In the extreme, life is what is capable of error.
(Michel Foucault, Introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological)
All of life is, in a sense, a transformation of energy into form. We are sunlight at a vast costume party, dressing itself up in one form after another, discarding one outfit to pick up a different one.
Starhawk, The Earth Path
This opening chapter provides half of the context for what follows, containing both background for several key concepts that are carried throughout this thesis and insight into a certain mode of critique that I both inherit and hope to emulate. Starting with the material most distant from my training may seem strange, but the ideas are such that it seemed best to work from the outside in, if you will, building from more general, anthropological considerations to the more overtly religious.
In its simplest formulation, vitalism refers to the belief that there is a source, usually described in terms of energy, that animates all life. It is the focus on this last term, life, that differentiates vitalism from its closest relatives: similar claims are made by monism, animism, pantheism, and even panentheism, but none of them center upon the question of life itself, of what separates the living from the dead, of how we identify the
characteristics that allow us to recognize life as a category of being. The modern usage of the term vitalism—considered as spanning perhaps two centuries—is explicitly post-scientific; that is, it is a reaction to the vacuum left by the retreat of religious answers from similar questions: if the defining mark of life is no longer a soul, what is it? If our spirit is not animated by God’s breath, what provides what we perceive as the underlying spark of consciousness? This framing is explicitly and intentionally Western, but the question is by no means limited by that geopolitical scope; indeed, with the late nineteenth century beginnings of globalization, notions of chi and prana (among other related categories) found their ways to the exploding populace of North America, offering additional multiplicities of possible answers to the core vitalistic concerns. To introduce a concept and metaphor that will dominate what follows, these Eastern notions (and others from South and Central America, from Africa, from Oceania) found fertile soil on the shores of the New World, and whether directly or through the impact of being “in the air,” added their notional substance, if not their actual presence, to the conversations. Other than the mechanics by which this happened—the voracious appetites of what emerges into the contemporary New Age, the ways in which early movements towards a blossoming globalization enable the process, the challenges these alternate modes of knowledge and authority pose to the rapid rise towards dominance of science itself—the details of these systems, their variants and their inner workings, fall beyond the realm of this thesis.
We are focused on the vitalist tradition that traces its roots to the weakening of the Medieval church, at the moment when the answer to queries about the forces that enable life could be sought beyond the restrictive confines of Catholic theology. Since then the
domain of vitalism has shifted, sometimes being found within the realm of religious explorations (both mainstream and alternative), more recently being seen as a concern of science and scientists, and often being relegated to a set of unquestioned assumptions that lie very close to the heart of our cultural world view. Even with this meandering, once life began to be considered as an entity separate and isolated from God’s will, vitalism
develops along two paths which will be detailed further below, but bear mentioning at the outset: there is a strain I will call bodily vitalism, locating this energy in the physical body itself and becoming most prominent in the historical twin emergence of medicine and biology, as well as in ongoing movements concerning health, diet, and sexuality; alongside this is a tradition I term worldly vitalism that turns outward, locating the vital force
externally, in the geography and geology of the external world. Here, what nourishes our beings, what provides us with the substance of our lives is something present in the natural world, eventually (especially in recent history) culminating in its being located in the biosphere itself.
Having created a definitional duality, it is necessary to immediately destroy any sense of inflexible permanence: even if the categories are accepted, they are my invention and the vitalist tradition certainly doesn’t see itself as participating in an oppositional binary. Worldly and bodily vitalism must be conceived as points on a spectrum where individual movements and practices may move freely back and forth, often combining elements both at will and unconsciously. This last point is actually key, I would claim, to understanding the phenomenon in totality, as the final question we will take up concerns what links the bodily to the worldly; that is, what mechanisms are offered either to
internalize the vital presence available in the external world, or to project outwards the energy that lies dormant inside of each of us.
There is an immediate tension between thinking about vitalism and thinking about philosophy in general, a tension that grows out of more than a desire to resist certain forms of intellectual temptation. Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995), who will serve as our
primary voice for vitalism in what follows, sums this up nicely in a passage worth keeping in mind for the entirety of the chapter.
Philosophy can succeed in its intention—to recover the unity of effort behind disparate acts of spontaneous creation—only by relating the various elements of culture and civilization: science, ethics, religion, technology, fine arts. To establish such relations is to choose among values. Criticism and hierarchy are therefore essential. Philosophy cannot adopt anything but a critical attitude toward various human functions that it proposes to judge. Its goal is to discover the meaning of those functions by determining how they fit together, by restoring the unity of consciousness. The business of philosophy is therefore not so much to solve problems as to create them. In Léon Brunschvicg’s words, philosophy is the
“science of solved problems,” that is, the questioning of received solutions. Now we can understand why philosophy has attracted hostile reactions through the ages:
philosophy is a questioning of life and therefore a threat to the idea that everything necessary to life is already in our possession. The goal of philosophy is to search for reasons to live by seeking the end for which life is supposed to be the means.
But to pursue such a goal is also to discover reasons not to live. Nothing is more at odds with life than the idea that an end to life may be a value not simply an
accident. Therein lies one source of philosophy’s unpopularity. (Canguilhem 1994, 384)