The French word vitalisme passed into Castilian as vitalismo. The term is used to refer to the doctrine that, to explain biological phenomena, goes beyond matter and uses a force typical of living beings.
According to vitalism, living organisms possess an immaterial life force that allows them to differentiate themselves from inanimate objects. This force is not the energy that physics recognizes, but a different impulse that makes life possible. For vitalism, therefore, the essence of the living being does not reside in matter. The element that makes the difference is what the French philosopher and writer Henri Bergson called elan vital: vital force. This drive cannot be explained by chemistry or physics.
The vital force postulated by vitalism can be associated with concepts such as spirit or soul and is what differentiates what is alive from what is inert. In that sense, when a person dies, he basically loses his life force. The origins of vitalism date back to the 19th century, although it began to expand in the second half of that century and was consolidated at the beginning of the 20th century. In the field of biology, vitalism meant transcending physical-chemical phenomena and sustaining that the main difference between a living being and an inorganic element is the vital force, an irreducible principle. Already in philosophy vitalism appears as a current that affirms that life lacks an external foundation to it. In this way, the value of life is located in life itself. The list of scholars who have represented vitalism throughout history is very extensive. The name that stands out is that of John Jacob Berzelius, a chemist born in Sweden in 1779, considered the main promoter of the current. But we cannot fail to mention the doctors Georg Ernst Stahl and Téophile de Bordeu, the doctors Samuel Hahnemann and Xavier Bichat or, more recently, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich related the concept of vital impulse with another of his own, the orgone. It is a type of esoteric energy that he proposed in the 1930s and that his disciple Charles Kelley continued to develop after his death in 1957. It was considered a ubiquitous and massless substance, similar to the luminiferous ether, although closer to the vital luminiferous ether. . energy than inert matter.
Other recognized personalities who dedicated part of their research work to vitalism was Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most important figures in Western philosophy. He is part of precisely this movement according to which life is a fundamental value. Nietzsche opposed the ideas of Greek philosophy that despised earthly things as belonging to the apparent world and also the emphasis on the rationality of our species. His version of vitalism understands life as the only thing that has its own value and considers that the other elements serve life. This value is emotional and biological, with special attention to the body, instincts, feelings and impulses. These ideas place him on the list of so-called irrationalist philosophers, along with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, because all three criticize rationality, distrust reason in favor of the level of emotions. He is also part of the philosophers of suspicion with Freud and Marx, for “suspecting” that consciousness is not what unites us beyond our differences.
