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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Vitalism/Mar 17th, 2022
  • A series of posts on vitalism (from 2009).
    • Deleuze and Vitalism: UPDATED | Larval Subjects .
      • This sounds right:
      • When evoking chemical reactions, biolochemistry, and biology we don’t need to evoke occult agencies like vital forces, but are instead talking about certain physical processes that obey time’s irreversible arrow and which are iterative (especially in biochemistry and biology) in nature. Under this thesis, rather than setting up an alternative between mechanism and vitalism, the claim would instead be that we have a lot to learn about how matter works.
      • Interesting Deleuze quote:
      • There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, and least I hope it is. (Negotiations, Columbia UP, 1995, p. 143).
    • Reviving Vitalism: Definitions and the Difference between ‘Cold’ and ‘Spectral’ | Complete Lies.
      • I think the key is the distinction between “machinic” and “mechanistic.” Mechanism is the old Newtonian physics that we all grew up with, which the romantics (like Schelling) and later vitalists (like Bergson) rebelled against. I think it’s safe to say that Deleuze and Grant are both steering clear of any sort of mechanistic causality as well as any Cartesian dualism with a causal “outside” and a non-causal “inside.”
    • the future « Object-Oriented Philosophy)
      • refs Brassier who I guess is close to a Churchland-eliminativist, maps our a quadrant for speculative realism:
      • “There would be the eliminativist wing with a heavy cog.-sci. bent. There would be a Meillassouxian wing generating fascinating philosophical proofs out of a radicalized correlate (and with Zizekians, Lacanians, and Badiouians in the vicnity). There would be a Grantian wing with a more vitalist/materialist approach and more of a Deleuzian flavor than the others. And then there would be an object-oriented wing, with Latour as a key patron saint and a flat ontology as the price of admission.”
    • via WS/bleary, Spin from your Entrails Unamuno
      • It's very much a... kind of vitalist (but a vitalism of the soul, let's say) existentialist book arguing for an embrace of absurd, groundless, self-contradicting hope in the face of despair and the depredations of rationalism on human life.
from Vitalism/Mar 17th, 2022
    • A series of posts on vitalism (from 2009).
      • Deleuze and Vitalism: UPDATED | Larval Subjects .
        • This sounds right:
        • When evoking chemical reactions, biolochemistry, and biology we don’t need to evoke occult agencies like vital forces, but are instead talking about certain physical processes that obey time’s irreversible arrow and which are iterative (especially in biochemistry and biology) in nature. Under this thesis, rather than setting up an alternative between mechanism and vitalism, the claim would instead be that we have a lot to learn about how matter works.
        • Interesting Deleuze quote:
        • There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, and least I hope it is. (Negotiations, Columbia UP, 1995, p. 143).
      • Reviving Vitalism: Definitions and the Difference between ‘Cold’ and ‘Spectral’ | Complete Lies.
        • I think the key is the distinction between “machinic” and “mechanistic.” Mechanism is the old Newtonian physics that we all grew up with, which the romantics (like Schelling) and later vitalists (like Bergson) rebelled against. I think it’s safe to say that Deleuze and Grant are both steering clear of any sort of mechanistic causality as well as any Cartesian dualism with a causal “outside” and a non-causal “inside.”
      • the future « Object-Oriented Philosophy)
        • refs Brassier who I guess is close to a Churchland-eliminativist, maps our a quadrant for speculative realism:
        • “There would be the eliminativist wing with a heavy cog.-sci. bent. There would be a Meillassouxian wing generating fascinating philosophical proofs out of a radicalized correlate (and with Zizekians, Lacanians, and Badiouians in the vicnity). There would be a Grantian wing with a more vitalist/materialist approach and more of a Deleuzian flavor than the others. And then there would be an object-oriented wing, with Latour as a key patron saint and a flat ontology as the price of admission.”
      • via WS/bleary, Spin from your Entrails Unamuno
        • It's very much a... kind of vitalist (but a vitalism of the soul, let's say) existentialist book arguing for an embrace of absurd, groundless, self-contradicting hope in the face of despair and the depredations of rationalism on human life.
from Christopher Alexander
  • This kind of thing is quite a challenge to my materialism. Alexander's case for something closer to vitalism – that life is not an accident of evolution but fundamental to the structure of the cosmos – is made compelling through the sheer beauty of the examples he gives and the thoroughness of his exploration of the questions.
from computational vitalism
  • To be clear: there are two different forms of vitalism. Dualist or metaphysical vitalism is the idea that there are two kind of stuff, the material and the vital (or mental or spiritual or whatever). Bodies are one thing, life and mind is another. This is obviously wrong and bad (and also baked into Western thought to the extent that getting away from it is hard). The thrust of modern science has been to show that this particular kind of vitalism is just wrong. There is no magic life-juice, living things are gloriously complicated machines, no magic outside ingredients necessary.
from animism
from Eugene Thacker
from The Quality Without a Name

vitalism

30 Oct 2021 - 05 May 2025
Open in Logseq
    • A mostly-discredited philosophy. Very anti-rationalist, which is why it appeals to me. Well, discredited among scientists, neovitalism is a big thing among philosophers, or was (probably a wave that has crested).

    • Incoming

      • From Alien Phenomenology
        • Timothy Morton [in Ecological Thought] rightly calls vitalism a compromise, one that imprecisely projects a living nature onto all things. With this in mind, Morton suggests mesh instead of nature to describe “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things."
      • “Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism; but as have seen, this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of view which has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new mechanism is fully as mechanistic as the old ... the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions”
        • – Norbert Wiener 1948
    • Some pre-AMMDI notes
      • Vitalism: Age of Wonder book p315
        • A group of young writers at U Jena, began to explore Schelling and Naturphilosophie..."science mysticism....the natureal word as a system of invisible powers....replete with spirutal energy or soul...evolutionary vitalist, electircal, idealist ideas all tangled up....appealed ot Novals, Schiller , goethe....atrractions by optimism and reverence for nature... but also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proseletyisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that "The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses" to which a Scottisch goelogist made the legendary reply: Then a quartz therefore, must be a diamond run mad".
      • In her study of Ross Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, Donna Haraway outlined the paradigm shift in biology in which the age-old dichotomy between mechanism and vitalism was reworked. According to Haraway, Vitalism was now seen as part of the mechanistic paradigm rather than opposed to it because both were limited by the same images and metaphors. "
      • Joseph Needham, "Hunting of the Phoenix" (1931)
      • Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow?
        • hm, "vitalism" only occurs once, but its in an interesting attack on bad poetry and SJGould
      • Coleridge, Notes Towards a New Theory of life (from The Age of Wonder p321)
        • I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble-distalled and (as it were) super-substantiated!
      • TREVOR H.LEVERE, Poetry realized in nature
      • The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy Edited by: Frederick Burwick,Paul Douglass
      • Brilliant zombies v. vampires piece
      • What's it like to live in a vitalistic world wehre everything is active? Means they might be threats or at minimum be competing for your attention. How do you find a path / a peace in such a world?
      • Hans Driesch, History of Vitalism (at sfpl)
        • raging at mechanism, darwinish, phylogenetics for some reason. (provide 'in-progress) ;;; in-progress ends here. Not very impressed I'm afraid coined "entelechy", "neo-vitalism"? student of Haeckel
        • guess he was most prominent 20thc vitalist after Bergso
      • Lebenskraft (life-power I guess)
      • Mayr, The Autonomy of Biology > Might there not be some sort of machine insdie the harmnious system, on the basis of which all its evolutionary acts occur? Weismann did regard embryolgy in this way...experiments now show that any part of the system, however large...mayb be cut away from it wihtout distrubing proprtionate development. This proves that a "machine" cannot be the basis of harmonious-equipotential differentiation: for a "machine", ie a sepcifi arrangement of phsci-chemical things and agents, does not remain tiself, if you take from it whatever you please, adn the organism...does remain :itself", withe rgard to its morphogenetic faculites, after any operation whatever. THe harmonious system, then, is not a "machine", it is , in fact...a something that is governed by INdividualising Causality. "Entelechy", as a non-mechinaical agent of nature, is at work in hte harmonious-equipotential system. (p210)