''Élan vital'' () is a term coined by French

philosopher Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

Henri Bergson in his 1907 book '' Creative Evolution'', in which he addresses the question of

self-organisation Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order and disorder, order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spont ...

and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. ''Élan vital'' was translated in the English edition as "vital impetus", but is usually translated by his detractors as "vital force". It is a hypothetical explanation for

evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...

– the intuitive perception of experience and the flow of inner time.

Precursors

Distant anticipations of Bergson can be found in the work of the pre-Christian Stoic philosopher Posidonius, who postulated a "vital force" emanated by the sun to all living creatures on the Earth's surface, and in that of

Zeno of Elea Zeno of Elea (; ; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea, in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia). He was a student of Parmenides and one of the Eleatics. Zeno defended his instructor's belief in monism, the idea that only one single en ...

. The concept of ''élan vital'' is also similar to Baruch Spinoza's concept of conatus as well as

Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( ; ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the Phenomenon, phenomenal world as ...

's concept of the will-to-live and the Sanskrit ''āyus'' or "life principle".

Influence

The French philosopher

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...

attempted to recoup the novelty of Bergson's idea in his book ''Bergsonism'', though Deleuze substantially modified the meaning of the term. No longer considered a

mystical Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight ...

, elusive force acting on brute matter, as it was in the

vitalist Vitalism is a belief that starts from the premise that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things." Wher ...

debates of the late 19th century, ''élan vital'' denotes for Deleuze an internal force, a substance in which the distinction between organic and inorganic matter vanishes, and the

emergence In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole. Emergence plays a central rol ...

of life cannot be discerned. In 1912 Beatrice M. Hinkle wrote that Carl Gustav Jung's conception of libido was similar to Bergson's élan vital. The notion of ''élan vital'' had considerable influence on the psychiatrist and phenomenologist Eugène Minkowski and his own concept of a ''personal élan'' – the element which keeps us in touch with a feeling of life.

Criticism

* The consensus of geneticists is that they see no "life force" other than the organisational matrix contained in the

genes In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protei ...

themselves, according to R.F. Weir. * The British secular humanist biologist Julian Huxley dryly remarked that Bergson's ''élan vital'' is no better an explanation of life than is explaining the operation of a railway engine by its ''élan locomotif'' ("locomotive driving force"). The same alleged epistemological fallacy is parodied in

Molière Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (; 15 January 1622 (baptised) – 17 February 1673), known by his stage name Molière (, ; ), was a French playwright, actor, and poet, widely regarded as one of the great writers in the French language and world liter ...

's '' Le Malade imaginaire'', in which the quack doctor explains why

opium Opium (also known as poppy tears, or Lachryma papaveris) is the dried latex obtained from the seed Capsule (fruit), capsules of the opium poppy ''Papaver somniferum''. Approximately 12 percent of opium is made up of the analgesic alkaloid mor ...

causes sleep: "Because of its soporific power." However, Huxley used the term ''élan vital'' in a more metaphorical sense: * The author and popular Christian theologian C. S. Lewis rejected Bergson's concept in his essay ''The Weight of Glory'' stating "...even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson's remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the

second law of thermodynamics The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on Universal (metaphysics), universal empirical observation concerning heat and Energy transformation, energy interconversions. A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spont ...

."C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection'' (2000) p. 99

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Elan vital Henri Bergson Vitalism Concepts in metaphysics

Precursors

Influence

Criticism

See also

References