What Does vitalism Mean
The French word vitalisme came to Castilian as vitalism . The term is used to refer to the doctrine that, to provide an explanation about biological phenomena, goes beyond matter and uses a force that is typical of living beings .
According to vitalism, living organisms have an immaterial vital force that allows them to differentiate themselves from inanimate objects. This force is not the energy that physics recognizes, but a different impulse that makes life possible.
For vitalism, therefore, the essence of the living being does not lie in matter. The element that makes the difference is what the French philosopher and writer Henri Bergson called élan vital : vital force . This impulse cannot be explained from chemistry or from physics.
The vital force that vitalism postulates can be associated with concepts such as spirit or soul and is what differentiates the living from the inert. In this sense, when a person passes away, he basically loses his life force.
The origins of vitalism can be traced years before the nineteenth century , although it began to expand in the second part of that century and took hold at the beginning of the twentieth century . In the field of biology , vitalism meant transcending physicochemical phenomena and sustaining that the primary difference between a living being and an inorganic element is the vital force, an irreducible principle.
In philosophy , meanwhile, vitalism appears as a tendency that affirms that life lacks a foundation that is external to it. In this way, the value of life is located in life itself.
The list of scholars who have represented vitalism throughout history is very broad. The name that stands out is that of John Jacob Berzelius , a chemist born in Sweden in 1779, who is considered the main promoter of the current . But we cannot fail to mention the doctors Georg Ernst Stahl and Téophile de Bordeu , the doctors Samuel Hahnemann and Xavier Bichat or, more recently, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich .
Reich related the concept of vital impulse with one of his own authorship, the orgone . It is a type of esoteric energy that he proposed in the 1930s and that his disciple Charles Kelley continued to develop after his death in 1957. It was considered a substance present everywhere and devoid of mass, similar to the luminiferous ether. although closer to vital energy than inert matter.
Other recognized personalities who dedicated part of their research work to vitalism was Friedrich Nietzsche , one of the most relevant figures in Western philosophy. It is precisely framed in this movement according to which life is a fundamental value . Nietzsche was opposed to the ideas of Greek philosophy that despise earthly things for belonging to the apparent world and also to the emphasis on the rationality of our species.
His version of vitalism understands life as the only thing that has its own value and considers that the rest of the elements serve life . This value is emotional and biological, with a special focus on the body, instincts, feelings and drives. These ideas place him on the list of so-called irrationalist philosophers , along with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, because all three criticize rationality, they distrust reason in favor of the plane of emotions. He is also framed in the philosophers of suspicion with Freud and Marx, for "suspecting" that consciousness is not what unites us beyond our differences.