On 1 January 2019, US magazine Commune published the manifesto of a group calling itself the Vitalist International. Entitled ‘Life Finds a Way’, the manifesto—referencing the slogan of the indigenous-led protests against the Dakota pipeline project, mni winconi, ‘water is life’—called for a revolution in the name of life itself. The vitalism invoked by the International emphasises unity between all forms of life against the ‘great structures of power—race, gender, private property, the state’, which are viewed as ‘the guarantors of separation’. In naming the ‘resonance between the rivers, the trees, and the forests’, the vitalism invoked has predictable ecological overtones. However, in its identification of resonances between ‘objects, spirits, the dead and those banished to social death’, with its demand for ‘the coordination of human bodies with bodies of thought, bodies of water, with bodies of buffalo charging at police, of life forms with art forms’, the political force of vitalism envisaged here is also seen as extending far beyond the unity of the living (Vitalist International 2019).

Commune is a magazine of the political left that emphasises aesthetic experience and popular participation as the levers of a necessary revolution.Footnote 1 Its publication of the vitalist manifesto nevertheless aroused suspicion on the part of other leftists, who view vitalism as an ideological tributary of fascism. Josie Sparrow, writing in New Socialist in March 2019, took such a critical line in her piece ‘Against the New Vitalism,’ where she identified the manifesto as part of a growing trend on the left to rehabilitate a vitalism seen as not only historically tainted by ‘political genealogies’ connecting it to fascism, but also compromised by intrinsic ‘ideological continuities’ with the latter. Sparrow argues in this respect that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Klages and Heidegger are connected to historical and contemporary forms of ecofascism by ‘the positing of some deep, trans-temporal/ahistorical force or power’ that supposedly underpins and supersedes the reality of social structures (Sparrow 2019).

The manifesto and Sparrow’s response raise important questions for considering the political reception of vitalism. For although forms of vitalist philosophy have undoubtedly been historically allied with right-wing agendas, they have also, as Sparrow notes, been invoked in the service of emancipatory forms of politics, whether by Gilles Deleuze, or more recently feminist new materialist thinkers such as Jane Bennett and Rosi Braidotti. The question of whether and to what extent these self-declared progressive or left-leaning invocations of vitalism are successfully progressive or emancipatory bears on the deeper issue of whether vitalism does, as Sparrow suggests, display elective affinities with reactionary political ideologies. Does vitalism inherently imply a specific politics, and if so, what is it?

Here, I aim to offer at least some possible answers to this question by examining historical and contemporary discussions around the politics of vitalism. In so doing, I offer an account of what vitalism is as a set of scientific and philosophical ideas about the nature of life and its status as an object of study. It is precisely because vitalism is concerned with the question of life that it implies political considerations from the get-go. However, some of the more problematic political consequences of what has often been referred to (sometimes erroneously or confusedly) as vitalism stem, I argue, from the attribution of vital powers to the non-living. This infusion of vitality into everything may seem egalitarian in its apparent levelling out of differences between forests, objects, spirits, the dead, and whole societies. Yet if everything is living, then the specificity of the living, the living itself, disappears. Whatever equality may or may not be purchased from this perspective, then, it can no longer properly be called vitalist.

1 Vitalism and Its Avatars

The matter of definition is one of the basic problems of engaging with the politics of vitalism. Vitalism is all too often rather loosely defined, so that it becomes indistinguishable from related but not co-extensive concepts, particularly holism (the privileging of wholes over parts), hylozoism (the idea that all matter is alive), Lebensphilosophie (the philosophical posture according to which life and its affirmation should be the primary object of philosophy), and biopolitics (the underpinning claim of which is that biological life is the ultimate object of politics).Footnote 2 As I aim to show here, some of the objections made against theories that describe themselves or are described as forms of political vitalism are actually criticisms of one or more of these related positions.

I agree with Charles T. Wolfe when he suggests that ‘“vitalism” be restricted to theories in which the difference between “life” and “nonlife” (living matter and nonliving matter, living bodies and dead bodies, bodies and machines, biology and physics, etc.) is crucial, however this difference is detailed and laid out’ (Wolfe 2021: 2). When the discourse of vitalism emerged in the late eighteenth century, it was predicated on the idea that life could not be explained purely in terms of mechanism or mathematics; that the laws of life were not reducible to the laws of the existing sciences of physics and chemistry. Thus, although it would later be sharply distinguished from biology as an unscientific, even supernaturalist, approach to the study of life, in fact the discourse of vitalism emerged in the context of the institution of the life sciences with figures such as Kant, Blumenbach, and Buffon (Steigerwald 2013: 51–76; Wolfe, Forthcoming). The specificity of life as compared with non-life, then, is the fundamental tenet of vitalism.

In many respects, vitalism’s meaning thus defined covers both what might be considered more modest claims for the necessity of a special science—biology—to describe the laws of life, and the more ambitious, metaphysical forms of vitalism that seek to explain life’s specificity by positing the existence of some kind of élan vital or vital principle. Though these two claims are connected, however, they are not the same. The first can be seen simply as a version of the claim to what Lovejoy (1911) calls ‘scientific autonomism’, which asserts or implies the logical discontinuity of scientific laws. Lovejoy classically made this point by arguing that if the basic premise of mechanism is that ‘the explanations of organic processes can eventually be found in the laws of some more “fundamental” science whose generalizations are more comprehensive than those of biology’—in other words if biological laws could be shown to be special cases of chemical or physical laws—then the vitalist counter-claim would be that, even given complete empirical data concerning the inorganic processes involved in organic processes, the latter cannot be reduced to or deduced from the laws of the inorganic. Here, the specificity of life is asserted without making any grand claim for a vital principle. An extrapolation from this position occurs when it is asserted that living organisms not only adhere to unique laws of their own, but that these laws cannot even be stated without positing the existence of special forces or agents—Bergson’s élan vital, Driesch’s entelechy—that animate living beings. Wolfe (2011) has distinguished between these forms of vitalism as ‘functional’ and ‘substantival’ respectively.Footnote 3

To some extent, vitalism’s political valency has always hinged on this assertion of an invisible power animating life. Peter-Hans Reill (1989) has argued that the shift in the eighteenth century from mechanistic theories of force to vitalistic theories of active power lent scientific credence to a new worldview that broke with traditional theological conceptions according to which power originated from an omniscient ruler dominating an inert, material nature. The dynamic conception of nature that accompanied what Wolf Lepenies (1976) has called the ‘end of natural history’ became associated, as Reill explains, with the idea that power ‘is fluid […] and hence cannot be associated with any solid, static body’. When translated into political language, this clearly challenged the idea that power was the preserve of an established elite. Thus, eighteenth century vitalism became the political correlate of ‘action and freedom of individual choice’ (Reill 1989: 212). Reill thus associates the political connotations of early vitalism with the emergence of what might be called liberal individualism, over against the conservative associations of both an earlier, mechanistic view of nature, and the quasi-mystical biologistic holism with which vitalism became associated in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Reill 1989: 208).

2 Ernst Haeckel’s Monism Between Mechanism and Vitalism

The association of a loosely defined vitalism with the reactionary politics of the nineteenth century can be found in Daniel Gasman’s classic study The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (Gasman 2004 [1971]: 64; 78). There, Gasman argued that the zoologist and populariser of Darwin in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, helped to lay the groundwork for the emergence of Nazi ideology by popularising a crudely biologistic worldview called monism, which combined elements of social Darwinism with mystical ideas of an invisible force animating matter and world history. For Gasman, Haeckel’s tacit embrace of vitalism was a crucial element of his worldview, and helped to pave the way ideologically for German fascism by valorising nationalistically inflected concepts of natural wholeness and vitality. Yet apart from being the teacher of Hans Driesch, whose contribution to the history and theory of vitalism is undisputed, Haeckel is much more commonly associated with mechanism or materialism than with vitalism (Freyhofer 1982; Normandin & Wolfe 2010: 8; Gregory 1971: x).Footnote 4 Questions thus remain as to what extent and in what way Haeckel can be considered a vitalist, and what role vitalism plays, if any, in the direct or indirect political uses of his ideas.

Certainly, rhetorically speaking, Haeckel was no vitalist. Throughout his career, he dismissed vitalism as an outdated, mystical and unscientific approach to the study of life and evolution. He explicitly rejected the idea of pluralism in the sciences, arguing that all of nature could be understood according to the laws of mechanical causation that govern the disciplines of physics and chemistry. In his early work Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866: XIV-XV), Haeckel aimed to bring biology, ‘the whole science of developed and emerging forms of organisms to the same level of monism in which all other natural sciences have sooner or later found their steadfast foundations’, namely on the basis of ‘mechanical-causal justification’ (ibid.). He explicitly rejected any recourse to notions of a teleological ‘vital principle’ or a ‘Bauplan’ governing the functioning of organisms, as well as the idea that the ‘force’ supposedly responsible for life is substantially distinct from chemical and physical forces (Haeckel 1866: 97).

Even in this early work, however, and despite Haeckel’s own avowed intentions, aspects of a metaphysical vitalism can be perceived. For though he shunned the idea of a special ‘Lebenskraft’, Haeckel did claim that all biological life was deeply connected by an underlying substance. Though Haeckel was a self-proclaimed Darwinist, his orthogenetic vision in fact drew heavily on pre-adaptive, progressive theories of evolution—that is, on paradigms that appear more teleological-vitalistic than causal-mechanistic. Lamarck and, above all, Goethe—the originator of the idea of a Bauplan, whom Haeckel frequently quotes—feature as centrally in Haeckel’s theoretical framework as Darwin. The biogenetic law Haeckel puts forward in the Generelle Morphologie, according to which each stage of an embryo’s development represents the adult form of an evolutionary ancestor, implies a form of empirically imperceptible organic memory—similar to Richard Semon’s later theory of engrams—that is difficult to reconcile with his formal rejection of teleology and metaphysical vitalism.

In Haeckel’s later work, the influence of vitalism is more pronounced. Insisting in Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben (1917: VIII) on ‘the fundamental unity of all natural phenomena’, Haeckel attributes features usually only associated with living beings to inorganic nature. Specifically, he argued that crystals are a form of ‘inorganic life’ possessing inner feeling states and even sexuality. With reference to crystals, Haeckel claimed that his monism broke down ‘the artificial boundaries between inorganic and organic nature, between life and death […]. All substance possesses life’, he argued, ‘inorganic and organic; all things have a soul, crystals just as organisms’. Haeckel’s claim here that ‘all substance possesses life’ is hylozoist rather than strictly speaking vitalist: he attributes life to matter in general, rather than distinguishing between living and non-living beings. Needless to say, hylozoism is far from functional vitalism, and it is not identical to, though it comes close to, substantival or metaphysical vitalism, which, like its functional counterpart, maintains the specificity of the laws of life and/or the life sciences. In seeking to explain this specificity, however, substantival vitalism has recourse to a speculatively posited life force, in which it is distinguished from hylozoism only in the fact that the hylozoist sees the vital force operative in all matter.

In Haeckel’s late work, therefore, his monism does come close to a form of vitalism in this specific respect. For if functional vitalism is associated with scientific autonomism and a pluralism among the laws governing the objects of the distinct sciences, whereas mechanism is conceived as monistic, proposing the possibility of an explanatory ‘reduction’ of biological and other phenomena to causal-mechanistic laws, it is surely too simple to align vitalism solely with pluralism and mechanism with monism. Although Haeckel continued to insist that life was ultimately explicable in terms of the same laws as the rest of non-living nature, rather than seeking to explain life in physico-chemical terms—in ‘reductive’ mechanistic fashion, as it were—Haeckel increasingly projected biological and psychological characteristics onto pre-organic nature. As such, his monism arguably comes much closer to a form of vitalist holism than to mechanist materialism. In fact, Haeckel’s monism is symptomatic of a decline in the currency of materialistic and mechanistic paradigms in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was correlated with the gradual triumph of evolutionary theory and the dynamic view of the natural world that it implied (Holt 1971: 267).

The political implications of Haeckel’s monist worldview have been the subject of vigorous debate. There is little doubt that Haeckel himself saw monism as entailing such implications. His first target in this respect was traditional religion; little wonder, perhaps, given that Darwin’s theory of evolution, which Haeckel broadly and at least rhetorically supported even if he did not follow Darwin on all points, refuted traditional religious teaching concerning the origin of human beings and their place in the cosmos. The organisation Haeckel founded, the Monist League, aimed to combat vitalism precisely because it saw it as a form of ‘intellectual and political reaction’ linked to outdated views of a natural world infused with divine spirit (cited in Holt 1971: 269). Far from rejecting religion, however, Haeckel saw monism as capable of connecting religion and science. He argued in this vein that

‘A broad historical and critical comparison of religious and philosophical systems…leads as a main result to the conclusion that every great advance in the direction of profounder knowledge has meant a breaking away from the traditional dualism (or pluralism) and an approach to monism’ (Haeckel 1894: 15).

Haeckel’s claim that profounder knowledge in both religion and philosophy—and by extension, science—moves towards monism is consistent with his belief in the unity of the sciences, which as we saw above is often associated with mechanism rather than vitalism. However, when Haeckel concludes from this insight that ‘God is not to be placed over against the material world as an external being, but must be placed as a “divine power” or “moving spirit” within the cosmos itself’, we can see once again that his own position appears rather as a more extreme, expansive version of vitalism than as a rejection of it (ibid.). Whereas the vitalist in Haeckel’s view merely sees the living world as moved by some invisible, divine force, for Haeckel the whole of reality is thus moved—by something that in the last instance appears as a kind of quasi-Spinozist God-as-matter. As he argues further in his writings on monism as a bridge between science and religion, ‘all the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only the products of one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the same primitive matter’ (Haeckel 1894: 16). That Haeckel identifies a mysterious evolutionary vital force in all matter rather than only in living matter makes it no less a vital force for the fact.

As we have seen, Haeckel extended the idea of an orthogenetic evolution also to non-organic nature, such that for him there was no mystery concerning the origin of life, which he claimed was a recurrent argument of the vitalist (Haeckel 1894: 93). He also extended these laws into the social and political realm, however. As Todd H. Weir (2012: 2) has pointed out, for Haeckel, Darwinian evolution was a ‘master theory that explained not only the multiplicity of biological life, but also developments in human consciousness and civilization, and linked them all together into a single meaningful totality’. Haeckel (1916: 116) articulates this idea explicitly in his essay ‘Eternity: World-war Thoughts on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution’, where he claims that ‘Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life’. Elsewhere, he makes it plain precisely what political flavour he believed Darwinism has when applied to the social world. In a piece responding to his contemporary the scientist and politician Rudolf Virchow, who had denounced Darwin’s theory of natural selection as dangerously socialist in orientation, Haeckel argues that ‘Darwinism is anything but socialist! If one wants to attribute a particular political tendency to this English theory—which is entirely possible—this tendency can only be an aristocratic one, not at all democratic and least of all socialist!’ (Haeckel 1908 [1878]: 68).

To the extent that Haeckel saw evolutionary forces at work in the social world, it is fair to call him a social Darwinist. In his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1889), for instance, Haeckel represented the human species according to a racial hierarchy that has caused many commentators to present him as a forerunner to National Socialist ideology (Gasman 2004; Weikart 2004). Indeed, Haeckel argues that the group he calls the ‘Midlanders’, which he claims includes the ‘caucasian’, ‘basque’, ‘hemosemitic’ and ‘indogermanic’ sub-groups, of which he sees the indogermanic as the most advanced, ‘surpassed all other [human] races and species in the struggle for existence thanks to its more advanced brain development, and now its web of dominance extends across the entire planet’ (Haeckel 1889: 739).Footnote 5 However, as we have seen, Haeckel’s evolutionism was far from straightforwardly Darwinist, and indeed some of the non-Darwinist elements of his evolutionism—his belief in progressive development, and morphological hierarchy—were most problematic when applied to the human world. If he invokes the classic social Darwinist refrain of the ‘struggle for existence’ in an attempt to justify indogermanic supremacy, his position on race was at least as much the result of the specific combination of holism and progressivism at the heart of his hylozoistic monist philosophy as it was of any Darwinian concept of adaptation. It was by erasing the distinction between life and non-life that Haeckel could argue that everything from crystals to human societies operated in accordance with ‘natural’, transhistorical evolutionary laws.Footnote 6

The objections against the political implications of Haeckel’s monism thus cannot be levelled at him as a vitalist, strictly speaking, if vitalism is defined by the distinction between the living and non-living realms. In fact, Haeckel’s projection of the laws of life beyond their biological domain of application can largely be seen to be responsible for the political consequences on account of which his monism has been criticised. Haeckel saw all material things as imbued with life, though not equally complex; he saw evolution as progressive, though not straightforwardly continuous. It was on this basis that he claimed some human races were less intelligent than many higher animals, just as he argued that a crystal could be more complex than some simple organic life forms (Richards 2008: 157–158).

Though there are undoubtedly genealogical connections between Haeckel’s work and fascist ideology, it is important to remember that reception does not necessarily imply retroactive culpability. Moreover, even if some monists adopted a nationalist stance before the First World War (despite his avowed pacifism, both Haeckel and his contemporary, the chemist and fellow monist Wilhelm Ostwald, signed the statement of ninety-three intellectuals defending militarism as a means of protecting German culture), there were also strong links between monism and pacifism in this period (cf. Holt 1975). Although many monists espoused eugenic theories and some were influenced by the chauvinist right in the early decades of the twentieth century, a majority supported pacifism and the ideas of the moderate and radical left (Dickinson 2001: 225). Many monists, such as Helene Stöcker, were also feminists and advocates for women’s rights. Even if pacifism and eugenicism, including in its explicitly racist forms, were not mutually exclusive among monists and others, the position of the Monist League was strongly anti-Nazi: throughout the 1920s, the monists repeatedly insisted that Darwin was a liberal, pacifist, and internationalist, warned of the rise of racism and superstition, and denounced anti-Semitism as unscientific.Footnote 7 In 1933, when many German organizations strategically aligned themselves with the Nazi regime, the Monist League disbanded rather than submit to Gleichschaltung (Holt 1975:37).

3 Hans Driesch’s Vitalism and the Politics of Holism and Occultism

If Haeckel represents a borderline case for the problems of vitalism and its possible attendant politics, that of his student Hans Driesch is surely clearer cut. Driesch can be considered a vitalist in both the functional and substantival senses. Driesch’s early experimental work on embryology challenged the prevailing mechanistic theories of August Weismann and Wilhelm Roux, supporting the argument that biological processes were subject to specific laws of their own. The non-mechanical causal force that he believed underpinned life processes, which he called entelechy, was, however, a highly speculative construct that resembled in important respects the psychoid force that Haeckel saw animating matter. Driesch’s concept of entelechy was, however, more obviously vitalist in the sense that he restricted it to the realm of organic life.

Driesch first became acquainted with Haeckel’s evolutionary ideas as an adolescent attending lectures at the newly opened Kosmos Institut in Hamburg where he grew up. At that time, he was convinced by Haeckel’s account of evolution and made up his mind to study zoology with Haeckel at university (Innes 1973: 29). However, thanks to his thorough Gymnasium grounding in mathematics and physics, Driesch soon began to question Haeckel’s approach to biology. For instance, he later claimed that he failed to follow Haeckel’s proofs for phylogenetic trees, because they did not resemble the deductive proofs he had learned in mathematics (Innes 1973: 30). Far from concluding, however, that his failure to follow Haeckel’s proofs was evidence of their inaccuracy, Driesch believed that he must not yet be advanced enough to follow Haeckel’s reasoning, a decision that led him to study in the first instance not with Haeckel in Jena, but with August Weisman in Freiburg. His education with Weisberg was significant, not least because his theory of entelechy as he articulated it in relation to embryological cell division was a direct response to the mechanistic Roux-Weisman theory of cell division. As Innes notes, however, Driesch’s decision is also revealing because it indicates that even if he doubted the accuracy of Haeckel’s more speculative claims about evolutionary forces, he was still open to the possibility that such explanations could be plausible (ibid.).

The aim of Driesch’s dissertation, which Haeckel supervised, was to analyse the different methods of colony formation in two species of freshwater hydroids. Driesch’s concern with what constitutes an individual organism, which he would articulate in more detail later in his lectures on The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, is clear already here, and reveals the influence of Kant’s conception of organism on his thinking. One of Driesch’s main concerns in the dissertation was how the morphology of individual hydroids functioned relative to the interests of the colony, and how the definition of the boundaries of the individual could affect the perception of that relationship. Driesch argued that since different individuals have different functions in the colony, such as feeding or reproduction, the development of form in the individual could only be understood with reference to its function in the colony. In other words, structural features could only be understood as a function of the whole (Innes 1973: 32–33). Thus, one can find traces even in Driesch’s early work of the holist dynamics that underpinned Haeckel’s monism, even if Driesch was clearly less afraid of teleological explanation than Haeckel. Indeed, one of the central principles of Driesch’s vitalism was that there are also laws of wholeness and finality in nature, i.e. not only purely causal connections. Unlike Haeckel, Driesch placed finality on an equal footing with causality (Driesch 1939).

Although Driesch’s vitalism is sometimes seen as representing a break with his early experimental work, one can find evidence of both functional and substantival forms of vitalism even in his earliest theoretical writings. In 1890, just a year after Driesch published his dissertation, he wrote a short paper called ‘The System of Biology’ in which he criticised the separation of biology into two separate faculties in German universities, each of which emphasised different approaches to the study of life. Driesch’s argument is that medical faculties emphasised physiological questions as they relate to the practice of medicine, and was based on an experimental method, while the more philosophical faculties teaching botany and zoology focused on morphological questions, which were explained with historical-comparative methods. Yet Driesch believed that organisms must be studied from both physiological and morphological perspectives, i.e. as a totality. Driesch’s argument that institutional isolation prevents the formulation of heuristic scientific questions may seem ‘monist’ in its implications, but in fact the unity Driesch aimed at here was a unity of biology as a discipline that operates according to distinct, internally coherent principles.

According to Driesch, the only researchers in Germany currently studying the organism as a totality in this way were those associated with the programme of developmental mechanics (Entwicklungsmechanik) advanced by Wilhelm Roux at one of the state-sponsored research institutes that operated outside the traditional university faculties and departments (Innes 1973: 33–34). Developmental mechanics was concerned with functional differentiation in organisms. At the embryonic stage, this concerned the question of how specific cells came to form specific organs. Roux supported a mechanistic view known as the Roux–Weismann mosaic theory, because the same idea had also been proposed by the cytologist and evolutionary theorist—and Driesch’s former teacher—August Weismann. The mosaic model claimed with each cell division hereditary units were apportioned in such a way that each cell generation received increasingly specialized particles. By the time differentiation was complete, each cell type (muscle, nerve, skin) contained only the particles determining that cell’s specific characteristics (Allen 2005: 270). In order to test this hypothesis, the developmental mechanists attempted to influence the sequence of normal embryonic developmental stages using mechanical interventions.

In his account of this research programme in ‘The System of Biology’, Driesch insisted, contra the developmental mechanists, that a teleological element is built into the theory of the development of form from the outset. ‘The essential feature of life’, he argues there, is the typical order of specific differentiated forms; there is absolutely no sense in which one could talk about such and such an amount of “eagle” or “lion” or “earthworm”’. However, if this observation led him to reject the concept of a ‘life substance’, he replaced the latter with that of ‘entelechy’, which was supposed to explain the ‘mechanism’ by which an organism becomes what it is as a whole (cited in Innes 1973: 35). Unlike the force that Haeckel saw animating all matter from the inside, as it were, Driesch imagined entelechy as in itself an immaterial factor primarily acting on matter from outside.Footnote 8

Driesch further developed his idea of entelechy in dialogue with some of the developmental mechanists’ experimental observations. One prediction of the mosaic hypothesis was that if one of the first two blastomeres—the first two cells formed by the cleavage of the fertilized ovum—was killed or removed, it would result in half-larvae, since half the determiners for the cell’s specific function had already been parcelled out into each daughter cell. Roux tested this prediction by puncturing one of the first two blastomeres of the frog egg with a hot needle and raising the subsequent developing larvae as far as they could develop. The results fitted Roux’s predictions, with some half-embryos developing. This supported the thesis that differentiation could be explained as a mechanical process resulting in an adult mosaic organism, with each cell type containing only the active determiners for its special characteristics (Allen 2005 270–271).

In 1891, Driesch, working at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, performed a series of experiments similar to Roux’s using sea urchins. Instead of killing one of the first two blastomeres of the sea urchin embryo, Driesch separated them by vigorously shaking. If Roux’s mosaic principle were true, Driesch predicted that he should also see half-embryos develop. In fact, however, he found that the separated sea urchin blastomeres each developed into a complete, though smaller-than-average sized embryo. Driesch interpreted the results as contradicting Roux’s mechanical model. The sea urchin embryo acted as what Driesch called a ‘harmonious equipotential system’, and for the next 7 years he carried out experiments in an attempt to understand the causes of this phenomenon. When, by the early 1900s, he had failed to find a mechanistic, physico-chemical explanation, he concluded that embryonic development was guided by what he had already designated as entelechy, ‘an organizing, directive force that consumed no energy, was immaterial, but was the factor that distinguished living from non-living matter’ (Allen 271). Even if Driesch’s refutation of the Roux-Weisman mosaic theory would later be proven more rigorously by Hans Spemann (whose concept of the ‘organizer’ is another ‘vitalistic’ concept in modern biology, cf. Peterson 2016), his commitment to vitalism was always highly controversial among his colleagues in academic biology.Footnote 9 Even erstwhile collaborators like Jacques Loeb, who had esteemed Driesch’s work despite being the arch-reductionist of his time, saw Driesch’s vitalism as a form of metaphysics unacceptable in natural science (ibid.).

Indeed, Driesch eventually abandoned experimental natural science altogether to work on the philosophy of vitalism and on parapsychology, the study of occult phenomena such as telekinesis, clairvoyance, and telepathy. If Driesch conceptualised entelechy as an immaterial force in contrast with Haeckel’s self-animating matter, he nevertheless followed Haeckel in attributing ‘psychoid’ characteristics to this force. Driesch conceived of entelechy as having two components: while the forming entelechial force worked on matter from the outside, Driesch also saw the reaction-determining factor in actions as a type of entelechy, which he called ‘psychoid’, or even ‘soul’, and located inside the organism. For Driesch, ‘psychoid’ or ‘soul’ was ‘the name given to the entelechy of an organism, insofar as its actions are subject to it’ (Driesch 1939: 269). Organisms, according to Driesch, therefore had a dual character: on the one hand, their form was the result of the action of entelechy in its externally shaping mode, while their action was the result of psychoid side of entelechy, which occupies something like the place of a psychological unconscious.

The broader concept of the ‘soul’ encompassed for Driesch both the unconscious, entelechial moment of organismic action, and the conscious moment in which the soul ‘illuminates itself’ (Driesch 1939: 271). Driesch saw this conception of the organism’s dual character resulting in a form of ‘psycho-physical parallelism, which is admittedly something quite different from the old psycho-mechanical parallelism, which wanted conscious experience to be the “other side” of brain mechanics’. He perceived a ‘causality between entelechy and ego-being’ in the way that the psychoid dimension of entelechy interacted with the conscious part of the soul. And if he denied that there could be a direct causality between mind and matter (‘entelechy is always the mediator here’), he nevertheless believed that ‘parapsychological facts’ such as ‘telepathy and thought transmission, speak of a direct causal relationship between different ego-beings’ (ibid.). Driesch pushed these arguments further in his 1925 work The Crisis in Psychology, where he claimed that psychology and biology were—and should be—moving away from the mechanistic paradigm and towards ‘totality concepts’ such as soul and entelechy, and called on psychology to take seriously the investigation of parapsychological phenomena.Footnote 10 Driesch’s interest in the occult and in parapsychology not only saw his vitalism discredited scientifically—in the 1930s, the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, claimed that his adversary Driesch had ‘gone over to the spiritualists’—it has also led to associations of his vitalism with fascist politics (cf. Harrington 1996: 124).Footnote 11

There is no doubt that Driesch personally opposed fascism. As a pacifist and a member of the League for Human Rights, Driesch opposed both world wars and despised racism and anti-Semitism: ultimately, Driesch’s pacifism and support for Jewish people saw him forced from his position in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The question here, however, is not so much whether Driesch personally opposed Nazism as whether his vitalism can in some sense be seen to lend itself to Nazi ideology. On closer examination, it is clear that it is not strictly speaking Driesch’s vitalism that is aligned with reactionary, totalitarian, and ultimately fascist politics—certainly not if we define vitalism functionally as the insistence that life and the life sciences are subject to distinctive laws that cannot be reduced to those of physics and chemistry. The elements of Driesch’s project that are supposedly politically problematic are rather occultism and holism, neither of which are coextensive with vitalism.

Concerning the occultist point, Horst Freyhofer (1982: 158) has observed that the decline in material living conditions in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s (whether this was construed nationalistically, in terms of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, or socially, as a failure of revolution and/or welfarism), ‘seemed to demonstrate that men were subject to forces either unknown or less known than claimed by many, or that they were subject to these forces to a greater degree than thought so far’. Fascists, in particular, argued that these forces were not the forces of reason—not Kantian categories or Marxian laws of history—but those of will, the unconscious, or the historical teleology of destiny.

Certainly, the substantival vitalist claim that life is driven by invisible forces can be seen to lend itself to extrapolation in an occultist direction. As Freyhofer writes, ‘[v]italists and fascists both affirm the existence of a transcendental, autonomous, and capricious force that controls all life, most apparently the life of men. And both think that some people can know and handle these forces better than most people’ (Freyhofer 1982: 161). For Driesch the vitalist parapsychologist, these ‘elite’ initiates were the experimenters, mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists who mediated between individual souls and the collective dimension of the psychoid; for fascists, the elite intermediaries were the Führer and his hierarchy. The political criticism of vitalism can thus be seen to be valid to the extent that, in its metaphysical form, vitalism does indeed claim that life is driven by unconscious, largely or wholly empirically unavailable forces that transcend history and are therefore outside of human control.

Yet some of Driesch’s own claims contradict Freyhofer’s assertion that, for fascists, ‘elites constitute the ultimate source of authority in all matters of human existence’ whereas for vitalists ‘the ultimate authority remains with the transcendental forces themselves’ (ibid.). In his autobiography, written between 1938 and 1940 but only published posthumously, Driesch denies the Nazi claim that what he calls the ‘despicable pogroms of winter 1938’ were a case of the ‘popular soul’ ‘boiling over’ against the Jews. Rather, Driesch argues that the pogrom was ‘deliberately ordered’ by the Nazis, an accusation that he recognises could land one in a concentration camp if uttered publicly (Driesch 1951; cf. Krall 2015: 111–112). Driesch’s attribution of responsibility (‘authority’) for the pogrom to the National Socialists themselves does not make him a fascist; rather, it demonstrates a deflationary attitude on his part vis-à-vis the role of spiritual forces in human history. Clearly, for Driesch, the vitalist claim that life is shaped and driven by unconscious, immaterial, only indirectly observable entelechial and psychoid factors did not translate into an apology for political atrocity as the effect of some vaguely defined transcendent power.

That National Socialists did invoke occultism in support of their programme (albeit with an intensity and enthusiasm that varied according to the moment and the personality: Hitler was well-known to be less committed to the incorporation of occultism into Nazi ideology than Rosenberg, for instance) makes it no less true that the almost causal association between occultism and Nazism is largely a post-war historiographical narrative. As Heather Wolffram (2003) has argued, the focus on irrationalism as an explanatory factor in the rise of National Socialism was popularised as part of the German Sonderweg thesis by writers such as George L. Mosse and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.Footnote 12 Reassessing this history, Wolffram claims that ‘far from being an irrational and politically conservative backlash against modernity, occultism was often the site of complex negotiations over religion, politics, and scientific knowledge, which aimed not only at critique, but also at reform’ (2003: 150). In this context she emphasises that ‘for Driesch, as for a number of European scholars, parapsychology provided scientific validation of a belief in the naturalness of liberalism and pacifism’ (ibid.). With this in mind, any straightforward association between Drieschian vitalism and fascist politics appears highly tenuous.

The holistic dimension of vitalism, too, has been claimed to harbour politically questionable implications. There is certainly reception-historical evidence for this point, as Anne Harrington has shown. She points to a number of Nazi figures and sympathisers who explicitly hailed Driesch as laying the groundwork for a holistic view of society and cosmos that they believed accorded with their own ideology. The philosopher of biology, Adolf Meyer-Abich, who played an active role in defining the significance of holistic biology for National Socialism, declared in 1935 that ‘“Holism stands . . . on the shoulders of [Driesch‘s] vitalism”’. In Das Weltbild der Biologie (1941), Arthur Neuberg wrote that Driesch instilled in the era the conviction that ‘[n]o part exists preformed . . . everything can become anything and the whole determines the function that the part must undertake’. Meanwhile, in a 1936 letter to Driesch, the philosopher Paul Gast told his friend that his (Driesch’s) terminology ‘had been adopted in some National Socialist discussions of the Volk as a vital, biological whole’. Some were arguing, Gast reported, that ‘“Driesch‘s vitalistic, holistic-philosophy would be a splendidly appropriate scientific underpinning for National Socialist terminology”’ (Harrington 1996: 190).

Harrington eschews the idea of some intrinsic connection between holism and fascism, arguing that ‘the Nazification of German holism’ occurred ‘not through some process of intellectual determinism, but because people—both opportunistic and out of conviction—came to “see” and argue that certain political conclusions must be drawn from the antimechanistic impulses of the interwar years’ (Harrington 1996: 189). As she acknowledges, Driesch sought to make ‘the language of wholeness and vitalism serve, not a fascist ideology, but a pacifist, democratic, humanist politics’ (Harrington 1996: 190). Significantly, the way in which Driesch did so reveals a distinction between his vitalist holism and a more expansive form of holism that sees vital principles applied simplistically to the social and political spheres.

The Nazi application of biological laws to human society is one ground for associating vitalism and/or holism with fascism. Yet if the application of biological laws beyond biology is certainly holist, it is not vitalist, as the case of Driesch’s criticism of his friend and collaborator Jacob von Uexküll’s 1920 book Staatsbiologie [Biology of the State] makes clear. In Staatsbiologie, Uexküll conceptualised the state as a living organism and aimed to diagnose certain pathologies that threatened the functioning of a healthy state. Much like Haeckel’s conclusion that the political orientation of Darwinism was aristocratic, Uexküll advanced the anti-democratic argument that the healthiest form of organization of the state was monarchy. In a quietly critical review of Uexküll’s book written in 1921, Driesch declared that Uexküll’s central claim that the state is properly understood as an organism was untenable. For Driesch, any particular empirical state could not, by definition, be considered a true biological whole because states possessed no independent, creative entelechy. Indeed, the only ‘super-personal’ organismic entity that Driesch was prepared to recognize—and, even here, only cautiously—was a concept of mankind that recognized no national or völkisch boundaries (Harrington 1996: 61). Driesch reiterated this idea of human unity in his autobiography, where he argued, contra the Nazis, that ‘racially determined differences, both physical and mental, are of almost no significance in comparison with what all human beings share in common’ (cited in Krall 2015: 112). Driesch’s assertion here of what Marx called the species-being of humanity is certainly vitalist in that it emphasises the unity and totality of the life form. However, by rejecting the validity of projecting the laws of life into the realm of the social, Driesch opposes a vitalistic form of holism to Uexküll’s more expansive and—on Driesch’s account—non-vitalist holism.

If Driesch rejected Uexküll’s extension of the laws of life itself to the social and political realm, he nevertheless did see the ultimate unity of all humankind beyond differences of race and culture as entailing political consequences. In Die sittliche Tat (1927), Driesch reflects on the political form most appropriate to this conception of human unity, and it is decidedly anti-nationalist. Influenced by the experience of the First World War, he writes that

‘There should be one state only, for there is only one mankind. But since historically states did not develop as they should have, but through violent acts of a few individuals or groups, we now have many empirical states. Every person should see to it that the many states become one state....But the best that could happen to the one state, and therewith to each particular empirical state, is that it would dissolve itself...that anarchy would become its “constitution,” because it needs no constitution. But this presupposes that “by nature” all men always act in accordance with the good which unfortunately is not the case. Still, while working toward the one state everyone must work toward obsolescence of the “state” as legal institution: the ultimate “goal” of the state is its own dissolution’ (Driesch 1927: 98).

If Driesch’s claim that states ‘did not develop as they should have’ might at first sight be seen to echo the Haeckelian idea of an orthogenetic law governing not only (in)organic nature, but also ‘civilization and the life of nations’, this impression is quickly dispelled by Driesch’s insistence on the role of human agency in constructing the socio-political world. Not only does Driesch see his vitalist conviction in the unity of human life as ultimately necessitating some form of single-state globalism on the political plane; unlike the National Socialists, whose application of the laws of life to the social world was associated with the idea of the rule of the strongest and with war between nations, Driesch’s political vision involves an explicitly anarchic component.

One can challenge the fundamental association of holism and fascism on a number of grounds. Among other things, there are at least three distinct, perhaps related, but certainly more and less maximalist versions of holism. From the perspective of the political instrumentalization of holism, it presumably makes a difference whether one departs from the idea, which Lovejoy identifies with mechanism, that all phenomena can ultimately be explained in terms of causal physico-chemical laws, or from the attribution of the laws of life to the whole of natural and social reality as in the case of Haeckel’s monism, or from the more restrictive vitalist claim that living beings can only be understood as self-contained wholes. If all vitalism is holist in the latter sense, not all holisms are vitalist, such that even if holism can be said to display an elective affinity with fascism (or perhaps better, totalitarianism, which in the Soviet context is usually associated with mechanism rather than organicism/vitalism), an intrinsic connection between fascism and vitalist holism remains to be shown (see Ash 1995 and, especially, Joravsky 1961 for more on mechanistic holism in the Soviet context).

4 Afterlives of Political Vitalism

Let us return in conclusion to Sparrow’s critique, which does indeed posit something like an intrinsic connection between vitalism and fascism. There, historical figures including Driesch, Heidegger, Klages, Nietzsche and others sit beside contemporary thinkers and activists: the Vitalist International, but also new materialists such as the political theorist Jane Bennett. In her book Vibrant Matter (Bennett 2010), Bennett develops a theory of matter itself as inherently vibrant or lively, imbued with power and agency in ways that blur the boundary between life and non-life. She encourages us to see both non-human and non-living material things as imbued with life and agency, capable of making things happen. For Bennett, political theory has for too long been focused on human agency, forgetting that we too are matter, and that matter itself is in some sense alive or at least possess creative capacities that are not entirely within our ken or control.

The stakes of Bennett’s project are thus highly political. Questions of ecology and racial justice, in particular, depend in Bennett’s view on an appreciation of thing-power.

She sees the ‘figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter’ as ‘one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption’ (2010: ix). Encouraging us to see the natural world, including in its inorganic facets, as alive may, she suggests, foster a more sustainable environmental politics.

In relation to matters of social justice, Bennett makes the following argument (2010: 13):

‘If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such.’

Yet despite its self-declared investment in the project of an emancipatory politics, Bennett’s vitalism—or vital materialism—comes in for criticism on account of what Sparrow, following feminist theorist Nikki Sullivan, calls ‘white optics’. Bennett’s explicit distinction of thing-power from ‘Flower Power, Black Power [and] Girl Power’ serves, Sparrow claims, to ‘belittle and diminish both feminist and Black liberatory movements’. She cites Sullivan’s (2019: 310) point here that new materialism relies on the ‘appropriation of both the (bad) feminist other [or Black, or any other so-called “cultural” identity that resists the flattening binary of human/nonhuman], and the (good) non- human other’ as a means of ordering and classifying the world towards certain ends, a process that paradoxically reasserts colonial power.

The white optics of Bennett’s vital materialism according to Sparrow thus stem from the fact that it is what has often been called a flat ontology: it ‘creates a flattened image of the monolithic “human”, and then works to performatively disavow it.’ She continues:

‘Humanity, in these discourses, is always the white settler-subject: the consumer, the polluter, the extractor; the creator of an “inauthentic” culture that is both reviled and mobilised by those doing the reviling. Attempting to escape this contradiction, vitalists and new materialists alike must posit a more authentic realm of individual entities that, in their withdrawnness, resist the relational assimilation of culture. It is not in their interest to consider differences within the category of “human”.’

It is on this basis that Sparrow argues Bennett’s revival of vitalism harbours an implicit connection to ecofascism understood as the positing of a romanticized and/or idealized natural state of life to which we must return or perhaps which we must still attain in order to achieve social and ecological equality qua harmony.Footnote 13

To take another example of a form of contemporary new materialism inspired by vitalism, we might turn to Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of the posthuman. Braidotti argues for what she calls a ‘Zoe-centred egalitarianism’ as ‘a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.’ The key notion, she continues, ‘is embodiment on the basis of neo-materialist understandings of the body, drawn from the neo-Spinozist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but re-worked with feminist and postcolonial theories. Embracing their version of vital bodily materialism, while rejecting the dialectical idea of negative difference, this theoretical approach changes the frame of reference’ (2013: 22). Braidotti’s reference to ‘zoe-centred egalitarianism’ calls to mind Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical distinction between bios as a particular mode of life, i.e. the life of a citizen in a given society with certain rights etc., and ‘bare life’ (zoe), or life in its brute physicality, without (whether prior to or deprived of) any sense of social belonging or rights (cf. Agamben 1998: 8). Braidotti distinguishes her ‘positive’ account of zoe from Agamben’s formulation (2013: 121), her use of the term signalling the politicization of what from an Agambenian perspective might be seen as the pre- or extra-political: living beings in their very existence as such are considered equal in this vision, outside the realm of ‘anthropos, that is to say bios’: outside the constructed realm of society and culture.

Yet Braidotti’s posthuman perspective looks not only beyond the human to animal and plant life, but also to inorganic nature, which is seen here too as inextricably connected to life. ‘The posthuman predicament’, she argues, forces ‘a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems’ (2013: 89). Here the boundaries between the living and non-living become blurred, if they do not disappear, such that the power, certainly of non-human creatures but also of things, is considered equal to that of living (human) beings. Here the parallel with Bennett’s vital materialism is clear. For Bennett (2010: x), not only are ‘stem cells, electricity, food, trash, and metals…crucial to political life (and human life per se)’, but ‘dead rats, bottle caps, gadgets, fire, electricity, berries, [and] metal’ are also living agents (2010: 107).

The naturalisation of bodily—and in relation to inorganic non-living phenomena, perhaps also evental or existential—equality opens up an interesting philosophical problem: if the premise of vitalist materialism is that all things are ontologically equal (positive difference), and that it is (negative) difference and inequality that are historically/socially constructed, then social equality, where and to the extent that it exists, must also be seen as historically constructed, i.e. fought and won. What, then, is the status of the relation between ontological equality/positive difference and historical inequality/negative difference? That is a question that new materialism is yet to answer.

The same problem, however, can be stated in more practical political terms, as Sullivan and Sparrow do: if equality is simply naturalised—which is to say that all things are considered naturally equal, thus equality is considered to exist already, at least at an ontological level—this threatens to erase the reality of very real historical struggles for social equality, and perhaps even to imply that no such further struggles are necessary. The question as to the implied political consequences of Bennett’s and Braidotti’s vital materialisms—as opposed to the avowed political positions of the authors themselves—is arguably more legitimate than the same question is when put to the philosophy of someone like Driesch, whose primary object was not the political per se.

One can take these criticisms of Bennett’s vital materialism as validand still pose the question as to whether they are in fact criticisms of vitalism, as they claim to be, or rather of some other philosophical position. Certainly, Bennett and Braidotti both invoke vitalism in defence of their positions, and describe those positions as in important respects vitalist. Yet this is not a vitalism concerned with ‘the difference between “life” and “nonlife” (living matter and nonliving matter, living bodies and dead bodies, bodies and machines, biology and physics, etc.) […] however this difference is detailed and laid out’ (Wolfe 2021: 2). For Braidotti (2013: 60), a ‘vitalist approach to living matter displaces the boundary’ between bios and zoe. Vitalism in this sense stands for a ‘generative vitality’ (ibid.) that bears more resemblance to Haeckel’s monistic extension of living power to the realm of non-living matter than to Driesch’s life-specific—if immaterial—entelechy. In other words, applied to Braidotti, the objection the equalization of power making human action equivalent to that of rivers, trees, and forests—to return to the formulation in the Vitalist Manifesto—is a criticism of holism and/or hylozoism in Braidotti, not of vitalism. The sale can be said for Bennett. Like vitalists such as Driesch, Bennett posits ‘the presence of some kind of energetic, free agency whose spontaneity cannot be captured by the figure of bodies or by a mechanistic model of nature’ (Bennett 2010: 61). Yet if, from the perspective of this form of vitalism, ‘matter seemed to require a not-quite-material supplement, an elan vital or entelechy, to become animate and mobile’, Bennett—claiming to follow Deleuze and Guattari in this respect—insists that ‘materiality needs no animating accessory. It is figured as itself the ‘active principle’ (ibid.). Here again, if matter itself is alive, then the characteristic vitalist distinction between life and non-life falls away. Thus again, the critique of the levelling out of power relations between living and non-living things is no longer a critique of vitalism, but of a monistic hylozoism or perhaps better in this case, animism.

Braidotti and Bennett’s common reference to Deleuze and Guattari is telling. Certainly, the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari were vitalists is not itself straightforward (cf. Ansell-Pearson 1999: 4). To be sure, Deleuze refers to his own work as vitalist and vitalistic at isolated points in his oeuvre, perhaps most notably in a 1988 interview often quoted in this context, where he states: ‘Everything I’ve written is vitalist, at least I hope it is’ (1990: 196). The context in which Deleuze makes that assertion, though, has little to do with theorizing the specificity of living beings, whether in terms of Drieschian entelechy or other (cf. Protevi 2012: 247). Rather, Deleuze is discussing the temporality of life versus art in terms that arguably bring his project close to a philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) that seeks to defend what Braidotti calls ‘generative vitality’ as a subject of philosophical reflection and to theorise it in terms that seek to escape from the strictures of sterile, commodified academic discourse. But as we have seen, Lebensphilosophie is not vitalism, despite frequent confusion. Lebensphilosophie seeks to affirm life philosophically, not to define it scientifically. Though the status of vitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is not my main concern, it is perhaps helpful to note, as John Protevi (2012: 247) has, that what is central to ‘Deleuze’s notion of vitalism is the “life” that encompasses both organisms and “non-organic life.”’ It should, then, be clear that Deleuze—nor Braidotti nor Bennett, to the extent that they follow him—is no vitalist in the sense intended here.

Theories and philosophies of vitalism are concerned with the distinction between life and non-life in some form. Given this emphasis, vitalism always has political stakes: where the boundary between life and non-life is drawn is, as theorists of biopolitics have shown, a supremely political matter; as perhaps is the will to draw it, though in scientific terms there are very good reasons for seeking to do so. Historically, vitalism has been associated with conservatism and fascism in ways that are sometimes genealogically defensible, sometimes only with difficulty or not at all. Conceptual confusion also complicates the task of onto-political critique. The political objections that have been made against new materialism (cf. Moir 2020)—that by levelling agency it denies the specificity of the historical—may be valid, but they are not critiques of vitalism. If anything, it is the extension of the attributes of life to the realm of the non-living that raise the political problems so often associated with vitalism.