biological communities, the importance of DNA as a tool for biological classification remains quite strong. The difficulty is that species previously held separate are now being found to share huge amounts of genetic code, including recent arguments that chimpanzees are actually closer to humans genetically than they are to other primates and are, in fact, close enough to warrant biological classification as human. We are left in a position where the biological answer to what is human depends on a fraction of a percent of genetic code, which seems intuitively insufficient, hence forcing a turn to behavior and culture, choices of action and social organization, for an answer.
We have moved now to the second register, but here the going is no easier: our primate brethren clearly participate in cultural ritual and clearly possess both their own language and the ability to learn others. Even religion, once seen as the highest proof of a truly human culture, has lost its hard boundary as primates have been seen celebrating the appearance and disappearance of the sun in what can only be seen as a mysterious
forbearer of human proto-religious behavior: even with all of the distance inserted by the chronologically qualifying phrases, the notion of a fixed boundary necessarily begins to fade in the pre-dawn mist. These discoveries hit home in a peculiar way, and highlight common cultural misconceptions to which we will return in later chapters: first, their inherent fascination is proven by their constant appearance in various media (that is, animal shows edit and select content subject to all the pressure of any capitalist enterprise, and the recurrence of certain themes signifies both the ongoing presence of that material in the natural world, but also its anticipated interest to the viewers). Secondly, and more
importantly for our purposes, the reaction to this information is often, in slightly overstated terms, tinged with an evolutionary apocalypticism of differing degrees, reflecting a
perceived threat to either human culture (“let’s see apes produce Shakespeare”) or humanity itself (“the dolphins are going to take over”). The mistake I want to highlight here centers on the term evolution. The growing acceptance of evolution as a scientific truth has done little to address its understanding, especially with regards to evolutionary time. The human brain is woefully ill equipped to deal with the very large or the very small, a flaw that seems compounded when time itself is concerned, leading us to project evolutionary change into a near future instead of a far-flung one. This tendency is perhaps most dramatically revealed in the New Age of the late twentieth century, with its constant predictions of a watershed moment in human history being driven by an evolutionary change, a topic that will be treated in more depth in later chapters.
We are left, then, a bit adrift, in a common situation where the general contours of defined cultural spaces are clear, yet their exact shape and boundaries blur out of existence the harder we try to bring them into focus, leaving us in an apophatic realm where to live is merely not to be dead. Historically, this proves unsatisfactory: rightly or wrongly, we insist that there is more than that, that there are qualities of life and ways to engage with the world that require the presence of an operative lurking somewhere behind the curtain of our bodies. This is the touchstone of vitalism, and whether these impulses form its source or not, they certainly are an identifiable spring from which its waters run. In the last few centuries, vitalism has emerged in two somewhat distinct forms, one focused on the individual and one focused on the natural world. The former provides the foundation for
the convoluted and often tense relationship between vitalism and science, while the latter allows vitalism to survive as a backdrop to a wide variety of philosophical and political moments. Ultimately, the joining of these two strands forms a key trope for understanding many religious movements in the west from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.