Élan vital

:" For other meanings, see Elan Vital

"Élan vital", coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book "Creative Evolution", 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 and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness. It was the existence of this vital force, which made people at that time believe that they were not able to synthesize organic molecules.

It was believed by others that this essence ("élan vital") could be harvested and embedded into an inanimate substance and activated with electricity, perhaps taking literally another of Bergson's metaphorical descriptions, the "current of life". The British biologist Julian Huxley 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 epistomological fallacy is parodied in Moliere's "Le Malade imaginaire", where a quack "answers" the question of "Why does opium cause sleep?" with "Because of its soporific power.")

Huxley himself subscribed to the notion of an "élan vital" as may be seen from the following excerpt:

A distant precursor 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. The concept of "élan vital" is very similar to Schopenhauer's concept of the will-to-live.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze attempted to recoup the novelty of Bergson's idea in his book "Bergsonism", though the term itself underwent substantial changes by Deleuze. No longer considered a mystical, elusive force acting on brute matter, as it was in the vitalist debates of the late 19th century, "élan vital" in Deleuze's hands denotes a substance in which the distinction between organic and inorganic matter is indiscernible, and the emergence of life undecidable.

ee also

*Emergence
*Vitalism