Adapted from the Introduction to Vitalism: On the Tracks of Life by Gioacchino Leo Séra, available from Rogue Scholar Press

The term “vitalism” has become somewhat confused in recent years.

In biology, vitalism refers to a set of ideas going back millennia which hold that living beings are distinct from non-living inanimate objects because they contain some sort of non-material life energy, to which different cultures and theorists have given different names, such as pneuma (Greek) prana (Sanskrit) and qi (Chinese). The concept to which vitalism is usually opposed is mechanism. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 states that mechanism

seeks to explain all “vital” phenomena as physical and chemical facts; whether or not these facts are in turn reducible to mass and motion becomes a secondary question, although Mechanists are generally inclined to favour such reduction. The theory opposed to this biological mechanism is no longer Dynamism, but Vitalism or Neo-vitalism, which maintains that vital activities cannot be explained, and never will be explained, by the laws which govern lifeless matter.

Since the distinction between the living and the non-living would seem to be self-evident, vitalism was the dominant paradigm in the human sciences, or proto-sciences, for most of their existence, from the ancient Greeks up to the early modern period, though there have always been dissenting voices such as Democritus and Lucretius, who are seen today as forerunners of mechanism. And it is they, and not their vitalist contemporaries, who inspired the scientific thinkers of the Renaissance, who in turn inspired the founders of modern biology and other sciences, such as Descartes, Newton, and later Darwin.

It was against these mechanist thinkers of the early modern period that a new and more nuanced theory of life energy was asserted in the 18th and 19th centuries. The term “vitalism” was coined by Charles-Louis Dumas in 1800 to refer specifically to the doctrines of Paul Joseph Barthez and the Montpellier School of Medicine. Barthez had developed the concept of the “vital principle” in contradistinction to both the physical body and the soul or conscious mind, a third “thing” (though he could never decide if it was material or not) which bears some resemblance to later ideas of the unconscious developed in psychology.

Barthez wrote:

It seems to me that one cannot help but distinguish the Vital Principle of Man from his thinking Soul. This is an essential distinction, whether one imagines that these two principles exist by themselves and are substances, or whether one supposes that they exist as attributes and modifications of one and the same substance… It makes little difference if one calls the Vital Principle Soul, Arché, Nature, etc., but what is absolutely essential is that no connection is ever drawn between the determination of this principle and the affections that derive from the faculties of prudence or any other faculties attributed to the Soul.

These vitalists—or neo-vitalists, since their ideas were hardly the same as the older and quasi-religious ideas of a mystical life force—made some notable objections to the prevailing mechanist views in science. But ultimately, the existence of vital energy could not be proven to the satisfaction of the scientific method, and today vitalism in the sciences is usually dismissed with Julian Huxley’s witty retort that positing a “life energy” no more explains life than positing a “locomotive energy” explains a train.

So what does any of this have to do with philosophy, and more specifically with Nietzsche? Although Nietzsche’s philosophy is grounded in biology, he did not put forth any specific theory of biology and science. His overriding position was extreme skepticism towards everything—i.e., the scientific method—and he was heavily influenced by Lange’s History of Materialism in his early career, as is especially evident in Human, All-Too Human and The Dawn. Thus to the extent that he takes a side in the mechanism versus vitalism debate, he sides with the mechanists and their skepticism (something which is also true, as we will see, of the author of this book Leo Séra).

The convergence of biological vitalism and Nietzsche comes through Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, the first great influence on the young Nietzsche, was unquestionably a biological vitalist, as shown by the chapters on “Physiology and Pathology” and “Animal Magnetism and Magic” in On the Will in Nature. Although this belief in a life energy as such did not carry over into Nietzsche’s philosophy, doubtless because it smelled of theology and metaphysics, what did carry over was Schopenhauer’s insistence on the unconscious nature of the will:

this will, far from being inseparable from, and even a mere result of, knowledge, differs radically and entirely from, and is quite independent of, knowledge, which is secondary and of later origin; and can consequently subsist and manifest itself without knowledge: a thing which actually takes place throughout the whole of Nature, from the animal kingdom downwards … 

[K]nowledge with its substratum, the intellect, is a merely secondary phenomenon, differing completely from the will, only accompanying its higher degrees of objectification and not essential to it … 

Thus for Schopenhauer, as for Barthez, neither the conscious volition nor the intellect are the same as the will, or life principle. For Schopenhauer, the will is metaphysical. Barthez could not decide if the life principle was material or not, immanent or transcendent, but he is in agreement with Schopenhauer that it is not conscious. For Nietzsche, the principle of life was what he later called the will to power. Like Schopenhauer’s will and Barthez’s life principle, it is something other than the conscious mind and reasoning intellect. Unlike Schopenhauer’s will, it is entirely immanent in existence.

Nietzsche arguably does leave open the possibility that there is a transcendent element or dimension, insofar as his philosophy, rooted in skepticism and epistemological modesty, does not absolutely deny the transcendent so much as ignore it, since it is not apparent to the senses and is hopelessly mired in abstract concepts and illusions. This insistence on immanence would later be identified as a key characteristic of the school of thought of which Nietzsche would be considered a progenitor, and which would eventually be called “German vitalism”—lebensphilosophie.

 

Lebensphilosophie

Lebensphilosophie is “life philosophy.” Its translation as “vitalism” has been somewhat unfortunate, since that term already existed in the sciences and denotes a different set of concepts and ideas, although there is sometimes overlap. Frederick Beiser in his recent study of German lebensphilosophie gives the following list of its characteristics:

a completely immanent philosophy, void of all transcendent entities; individualism and relativism in ethics; opposition to pessimism and an affirmative attitude toward life; historicism and hermeneutics in the study of culture and society; and an individualist and relativist conception of philosophy. Lebenphilosophie was the first strictly non-religious philosophy—its first principle was atheist or agnostic—and the first explicitly relativist ethics in the history of Western philosophy.

Although Nietzsche himself did not use the term lebensphilosophie (let alone “vitalism”) to describe his ideas and views, that label came to be applied to him and to other, later thinkers who share some or all of these characteristics. Beiser focuses on Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, both contemporaries of Nietzsche. Whereas Nietzsche was a right-wing radical—he endorsed Georges Brandes’ description of his philosophy as “aristocractic radicalism”—Dilthey and Simmel were both political liberals. Thus, from its inception in these three thinkers, lebensphilosophie or German vitalism has been split between its right and left wings.

In his encyclopedic article “Life: Vitalism” for the left-wing Theory, Culture & Society, written in 2006, Scott Lash uses “vitalism” and “lebensphilosophie” interchangeably and gives the following genealogy of vitalist thinkers:

There are three important generations of modern vitalists. There is a generation born about 1840–45 including Nietzsche and the sociologist Gabriel Tarde; the generation born about 1860 including the philosopher Bergson and the sociologist Simmel, and the generation born about 1925–33 including Gilles Deleuze, Foucault and Antonio Negri. Contemporary neo-vitalism can in many respects be understood as Deleuzian. There seem to be two vitalist genealogies. One connects Tarde to Bergson and Deleuze, and the other runs from Nietzsche through Simmel to Foucault. The Bergsonian tradition focuses on perception and sensation while the Nietzschean tradition focuses on power. 

What we see here is that, as with Nietzsche himself, lebensphilosophie underwent a kind of rehabilitation and reorganization after the second World War, with its rightist elements being suppressed or misrepresented. This is largely due to the prominence of Gilles Deleuze, who wrote influential books on Nietzsche and Henri Bergson in the 1960s and who considered himself to be a vitalist, famously declaring, “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is.”

The genealogy that Lash establishes for contemporary Deleuzian vitalism is not, however, the only branch that grew from the root of Nietzsche’s ideas (or, as Deleuzians would prefer to say it, not the only shoot from the Nietzschean rhizome). In his 1932 study The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau, Gerald Spring establishes a quite different genealogy of vitalism. He sees its antecedent in Romanticism, both in Germany and in France, and the development of Romanticism into vitalism-lebensphilosophie as a result of its fusion with ideas of the active unconscious from the Montpellier vitalists and others.

The romantic theory of the German poets and philosophers amounts practically to a generalization of the vitalism of biological theorists, they were given to extending the vitalistic formulas to all orders of reality. Depreciating mechanism or cold intelligence these German romantics glorified “vital impulse” which they considered to be the underlying principle of all reality. To intellectual analysis which decomposes the whole into its parts and mechanical construction which builds up by means of assembling parts already given, they opposed that obscure power of creation and synthesis working spontaneously from inside outwards which is manifested by what we call life. These romantics recognized this power of life in societies no less than in biological organisms.

Spring’s characterization of vitalism is worthwhile:

Vitalism in this broader sense might be called a philosophy of affirmation since it is anti-ascetic, opposing all asceticism in religion and philosophy and destructive or negative intellectualism. … [Vitalists] are inclined to value intuition more than intellect and to glorify “life” as the ultimate reality. Pragmatism follows from this as a matter of course, for vitalists naturally wish to heighten life and to further it in every way.  [my emphasis]

Much importance is attached by vitalists to instinct or “unconscious spontaneity” which they view as superior to reason or cold intelligence. Instinct, moreover, has its social equivalent in tradition so that vitalists, as a rule, deprecate undue intellectual interference in social evolution, preferring to trust the irrational or non-rational continuity or spontaneity of life itself. Thus eighteenth Century rationalism and the Contrat Social of Jean Jacques Rousseau and their sequel, the French Revolution, are anathema to vitalists. …

Vitalists are advocates of intense living and emphasize the importance of strength of character—one thinks of the cult of energy of Stendhal, Merimée, Gobineau and Nietzsche. Vitalism is anti-intellectual and hostile to rationalism; reason proceeds by means of identity, while life makes for differentiation. Vitalists abhor the abstract notion of man brought into fashion by the “philosophes” of eighteenth Century France and the more logical and consistent among them combat the “égalitaires” and, in particular, the attempt of Rousseau the rationalist to create an artificial equality among men.

Vitalists tend to distrust the dispassionate use of the intellect and to deny the concept of absolute truth, because they favor individual truths. They sympathize with illusion whenever it is seen to favor life.

What Spring describes here is the vitalism of the Right. This line or branch of vitalist thought, from Gobineau, Stendhal and Nietzsche, to Ludwig Klages and Oswald Spengler, has been largely suppressed and ignored since the second World War, only coming to relative prominence once again in the 21st century thanks to the republication of works by Spengler and Klages, and the popularization of Nietzschean vitalism by Bronze Age Pervert.

There are many similarities and overlaps between the vitalist thought of the Right and that of the Left; often the difference is in how certain ideas are applied rather than the ideas themselves. As Jonathan Bowden noted, the Left has always liked the part of Nietzsche’s philosophy which is destructive and critical, particularly towards Christianity. Nietzsche’s rejection of conventional morality informs both the leftist and rightist interpretation of him, though in very different ways. For the Right, Nietzsche’s “immoralism” means that war, slavery, exploitation, and cruelty must be seen anew, not with the condemnatory eye of a moralist but with a biologist’s and anthropologist’s eye, in order to understand their functions in the life process. For the Left, immoralism means something else, perhaps best exemplified by André Gide’s novel The Immoralist, written in 1901 when Nietzsche’s corpse was barely in the grave, in which the main character uses Nietzsche’s ideas as a justification for pederasty and homosexuality. One can see from this example that the split between leftist and rightist interpretations of Nietzsche precedes World War 2.

In my view, the key distinction between rightist and leftist vitalism lies in their different relationship to nature. Rightist vitalism extols and reveres nature, and looks to nature for its understanding of what life is and how it functions. Nature therefore means biology, animal life, and ecology, but with the key understanding that nature is hierarchical and predatory. This is especially true of Nietzsche and Klages. For leftist vitalism, nature seems to be the enemy, something to be overturned. They seem more interested in the grotesque than in the beautiful. In this way, “leftist vitalism” is something of a misnomer since it is often theory divorced from biological life; the conceptual and logocentric play of the intellect, divorced from the body.

For rightist vitalism, it is not a matter of privileging the body over the mind, but rather, as Jonathan Bowden said, of “bringing the mind and the fist together.” Gioacchino Leo Séra, author of Vitalism: On the Tracks of Life, wrote:

I will only say that in some men the strongest thought coincides with the most intense life, and that these men are, or should be, at the top of the tree. … [I]n the highest stages life coincides with thought, and it is only when going down from the two parts of the hierarchical curve that we find either the predominance of life in its lower and more brutal functions, or thought more or less morbid with its abstractions and abstrusenesses. I maintain, however, that for the highest interest of life, its preservation, I incline to the first defect rather than to the second.

Vitalism has some commonality with Buddhism’s critique of the discursive intellect, with its endless verbalizing and fabrications which obscure direct perception and cognition. But whereas Buddhism sees direct perception as a function of the mind (in its original, pure state, which is metaphysical), vitalism, as a secular philosophy rooted in biology, sees direct perception as the instinct of the body. Insofar as Séra inclines towards the body rather than the mind or intellect, he somewhat agrees with Ludwig Klages, for whom the development of the intellect, the conceptual mind, was a kind of cosmic disaster not unlike the way Rust Cohle describes the emergence of human consciousness in True Detective. But vitalism need not be primitivism, an attempt—perhaps futile and impossible—to return to a pre-conscious state of animality and instinct. Rather, it can be the attempt to to integrate intellect and instinct, to fuse them into a higher state of mind and being, to make “the strongest thought coincide with the most intense life,” as Séra says. Since man is both body and mind, or soul, regardless of whether one sees them as dualistically separate or as different aspects of the same thing, both should be cultivated to their maximum potential.

In his article Lash correctly asserts that vitalism is rooted in Heraclitus’ philosophy of flux and becoming, rather than the Parmenidean-Aristotelian tradition of being and stasis. One might say it is Dionysian rather than Apollonian. At the heart of vitalism is the suspicion, and the desire, that life can be something more than it is, something more than “mere life” as Bronze Age Pervert says. The ordinary life which is given is not enough, especially in our day and age. Ludwig Klages wrote of the need for rausch, ecstasy. A half century earlier, Charles Baudelaire described the something more as akin to intoxication:

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

At its best, vitalist thought can inspire the quest for this intoxicating something more, in whatever forms it may take.