Vitalism/Organicism (1800-1840)

Vitalism is the dominant philosophy of the Romantic approach to nature. It originates in German Naturphilosophie, in the work of Goethe and that of Immanuel Kant, and it is through vitalism that organicism enters 19th and 20th century science.

Characteristics of the Romantic (and later organic) approach to nature and mind

• The organism (not the machine) as the root metaphor for nature
  
• Science must not bring about a separation between humanity and nature:
  humanity is a part of nature and nature is a part of humanity
  
• Science must be knowledge of nature as a whole-because of the unity of nature,
  • smaller natural events reflect the characteristics of larger natural events and vice versa:
  • Exs: The cell as a microcosm of the solar system
    rivers are to the earth as veins are to the body
  • Rejection of the fragmentary nature of mechanism and of the reductionism it entailed
    
• Acceptance of a LEBENSKRAFT, a life force, sometimes manifest as a Seelenkraft (mind force) - Because of the vital force, it is impossible to reduce of the phenomena of life (and mind) solely to principles of physics and chemistry
  
• Doctrine of metamorphosis: change, development, unfolding are a perpetual feature of life and mind.
  • Exs: Wundt's Entwicklung
  • the new science (1810ish) of embryology
    
• Wechselwirkung: interaction or interrelationship that results in change.
  
  • All things are in constant interaction and that interaction produces change, so that the properties of the mind or body at one moment are transformed by changes that result from prior interelationsships. The interrelationships are active and dynamic rather than passive and static. They may never happen exactly the same way twice.
    
  • Organisms are in constant Wechselwirkung, internally and with their environments- The interaction of the whole, not any set of parts is the essence of life.
    
  • No one part can be considered more important than another-all interact.
    
• Teleology: all life processes (and organisms themselves) are imbued with purposiveness. The most complicated manifestation of the purposiveness of life is mental volition.
  
  • Rejection of sole reliance on mechanistic or efficient cause in nature. A modern return to Aristotle's final cause.
    
• Emergence: in any organized system, qualitatively novel properties emerge from dynamic interactions that could not be predicted from knowledge of the interacting elements.
  
  • Entails rejection of radical elementalism and focus on the interacting whole.
    Sometimes the whole is very different from the sum of its parts.

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