On the Vitality of Vitalism

MANY OF those who share an interest in the life sciences today, perhaps most, would agree with the claim that vitalism is obsolete. Some prominent biologists now use ‘vitalism’ as a derogatory label associated with lack of intellectual rigour, anti-scientific attitudes, and superstition (see, e.g., Dawkins, 1988). Other scientific commentators treat the term more seriously, but equally arrive at the conclusion that vitalism is an untenable perspective. Prigogine and Stengers (1984), for example, have described vitalist concepts as meaningful for biology within the broader scientific context characterized by Newtonian physics, but as having been made redundant by 20th-century developments both in physics and in (molecular) biology. The claim that vitalism is obsolete – the ease with which this proposition is apparently accepted – might serve as a useful way of approaching the particular status of this concept in the work of Georges Canguilhem. The link is pertinent at different levels, in different ways. First of all, there is the point that Canguilhem addresses vitalism precisely in so far as it is constantly refuted, constantly declared ‘obsolete’ – a point to which I shall return in more detail below. Second, there is a question of the extent to which Canguilhem’s own propositions may be ‘obsolete’, on account of their vitalism. This second question seems to be a concern in several commentaries that offer positive appreciations of Canguilhem’s life and work, but that also seem to share an intent to qualify and circumscribe the vitalist aspect of his thought. Dominique Lecourt, for example, exposes the ‘misadventures’ of Canguilhem’s vitalism in so far as it relies on a notion of biological individuality that has been exploded by the development of molecular biology since the 1950s. According to Lecourt, while Canguilhem rightly highlighted the need to understand and preserve vitalism as a meaningful intellectual and ethical demand rather than a positive philosophy of life, this did not prevent him from attaching a substantialist and anthropocentric