Vitalism

Vitalism (Latin vita 'life' ) is a collective term for lessons that take as the basis of all living a life force (vis vitalis ) as an independent principle or soul. In order for a essential difference between organic and inorganic is claimed. The term vitalism is a battle cry from the 19th century.

The representatives of vitalism are called vitalists. As a precursor to the vitalism of Aristotle may apply, who regarded the living as possible by a principle of life, which he called entelechy. However, his metaphysics also be interpreted functionalist - materialist. Significant representatives of vitalism in the strict sense were Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644), Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734), Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776) and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 -1840 ). The School of Montpellier represents in the late 18th and early 19th century, a peculiar kind of vitalism, which stands out of steel animism. In the 19th and early 20th century, the thinkers of the philosophy of life represented positions of vitalism. The last major biologist, who represented a vitalist position ( neo-vitalism ), was Hans Driesch ( 1867-1941 ). He referred to the Aristotelian concept of entelechy.

Since then, especially since the synthesis of urea in 1828 by Friedrich Wöhler and certainly since the spontaneous generation of amino acids in the experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold C. Urey in 1959, the vitalistic approach in biology is considered outdated. It is concluded there that life force or vital energy for producing organic substances are not necessary. From vitalists however this indicated that the manipulated or spontaneous emergence of individual building blocks of life is not to be equated with the emergence of animated substance.

Features or elements of a vitalistic interpretation can also be found in the works of Franz Anton Mesmer ( " animal magnetism " ), Karl von Reichenbach ( "OD " ), Henri Bergson ( " élan vital " ), Alfred North Whitehead ( " creativity" ), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( " Radial power " ), Wilhelm Reich ( " orgone " ), Adolf Portmann ( " self-presentation " ), Arthur Koestler ( "The Ghost in the Machine" ), Ken Wilber ( " holon " ), Ervin Laszlo ( " Akashic field" ) and Rupert Sheldrake ( " morphogenetic field"), and in the Far Eastern concept of a life force prana or qi, which was also taken up by the modern Western esotericism.

In recent years some cell biologists attacked this term in a figurative sense again as "molecular vitalism ."