§ 1. Vitalist Vocabulary

Without even including later definitions of “vitalism,” the term's usage in the period that concerns us – roughly, 1740–1800 – is confusing given the existence of several other contemporary medical denominations that cover partly the same extension. Notably, “organicism,” which means something quite different (almost the opposite) from its sense in twentieth-century philosophy of biology, where it is more or less synonymous with “holism” and sometimes “vitalism.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we find the vitalists sometimes misleadingly referred to as “organicists.” This view, associated with the Paris medical faculty, held that illness is the dysfunction of a particular organ, not of the organism as a whole; in contrast, vitalists, associated with the Montpellier medical faculty, tended to have a unified conception of disease, as a “state of affairs” of the patient (Raynaud Reference Raynaud1998, 730, 723; Malaterre Reference Malaterre2007).Footnote ² Balzac's novel La peau de chagrin is a well-known portrayal of conflicts between vitalist and organicist physicians. Far from being a doctrine of vital forces, in fact, organicism in this older sense was a “solidism,” to use the other contemporary term of art. Solidists, as opposed notably to humoralists, held that illness is due to a pathological change in the solid parts of the body. Thus, in dealing with a particular topic such as digestion, solidists would reduce the process to one of “trituration,” of spatial relations between masses, whereas chimatrists and post-Stahlians (like Venel, in his articles for the Encyclopédie including “Chymie,” “Chaleur,” “Digestion,” and “Mixte”) emphasize the chemical transformations of the substances involved in the digestive process.Footnote ³

Now, the Montpellier physician Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776), because he rejected Stahlian explanations that appeal to the soul, while retaining the idea of a self-preserving force in matter which is generated by the coordinated organisation of the organs, was initially viewed as an organicist (since in any case, there was no term “vitalism” to be applied for close to fifty yearsFootnote ⁴), notably by Paul-Joseph Barthez (1734–Reference Barthez1806), who does not accept that “Life” writ large, la vie générale, is merely the emergent product of the association and interaction of local lives with a lower-case “l”, i.e., the lives of each particular organ (Boury Reference Boury1999, chap. 17; cf. Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, § CVIII). Confusingly for us who have grown accustomed to a basic distinction between mechanists and vitalists, Barthez criticizes both Baglivi (who falls under the former category) and La Caze (who falls under the latter) for explaining all vital phenomena in terms of the motive forces of basic fibres (Barthez Reference Barthez1806, I, 22–25). While there is something patently absurd in Barthez's analysis of Bordeu as a “solidist,” notably since Bordeu often speaks favorably of Venel and how new chemical concepts enable the physiological theoretician to “set down limits to physical explanations” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 2, 934),Footnote ⁵ it may turn out, as we shall see, that Barthez was right in the end, if Bordeu was in fact more “mechanism-friendly” than we might expect a vitalist to be.

Given their shared insistence on sensitivity as the sole, definitory property of living beings, against Albrecht von Haller's basic distinction between irritability and sensitivity, the vitalists could just as easily have been called “sensibilists,” as we can see in this brief synopsis of the movement provided by Henri Fouquet (1727–1806), in Reference Fouquet1803:

Fouquet admits that the terms amount to the same thing, since everything that is “sensible” (or “sensitive”) is “vital” (78). A very similar statement can be found in the memoirs of Jacques-André Naigeon, Diderot's colorful disciple, militant atheist, editor of the Encyclopédie méthodique during the Revolution, and early defender of a “vitalo-materialism” (a philosophical materialism significantly conditioned by the ideas of the Montpellier vitalists, following Diderot's lead):

What we learn from Fouquet and Naigeon is that for the (Montpellier) vitalists, living matter is sensitive matter; sensation and movement are basic properties of living matter; even glandular secretion “reduces to a type of sensation” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751; § CVIII, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 163). Isn't the entry in the Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science correct, then, to describe vitalism as a metaphysics?

Indeed, much as we may disagree with this label, it must be acknowledged that this is not merely a recent, anachronistic interpretation or ideological projection onto some Enlightenment medico-philosophical ideas. The accusation that vitalism was merely a “metaphysics” and not worthy of serious medical or other scientific discussion actually dates back at least as far as the early nineteenth century in France, with the rivalry between medical faculties of Montpellier and Paris, respectively promoting “vitalism” and “organicism.” Thus Bichat, Magendie, and other representatives of the Paris faculty spoke out against the metaphysical language of the vitalists; one commentator in 1840 states that “metaphysics made them [sc. the Montpellier vitalists] forget medicine.”Footnote ⁶ Bichat explicitly identifies Barthez's vital principle with Stahl's anima and Van Helmont's archaeus (Rey Reference Rey2000, 361) and Broussais claimed that Barthez “founded medicine on his readings rather than observations” (Broussais, Examen des doctrines médicales, quoted in Lavabre-Bertrand Reference Lavabre-Bertrand1992, 89). Overall, the montpelliérains were heavily identified with the Hippocratic slogan “bring medicine into philosophy, and philosophy into medicine” (Raynaud Reference Raynaud1998, 735); Bordeu does speak of the best doctors as being, not médecins populaires who are stubborn clinicians, but rather free spirits who practice a “Médecine philosophique ou transcendante” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1754, Enc. IV, 489a-b).

Of course, some of these criticisms also reflect professional tensions and rivalries; it is perhaps more significant that the montpelliérains themselves make such attacks within their own group, usually on their immediate predecessor(s), although a common target is Georg-Ernest Stahl. Barthez expresses what may be a widespread desire not to be equated with other vitalists when he says, “my doctrine is diametrically opposed to that of the followers of M. La Caze” (as we have seen, he rejects what he perceives as the “organicism” of La Caze and Bordeu – their componential explanation of vital properties in terms of fibres or organs) and, more bluntly, “I do not wish to be the Leader of the Sect of the Vitalists” (Barthez Reference Barthez1806, 96–97, 98, n.17–18 and 65, n.1; Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 29, 30n., 130, 131n.). Bordeu sounds like any ambitious, frustrated young scholar or clinician when he describes the confusion of his days as a medical student:

Regardless, from Cuvier's vantage point in Paris, all the montpelliérains end up being avatars of Stahl and worse, Van Helmont:

We see that the term “vitalism” takes some time to stabilize with a recognized meaning; and that even when it does, many of its key actors accuse each of other of not being “reasonable vitalists” (grounded in clinical medicine rather than in commentaries on texts, and so forth), but rather of being unreasonable, “metaphysical vitalists” who appeal to “occult entities” (Cuvier Reference Cuvier1810) in order to explain phenomena they cannot account for otherwise.

Now, when we point to this rather “parricidal” attitude of the vitalists faced with their predecessors (the anxiety of influence, as it were), we do not mean to suggest that it reveals an underlying process of naturalization, a march onwards from “metaphysics” to “science”; our goal is not “to legalize past science in the name of a future science of which the eighteenth-century thinkers had no idea” (Chouillet Reference Chouillet1984, 66). Rather, we wish to call attention to the recurring features of this intellectual construct which the montpelliérains seek to apply to one another, or conversely to deny insofar as someone is applying it to them. This construct – let's call it “metaphysical, substantival vitalism” – is something of a straw man which exists nowhere in the writings of Ménuret, Bordeu, or Fouquet and barely anywhere in the writings of the more “animist-friendly” Sauvages or Barthez, who revises his major work between 1778 and 1806 precisely to make it sound more “Newtonian” (see § 5), more skeptical, and less metaphysical. But if the vitalist minimal credo is not to be identified with unnecessary ontological proliferations such as Stahl's anima or Van Helmont's archaeus, what is it?

§ 2. A Minimal Credo? Vitalism as “neither mechanism, nor animism”

It is almost a commonplace that Montpellier vitalism explicitly defines itself in contradistinction to both mechanistic and animistic models of life: the body is neither a warehouse, workshop, system of levers, pulleys, and clockwork (see notably Ménuret's article, “Œconomie Animale,” Reference Ménuret1765d, Enc. XI, 364a), nor merely an instrument controlled by the soul, both of these implying a passive understanding of the body as an entity dependent on some external force. Stahl describes the body and its organs as literally mere instruments of the soul, a position sometimes revised so that “organs are not, as the name might suggest, mere instruments,” but nevertheless, “it is the soul that makes the lungs breathe, the heart beat, the blood circulate, the stomach digest, the liver secrete” (Stahl Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1706a, § xcviii, in Stahl 1859, 347; Lemoine Reference Lemoine1864; in Hall Reference Hall1969, vol. 1, 363). For the vitalist, mechanism and its appeals to purely structural anatomical explanations cannot grasp the essential unity of a living body (the way in which organisation, as we shall see, is necessarily a “living and organized composite” [Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765a, Enc. VIII, 713a] of body and soul), whereas animism slips too easily into a metaphysics of Life which omits the functional explanation of the parts of the body(Ménuret Reference Rey1765e, Enc. XIII, 215b, 240a 215b, 240a; Rey Reference Rey2000, 121; also Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 23, 368). In this essay we have selected the concept of économie animale for we believe that it expresses the Montpellier vitalist attempt to integrate dynamical, functional properties into structural explanatory models which originally are mechanistic. In the broader context of eighteenth-century biomedical thought (or medico-philosophical thought as occurring in physicians, physiologists, and other kinds of natural philosophers), there is a space of activity which is neither Cartesian medicine, iatromechanism, Newtonian physiology, and biomedicine, nor the various permutations of chimiatry and animism (Roger Reference Roger, Rousseau and Porter1980). It is in this space that Montpellier vitalism is located, as it draws on and hybridizes these various currents, without necessarily attaining any absolute degree of conceptual coherence, and it is this space which we would like to describe, by focusing on the concept of œconomie or économie animale (the shift towards the modern spelling takes place precisely during the period analyzed here).

This idea of vitalism as an intermediate, pragmatic position located in between two metaphysically rigid extremes was nicely summarized in 1800 by the first “ideologist” of vitalism, Charles-Louis Dumas, for whom

But this definition of vitalism as “neither mechanism nor animism” is not original to Dumas: Bordeu, Jean-Joseph Ménuret (1739–1815) who will be a central figure in our analysis,Footnote ⁷ and Barthez regularly opposed the mistakes of the mechanists to those of the animists, juxtaposing the two standpoints and showing how they partly cancel each other out (e.g. Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 23, 368). Using perfectly teleomechanical language (to borrow an expression coined in Lenoir Reference Lenoir1982), Barthez says that “mechanics” is useful for determining exactly what “the advantages of the living body's organs are, in the mechanism of its intended functions” (Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 37). Barthez sounds almost like Stahl here, for whom “the life of the soul consists . . . particularly in action exercised and carried out in a body, by means of a body, on and affecting bodily activities” (Stahl [Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1706a] 1859, § LII, 298).

But the more materialistically inclined vitalists are more likely to challenge “soul explanations” than anything else, whether because they are metaphysically false or because they get in the way of the physician's proper task of understanding and curing illness; the animist insistence on the near-omniscience of the soul renders our corporeal finitude hard to fathom. Bordeu refers to the “evident fact” that animal bodies are not like watches because they are self-winding, and comments that unfortunately the Stahlians took this to mean that the higher-level features of vitality (fighting off illness and maintaining stability in the body, whether its temperature, digestive system, etc.) are dependent on the soul (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, § CXXXI, 1818, vol. 1, 204). Diderot, the greatest “disciple” of the vitalists, says of Stahl, half-skeptically, half-ironically, that the soul simply cannot know that much about nature and its operations,Footnote ⁸ a point often made by Ménuret, referring to cases including sleep and more severe comatose states where vital functions (“movements”) continue to be performed without consciousness (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765a, Enc. VIII, 713a). Elsewhere, Ménuret appeals in good reductionist fashion to a fairly basic, indeed “base” level of bodily dysfunction – inflammation of the lower intestine – in order to challenge animism:

However, it is not correct that Montpellier vitalism in its entirety is anti-Stahlian, as is claimed by commentators doubtless hoping to fully rehabilitate this movement so it can have a rightful place in a “canon” of mainstream history of science.Footnote ⁹ In fact, the montpelliérains include figures such as François Boissier de Sauvages (1706–1767), something of a “home-grown” animist for whom the bodily “machine” requires a soul, so it can discern good from evil (and conversely, machines do not fall ill, only living bodies). He says approvingly that “the Stahlians support the views of the ancients with an infinity of reasons drawn from practice” (Sauvages Reference Sauvages1770, II, 12). However, Sauvages’ animism is highly “functional,” being stripped of most the metaphysical dimensions that typically accompany such a position; he defends a “stahlianisme rénové” (Duchesneau Reference Duchesneau1982, 384; Martin Reference Martin, Cunningham and French1990). Further, even as materialistically inclined a vitalist as Ménuret grants that Stahl's system “is very favourable to practical medicine,” because it focuses on observation; he thinks it errs when it moves into metaphysics and “confuses nature with the soul” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765c, Enc. XI, 316b). Bordeu, too, sounds quite Stahlian when he says that all parts of the (living) body are guided or directed by a force conservatrice that watches over them unceasingly; but he also ridicules Stahl for claiming that it is the soul that sends saliva to the mouth, and refers approvingly to Haller's dismissal of Stahl on this matter (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, §§ CVIII, XXII, CXXXI, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 163n., 71, 204).Footnote ¹⁰ In “Sécrétion,” Fouquet praises Stahl as the “Plato of modern medicine,” apparently without irony, and cites the saliva example – positively (Enc. XIV, 873a-b).

In fact, animism itself is not monolithic, since by the 1730s, with Whytt and Sauvages, it is already something different from its Stahlian heyday (Steinke Reference Steinke2005, 185); Stahl himself asserts that “the soul is a being which is destined to become involved with material entities,” as it is the source of movement in matter, or – now sounding a good deal like Bordeu, conversely – that what most disturbed him in “the physical theories of the human body” was how “from the outset they were silent about life itself” (Stahl Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1706a § lxix, in Stahl 1859, 318; Stahl Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1706b, in Stahl 1859, 224).

All of these quotations variously illustrate the basic point that “research programs” or at least the models of which they are composed do not smoothly correspond to univocal metaphysical positions. Even when they do have a manifest conceptual component, it is, perhaps by necessity, “eclectic” and “hybrid.” Indeed, this “neither-nor” situation between mechanism and animism characterizes 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 (Steinke Reference Steinke2005, 178–182),Footnote ¹¹ Newtonian biomedicine in England (Pitcairne, Keill, Robinson, Hales, et al.), Maupertuis’ appeal to forces of attraction to explain molecular-level properties of living beings (Kaitaro Reference Kaitaro1997, 83) . . . or Montpellier vitalism. Haller, the pupil of Boerhaave who developed ingenious quantitative experiments and experimental protocols, famously spoke of the project of physiology as “anatomia animata” (“Physiologia est animata anatome,” Haller Reference Haller1747, 5); but the vitalist Bordeu also, less famously, described his goal as being to “animate . . . the skeleton of Anatomy” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, Preface, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 46).

What is the nature, then, of this “in-between” conceptual space in which the économie animale is located? In order to answer this question, we shall briefly present the history of the term along with some key examples of its vitalist usage, notably the “metaphor” of the bee-swarm, examine the way in which it extends and transforms mechanistic concepts, via “Newtonian-analogical” thinking and in close proximity to materialism, and conclude with some considerations as to its ontological status.

§ 3. Économie animale, an Object and a Program

“Économie animale,” animal economy, was by no means a new word in the mid-eighteenth century. It had a Hippocratic pedigree dating at least back to the sixteenth century, when it was used by Hippocratic physicians such as Louis Duret in Paris, who speaks of an “oeconomia naturalis, vitalis et animalis” (Duret, Hippocratis magni Coacae Praenotiones [1588], Paris, 1621, 29, 146, and 440, quoted in Balan Reference Balan1975, 301), and earlier by followers of Paracelsus, who added onto the older theological sense of an oeconomia as an order, an alchemical sense of the body as a distillation vat (Balan Reference Balan1975, 289). But it is used loosely, not as a technical term. In the seventeenth century, it was extremely common in Newtonian medicine (Brown Reference Brown1974 and 1981) and in Walter Charleton's “Epicurean” medicine; Charleton published several works with oeconomia animalis in the title (e.g. Charleton Reference Charleton1659). But it was explicitly turned into a new, polemical term by vitalists such as Ménuret, in his crucial contributions to the Encyclopédie, including “Œconomie Animale,” “Inflammation,” “Mort,” “Observation,” and many others, initially signed by name, then “m” or “M” after vol. IX. As Rey has shown, Ménuret authored 86 articles in the Encyclopédie; not an enormous number, but if one takes into consideration the length of some of the articles, such as “Pouls” (more than 70 columns), his contribution amounts to more than one per cent of the 17 volumes of the Encyclopédie. Moreover, he uses the term “Œconomie animale” at least sixty times, which amounts to almost 15 per cent of its specifically conceptual occurrences in the Encyclopédie (60 out of 410). Ménuret also speaks self-consciously about his recognition of the animal economy as an over-arching concept (or “function”): “The priority of this function has escaped the attention of almost all observers; they have only examined one function after another, ending up in a vicious circle in which . . . causes become effects, and effects causes” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765d, Enc. XI, 362b).

Our specific interest in the notion begins with Ménuret's definition: the animal economy, in its “most exact and common sense,” is “the order, mechanism, and overall set of the functions and movements which sustain life” (ibid., 362a; emphasis in original). The vitalist emphasis here is absent from earlier articles of the Encyclopédie that use the notion, such as D'Aumont's “Équilibre,” “Faim,” “Fibre,” “Foie,” and “Grossesse.” When Ménuret or Bordeu use the phrase it has a distinctly assertive and programmatic character; it is there in the first and last sentences of Bordeu's major work, the Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751); Ménuret speaks of how the mechanists with their ordinary physical laws will never understand the workings of the animal economy (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765d, Enc. XI, 364b). Indeed, the number of doctoral dissertations explicitly devoted to some aspects of the animal economy concept, particularly in Montpellier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shows that it is a vitalist leitmotiv.Footnote ¹²

However, as we saw with D'Aumont's usage and others, one should not project the vitalist overdetermination of the notion onto all other usages of it, as Roselyne Rey seems to do when she asserts that “animal economy” and “physiology” correspond to two different medical trajectories (“deux médecines différentes,” Rey Reference Rey2000, 123), the former more holistic, the latter more reductionist (as in Haller). Granted, it is easy to find some texts from the broader medical context that support this view. Mandeville often uses the word “oeconomy” to mean something distinct from the “structure of the body,” such as when he names Harvey, Borelli, and others as helpful sources for understanding “the Oeconomy as well as the structure of the body,” or when he notes: “When we see Creatures differ immensely from one another in the Structure of their inward, as well as outward Parts, why should we look for a greater Analogy between them in their animal Oeconomy?” That is to say that structure – whether internal or external – is not the same thing as the “oeconomy” (Mandeville [Reference Mandeville1730] 1976, 21, 143). Closer to Ménuret's polemical standpoint, the Scottish military doctor John Pringle (1707–1782), who had been Boerhaave's student and was to end his career as the President of the Royal Society (1772–1778), declared in one of his discourses to the Society: “I think we are still backward in knowing the laws of the animal economy; the common mechanical ones, such as my old master Boerhaave laid such stress upon, can account for little” (Pringle, as quoted in Blumenbach Reference Blumenbach1785, I, 585).

But there are probably more occurrences of physicians and commentators using the terms “physiology” and “animal economy” indifferently, as equivalents, or as overlapping, non-contradictory programs, as in Boerhaave's statement: “Vocatur φυσι oλóγικη, oïχoνoμíα humana, doctrina de usu partium” (Boerhaave Reference Boerhaave and Haller1739, I, § 33, 48), a statement that was reiterated by Haller and repeated almost verbatim in the article “Physiologie” by Tarin (Enc. XII, 537b). Similar occurrences can be found in medical treatises and handbooks from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century: for instance, Johannes Bohn's 1680 Circulus anatomico-physiologicus, seu Oeconomia corporis animalis (Bohn is in fact considered to be one of the earlier users of the term “physiology,” notably in his earlier Exercitationes physiologiae, 1668); François Quesnay's influential Essai physique sur l'œconomie animale (praised by both Haller and La Mettrie; first published in 1736 and revised subsequently); and Boerhaave's own Physiologike sey Oeconomia animalis (1741). Later examples include Charles Jenty's mid-eighteenth-century handbook featuring Haller, Morgagni, Ruysch, Winslow, etc., entitled Course of anatomico-physiological lectures on the human structure and animal oeconomy (1757), and the translation of Haller entitled Dr. Albert Haller's Physiology, being a course of lectures upon the visceral anatomy and vital oeconomy of human bodies (1754). Haller is precisely the figure who expands the scope of mechanism to such an extent that Rey's distinction between the two medical traditions does not apply. Even Barthez, amongst the vitalists, uses the expression “économie animale” without any particular emphasis, sometimes in the same sentence as “physiologie” (Barthez Reference Barthez1858, 23, 99, 130 n., 360).

Thus the point is not that the animal economy is the key conceptual innovation in all of mid-eighteenth-century biomedicine, but rather that it is a defining concept of vitalism. If we examine the occurrence of the words “économie animale” and “physiologie” in the Encyclopédie, we find a marked difference in favor of the former. With various possible spellings, the result is the following: économie animale 302; conomie animale 112; economie animale 15; écon. anim. 13; econom. anim. 11; con. anim. 7; conom. anim. 4; économie anim. 2; économ. animale 1; conom. animal. 1; a total of 468, of which 58 are just subject headings. In contrast, “physiologie” has only 300 occurrences, of which 115 are subject headings. In addition, the article Œconomie Animale” is 13.8 columns long, whereas “Physiologie” is only 1.8 columns long. It would seem, then, that the notion of animal economy plays an important rôle in the Encyclopédie, expressing the structural-functional understanding of biological life (“l'ordre, le méchanisme, l'ensemble des fonctions & des mouvemens qui entretiennent la vie des animaux”) – despite the absence of the term “animal economy” from the “Système figuré des connaissances,” unlike “physiology.”Footnote ¹³

In the nineteenth-century Littré medical dictionary, the animal economy is described as comprising “the laws governing the organisation of animals and plants”; but the authors note that by the mid-eighteenth century the term took on the meaning, not of the laws or theoretical system, but of the actual “set of the parts of organized beings” (“Économie,” in Littré and Robin Reference Littré and Robin1863, 486). And Bernard Balan, in his thorough study of the history of the term, notes that “animal economy” can mean the science or its object (Balan Reference Balan1975, 294); perhaps more than a “science,” it was a “research program” (Huneman Reference Huneman, Wolff and Cipolloni2007, 264). Already in Stahl, “naturae seu conomia animalis” meant both “the order and harmony which define the living body,” and “Nature which restores and preserves the living body” (Balan Reference Balan1975, 296; Stahl, Physiologia, I.ii.8, in Stahl [Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1730] 1860, 212).

In essence, there is something “deictic” about the notion in its vitalist usage: the practitioner-theorists of the animal economy often try and direct the reader's attention to this particular object, but conversely it is only by the existence of this object that their science or cluster of sciences can emerge. However, Ménuret directly challenges this Stahlian duality and thus by extension, Littré and Balan's comment: he specifically protests against those who use the term to mean the body itself (thus “the movements and functions of the animal oeconomy”) when rigorously it means “the order, mechanism, and overall set of the functions and movements which sustain life” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765d, Enc. XI, 362a). As to what the exact extension of the “animal economy” is, Ménuret provides both a negative and a positive statement. Negatively, as opposed to the body as machine:

and positively, as a kind of “dynamized” machine:

In this important passage we learn that animal economy is both a structural notion (dealing with parts of the body and their location) and a functional notion (incorporating the “action and movement” of the parts; Ménuret also frequently speaks of their “usage”). And this temporal, active language of function and usage is often opposed to the static, atemporal character of purely anatomical approaches. In other words, the animal economy is “comprised of a set of functions which govern the disposition of the living body as such, and enable it to be distinguished from the dead body, which is left open to corruption by the loss of these functions” (Balan Reference Balan1975, 291). And how is it that a particular arrangement of parts differentiates a dead body from a living body? The difference lies not merely in the arrangement, but in the very nature of the parts: the vitalist will argue that individual organs, or even fibres, are not merely “masses” or “aggregates” but lives:

Ménuret suggests that “we cease to consider the human or animal body as the mechanists and Boerhaavians do, namely, as a crude machine in which all actions and parts are independent of one another” (ibid.). Now, importantly, he does not distinguish the animal economy from an “inorganic machine” because it is a phaenomena bene fundata, like Leibniz's “source plus profonde” (a deeper metaphysical ground from which the general principles of bodies flow, the latter being fully specifiable in mechanistic terms).Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, the difference lies in the nature of the components, for the body is “an infinite assemblage of small bodies,” all equally alike, animated and alive, each of them possessing a specific and particular life, action, sensitivity, movement and at the same time, a common and general life, sensitivity, etc. (ibid.).

The animal economy is a whole, formed of parts which have, or are, independent lives. This definition is expressed most memorably in the celebrated metaphor of the “bee-swarm” (grappe d'abeilles or groupe d'abeilles), in Bordeu and Ménuret; the image was also used by Maupertuis in his Système de la nature in 1751 and then transposed from vitalist “medicine” to materialist “philosophy” by Diderot in Le Rêve de D'Alembert in 1769. The bee-swarm arguably represents the single most condensed expression of the structural-functional vision of the animal economy in Montpellier vitalism. As such we quote Bordeu's version, in his Recherches anatomiques, extensively. The title of the section is “How to understand the action of all the parts, their departments, and their periodic motions.” Bordeu begins by distinguishing between a “particular,” localized circulation and a “general” circulation, and seeks to describe the levels of interrelation between the two, with the telling claim that even the smallest body part wants to be treated as “a body apart.” He then shifts rhetorical gears and asks,

Bordeu uses the image of a circle, which we would today describe as “circular causality”; other vitalists including La Caze speak of the “cercle d'action” which exists in the body and render mechanistic explanations of cause and effect inapplicable therein (La Caze Reference de La Caze1755, 66–68).Footnote ¹⁶ Regardless, it is a vitalist constant, out of which Bordeu builds this elaborate image of organic unity. Similarly, in the article “Observation,” Ménuret mentions the bee-swarm and Bordeu (and claims priority for Bordeu over Maupertuis) in order to emphasize that life in the body occurs, or is best described as, a “connection of actions” (“liaison d'actions”):

Whether the term used is “metaphorical” like the bee-swarm, “technical” like that of “organic sympathies,” or somewhere in between the two like the “circle of action,” we can see that Ménuret (and Bordeu) are trying to articulate a structural, relational concept of interaction amongst living parts (“lives”) that does not rely on strictly linear causality. This is also shown by the frequent usage of the Hippocratic maxim, “everything concurs, consents and conspires together in the body.” The forces and actions of the animal economy are too intimately intertwined to be quantified according to purely mechanical laws of force and motion. That the image or metaphor of the bee-swarm and its close analog, the image of the musical instrument with vibrating strings producing a unified resonance, is not merely poetic inspiration but is interwoven with the “technical” developments of the vitalists, can be seen in Ménuret's article “Pouls,” this time influenced by the Chinese medicine of the pulse (sphygmology):

Indeed, un groupe d'abeilles, un luth, la vie générale formée par les vies particulières des organs: these metaphors which express the structural-functional composite which vitalism seeks to articulate, are all from articles in the Encyclopédie written by Ménuret (“Observation,” Enc. XI, 318b; “Pouls,” Enc. XIII, 227b; “Œconomie Animale,” Enc. XI, 361b), whose status should then be reevaluated, following Rey's ground-breaking work. Bordeu uses the image in a more materialist way, emphasizing the mechanical interaction of the parts, whereas Ménuret is more “holistic,” emphasizing interdependence as a constitutive feature of the organic whole.

Barthez and others were mistaken in thinking of Bordeu and La Caze as “organicists” inasmuch as the latter do not reduce function to the properties of solid components. To use a distinction which Diderot was to exploit at length, organic parts are continuous rather than merely contiguous; this is what differentiates the wholes they form from mere aggregates. On this point, Leibniz, Stahl, post-Stahlian chemists such as Venel, Diderot, and the vitalists all concur. Vitalists, however, tend to speak out against the iatrochemical, Paracelsian approach to living beings which treats the body merely as a “still,” a distillation chamber (Bordeu, Recherches sur les maladies chroniques, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 2, 349).Footnote ¹⁷

The point here, however, is that the animal economy is different from other competing models of the living body (mechanical, chemical, and the various permutations thereof) because it defines, not just the arrangement of its parts, but their very nature, differently. Put differently, the animal economy is neither like the Strasbourg clock nor like a distillation still, but it is most unlike the clock, because of the nature and arrangement of its parts, understood as “lives.”

An “oeconomy” is a stable interaction of parts (thus Fouquet defines health as the “economic action of sensitivity” [Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, Enc. XV, 42b]) as opposed to an imbalance in the activity of the organs); but an animal oeconomy is a stable interaction, not just of “parts” but of “lives,” that is, of organs considered as lives, like individual bees in the collective swarm. Ménuret describes movement and sensation as two basic properties which exist in modified forms in every organ; “they give rise to a corresponding number of particular lives, the whole of which, in concert [concours] and mutual support, form the general life of the body” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765d, Enc. XI, 361b); Fouquet says that “each organ senses or lives in its own way, and the agreement [concours] or sum of these particular lives comprises life in general, just as the harmony, symmetry and arrangement of these little lives comprises health” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, Enc. XV, 42b). The point is made still more clearly in an Essai sur l'irritabilité published by ‘D.G.’ in Avignon in 1776: “the life of each organ of the animate body is not merely a simple life but in truth, the product of as many particular lives as there are living molecules entering into the composition of this organ” (Essai sur l'irritabilité, Avignon, 1776, 12, as quoted in Huneman Reference Huneman, Wolff and Cipolloni2007, 390 n.2).

The animal economy as a combination of “lives” is thus distinct from mechanical and chemical theories of the body, being defined as a structural and functional whole. But isn't this the definition of another term of the period, one which overlaps with the animal economy but emerges – and extends – much later? We mean the term organisation, which the Encyclopédie defines as the arrangement des parties qui constituent les corps animés (XI, 629b), a definition reminiscent of the animal economy. But if the question is: how does the notion differ from that of a machine, while nevertheless integrating properties such as sensitivity into an integrated structural (and causally closed) whole?, then looking at the occurrences of “organisation” in the Encyclopédie will not give us the answers. First, because the article “Organisation” is two lines long, as opposed to “Œconomie Animale,” which is seven full pages long; second, because the Encyclopédie defines “organisation” in purely mechanical terms. This does not mean the notion was mechanistic, but that the Encyclopédie is the wrong place to look to for conceptual novelty (Rey Reference Rey2000, 174).Footnote ¹⁸

In fact, it is important to note that the enrichment of the notion during this period is very much due to the input of the vitalists. Ménuret speaks of “organic bodies” (in this following Leibnizian usage) and is one of the first to distinguish the organic and the “inorganic” in these terms. If we recall the sense of oeconomia as “order,” we can see its closeness to organisation, as when Fouquet, in “Sensibilité,” defines the latter term as “l'appareil économique de la vie ou de la sensibilité” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, Enc. XV, 41b).Footnote ¹⁹ But there is a more explicitly “structural” connotation of the newer term: in 1803 (thus close to forty years after his contributions to the Encyclopédie), Fouquet says in his lecture on clinical medicine that the physician must know “the structure or organisation of man” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1803, 14). Whether it was called organisation or animal economy, the vitalist model for the living body inasmuch as it required explanations beyond purely anatomical-mechanical ones, was expressed, as we have seen, as being like a bee-swarm: a combination of individual lives which form one collective Life.

Returning to the grappe or groupe d'abeilles, we are tempted to ask what kind of concept it is; it is an “image,” of course, but one that its authors clearly intend as encapsulating their speculative and practical efforts. Bordeu himself is aware of the difficulty and asks “to be allowed a metaphor” when dealing with forces that govern “a thousand singular motions in the human body and its parts,” given that “we do not even know which terms to use to describe certain motions in plants or properties of minerals” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, § CVIII in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 163). He admits at the end of this passage that he can only provide “a way of conceiving things [une manière de concevoir les choses], metaphorical expressions, and comparisons” (ibid.). One can easily imagine the reaction: the bee-swarm and its assorted ancillary metaphors are of course not scientific concepts! But do we know exactly what a scientific concept is? As we shall see shortly, neither mechanistic explanations nor Newtonian methodological innovations – to mention two widely agreed-upon definitions of modern scientific procedure – reduce to any fundamental, unequivocal level of provable “facts.” Granted, if the criterion is experiment, then the vitalist theory of the animal economy cannot be easily called “scientific” (unlike its medical-Newtonian homonym in England, as we will see in section 5, or in Haller's physiology, which does seek to quantify functions using measuring-instruments, such as the “mathematical instrument divided into very small parts” which he applied to the length of a dog's nerve while irritating it, so as to measure its contractions [Haller Reference Haller and Shirley1755, 39; 1981, 675]).

It is well known that the Montpellier vitalists praise observation and disparage experiment, whether the latter consists of anatomical and pathological studies of corpses, or worse, of vivisection of live animals. Fouquet speaks of Haller's theory as dependent on a “horrific experimental set-up [appareil d'expériences],” ostensibly “guided by the desire to help humankind, but leaving out no painful instrument, no source of torment for . . . an infinite number of animals” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, Enc. XV, 50b). Ménuret restricts his criticism to epistemology when he describes experimental phenomena in his programmatic article “Observation” as having been arbitrarily “decomposed and combined,” giving rise to conditions “far different from those present in nature” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret de Chambaud1765c, Enc. XI, 313b). When the physiologist dissolves blood freshly drawn from an animal, using other liquids, the knowledge he derives regarding the resulting mixture “is no longer the fruit of pure observation; . . . knowledge acquired by this means is quite mediocre and imperfect” (ibid., 314a). La Caze insists that “observation” means “what can be observed on a healthy or sick body,” whereas “experiment” means “whatever can be observed of a dead body” (La Caze Reference de La Caze1755, 9), and also targets Boerhaave's “useless experimentation” (ibid., 47–48, 66).

But if the criterion for vitalism's being “scientific” is that the animal economy is used as a heuristic device in the (Montpellier) vitalist medico-physiological inquiry, then it is “scientific.” In any case, rather than reaching a premature decision on the matter, we want to emphasize that the animal economy façon vitaliste is a model of the living body which seeks to articulate its interrelation of parts as a “unified whole obeying principles of global regulation, by means of which the activity of each part is harmoniously adjusted with that of the others” (Guillo Reference Guillo2003, 43). It is an interdependent system of actions which is defined in contradistinction to the machine. Or is it?

§ 4. Expanded Mechanism

Prima facie, the animal economy or organisation appear to be defined explicitly against mechanistic models of explanation, causality, or substance. Aren't we always told that mechanistic models are limited in their emphasis on the “non-living” features of organisms, notably physical laws, whereas “organismic” models (not to be confused with the “organicism” of the Paris medical faculty in the early nineteenth century!) emphasize the “organisational features” of organisms? On this view, a mechanistic model deliberately excludes relevant features of living organisms in order for the model to “work,” in contrast to the emphasis on “holistic” features of living systems (Gierer Reference Gierer1996).

A concise formulation of the distinction and how the new vitalist concept is meant to overcome it was suggested by Roselyne Rey, who defined “organisation” as “machine plus sensitivity”; “this plus amounts to more than mere addition: a complex and autonomous system, endowed with multiple networks of relations, mutual interdependence, intimate correspondences and connexions, a system which can record external impressions and respond to them” (Rey Reference Rey2000, 177). We then have a precise definition of how organisation amounts to a new vision of life in structural, relational terms. But immediately this turns out to be problematic. What could it possibly mean for organic sensitivity to be “added on” to the basic features of machines? Of course, it could mean the micro-mechanism of Haller's “animated anatomy”; but this does not help us define specifically vitalist concepts. Indeed, what is problematic in Rey's formulation is that she intends it as an anti-mechanistic statement: the new notion of animal economy is not simply the result of adding on some features of living bodies onto the successful mechanical models of Descartes and La Mettrie (who she incorrectly describes as a mechanist), both of whom “miss the specificity of living being” (ibid., 137).

If we step back from this deceptively simple and conclusive definition, we can see that both historically and conceptually, “machine” and “mechanism” are broader than their common, rather a-historical definitions. Boerhaavian mechanism is more expansive and eclectic than Cartesian mechanism; Hallerian (micro-)mechanism is more expansive and eclectic than Boerhaavian mechanism. Even Descartes himself is increasingly seen as having a more complex physiology than the classic opposition between “mechanism” and “teleology” reveals. The neat conceptual clarity of this opposition does not match up with the historical and experimental context well at all. As Stephen Gaukroger has observed, Cartesian mechanistic physiology, far from denying the existence of goal-directed processes, is in fact replete with functional language, e.g. when discussing the circulation of blood and the motion of heart; the Cartesian point is not that bodies actually are machines (an eliminativist view, as Gaukroger puts it) 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) (Gaukroger Reference Gaukroger, Gaukroger, Schuster and Sutton2000). The interplay between mechanistic and teleological notions is more explicit still in the case of Boerhaave (Duchesneau Reference Duchesneau, Cimino and Duchesneau1997, 301), and ultimately in Haller's vis insita which he locates within his micro-mechanical framework – although Haller wavers ontologically, saying to Réaumur in 1752 that “it appeared to me that irritability occurs mechanically, without the participation of the soul,” but to Bonnet in 1755 that “I do not believe irritability to be subject to the common laws of motion”Footnote ²⁰; if confronted with the question, Haller would doubtless have said, as he did on several occasions, that his goal was not to undertake a mechanistic investigation of irritability itself – even though he occasionally lapsed and suggested that its material substratum was the “animal gluten” inside the fibres.

Thus “mechanism” exists in many forms – whether Cartesian, Boylean, iatromechanistic or Boerhaavian; and within physiology itself it is possible to speak of an “expanded” or “broadened” mechanism (a “neo-mechanism,” in Jacques Roger's terms; a “special mechanist hypothesis” in François Duchesneau's; most recently, Maria Teresa Monti has spoken of “micro-mechanism”; Duchesneau Reference Duchesneau1982, 126–170, 201–234, here, 156; Monti Reference Monti, Cimino and Duchesneau1997, 43; Steinke Reference Steinke2005, 105) in which vital properties are accounted for in terms of the interrelation between anatomical structure (the cause) and physiological function (the effect). The model of the machine has significant heuristic value because it is primarily an explanatory model. Countless iatromechanists, and philosophical mechanists of different stripes such as Boyle and Descartes, could say, like William Thomson later on, “I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model of the object that I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise, I do not.”Footnote ²¹

Not only are the mechanistic models of this period plural, diverse, and variously defined; the interplay between “mechanical models of life” and their various opposites (the Stahlian or Leibnizian organism; the vitalist animal economy and organisation, etc.) is complex, with blurry contours and shifting borders. La Caze describes his aim in L'Idée de l'homme physique et moral as the explanation of “the mechanism which subserves the functions of the animal economy,” a mechanistic level “chiefly founded on anatomical observations” (La Caze Reference de La Caze1755, 2); he sounds more clearly vitalistic some pages later when he says that movement and sensation are basic, non-reducible features of the body (ibid., 12). Ménuret speaks in rather hybrid terms of “l'organisation animée de notre machine” in the important article “Pouls” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret1765e, Enc. XIII, 239); after all, what is the medicine of the pulse if not a “structural-functional” compromise brokered between mechanism and its opposite? Similarly, Buffon, the theorist of “organic molecules,” comfortably speaks in the same sentence of “animal economy” and “machine,” or “la mécanique vivante” and “le mécanisme de l'économie animale”Footnote ²²; conversely, “machine” was frequently used to mean “body.” By the nineteenth century the situation is different, with the Encyclopédie méthodique explaining (in 1808) that one should no longer use the expression “machine humaine” . . . but that “animal economy” or “organism” are suitable substitutes: “It is preferable to use the synonymous expressions ‘living economy’, ‘vital economy’, ‘animal economy’, ‘organism’, ‘organic mass’, ‘the entire economy of the human body’. The term ‘machine’ seems to refer to a system of causes and effects which belongs wholly to the mechanistic theory” (“Machine,” in Encyclopédie méthodique, 1808, 310). In contrast to “organism” in Leibniz or Stahl, organisation and économie animale in vitalist usage are “mechanism-friendly,” ultimately less “teleomechanical” than they are concepts reflecting an expanded sense of mechanism, which we term “structural-functional.” A classic example of this is Bordeu's way of defining the workings of the glands.

Bordeu is often described as having selected the glands as his theoretical object because they are the exemplar of what is non-mechanistic about the animal economy, since all mechanistic physiologies stumble, not on the humours the glands extract from the blood, but on the workings of the secretory organs themselves: for instance, how does a gland differentiate between one fluid and another, given that they are clearly ‘intended’ to deal with specific fluids and not others?Footnote ²³ Humours, Bordeu says, cannot be explained according to “the actions of solids and the disposition of the organs” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, Preface, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 48). But at the same time he doesn't want to fall back on a chimiatric explanation of humours, just to emphasize that pure mechanism can't account for them. The distinctively Bordevian emphasis here is on the “sensitivity” of each gland (which works like a force). But to achieve this level of analysis the glands have to be studied according to “position and interconnections, in order to know their action” (ibid., 46). There is the structural-functional analysis encapsulated in a sentence; but it is not superfluous to note that Bordeu continues, “this is indeed part of Anatomy” (ibid.; emphasis in original). Simply, the scope of “anatomical inquiry” must be widened, Bordeu argues, to include “the use of the parts, their interplay, connections and relations” (ibid.). This is what he means by “animating the skeleton of anatomy.”

Indeed, Bordeu is less “anti-mechanistic” than he is an “expanded mechanist,” performing experiments by compressing a piece of sponge in the jaws to study how a gland reacts to compression by muscular tissue. Fouquet, in his article “Sécrétion,” provides a useful summary of Bordeu's work:

Similarly, when Bordeu discusses the functioning of the seminal vesicles, he explains function in terms of the spatial disposition of the parts: “All the parts have been arranged so as to favour this convulsion; they are extremely sensitive and nervous, and are disposed so that, by communicating their movements to each other, they sustain and reinforce one another” (Bordeu, §§ C, LXXI, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 157, 125–126; emphasis ours). In this passage, the language of organic sympathies and sensitivity is seamlessly combined with that of spatial contiguity and communication of impulses through strictly efficient causality. So even in as apparently anti-mechanistic an area of physiological inquiry as glands and glandular secretions, Bordeu reasons in terms of parts, locations, pressure, and quantities of fluids.

As to Ménuret, he defines a proper physiological explanation as one which is grounded on “the structure of the human body and its properties,” and would take account of “the changes occurring in the organisation of the body and the mechanism of the functions, as age increases” (“Mort,” Enc. X, 721 1765i). Notice the recurring parallel between “organisation” and “mechanism,” here made more complicated by the idea that the organisation is the structure and the mechanism . . . the function). These changes in bodily structure and function are defined mechanistically as a tightening and hardening of the fibres, which become “less sensitive, less irritable” (ibid.). Physiology requires a combined “statico-hydraulic” analysis, which features both the hardening of fibres, vessels, and viscera, and, pace Bordeu, the decreasing secretions, the increasingly dry skin, and the decline in the pulse.

If the vitalism we are discussing were indeed of the “metaphysical, substantival” sort, there is a good chance it would also claim that the range of phenomena it covers are somehow extra-causal, “beyond causality,” outside of the causally closed space-time world. Neo-vitalism in the late nineteenth century, from Driesch to Goldstein, often insists on the essentially temporal character of organisms as opposed to the spatial, mechanical character of the non-organic world (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2004, Reference Wolfe2006a). And granted, a well-known aspect of vitalism, montpelliérain and other, is to insist on the irreducible complexity of the “cercle d'action” (La Caze Reference de La Caze1755, 68–69; Wolfe Reference Wolfe, Audidière, Bourdin and Duflo2006b), with its circular chain of causes and effects that make it impossible to discern, as the mechanist would hope to, causes from effects: “at any time, effects therein become causes, and causes in turn become effects” (La Caze Reference de La Caze1755). Ménuret and Diderot speak of the ceaseless “action and reaction” in the animal economy; Cabanis will similarly declare that in the body, “all functions are linked together, forming an unbroken circle.”Footnote ²⁵

But if we look closer at the vitalist texts, beyond the theme of the “circle of action,” we find plenty of appeals to efficient causality, to direct, spatial transmission from one material part to another, contiguous part. As we have already discussed, Bordeu analyzes the mechanism of ejaculation in terms of the disposition of parts and how movement is transmitted from one part to the next; more generally, he relies on a very linear sense of causality and says that “the machine is arranged in such a way that one function is the cause of the next, such that there is a chain of successive actions, which are the causes of the others” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, §§ LXXI, LXXXVIII, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 125, 145). Ménuret extends this linear, structural emphasis on efficient causality a bit further, in discussing excretory mechanisms:

and, in that most strategic location, his article “Œconomie Animale,” he reasons in terms of efficient causality and bluntly says that with the body, as with any other machine, we need to find its “springs” to understand how it works:

Ménuret also describes his project as an “anatomie médicinale,” thereby using a term (anatomy) which officially belonged to the opposing camp. Our point here is that careful focus on the status and construction of “animal economy” or “organisation” indicate that Montpellier vitalism can be understood, with some caveats (Sauvages, Barthez occasionally) as a kind of expanded mechanism.

To use a distinction made popular by Thomas Kuhn at one time, between mathematical and experimental traditions in the history of science, in which the former seeks to formalize and render coherent existing knowledge, whereas the latter seeks to provoke and discover new phenomena (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1976), one might say that Bordeu and Ménuret do not want to reduce the workings of the body to mechanics as a known science, yet the properties they invoke are dependent on mechanistic concepts, they supervene on them. In this sense what we are referring to as “expanded” or “enriched” mechanism is similar to what Morton Beckner called “weak organicism” (Kaitaro Reference Kaitaro1997, 28). As such the vitalism of the animal economy is “structural-functional” rather than substantival or ontological. Since Leibniz is often named as a major philosophical source of Montpellier vitalism, one could imagine this “expanded mechanism” as being like the view that Leibniz, who never tired of repeating that “everything happens mechanically in Nature,” could hold if he had given up all commitment to a two-world ontology in which there was a deeper foundation of reality, a “source plus profonde” which is the source of Life, animation, identity, etc., and accepted that Life is a product of a special kind of interaction between a special kind of parts – emergence, in other words, and “innocent emergence” at that.

Montpellier vitalism is not a holistic philosophy of nature that rejects the scientific pertinence of mechanistic explanations, but rather an “expanded mechanism,” and by extension a scientific approach – if not per se a “paradigm,” as we discuss in the conclusion – in which the key features of organic continuity are “modeled” in structural-functional terms, as “animal economy” or organisation. But it's not just a matter of the occurrence in vitalist vocabulary of “machine,” “mechanism,” “structure,” “causality,” and the like. Rather, Montpellier vitalism is not a “substantival, metaphysical vitalism” for two additional reasons: because it participates in the broader movement of Newtonian analogy in biomedicine, and because of its close, overlapping relation to materialism (a view which is not shared by many other interpreters, as we shall make clear).

§ 5. The Rejection of Metaphysical Vitalism: Newtonianism and Materialism

§ 6. Innocent, Structural-Functional Vitalism

It is hopefully clear philosophically why the montpelliérains are not neo-vitalists like Hans Driesch in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they do not look for a metaphysical foundation for the inquiry into organic nature, and specifically do not “multiply entities” by suggesting that there are, e.g. “entelechies,” that is, non-physical causes of physical events. However, historically it is not clear that there is anything like a “paradigm” here. There are some distinctive, useful heuristic concepts such as the animal economy or organisation, which combine structural and functional levels of explanation in an original way; and there are constant traits found in the various versions of the theory, such as the “dialectical” relation to mechanism and animism, the opposition between observation and experiment, the related invocation of Hippocrates and Hippocratism, and the focus on temporal and dynamic features of organisms. But there is not a fully coherent doctrinal whole, a “paradigm,” in the eyes of commentators for whom iatromechanism possesses a comfortable theoretical foundation, in conformity with the methodological and epistemological aspirations of the Scientific Revolution, whereas vitalism lacks such a foundation, and, in the words of Ernst Mayr, “never reached theoretical unity.”Footnote ³⁴

However, this does not diminish the interest of the vitalist outlook, historically: our task is then to seek to render intelligible the occasionally archaic-seeming, patchwork theory. While we are skeptical regarding this attribution of paradigmatic status to one “prize-winning” candidate and not another, the opposite view does not itself make much more sense – namely, to claim that with Haller's development of irritability on systematic, testable grounds, a “paradigm shift” from mechanism to vitalism takes place.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, as Salomon-Bayet has suggested, it is not clear in what sense Kuhnian notions of “paradigm,” “normal,” or “abnormal” science are applicable to the emergence of “biology” at the end of the eighteenth century. If there were a scientific revolution for bio-medicine, she argues, it would have to last from 1666 to 1793 in her “target” area, the Académie Royale des Sciences; it would then be something of a “permanent revolution” (Salomon-Bayet Reference Salomon-Bayet1978, 15). In that sense, the basic Kuhnian notion that a scientific revolution is a shift in paradigms cannot apply to the history of medicine and the allied sciences, for “the medical community is not homogeneous” and “the paradigm tears apart in multiple directions” (Salomon-Bayet Reference Salomon-Bayet, Jahnke and Otte1981, 36, 39). If there had been a paradigm shift from mechanism to vitalism with Haller, what should we make of figures such as Bordeu and Wolff, on their respective sides of the Rhine, neither of whom share much agreement with Haller? (Roger Reference Roger, Rousseau and Porter1980).

However, there are unmistakable signs in the vitalist conceptual edifice of a systematization of fields of inquiry, which in the earlier part of the period examined here would have been called “animal economy,” and which bears real resemblance to what was later called “biology.” Thus Barthez insists that the separate classes of animals and plants should be brought together in a common scale of living beings (Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 63–64) and defines the objects of his planned “science of man” as: “the forces of the Vital Principle in man, their communications or sympathies, their unification into a system, their distinctive modifications in the various temperaments and ages, and their extinction at the time of death” (ibid., 35–36). The point isn't to say that Barthez rather than Treviranus and Lamarck is the founder of “biology” but that the conceptual space of the animal economy, as we have tried to reconstruct it, is close to that of biology, albeit not on reductive grounds. Indeed, Lordat, Barthez's main disciple, will indeed restate the doctrine of the Vital Principle as “biology,” adding embryological and cerebral analyses to complete the picture (Lavabre-Bertrand Reference Lavabre-Bertrand1992, 197–198, 201).

If, despite these historical caveats, we can see that the scientific discourse of Montpellier vitalism achieves a kind of conceptual coherence, we then want to know, finally, what kinds of concepts does it produce? We have seen how the notion of animal economy emerged and how it relates to other, kindred or competing models of the time, and now wish to clarify the ontological status of the concept.

We claim that the animal economy and organisation in Montpellier vitalism cannot be located squarely on either side of the classic opposition between Machine (reductionism) and Organism (holism),Footnote ³⁶ given their usage of Newtonian analogies, their relation to what we have called an “expanded mechanism,” and their ontological proximity to materialism. If they are proto-organismic concepts, it is by integrating plural levels of causality rather than denying causality as a whole. In this respect they are unlike the concept of organism found in Leibniz or Stahl (despite the differences between these two), which will develop into a Romantic sense of organism grounded on a hyper-internal, foundational subjectivity opposed to the causal, space-time world, an “ego” or “soul” which lies deeper than physiology, deeper than the laws of nature.

Granted, Bordeu and Barthez refer positively to Leibniz (although Barthez also names Bacon, the Stoics, and Hume as precursors, often in the same sentence!). But it is difficult to believe that Leibniz is the main philosophical source of vitalism, as is sometimes claimed (e.g. Rey Reference Rey2000; Han Reference Han2004). Even though Leibniz granted that bodies were to be studied “mechanically,” he always insisted on a deeper metaphysical ground of life which is not itself mechanical, causal, or measurable; and this “deeper source” is not a heuristic, analogical construct designed for methodological purposes, in contrast to Barthez's vital principle (among other representative vitalist examples): in the third edition of his Nouveaux essais, Barthez insisted in response to various criticisms and mistaken “borrowings” of his ideas by others, that “I have never used the term ‘Vital Principle’ to explain any of the phenomena of life, but only for greater ease and sureness in [accounting for] the formation of new results of these phenomena” (“Discours préliminaire,” § 1, in Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. I, 2) . . . even if Barthez does not always live by what he proclaims. This kind of contrast also emerges in Peter Hans Reill's helpful opposition between vitalism and Naturphilosophie (although he confusingly combines Buffon, Barthez, Humboldt and German vitalism in one category), and in James Larson's remark that vital forces in the German tradition are better understood as regulative principles, not as ontologically specific entities.Footnote ³⁷

While it may be the case that “from organisation to organism, there is only one step to be taken, which Romantic philosophy will take” (Leduc-Fayette Reference Leduc-Fayette1978, 45), we wish to stress that this is a big step to take: conceptually, organisation is far more materialism-friendly than organism (see Wolfe Reference Wolfe2004 and Reference Wolfe2006a; Cheung Reference Cheung2006) and historically, no vitalist drops his copy of d'Holbach's Système de la nature after having opened it, exclaiming in horror at the “deadly, morbid coldness” of the book which “horrifies us as if we had seen a ghost,” in an “atheistic twilight” (this is Goethe) (Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, XI, in Goethe Reference Goethe1887–1919, pt. 1, vol. 28, 69–70).

The économie animale extends biomedical inquiry beyond iatromechanism, incorporating some of the “temporal” dimensions of Stahlian animism (recall that for Stahl, since the soul is intelligent and has to compare different objects to one another, it is temporal in its essence) (Stahl Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1706a, § lxix, in Stahl 1859, II, 319, and § lxx).Footnote ³⁸ This is also part of its Hippocratic pedigree: in “Crise” Bordeu returns to an idea he had suggested in the Recherches anatomiques, that it is important to try and correlate the medical phenomena observed in the body at a given time with the workings of specific organs, that is, to seek to correlate (organ) structure and function temporally rather than just spatially (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, § 127; and Bordeu Reference Bordeu1754, Enc. IV, 488). But unlike Stahl or Leibniz's “organism,” the animal economy, like the bee-swarm, is not predicated on a soul or ego, despite Ménuret's sometimes misleading insistence on a first-person perspective, as when he claims that “above all, the study of oneself” is basic for the success of his theory; otherwise one is lost in “tedious anatomical inquiries” or “the poorly known, badly interpreted laws of the circulation of blood” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret de Chambaud1765f, Enc. XV, 437a). Rather, the animal economy is a structural-functional concept which is emergent with respect to the interaction of its components.

Emergence has often been invoked in attempts to proclaim a vitalist metaphysics; we merely wish to say, in demystified terms, that the montpelliérain vision of the living body, in its “expanded mechanism,” is a form of “weak” or “innocent” emergence, which does not deny the significance of the parts or the components (on the contrary: witness Barthez's charge that Bordeu is a mere organicist). Consider the following passage in T. S. Hall's history of physiology, which is both suggestive and somewhat confusing:

We can make three observations about this passage. First, whether “life is anything more” than the interactive activity of the parts of a system is not a question we have encountered in the Montpellier vitalist corpus, except for some moments in Barthez (who tended to remove or modify them in the second edition of his book). Second, much as we have noted with respect to Wellman's recent definition that “materialists explain everything in terms of matter and motion; vitalists, in terms of the soul or vital force,” it is incorrect on Hall's part to describe Montpellier vitalists as “introducing a nonmaterial vital agent.” What is puzzling in the passage, however, is that Hall appears to shift towards a weaker definition of emergence, attributing it to “strict materialists and mechanists”: namely, the idea that “Life” emerges automatically from the arrangement and interaction of its parts. Now, replace the word “parts” with “smaller lives” or “organs” and you have the position of Bordeu and others, according to which la vie générale emerges from the sum total, the concours of each petite vie, without any individual soul or life principle explaining the life of the bee-swarm.

•   Ultimately, vitalism seems to reduce to two alternatives:

• – the (ontological) assertion of a vital force or substance

• – emergentism

We shall briefly review the way these alternatives play out in our montpelliérains before we close.

The presence of just this alternative is plainly apparent in Barthez, who presents both views in one paragraph. It is undoubtedly possible, he says, for the “Author of Nature” to have established a general law by which a vital faculty possessed of motive and sensitive force “necessarily follows from (albeit in an undefinable way) the combination of matter which makes up every animal body”; but it is also possible for “God to add to this combination of matter, a self-subsisting Life Principle,” which incidentally is not the same as the “thinking soul” (Barthez Reference Barthez1858, vol. 1, 116, emphasis ours). The historian of philosophy would doubtless be curious to note Barthez's wide reading in Locke, Hume, Bacon, and related authors; the first author is undoubtedly the source of the latter phrasing, reminiscent of Locke's conjecture that God could “superadd” thought to matter. But we merely wish to emphasize that Barthez's first definition of the vital principle is a (weak) emergent one: it necessarily follows from a certain combination of matter. The second definition corresponds to substantival, metaphysical vitalism, with an additional theological inflection. In addition, the Newtonian aspect of his argument results in Barthez insisting, like Haller and others, that the vital principle or faculty is a “place-holder” or nom d'attente, as Haller called it.

Bordeu, as we have seen when discussing the metaphor of the bee-swarm, admits that he uses images and comparisons, and explicitly points to the gaps in his scientific terminology; but he clearly invokes the same distinction we have suggested above, between a vital force understood as “the essence of a portion of matter,” or as “a necessary attribute of its combinations” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, § CVIII in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 163). It reflects Bordeu's particularly materialistic outlook that his version of the alternative is not that between an immaterial force or an emergent result of the interaction of material entities, but rather between something material and substantival, or something merely emergent. As we have seen regarding mechanism and its expansions, Bordeu does not reject strict mechanical causality, asserting on the contrary that “the machine is arranged in such a way that one function is the cause of the next, such that there is a chain of successive actions, which are the causes of the others” (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, §§ LXXI, LXXXVIII, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 125, 145), from the life of one organ to the higher level of the Life of the whole. He speaks of the latter whole as existing in “equilibrium.” Fouquet defines sensitivity in terms which are both reductionist (like Haller's) and holist (like Bordeu's): sensitivity in various organs is “a necessary consequence [suite] of their organisation which is specified in each of them by a certain quantity of cellular tissue, and the way this tissue is employed, by their consensus with neighboring organs, by their location, and an infinite number of other circumstances” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, 51a).

Mechanical models and explanations of the phenomena that the physiologist seeks to understand have enormous heuristic value, as we saw in section 4 (recall William Thomson's statement that he needs to build a mechanical object if he is to understand it), a value which is not neglected by vitalists like Bordeu and Ménuret, for whom the body is “like all other machines that can be put together and taken apart by art, [so] we can see their smallest springs [ressorts]” (Ménuret Reference Ménuret de Chambaud1765d, Enc. XI, 362b). But as we saw notably in section 2, the vitalists also insist on features of the body like its ability to preserve itself from danger and maintain a constant temperature, which appear just as “basic” as the mechanistic transparency invoked above. These features (like Bordeu's “force conservatrice”) are derived from Stahl's explicitly teleological account of sensation and bodily functioning (Stahl Reference Stahl, Blondin and Boyer1730, § 3 in Stahl 1860, 415; Bordeu Reference Bordeu1751, §§ CVIII, in Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818, vol. 1, 163 n). As such, they would appear to be a challenge to our reading of the animal economy as an “innocently emergent” concept. The vitalist response would be that these features emerge out of the interaction of parts (granted, these parts are themselves treated as “lives” rather than as inanimate parcels of matter). This is what we have tried to highlight also with the idea of the animal economy as “structural-functional.”

The vitalist version of structural-functional correlation lies in the series of images we have encountered, such as the bee-swarm and its musical analogs (also as applied to the pulse), if we combine them with the repeated insistence that animal economy and organisation are somehow different kinds of organisation than machines (or souls, or organisms understood in a spiritualist fashion). Ménuret puts it quite simply: physiology focuses on “all the phenomena resulting from the combination [concours], the whole and the integrity [intégrité] of human functions”; if all these phenomena were grouped together, one would then have a “complete history of man,” one which is required to “solidly build a system of animal economy,” hitherto neglected (Ménuret Reference Ménuret de Chambaud1765c, Enc. XI, 318b). Up until now physiological systems, Ménuret stresses, have merely drawn up “lists of human functions,” “as if they [sc. the functions] did not have a mutual action and influence on one another; from their writings, one would think that in man there are as many different animals as there are parts and functions; these animals apparently live separately, without any communication” (ibid.). Similarly, Fouquet describes the key property of sensitivity functionally as “the property certain parts have of perceiving the impressions of external objects and of then producing movements in proportion to the intensity of this perception” (Fouquet Reference Fouquet1765, 38b). And Bordeu repeatedly insists that sensitivity is neither strictly mechanical nor a property of the soul: it is immanent in living fibres but decentralized and differentiated, since it takes on a form specific to the function of each organ.

Granted, vitalists do not tend to accept Haller's strict correlation of specific structure : specific function. But inasmuch as they are emergentists rather than vital-force theorists they can allow for more “structural-functional” concepts than they are usually given credit for, which means integrating mechanism, not rejecting it. Further, this integration seeks to reflect the unique features of biological entities, which is why the animal economy considered as a “research program” occasionally sounds so much like a proto-biology. Far from being a doctrine of an immaterial vital force or entelechy, Montpellier vitalism has a significant materialist component – because otherwise how it could recognize that organisation matters? The reality of the animal economy concept is that the vitalist does not and cannot afford to ignore the biological matter in which a living system is realized, just as the mechanist cannot afford to ignore the organisational features of the matter. A vitalist, at least of the Montpellier variety, could not say, as Hilary Putnam did, that “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn't matter” (Putnam Reference Putnam and Putnam1975, 291).Footnote ³⁹