Vitalism: an agnostic theory of the living organism

[gottaB]

Actually I had wanted to discuss a rather different kind of vitalism, but after some googling it became clear that I wouldn't be able to completely avoid the debate in the life sciences. Broad's piece struck me as quite provocative, so I thought I'd share it.

Concluding section from C.D. Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature, Chapter II, "Mechanism and its Alternatives":

When we consider the teleological characteristics of organisms the three possible theories of Substantial Vitalism, Emergent Vitalism, and Biological Mechanism cease to be on a level. In the first place, there seems to be nothing to be said for Substantial Vitalism, and a great deal to be said against it. We may therefore provisionally reject it, and confine our attention to Emergent Vitalism and Biological Mechanism. It seems to me that, so long as we merely consider the behaviour of the organism as a going concern, there is no strong argument for deciding between the two types of theory. For it is quite certain that a material system, once it is in being, can be teleological and at the same time mechanistic in its behaviour. Hence, even if we did not see our way to explain certain teleological characteristics of developed organisms mechanistically, the Biological Mechanist could always answer that this is merely because we do not yet know enough about the minute structure of the machine or about the more obscure physico-chemical properties of non-living matter. And this is what he is continually occupied in saying. But, when we come to consider the origin of organisms as well as their behaviour, the case is altered. We find that Biological Mechanism about the developed organism cannot consistently be held without an elaborate Deistic theory about the origin of organisms. This is because Biological Mechanism is admittedly a theory of the organism based on its analogy to self-acting and self-regulating machines. These, so far as we can see, neither do arise nor could have arisen without design and deliberate interference by someone with matter. And, in applying our analogy, we have no right whatever to ignore this side of it. I do not of course assert that this is a conclusive objection to Biological Mechanism. Deism has always seemed to me a much more sensible theory than most of its more pretentious successors. But I do wish to make it quite clear that Biological Mechanism is committed logically to a great deal more than is commonly supposed. It Emergent Vitalism could dispense with the need for all this Deistic supplementation it would pro tanto score over Biological Mechanism. But can it?

It might well be thought that in this matter Emergent Vitalism is no better off than Biological Mechanism. On both theories the peculiar behaviour of an organism is completely determined by its structure and its components and by nothing else. The only difference is that on the Emergent View the peculiar behaviour of such systems must be "seen to be believed", whilst on the Mechanistic View it could in theory have been foretold from the structure and the behaviour of the components in isolation or in non-living wholes. If you make it an objection to the Mechanistic Theory that the characteristic behaviour of the organism depends on the arrangement of its parts, and that this arrangement could only have happened by design, does not the objection apply equally strongly to the Emergent Theory? This argument is plausible, but I do not think that it is sound. The Biological Mechanist points to the analogy between organisms and artificial machines, and asks us to believe on this ground that organisms are machines. To this we answered that matter has no natural tendency to arrange itself in the form of machines (i.e., of teleological systems whose characteristic behaviour is mechanistically explicable); and that therefore, if organisms be of the nature of machines, there is no reason to suppose that they could have arisen spontaneously and without design. But it is perfectly consistent for a man to hold that matter has no tendency to fall spontaneously into the form of machines and that it has a natural tendency to fall into the form of organisms; provided he holds, as the Emergent Vitalist does, that organisms are not machines but are systems whose characteristic behaviour is emergent and not mechanistically explicable. Thus the real difference is that a possibility is open to the Emergent Vitalist, who recognises two fundamentally different kinds of teleological system, and that this possibility is closed to the Biological Mechanist, who recognises only one kind.

Of course this possibility, which is open to the Emergent Vitalist and not to the Biological Mechanist, is very vague and needs to be worked out in much greater detail. This would be the task of the empirical scientist rather than the critical philosopher. I will content myself with saying that the Emergent Vitalist should not rest with nothing better than the vague statement that matter has a natural tendency to fall into that kind of structure which has vital behaviour as its emergent characteristic. If Emergence be true at all there are probably many Orders below the Vital Order. What must be assumed is not a special tendency of matter to fall into the kind of arrangement which has vital characteristics, but a general tendency for complexes of one order to combine with each other under suitable conditions to form complexes of the next order. At each stage in this process we shall get things with new and irreducibly characteristic properties and new intra-ordinal laws, whilst there will probably remain certain complexes of all the lower orders. The universe would thus grow continually more varied, so long as the special conditions necessary for this combination of complexes of lower order to give complexes of higher order continued; and at every new stage new possibilities of further development would begin. It would be the business of the believer in Emergence to determine the precise condition under which the passage from one order to the next can take place; to state definitely what are the irreducibly characteristic features of each order; and to deduce those characteristic features which can be deduced.

It seems to me then that on the whole Emergent Vitalism is distinctly to be preferred to Biological Mechanism. It does not necessitate a complicated Deistic supplement, as Biological Mechanism does; and this seems to me to be an advantage. At the same time it is perfectly consistent with the view that there is a God who created and controls the material world; so that, if there should be any good reason to believe in such a Being, the Emergent Vitalist could meet the situation with a quiet mind.

http://www.ditext.com/broad/mpn2.html