Boerhaave (1668 â 1738) was able to reject the Cartesian ..... Knoeff R. Herman Boerhaave (1668-1734): Calvinist chemist and physician. History of science ...
Vitalism in Contemporary Western Herbal Medicine – asset or burden? Part 1: A historical survey of vitalism
Sabine Hiller M.Litt., B.Sc.
Abstract Vitalism is regarded as a defining feature of most Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) modalities, and Contemporary Western Herbal Medicine (CWHM) is no exception. In order to fully understand the current function of CWHM vitalism it is necessary to place it within a historical context. This article gives a brief overview of the history of vitalism and examines the reasons behind its emergence. While the attribution of inexplicable events to immaterial agents is as old as humanity itself, it is shown that vitalistic concepts fulfilled a more specific role in physiological thinking and need to be differentiated from the wide spectrum of related concepts. The article further distinguishes between the historical use of vitalism as a heuristic device on the one hand and as a term that postulated the existence of purposeful forces or agents on the other. Finally, it outlines the circumstances under which vitalism became superfluous in nineteenth-century physiological theory. Keywords: Vitalism; mechanism; Montpellier vitalism; Naturphilosophie. 1
1. Introduction One of the features distinguishing CWHM from the biomedical use of botanical medicines is vitalism – whether openly embraced or merely tolerated, some belief in vitalism is seen as integral to the practice. Vitalism, alongside humoral and other traditional doctrines, is often taught in B.Sc. herbal medicine/herbal science courses within so-called ‘philosophy’ modules. However, philosophy within CWHM is understood as the instruction in such doctrines, and does not imply a philosophical analysis or evaluation of the underlying concepts.2 In this first article in a series of two, I will give a historical overview of the genealogy of vitalism, its functions within an emerging natural science and its subsequent decline. The second article will examine and evaluate the present-day use of vitalism within CWHM in the light of this historical and conceptual exposition.
2. Early days – prehistory to scientific revolution The attribution of inexplicable events to conscious external agents is a feature of human behaviour as old as humanity itself. Gods and spirits were held responsible for droughts, floods and illness, and the fact that upon a creature’s death its warmth and animation disappeared, suggested that an invisible force or spirit ruled the body and left it at the time of death. Considering that with death breathing ceased and the heart stopped, it is not surprising that the Greek pneuma (breath) came to mean ‘soul’, and that both Plato and Aristotle held a cardiocentric view of the body (Martensen, 2004, p.147). While cosmologies involving the postulation of non-material souls were clearly popular, almost at the very beginning of Greek philosophy philosophers such as Democritus, Leucippus and Epicurus were outlining materialist positions. They described everything as composed of atoms, ascribed thoughts to physical processes, and taught that souls, equally composed of atoms, perished with the body (Lange, 1865, pp. 3-36; Russell, 1925, p. 211; Russell, 1972, pp. 64-73). Such materialist attempts at explaining life became limited from late antiquity well into the Renaissance, due to the hold of the Catholic Church and Aristotelianism on intellectual life. According to Aristotle form was a teleological principle which gave unity to a portion of matter. This meant all natural things contained an internal principle leading to a teleological conclusion - such as an acorn becoming an oak tree, or rocks falling downwards in order to attain their ultimate goal of reaching the centre of the earth. This inbuilt principle of purpose seemed to explain all natural processes, and any other attempts at explanation were more than discouraged (Russell, 1945, p.203-7; Skirry, 2006). Vesalius (1514-1564), Fuchs (1501-1566) and Copernicus (1473-1543) heralded the Scientific Revolution by attempting to understand nature without relying on metaphysical assumptions or blindly accepting the orthodoxy of ancient authority (Martensen, 2004, p.2), challenging Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galen's doctrine of medicine.3 Despite these challenges, dominant practices remained rooted in the older concepts for a considerable time. From the jumble of terminology and meanings used, however, a distinction may be attempted between concepts such as pneuma, psyche and the Hippocratic to enormôn on the one hand, and vis medicatrix naturae on the other. The latter described the ability of the organism to recover – in most cases – from injury or illness thanks to the ‘tincture of time’ (Whorton, 2002; Lohff, 2001).4 This ‘self-healing power’ was contained in Hippocratic teachings that ‘nature is the best physician’, and in Paracelsus’ mumia, the self-healing ‘inherent balm’ (Weeks, 2008; Gibbons, 2001).
It is thought that the term ‘vitalism’ was first used by Charles-Louis Dumas in the late 1790s to describe Montpellier vitalism, but was retroactively applied to older works such as those by Plato and Aristotle (Waisse et al, 2011; Wolfe, 2012; Wolfe and Terrada, 2008). Such retrofitting is problematic as “[t]he psyche of ancient Greek usage was at once a spiritual, a vital, and a rational principle. Aristotle and Galen, for example, used the word to denote the source of mind, of consciousness and of life itself.” (Haigh, 1984) The Hippocratic to enormôn or impetum faciens was identified by some with the divine breath breathed into the body of man (French, 1990, p.102), while others used it to express sometimes the functions which had been ascribed to the vegetative, and at other times those which had been ascribed to the sentient soul; sometimes to designate the cause of the contractile power of the muscular fibre, and at other times the source of the sensibility of the nervous system. (Thomson, 1832; see also French, 2003, pp.243-4) While vitalism was generally seen as a descendent of the Hippocratic to enormôn, late 18th century physician Barthez (1734 -1806) was explicit in replacing to enormôn with vital principle, drawing a sharp distinction between the two concepts (Canguilhem, 1965, p.62). It becomes clear that attributing vitalism to authors prior to the mid-eighteenth century is extremely problematic and can lead to anachronisms. In fact, historian of biology William Coleman (1977, p.145) urged a thorough review of the term vitalism, because of its exceptional ambiguity and susceptibility to being misused, saying that “without full and explicit qualification [its] employment is usually pernicious” (Coleman, 1977, p.12).
3. Enlightenment mechanism and vitalism With the Scientific Revolution materialist conceptions of the world became once again possible, and the success of classical physics led to all phenomena of nature, including living organisms, being understood within a new, mechanistic framework (De Klerk, 1979). Mechanism introduced a redefinition of matter, plus methodological and explanatory procedures authorized by an evolving epistemology (Reill, 2005, p.34). “An explanation of natural phenomena couched in terms of qualities observable to the unaided senses assumed a nature different from one that appealed to microscopic mechanisms, magical natures, or invisible forces.” (Park and Dastin, 2006, p.11) Both Descartes (1596-1650) and van Helmont (1577-1644) turned away from the teachings of traditionalists and schoolmen, and rebelled against Aristotle and Galen, albeit in different ways, and each inspired different groups of anti-mechanists. Of particular importance was Descartes, who
insisted on a radical distinction between matter and mind, partly from religious motivations, but also to eliminate mentality from the nature of physical things, thereby enabling the conception of a new mechanistic physics. (Reill, 2005; Skirry, 2008; Skirry, 2006).
3.1 Mechanism and the emergence of animist and vitalist hypotheses Students and practitioners of the life sciences dreamed of formulating a coherence in the living world similar to that of Newtonian physics (Haigh, 1977). The aim was to reduce the varied expression of nature to simple principles, which could then be used to predict and control natural processes (Reill, 2005; Salthe, 2008). Unlike both Aristotelianism and hermeticism, which saw matter as animated and endowed with appetites, desires and sympathies, matter was now seen as movable but inert; rather than being driven by internal principles of purpose and self-regulation, the movements of matter obeyed physical laws that could be discovered and formulated (Reill, 2005, pp.5, 34). Mechanists considered that cause and effect were directly proportional, and that a fixed relationship between them could be established. Mathematics assumed a prime position, not necessarily through direct measurement and quantification, but by favouring “the reduction of things to fixed, logically coherent principles inspired by mathematics' simplicity and elegance.” (Reill, 2005, p.35) Mechanism thus seemed to offer a haven of security in a world of chaos and unrest, but towards the middle of the eighteenth century young intellectuals noted with dissatisfaction that the principles of mechanism had been employed to support the status of political absolutism, religious orthodoxy and generally to maintain established social hierarchies. Moreover, an atmosphere of scepticism had developed against the over-reliance by mechanists on abstract reasoning in constructing a coherent picture of reality. As regards medicine, an iatromechanical view of physiology meant that its proponents had to explain movement within the living organism – matter after all was now seen as a “passive substance with no innate ability to generate motion.” (Haigh, 1984) As the orthodox European medical man in 1700 was not only a mechanist, but also a dualist who believed that the living being was the combination of a material body and an immaterial soul, explaining the action of voluntary muscles posed no problem to a believer. The soul was assumed to “oversee the voluntary, willed and rationally determined functions of the body” (Haigh, 1984). However, there was opposition to the Cartesian model from various stand-points: La Mettrie (1709-1751) saw the postulation of an immortal soul as an impediment to research and understanding, and insisted on the interconnectedness of nature, regarding humans as entirely physical creatures just like other animals and plants (Wellmann, 1992, p.170). Boerhaave (1668 – 1738) was able to reject the Cartesian
mind-body problem on the strength of his Calvinism and instead accepted Newtonian natural philosophy grounded in the providence and intelligence of God (Knoeff, 2001, pp.46-51; Powers, n.d.). He argued that study should focus solely on ‘how’ the body functions, and not be concerned with the ‘why’. However, the explanation of autonomic functions such as digestion, growth and heart rate continued to pose major problems. The inability of mechanists to provide a satisfactory account for, say, the change of heart function in response to mental states (as an involuntary organ the heart ought to be independent of the soul) provided a fertile ground for animist and vitalist hypotheses (Haigh, 1984). Late Enlightenment responses to mechanism are extremely difficult to categorise – as Wolfe and Terada (2008) point out, it is a “confusing historical and doctrinal terrain”. Not only are there a variety of anti-mechanistic responses, but the term ‘mechanism’ itself needs clarification. While Cartesian mechanistic physiology is often accused of seeing the body simply as a machine (eliminativist mechanism), it did not deny the existence of goal-directed processes, and was replete with functional language. “[T]he Cartesian point is not that bodies are actually machines […] but rather that the structure and behavior of bodies are to be explained in the same way that we explain the structure and behavior of machines (a reductionist view)” (Wolfe and Terrada, 2008). This description ties in with Allen’s distinction between operative or explanatory mechanism (mechanism as an epistemology) and philosophical mechanism (mechanism as an ontology). Both consist of the expectation that any biological process is amenable to a description in terms of its component parts and the activities through which they interact – however, not every operative mechanism is necessarily a philosophical one (Allen, 2005, pp.263-4). Strategies to deal with the critique of mechanism were manifold and involved dealing with the question “whether organisms are merely specially structured collections of molecules, or when [sic] they embody something qualitatively different and inexplicable in physical and chemical terms.” (Allen, 2005, p.265) Neo-mechanists such as Condorcet and Laplace retained the notion of the inertness of matter, but limited the role of mathematics and adopted an attitude of epistemological modesty (Reill, 2003, pp.32-3). Several attempts have been made to categorise so-called vitalist approaches of the late Enlightenment. According to Haigh (1984), they fell largely into three camps: animists, vitalists and organicists. Animists like Georg E. Stahl (1659-1734) were heir to Descartes’s dualist theory of nature, and proposed that a rational soul or anima controlled the activities of the body. Vitalists included those who proposed a third substance besides body and soul as a life-conferring principle,
while another group of vitalists, whom Haigh calls ‘organicists’, were heir to Helmont’s teachings and saw vital properties as intrinsic to the body (Haigh, 1984; Martensen, 2004, pp. 31-32; Lohff, 2001). Joan-Baptista Helmont (1577-1644), like Descartes a rebel against Aristotle and Galen, followed Paracelsus in teaching that a life-force (archeus) was immanent in all bodies (living and non-living): “in other words, the world consisted of enmattered psychoid impulses that were intrinsic, rather than superadded to matter” (Pagel, 1982, p.36; Martensen, 2004, p.31). Haigh calls the proponents of this form of vitalism monists who believed that vital properties such as sensibility and contractility reside in the bodily parts themselves. Although they considered these properties to be distinct from and irreducible to the physical ones, they thought them to be intrinsic in the material of the body and a product of its organization (Haigh, 1984). However, as Wolfe and Terada point out, organicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was not a doctrine of vital forces, but arose from solidism. It was associated with the Paris medical faculty, and “held that illness is the dysfunction of a particular organ, not of the organism as a whole” (Wolfe and Terrada, 2008). 5As such, organicism was almost the opposite to its sense as ‘wholism’ or ‘vitalism’ in twentieth-century philosophy of biology.
3.2 Montpellier vitalism: vital force as a heuristic The autonomy gained by the life sciences during the eighteenth century allowed for the introduction of theoretical concepts that seemed not directly reducible to physics. When Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) introduced irritability as a property of muscle tissue, he could not as yet explain its causes, nor reduce the phenomenon to known physical properties of that tissue. [H]e supposed that it depended on the “primordial fabrication” of the parts that are susceptible to it. The postulation of such unexplainable properties was considered perfectly legitimate insofar as they – or their effects – were experientially observable (Kaitaro, 2008). The aim was therefore to postulate vital forces and properties that applied exclusively to life, but which could be reconciled with the knowledge that the body was subject to physical and chemical laws (De Klerk, 1979; Lohff, 2001). According to Kaitaro (2008) this “opened the way to attributing vital properties to matter itself, without needing recourse to soul-like entities.” Some physiologists argued that the vital force was a property of organic matter, others connected it with the galvanic force or asserted that it was hidden within the function of nerves. Two main rationales stand out: vital force as a valuable research hypothesis, and the view that a vital force exists in reality (Lohff, 2001; Kaitaro, 2008).
In Benton’s typology, these rationales would be attributed to ‘phenomenalist vitalism’ and ‘realist vitalism’ respectively (Benton, 1974). ‘Phenomenalist vitalists’ were epistemological sceptics who conceived of vital powers “as general relationships arrived at through observation of phenomena. No underlying agency was hypothesized.” (Benton, 1974, p.21) ‘Realist vitalists’ in contrast, “[hypothesised] the existence of a non-physico-chemical agency or entity underlying the observable vital phenomena which are its effects.” (Benton, 1974, p.21) Interestingly, Benton chooses as examples an eighteenth-century physiologist for the first category and one from the nineteenth century for the second one (Benton, 1974, pp. 25-30). This exemplifies the point Wolfe and Terada as well as Reill make – that there is a distinctive difference between late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century vitalisms.
Wolfe and Terada, in examining the Montpellier school of vitalism during the period of 1740-1800, state that using ‘unknowns’ as a means to describe clusters of phenomena “was a key feature of physiological thinking in this period and that the vitalists employ this in such a way as to conceive of vitality without locating it in a special substance.” (Wolfe and Terada, 2008) This led to what Wolfe and Terada describe as a “neither-nor” situation between mechanism and animism [which] characterises most of the interesting and innovative medical, physiological, and “biophilosophical” developments of the mid-to-late Enlightenment, whether Haller and his various disciples, some leaning more towards mechanism, some (like Zimmermann) more towards vitalism, Newtonian biomedicine in England […], Maupertuis’ appeal to forces of attraction to explain molecular-level properties of living beings... or Montpellier vitalism (Wolfe and Terada, 2008). Despite the shifting boundaries between mechanism and vitalism, ‘Montpelliérains’ were reproached by the Paris school for their “contradictions and metaphysical obscurity” as well as “over-using the notion of what they termed the vital principle, using this occult being quite vaguely, in order to attribute to it all the phenomena they found difficult to explain.” (Cuvier, (1810), quoted in Wolfe and Terada, 2008) Montpellier vitalist Théophile Bordeu (1722-1776) tried to combine the insights of animism with the explanatory devices of mechanism, suggesting that each organ had its own independence, and therefore its own specific organ vitality, “inherent in and inseparable from the very substance of living matter.” (Haigh, 1977; see also: Wolfe and Terada, 2008, p. 573; Lohff, 2001, p. 552; Reill, 2005, pp. 131-3) By contrast, Barthez regarded the vital principle as co-existing with the body and the rational soul, but refused to make an ontological commitment regarding its nature (Haigh,
1977). His position is regarded as undecided between a ‘realist’ assertion of a vital force, its conception as a weak emergent property, or as a place holder (Wolfe and Terada, 2008; Haigh, 1984; Lohff, 2001; Williams, 2003, p.263). Jean Grimaud (1750-89) not only re-introduced dualist perspectives, but based them on both spiritualist and aesthetic foundations, which “opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism” (Williams, 2008, p.596). Despite these inconsistencies, Wolfe and Terada (2008) describe Montpellier vitalism as an expanded mechanism, close to materialism. As such, late Enlightenment vitalism should not be conflated with developments in the nineteenth century, when vitalism became both spiritualist and conservative, nor with the neo-vitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exemplified by Driesch.
4. The transition to Romantic Naturphilosophie With the dreams and aspirations of the French Revolution disappointed, later defenders of Montpellier vitalism moved to the right in the new ideological space provided by these events (Williams, 2003, p.328). The epistemological modesty of the late Enlightenment was replaced “with an epistemological aggressiveness staking out bold new claims to power and knowledge.” (Reill, 2005, p.209) Jacques Lordat (1773-1870), the most important figure in the Montpellier faculty of medicine from 1810 to the 1850s, abandoned the approach of an expanded mechanism and reprimanded the organicists, who “wish only to occupy themselves with the material, and have a horror of the invisible.” (Lordat quoted in Jacyna, 2000, p.33) Lordat held that “certain truths were not, however, present to the clinical gaze” but accessible to an aesthetic sensibility, which he believed should be developed through the study of painting (Jacyna, 2000, p.33-4). He characterised his organicist opponents as Cartesians, because they only recognised physical and spiritual substances and denied the existence of a distinct vital realm (Jacyna, 2000, p.33; see also: Williams, 1994, p.200). In addition, he saw their thinking “as tainted by a revolutionary ideology – as a manifestation of a kind of medical Jacobinism – which called for fundamental change and which glorified conflict.” (Jacyna, 2000, p.35) Lordat’s conservative sensibility was especially insulted by this emphasis on change, and he reproached medical reformers for attempting to form a new science, arguing that “[t]he present ought to be the continuation of the past, just as the future will be the continuation of the present.” (Jacyna, 2000, p.35) Montpellier vitalism was thus purged
of its association with Enlightenment materialism and, in particular through the influence of Lordat, became allied to Catholic conservatism (Williams, 2003, p.328; Williams, 1994, p.136-40). Furthermore, vital forces intended as heuristic devices were now seen as purposeful agents with a material activity. As Larson points out: A vital force is a heuristic device for unifying phenomena where the laws of mechanical causality do not suffice. Such a device cannot found a theory or lead to knowledge of objects and their constitution; it simply offers a subjective rule for judging nature. Kant went to warn that even such attenuated teleological principles had a tendency to drive out mechanical principles, and that the purely regulative procedure very easily became constitutive. Purpose, in spite of its hypothetical status, tended to be used as a ground for the explication of phenomena (Larson, 1979).
4.1 Naturphilosophie In addition, a loose group of German intellectuals born in the 1770s or after, who had lost faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, became determined to restructure the way nature was conceived (Reill, 2005, p.200).6 Against the backdrop of decades of warfare and uncertainty, young people yearned “for absolute answers that relegated the mundane world to an epiphenomenon, asserting, in its place, spirit as the true essence of reality.” They rejected the use of mechanism in the explanation of natural phenomena, instead endeavouring to describe the universe “as a living entity developing itself according to inherent principles.” As such, the Naturphilosophen “sacrificed epistemological modesty at the altar of certainty, raising reflective introspection to the status of universal truths of nature, spirit, and humanity.” (Reill, 2005, p.202) Naturphilosophie ascribed a teleological structure to nature – individual organisms as well as nature as a whole were regarded as purposively organised. In contrast to the mechanistic image of a clockwork (fundamentally atemporal and thus ahistorical), nature came to be seen no longer as static and God-given, but temporalized and subject to change – hence nature had acquired a history. (Richards, 2002, p.10-11) Furthermore, this history was acquired on the basis of a strong developmentalism. Not only was nature in constant flux, but this flux was seen as unidirectional, moving continuously from lower to higher life forms, from initial chaos to man (Gould, 1977, p.35; Richards, 2002, p.11, Reill, 2005, pp.37-9). This led to conjectures that lower life forms were merely manifestations of the “apprenticeship of nature in learning to make man” or “a series of human abortions” (Gould, 1977, p.36). Naturphilosophie generally regarded living nature as being composed of fundamental organic types
(archetypi, Urtypen), each being the manifestation of the very ideal they embodied (Richards, 2002, p.9). This ideal was resident in an intelligent archetype, the ‘Divine mind’, and hence “physical nature was seen as a series of variations on ‘thoughts’ of God, a vast unity formed and informed by spiritual forces.” (Menhennet, 1981, p.20; Oken, 1843, p.14) While Kantian biologists had previously employed such archetypal notions in a purely heuristic manner, Naturphilosophen, in line with their teleological position, argued that nature was intrinsically archetypal, and instead of appealing to mechanistic laws, they “invoked special causal forces to explain the instantiation of archetypes and their progressive variations.” (Richards, 2002, p.9) In order to conceive of this production of nature from ideals, Naturphilosophen took up the seventeenth-century quest for a universal mathesis. Mathesis was seen as the self-realisation of nature in its most universal form “whose task it was to order, control, and reign over the everyday flotsam and jetsam of material and empirical reality.” (Reill, 2005, pp.204-5; Grant, 2006, p.96) Nevertheless, there was no sophisticated mathematical reasoning here: “The Naturphilosophen returned to the mechanistic ideal, but with one major proviso, namely that mathematics had first to be philosophized. They considered it necessary to recapture mathematics' essence and meaning”. While rejecting calculation and quantification, they emphasised “receptivity to the ‘magical world of characters’” (Reill, 2005, p.205). As part of their quest for “permanence behind the facade of mere events” (Reill, 205, p.214) Naturphilosophen defined change as circular, thereby achieving an almost static view of nature. Rather than accepting temporal chains of cause and effect, they suggested a detemporalised circular movement involving polar opposites and a continual return to the starting point (Bowie, 2010; Reill, 2005, p.216-8). This obsession with the idea of return not only reflected the fundamental nostalgia within Naturphilosophie, but meant that movement was not seen as sequential change, but the manner in which polar opposites were united. A language of succession was thus transmuted into a “relational hierarchy of values” (Reill, 205, p.218). Physicians in particular felt drawn to Schelling’s teachings, and while it is uncertain whether Schelling can be regarded as a vitalist, other Naturphilosophen such as Oken and Treviranus clearly were. (Bowie, 1993, pp.34-8; Driesch, 1914, pp.94-103, Richards, 2002, pp.287, 293) In contrast to Enlightenment vitalism, their conception of the vital force is of a substantive nature: Treviranus (1776-1837), quoted by Driesch (1914, p.103), considers that “life is something entirely extraneous to matter” which can be quantified and holds that vital force (vis vitalis) and matter are “determined
reciprocally the one by the other”. However, despite Driesch’s claim that the old vitalism “had not been overthrown”, but “died for lack of opponents”, vitalism soon received several blows (Driesch, 1914, p.125). Wöhler’s synthesis of urea in 1828 seriously undermined the popular theory that there was a fundamental difference between inorganic and organic substances (Mendelsohn, 1965; Benton, 1974), while Helmholtz’s discovery of the conservation of energy in 1847 disposed of attempts to argue for the existence of a vital force, based on the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile in the physical and hence biological world (Lohff, 2001). In addition, Theodor Schwann (1810-1882), the co-inventor of the cell theory, was engaged in experimentation that severely questioned the necessity for the postulation of vital forces (Mendelsohn, 1965). Nevertheless, vitalistic elements and terminology continued to persist in many medical doctrines throughout the 1840s (Williams, 1994, p.196).
5. The end of old and the beginning of new vitalism The 1840s and 1850s saw the rejection not only of the a priori speculation of Naturphilosophie but also increasingly that of vitalism, as it was no longer seen to have a place in biology. But medical theoreticians were not as clear about the issue of purpose. Schwann, a deeply religious man, “did not deny purposefulness, but he transferred it from biology to the world as a whole, and from a vital force to the Creator.” (Temkin, 1977, p.342) By choosing a teleomechanical framework, Schwann and other physiologists attempted to adopt an agnostic position regarding the cause of order in living phenomena (Lenoir, 1982, pp.113-5). Teleomechanism was resurrected again in the last decade of the nineteenth century by so-called neo-vitalists, such as Driesch and Hertwig (Lenoir, 1982, p.243). Hans Driesch (1867-1941), unlike the teleomechanists of the middle of the nineteenth century, saw “no objection to the inclusion of teleological considerations as part of natural science, whereby he does not simply mean their employment as occasional heuristic guides, but rather as the purposive ground of organic structure and function.” (DuBois-Reymond in 1894, quoted in Lenoir, 1982, p.244) For ‘vital force’ Driesch adopted the Aristotelian term entelechy, and defined it as a “nonmechanical agent which is the bearer of individualising causality” (Driesch, 1914, p.272). Entelechy enabled the organism to become purposive and, in Driesch’s words, “is possessed by all organisms, plants as well as animals.” (Driesch, 1914, p.83) He conceived “of an order concerning the rank or dignity of entelechies” (Driesch, 1914, p.150) some of which use “the conductive and specific faculties of the brain as a piano-player uses the piano.” (Driesch, 1923, p.96)
Driesch regarded eighteenth-century vitalism as a response to materialism, and neo-vitalism as a response to Darwinism (Driesch, 1914, p.170). He commends Wolff for his hope “that the fall of Darwinism will bring a simultaneous revival of teleology of great significance.” (Driesch, 1914, p. 175; Mayr, 1998, p.13). Driesch frequently refers with admiration to Bergson, whom he describes as “the chief advocate of psycho-physical causality” (Driesch, 1914, n.2, p.163). However, Bergson (1911, p.42) concedes that “the ‘vital principle’ may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance.” (see also: Lawlor and Moulard, 2010; Lacey, 1998, Protevi, 2006) By the 1930s vitalism as a viable concept in biology had finally lost all credibility. “Once physiological and developmental processes began to be explained in terms of physico-chemical processes at the cellular and molecular level, these explanations left no unexplained residue that would require a vitalistic interpretation. Vitalism simply became superfluous.” (Mayr, 1998, p.14) However, this does not mean that all references to vitalism were henceforward dropped. As will be shown in Part 2, despite the fact that no new evidence has emerged to validate vitalism, for its adherents vitalism continues to provide an attractive esoteric concept. It will be shown that while CWHM’s usage of vitalistic language is highly ambiguous, vitalistic concepts are regarded as intrinsic to CWHM practice.
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CAM – Complementary and Alternative Medicine; CWHM - Contemporary Western Herbal Medicine; MH – Medical herbalist 2 For example, the original B.Sc. in Herbal Science at Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland, included a module in “History and Philosophy” albeit without a single philosophy text on its recommended reading list. Cork Institute of Technology. Module PHIL6001. History and philosophy. [cited 2011 May 8] Available from: http://courses.cit.ie/index.cfm/page/module/moduleId/1507 3 For an account of the challenge to Galen, see Bos, 2009. 4 A different spelling - vis mediatrix naturae - can occasionally be encountered. Interestingly, it seems that the Hippocratic term vis medicatrix naturae has in some texts become conflated with the idea of the mediatrix, a Roman Catholic theological term referring to the mediating power of the Virgin, which became popularised in the 1960s after the 2nd Vatican Council (see for example: Catechism of the Catholic Church, Dublin: Veritas, 1994, p.221). 5 For the origin of solidism, see: Forbes et al., 1833, p. xx. 6 For a discussion of speculative versus transcendental Naturphilosophie, see Lenoir, 1981. 1
