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| Michelangelo: God breathing the life force into Adam |
This
essay was intended as a response to Daniel Lazare’s polemic against me,
Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism. In his article Lazare makes a number of
patently false statements attributing to me positions I do not hold. He also
fails to respond to the bulk of my essay, Marxism,
psychoanalysis and human sexuality. That essay was in turn written in
response to his article, Materialism
and Gender Theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck. I
challenged the theoretical conclusions Lazare drew in that essay about gender
theory, psychology, human sexuality and evolutionary theory. After reading
Lazare’s response to my critique I was reminded of a statement by Engels when
he characterized the arguments of a group of social Darwinists in Germany in
the 1870’s. He wrote,
The
puerility of …[ this method of argumentation]… is self-evident, and there is no
need to waste words on it.[1]
I will
therefore concentrate on the philosophical and scientific issues that Lazare
touched on and spare the reader, as far as possible, a blow by blow account of his
puerile arguments. I did consign a bit of that to the footnotes for those who
are interested.
The
first of the topics I will deal with is vitalistic biology, its history and the
role it plays within gender theory.
Vitalistic
Biology as one reaction against the dark side of mechanistic materialism
We got
to this topic by way of a quote from Judith Butler,
Any theory of the culturally constructed body ... ought to
question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as
passive and prior to discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian
precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies
in the nineteenth century, understand ‘the body’ as so much inert matter,
signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen
state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal
feminine.[2]
Lazare serves
up this quote from Butler but later he changes her reference from “vitalistic
biologies in the nineteenth century” to “modern biology.” By way of this thoroughly dishonest sleight-of-hand
Lazare then goes on to castigate Buttler as being an enemy of “modern biology”.
Whatever one thinks of Butler this is,
to say the least, a shoddy piece of journalism.
Now one
can legitimately say that vitalistic biology made significant contributions
that were later incorporated into modern biology. There is certainly some truth
to seeing an area of continuity between this form of 19th century
science and modern biology, but that hardly justifies saying they are the same.
I once made a similar point about the precursor to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th
century when I wrote,
When it comes to the history of science … the form of magic
may be irrational, [but] the magical traditions of the Renaissance contained in
embryo some of the seeds that would later mature to fruition in the Scientific
Revolution.[3]
That
being said, the magical tradition of the Renaissance is not the same as the
Scientific Revolution that followed that gave us the science of Copernicus,
Galileo and Newton.
In the
above quotation Butler references “Christian and Cartesian precedents” of the
concept of the human body. While she does not specify more than that, it is
likely that the Christian theologian she has in mind is St. Augustine who
literally believed that the sexual organs of the human body are an invasive
product of original sin that constantly divide man from his better nature.
Thereby all manner of proscriptions against unregulated sexual behavior
follow. The Cartesian precedent is a reference to the school of
mechanical materialism that subscribed to Descartes’s dualism. According to
Descartes the mind, which is further identified with the soul, exists apart
from matter and vice-versa. The mechanists inspired by Descartes considered
that animals, because they have no soul, are therefore mechanical devices with
no consciousness and no feelings. Descartes called them, bête-machine,
‘beast machines’. Therefore all manner of horrific experiments
were conducted on helpless animals which they thought did not experience pain.
Here is an account of this practice, one that I referenced in my earlier
article:
A visitor in the 1650s, to the Port Royal School at Paris,
reports that pupils were dissecting dogs who were nailed alive to wooden planks
by their four paws. The purpose was apparently to inspect the circulation of
the blood, a subject of controversy. Hammering in the nails inevitably caused
pain to the victims, an ordeal dismissed by the experimenters. “Their [animal]
cries when hammered were nothing but the noises of some small springs that were
being deranged” (Gombay 2007:ix). The justifying associations of mere clockwork
fit the Cartesian theory of animals as automata. The molesters made fun of
persons who pitied the creatures feeling pain. The cruel situation was reported
by Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709), who employed a testimony of his niece. Fontaine
included the details in his Memoires pour servir a l’histoire de
Port-Royal, published in 1736 (Delforges 1985:97).[4]
Whereas we can say that Cartesian mechanical
materialism was a positive moment in the history of science and the history of
philosophy when it first emerged, overturning the previous scholastic and
theological dogmas, it soon exhibited its dark side as the torture of animals at
the Port Royal School showed. Vitalistic biology was a reaction to this dark
side of the mechanical materialism that was empowered by Cartesianism. Yet the vitalistic biology of the 19th
century had its precursors. It turns out that Descartes’ “bête-machine” had
a larger application than those helpless animals being tortured at the Port
Royal School. Workers were also
conceived of as machines whose miserable lives were seen as a necessary
sacrifice for the cause of commercial progress. When the Industrial Revolution arrived
in 18th century England entire cities such as London and Manchester were
turned into a living hell, a capitalist version of the Port Royal School of
horrors re-imagined on a colossal scale. These conditions gave rise to the
eloquent protests of the artisan-poet William Blake.
Blake
understood that the factories of London were not only destroying the way of
life of his fellow artisans and farmers but were literally poisoning the air
they breathed, the land they cultivated and were enslaving the proletariat,
including small children, condemned to work under horrendous conditions until
the spark of life they were born with was snuffed out. Blake’s poetry
borrowed from the images of the English
Revolution of the 17th century and spoke in the prophetic Biblical
language that marked the most radical voices of that bygone age. To quote from an essay on Blake by Cyril
Smith,
The visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827) and
the revolutionary thinker Karl Marx, born 60 years later, were equally hostile
to eighteenth-century individualistic materialism, the predominant way of
thinking of their own times, and, in a cruder form, of ours. In an early
work, There is no Natural Religion (1788), Blake attacked the
outlook promoted by John Locke, who he often linked with Bacon and Newton.[5]
It is
one of the great ironies of history that Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” was adopted
as a patriotic hymn and turned into an unofficial national anthem of
England. Blake despised the monarchy and
traditional religion, opposed nationalism and was aligned with the American radical
Tom Paine in his support of the American and French Revolutions at a time when
such sentiments were considered treasonous and subject to severe punishment.
One can only guess what a great parody Blake would have written about the kidnapping
of his poem to serve as a celebration of “little England”.
Marx
also broke with mechanical materialism early in his intellectual life when he
wrote in his Thesis on Feuerbach,
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that
of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived
only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not
as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in
contradistinction to materialism, the active side was
developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real,
sensuous activity as such.
The
point is further clarified in the Third Thesis:
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of
circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and
that the educator must himself be educated.[6]
It is
noteworthy that Lenin came to similar conclusions after the outbreak of World
War I when he embarked on a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Having been educated up to that point in the
version of Marxism espoused by Plekhanov – who minimized the difference between
Marxism and mechanical materialism --Lenin was astounded by the revelation
that, “…intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid
materialism”.[7]
Or take
this quote from Lenin in which he explicitly places Plekhanov as sharing the
conceptual outlook of vulgar materialism,
Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism .. more from a
vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint
...Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century the Kantians
and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Buchner) than of Hegel.[8]
One can
also produce numerous quotes from Trotsky that illustrate his approach to philosophy
was the polar opposite of mechanical materialism.[9]
Finally, one should be forewarned that sometimes
critical remarks against ‘vulgar materialism’ are employed as a kind of
back-handed defense of mechanical materialism. It’s a phenomenon that we identified long ago
as “the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism”:
Vulgar materialism isn’t some quaint, old annoyance that can
be dismissed with a passing remark: it is, in the form of positivism, a default
position of bourgeois ideology. The vulgar critique of vulgar materialism
ignores this…[10]
When it
comes to biology, there is no shortage
of criticisms of earlier theories that are today considered “vulgar materialism”.
But that does not mean that the critic has overcome mechanical materialism. In
many cases it indicates that the critic is proposing a more sophisticated
version of mechanical materialism to replace an earlier one. Thus a contemporary mechanist may claim that
we can explain consciousness solely through the action of neurons in the brain
and that earlier theories based on the structure of the face (physiognomy) or
bumps in the skull (phrenology) were vulgar and unscientific. Their criticism of the earlier theories would
be completely valid but their own theory remains mechanical and reductionist. It’s a phenomenon we will see over and over
again -- and one often employed by vulgar Marxists – more sophisticated
versions of reductionism still remain reductionist.
Who were
the vitalistic biologists?
In any
discussion of the vitalistic biology of the 19th century it is
important to distinguish the theories developed on behalf of vitalistic from a
practitioner such as Louis Pasteur. Pasteur has sometimes been placed in the
camp of vitalistic biology because he was sympathetic to the argument that fermentation requires the participation
of a living tissue. But those who place Pasteur in this camp go way overboard.[11]
He was a working scientist and was one of the first biologists to test theory
with well-designed experiments. While there is some justification in seeing
Pasteur’s work as aligned with vitalism early in his career, when he studied fermentation and incidentally
discovered the role of microbes, Pasteur also dealt the death blow to one of the
most important principles’ defended by vitalistic biology, the idea of
spontaneous generation. To quote a scientific review of his work in this area,
Since Aristotle (sixth century bc), it had been
generally believed that the metamorphosis and decomposition phenomena, such as
decay, putrefaction, rotting, fermentation and mouldering, resulted from a
‘vital force’ existing within the organic substances. Many living things came
forth from non-living matters because the non-living material contained pneuma
or ‘vital heat'. This theory of the spontaneous generation of living creatures
was still prevailing in Pasteur's time, despite remarkable experimental and
premonitory works by the Italians Francesco Redi (1626-1697) and Lazzaro
Spallanzani (1729-1799). Using well-designed experiments, Spallanzani had
produced evidence in 1765 for the preventive role of heating on broth
infusions, suggesting that the air was a source of contamination of the culture
broth. Pasteur reproduced these experiments using yeast infusions (1861-1865).[12]
The rise
of vitalistic biology was an important moment not only in the history of
science but also in the history of philosophy.
For vitalistic biology grew out of the necessity to provide an
alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic biology that was one of the
outcomes of Cartesian dualism. Vitalism as a philosophical movement was
responding to the problem of reductionism in the life sciences. The Cambridge History of Philosophy provides
a succinct summary of these debates:
While vitalism can be traced to ancient Greece (Aristotle’s On
the Soul is a vitalist work), modern vitalism arose as a rejection of
Descartes’s mechanistic view that plants, animals, and even living human bodies
are kinds of machines. Early modern vitalists such Georg Ernest Stahl
maintained that what distinguishes living things from nonliving things is that
the former contain an irreducible component that is responsible for animating
the body. By the start of the nineteenth century, however, a number of researchers
had followed Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s lead in applying the new chemical
theory to physiology. And the debate between vitalists and mechanists became
focused on whether it is possible to give chemical accounts of vital behaviour
such as metabolisation, respiration, and fermentation (Asimov 1964). Many
vitalists argued that an account of these vital behaviours would require the
discovery of fundamental, vital forces, while mechanists argued that there are
no fundamental vital forces, and that organic and inorganic processes differ
only in complexity (see Bechtel and Richardson 1993 and 1998).[13]
The
vitalists were correct in insisting that an explanation of a living organism is
not possible in purely mechanical terms.
Some vitalists however completely dismissed all mechanical explanations
as being irrelevant. That was clearly a
misstep as there is no denying that mechanical and chemical processes occur in
any organism. For example, William
Harvey used the mechanics of a pump to explain the role of the heart in the
circulation of blood. But mechanical explanations are clearly insufficient when
it comes to life. For example, through the miracle of modern medical technology
you can remove a heart from a body and when hooked up to the right machinery
keep it beating. Clearly it is a type of
pump, but is it still a heart now that its function, the role it played as a
critical part of an organic whole, a living organism, has been lost? The vitalists were however wrong in
attributing what was unique about living organisms to a vital force, a type of immaterial
substance. It took a lot of experimental work throughout the 19th
and early 20th century to disprove the theory of a “vital
force”. But the problem of reductionism
remained and is still an issue that has been contested in modern biology. There
is in fact a huge literature in the discipline known as the ‘philosophy of
biology’ that deals with reductionism in modern biology.[14]
The philosophical
solution to the problem of reductionism lay in understanding that newly
emergent properties arise in a living organism, properties that cannot be
understood as simply more of the same mechanical processes although more
complex, but are instead defined through their relation to the whole of the
living body and its interaction with its environment. This insight was articulated
by Hegel, in the early part of the 19th century, prior to the great
discoveries in the biological sciences that were to follow. Hegel’s anti-reductionist and dialectical
understanding of a living organism was summed up by one commentator,
Hegel’s core position on the organic is as follows: he
believes that organisms cannot be fully understood without the categories that
are proper to them alone, and organic life is irreducible to inorganic nature.
However, this position does not imply that the laws, as well as specific causal
mechanisms that operate in inorganic nature, do not also operate in living
organisms.[15]
It
should be understood that Hegel was not doing philosophy completely removed from
the individual sciences. His understanding of the philosophical issues in
biology was firmly rooted in the science of his time. Engels, in his Dialectics
of Nature, praised Hegel’s engagement with the biology of his time. For
example, take this statement by Engels in which he credits Hegel’s dialectical
conception of a living organism as in one fell swoop refuting both mechanistic
materialism and vitalistic theories of biology,
Life and death. Already no physiology is held to be scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life (note, Hegel, Enzyklopädie, I, pp. 152-53), the negation of life as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this. But for anyone who has once understood this, all talk of the immortality of the soul is done away with. Death is either the dissolution of the organic body, leaving nothing behind but the chemical constituents that formed its substance, or it leaves behind a vital principle, more or less the soul, that then survives all living organisms, and not only human beings. Here, therefore, by means of dialectics, simply becoming clear about the nature of life and death suffices to abolish an ancient superstition. Living means dying.[16]
Of course there have been several revolutions in our understanding of biology in the last two centuries, but the problem of reductionism remains with us, largely because the discipline of modern biology, as a byproduct of increasing specialization and compartmentalization, has walled itself off from philosophy. A modern dialectical understanding of biology requires an engagement between dialectical philosophy and contemporary biology. Working scientists in the field, if they have not reflected on the philosophical issues behind biology, do not thereby escape philosophy. Rather they unconsciously adopt a “default” philosophy which in our time is a version of positivism.[17]
However,
the announcement of the death of vitalistic
biology has proven to be premature. Although an outlier when it comes to what
we understand to be modern biology, a 20th century version of
vitalistic biology was championed by the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem.
Canguilhem’s version of vitalistic
biology was strongly influenced by his reading of the early Marx. According to one reading of Canguilhem’s work,
he was the key representative of an undercurrent of European philosophy called “Vitalist
Marxism”, designating "a theoretical position that not only recognizes
‘life’ as an essential foundation of the production process in modern
societies, but also considers it a critical resource for resistance to the
capitalist logic of exploitation".[18]
Canguilhem was also a critic of 19th century vitalistic
biology. While recognizing their
legitimate criticism of mechanism, he rejected their metaphysics of a living
substance. He was therefore not only
inspired by Marx but was very much aligned with Hegel’s anti-reductionist
conception of a living organism. He held
a very prominent position within French philosophy and directly influenced
thinkers such as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Althusser. The connection with
Foucault raises a number of intriguing questions, for Butler was heavily
influenced by Foucault. Could she have appropriated Canguilhem’s critique of 19th
century vitalistic biology by way of Foucault? This remains an open question as
Butler has never written on Canguilhem.
The
hermeneutical dimension of vitalistic biology in gender theory
If you
want to understand the role of vitalistic biology in gender theory then there
is more going on than a strictly historical explanation. Rather you need to
understand how this historical episode has been interpreted by gender
theorists. That means that there is a hermeneutical dimension with which we
must engage if you are going to critique gender theory or Judith Butler. This
is just as important as getting the history right. I made reference to this
hermeneutical tradition in a quote by another gender theorist that I provided:
Rogers argues that vitalism, in alliance with an emergent
liberal feminism contested theories that stressed the passivity of matter and
legitimized the imposition of masculine power on a natural world gendered as
female.[19]
What the
quote illustrates is a common practice among gender theorists, where concepts
taken from the history of philosophy or the history of science become “sexed”. In
the narrative of many gender theorists, one outcome from Cartesian dualism,
mechanistic biology, represents the oppressed female principle of passivity in
nature. Its opposite, vitalistic
biology, represents the oppressive male principle of life and activity that
must be implanted in a passive nature to fulfill its destiny. Understood in this manner it is easy to see
why a gender theorist like Judith Butler would be singling out “vitalistic
biology”. To return to the quote from Butler, what she is actually saying is that both mechanistic biology and vitalistic
biology fail to understand that they are social constructs, that working
together, reinforce social norms that create an oppressive society for women
and non-binary gendered people in general. While the narrative of mechanistic
biology pushes the idea of the passive female body, claiming the authority of
the natural sciences, its complement, the vitalistic biology, claimed the
authority of essentialist metaphysics in categorizing male principles as
animating and dominant. Thus, the vitalistic biology of the 19th
century did indeed posit an immaterial essence, an elan vital, that animated
matter, lending credence to the gender theorists schema, which is undoubtedly
why Butler specifically identified “vitalistic biology” in her statement. Her case would be harder to make had she
spoken of “modern biology” as the latter does not posit an immaterial essence
explaining life. It is impossible to
understand Butler’s statement without this historical and hermeneutical
background. And it is necessary to
understand what she is saying before writing an honest critique of her
theories. I refer to my previous article, Marxism,
Psychoanalysis and human sexuality,
for such a critique.
The
problem of reductionism
What
mechanical materialism leads to is the problem of reductionism, as we have
shown in the discussion of vitalistic biology.
What is
reductionism and what is the attitude of Marxism towards it? This is perhaps
the single most important philosophical problem of our time.
Oftentimes
we see critiques of reductionism from postmodernists. This is typically phrased
as a questioning of “meta-narratives, by which they mean the materialist
conception of history. The post-modernists question any philosophy that claims
history can be understood rationally. In
this they are joined by anti-Marxists of the past century like Karl Popper. But
of course it does not follow that every critique of reductionism comes from a
postmodernist and anti-Marxist perspective.[20]
Reductionism has in fact been at the center of
the Great Debate that have rocked the foundations of Marxism for well over a
century. Reductionism was an issue that Engels felt compelled to address way
back in 1890 when some followers of Marx thought that the materialist
conception of history can be reduced to a doctrine of economic determinism, as
if all the other layers of a social formation, its political dynamics, its
legal institutions, its cultural forms, not to mention the psychology of the
masses, are mere epiphenomena that automatically follow. He wrote,
According
to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining
element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than
this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into
saying that the economic element is the only determining one,
he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit:
constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle,
etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in
the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories,
religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also
exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in
many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an
interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of
accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so
remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as
negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.
Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be
easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.[21]
Despite
Engels intervention in his later years, reductionism remained a huge problem in
the Second International, particularly in the versions of dogmatic Marxism
expounded by Kautsky and Plekhanov. To explore this topic would require an
entire volume but suffice it to say that reductionism lay behind the debate
within the Second International on the theory of permanent revolution.[22]
If
reductionism has proven to be a major problem in historical analysis, it is
even more so when it comes to biology.
There, reductionism has been largely the rule rather than the exception. There were good historical reasons for that,
as noted by the dialectical biologists Lewontin and Levins,
Inevitably
people see in physical nature a reflection of the social relations in which
their lives are embedded, and a bourgeois ideology of society has been writ
large in a bourgeois view of nature. That view was given explicit form in the
seventeenth century in Descartes's Discours, and we practice a science that is
truly Cartesian. In the Cartesian world, that is, the world as a clock,
phenomena are the consequences of the coming together of individual atomistic
bits, each with its own intrinsic properties, determining the behavior of the
system as a whole. Lines of causality run from part to whole, from atom to
molecule, from molecule to organism, from organism to collectivity. As in
society, so in all of nature, the part is ontologically prior to the whole. We
may question whether in the interaction new properties arise, whether the
"whole may be more than the sum of its parts," but this famous
epistemological problem comes into existence only because we begin with an
ontological commitment to the Cartesian priority of part over whole.[23]
Lewontin
and Levins then proceed to clarify the critical distinction between this
“ontological commitment”, which has been called “Cartesian reductionism” with
the methodology employed in many sciences of analyzing the parts and building
up a picture of the whole from there. The latter, as a methodology, has been
extremely successful, while at the same time passing over huge gaps in our
understanding of the whole. But these partial successes reinforce the
ontological commitment. The ontological
commitment on the other hand reinforces confidence in reductionism as a method.
As Lewontin and Levins indicate,
“In
actual practice, reduction as a methodology and reductionism as a world view
feed on and recreate each other…”
Lewontin
and Levins then go on to provide a materialist explanation of the success of
the reductionist world view despite its numerous lacunae,
The great success of Cartesian method and the Cartesian view
of nature is in part a result of a historical path of least resistance. Those problems
that yield to the attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the
method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled
off from understanding by the commitment to Cartesianism. The harder problems
are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers
are not built on persistent failure.[24]
We will
explore this issue further in Part II devoted to the “Darwin Wars”.
NOTES
[1] MECW, vol. 25,
584.
[2] Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 42-43, 164.
[3] Downward Spiral,
Chapter 5, p. 137. https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch05.pdf
[5] Cyril Smith, Marx
and the Fourfold Vision of William Blake, 2002, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/blake.htm
[6] See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
Numerous
commentators have explored Marx’s break with mechanical materialism, particularly
in relation to the Theses on Feuerbach. My contribution to this literature can
be found in The dialectical path of cognition and revolutionizing practice,
2004, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf
[7] Lenin. C.W.
Volume 38, p. 276.
[8] Ibid. p. 179.
[9] See for instance,
Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Progressive Publishers,
2006 and
Michael
Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:
The Theory of Permanent
Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010, and Trotsky as a
Marxist Theoretician: The Evidence in the Notebooks, Critique,
Volume 47, 2019 – Issue 2, by Alex Steinberg.
[10] Frani Brenner, On
the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism, 2008,
https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf
[11] Lazare claims
that I dismiss vitalistic biology as a “pseudo-science” where in fact what I
said was that “Some would even call it a pseudo-science”. Clearly my use of the pronoun “some” should
have tipped off Lazare that I am characterizing the opinion of others and not
necessarily my own. I also said nothing at all about Louis Pasteur, but Lazare
insinuates that I would have called Pasteur a “quack”.
[12] Berche P: Louis Pasteur, from crystals of life to vaccination. Clin
Microbiol Infect. 2012, 18 Suppl 5:1-6. 10.1111/j.1469-0691.2012.03945.x
[13] 1. McLaughlin B.
Vitalism and emergence. In: Baldwin T, ed. The Cambridge History of
Philosophy 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press; 2003:629-639.
[14] One volume that
discusses the problem of reductionism in modern biology is Promises and Limits
of Reductionism in the Biomedical Sciences, Edited by Marc H. V. Van
Regenmortel and David L. Hull, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
[15] Anton Kabeshkin, Hegel’s
anti-reductionist account of organic nature,
Intellectual History Review, 2021, VOL. 31,
NO. 3, 479–494
[16] Engels, Dialectics
of Nature, pp. 295-311; Progress Publishers, 1934, 6th printing 1974;
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07g.htm
[17] Adam Becker makes
this observation about physicists, but a similar one can be made about
biologists:
“Physicists had simply adopted a
caricature of the positivists attitude. If something can’t be seen, why worry
about it? Things that can’t be seen are meaningless anyhow. And if anyone still
wasn’t convinced, there was a large pile of borrowed and bastardized arguments
from the positivists about why this kind of reasoning worked, enough to keep
most people from worrying – especially with the wide variety of interesting
work using the mathematical machinery of quantum physics.”
There
is a no less wide variety of “interesting work” for biologists to do today
using the mathematical models that have been developed in 21st
century biochemistry.
Adam
Becker, What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum
Physics, Basic Books, 2019, p. 177.
[18] Prinz, Benjamin; Schmidgen, Henning
(2024). "Vitalist
Marxism: Georges Canguilhem and the Resistance of Life". Theory,
Culture & Society. 41 (4): 3–21, p.4. doi:10.1177/02632764241240399
[19] Alvin Snider, Cartesian
Bodies, Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing
of Women: Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), p. 303,
Published by: The University of Chicago Press.
The
reference is to the book by John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution
[20] One of Lazare’s
puerile arguments is that because I bring up the problem of reductionism that I
must be holding out an olive branch to postmodernism. Enough said!
[21] Engels letter to
J. Bloch In Königsberg, 1890,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm
[22] See the book by Michael
Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:
The Theory of Permanent
Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010
[23] Richard Levins
and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University
Press, 1985, pp. 1-2.
[24] Ibid. p.3.
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