Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This paper complicates accepted narratives of vitalism in Germany in the years around 1800. The early 1790s were marked by a proliferation of publications arguing for special Lebenskräfte to explain the unique properties of organic vitality. These works appeared in reaction to a controversial claim to provide a chemical explanation of the phenomena of life by Girtanner in a 1790 treatise. Despite Kant’s critical analysis of the limits of our ability to understand living organisms and his rejection of the possibility of a science of life, several physiologists and naturalists argued for a science of biology based on unique vital principles. But new empirical investigations into the material conditions of excitability and generation from the mid-1790s blurred the boundary between organic and inorganic phenomena. Schelling drew on these new studies to reject a unique vital power or science of life, and instead to conceive living processes as but a stage in the dynamic becoming of nature. Vitalism in Germany thus was not a product of speculative philosophies of nature. Both philosophies of nature and experimental investigations at the turn of the nineteenth century problematized the demarcation of a distinct domain of life, even as they focused attention on organic vitality.