“A Mountain of Nonsense”? Czech and Slovenian Receptions of Materialism and Vitalism from c. 1860s to the First World War

Abstract

In general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.

The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.

In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.

In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín Lenz (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.

Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

Although a rich historiography attends the histories of vitalism and materialism in Western Europe, to my knowledge there have been no systematic attempts to discuss vitalism and anti-materialism in eastern Europe (or more properly east central Europe, according to recent scholarly conventions). The reasons for this are puzzling and can only be partially explained in the context of this paper. A significant reason, I suspect, is presentism. Charles Wolfe has been instrumental in providing a number of contexts and contextualization for vitalism and materialism in Western Europe (Normandin and Wolfe 2013; Wolfe 2016, “Canguilhem and the Logic of Life”, see also this volume) and arguing that the histories of vitalism and materialism add to our “philosophical technology” (my term) for understanding contemporary science and more importantly, the implications of those life sciences now undergoing (one may argue). Vitalism in “Eastern Europe” or “East Central Europe” has been in English language literature more or less ignored or exoticized (Chirot 1991). Marius Turda has likewise referenced “Balkanism” and “Orientialism” (2011).¹

This is due in part to what I have recently called “occidentalism” (Donohue, 2020) in which Eastern Europe is placed outside of the development of Western science and culture and onto the path of an alternative or “backward” modernity. Even for very recent scholarship somewhat more responsible in the anglophone world, “science” in Czech speaking lands is science in the “German” language and, according to Michael Gordin, reducible to physics, where writing in the Czech language was the consequence of “linguistic purism” and a “dilemma” (Gordin 2020: 219). Those who identified as “Czechs” were conflicted over the use of German or Czech in their scientific publications. Although Gordin’s work is here singled out, such almost ethnographic accounts of Czech-language intellectual output are widespread in the field.

Although the processes of transformation of the scientific languages of the Czech and Slovenian speaking lands are not the central focus of this paper, the subsequent material discussed will illustrate that many Czech especially and Slovenian writers were quite comfortable moving between their native languages, French, German and even occasionally English. It is also worth noting that Gordin as a historian of physics, is focused on physics journals in Central Eastern Europe, and thus would not necessarily be aware of journals in the biological, theological and sociological sciences such as Ceska mysl (Czech mind) begun in 1900 as an international pedagogical review in the social and the biological sciences, with articles in the physical sciences as well.

Magazines such as Czech Mind as well as a number of theological periodicals discussed below used a number of languages which showed Czechs critically engaged with a number of European intellectual currents. As importantly, while Czech physics was attempting to migrate into the German language, Czech biology, social sciences and theology remained intermixed with languages and a reception to pan-European and American intellectual currents. Incidentally, the Habsburg influence on Catholic theology in Czech speaking lands lead to some interesting vocabulary differences between the predominately Catholic areas of Moravia and the “standard” Protestant version of literary Czech used in the universities in and around Prague see (Bartoš 1905).

Vitalism itself has only recently been subject to sustained critical analysis. For a generation of scholars, particularly after the Second World War, vitalism was synonymous with irrationalism and political messianism and among the progenitors of the Nazi racial state and of the Holocaust or Shoah. Many years ago, Emile Brunner wrote bluntly that “National Socialism springs from a view of man which may be described as vitalism” (Brunner 1947, 56.) “Vitalism” has also not fared particularly well in the work of the past generation of intellectual historians (and intellectuals) who sought to understand the ideas driving the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the eras of fascism. Georg Lukács, commenting on Ludwig Klages in his Destruction of Reason, noted that the philosopher and physiologist Klages “transformed vitalism into an open combat against reason and culture” (Lukács 1981, 248). Roger Griffiths locates Mussolini’s “ethical revolution” in “Fascist vitalism” which would “lift the apathetic, cynical individual…into a new spiritual orbit” (Feldman and Griffin 2008, 8). Various efforts have been made more recently to connect various kinds of vitalism with French fascism for example in the work of Maurice Barrès (Soucy 1972), and the varieties of Spanish fascism (Priorelli 2020) and the elitist and eugenic political theory of vitalism and ‘life-force’ in George Bernard Shaw (Linehan 2000).

Moir (“What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?”, this volume) underscores that the links between fascism and vitalism in the twentieth century are often tenuous and vitalism itself is often unfairly conjoined with totalitarian and other forms of political and social reaction. Oftentimes, Moir argues, it was not vitalism itself, but conceptions often viewed as closely related to vitalism, such as holism in the case of National Socialism, monism or animism. Today, vitalist understandings of the distinction between life and non-life (properly defined) often lead to precisely the kinds of pluralistic politics and anti-reductionistic accounts of social life and of the person which work against totalitarianism and its brethren. Vörös (in the chapter “Is There Not a Truth of Vitalism? Vital Normativity in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty”, also this volume) underscores that vitalism- even in the work of its skeptics or opponents- amounts to an openness to complexity and to spontaneity where vitalism is capable of both establishing as well as transcending norms.

Materialism from the second half of the nineteenth century to the First World War in the Czech-speaking lands especially, enjoyed the same dubious reputation of being connected with unsavory forms of politics and social life. Vitalism in both Czech and Slovene contexts was viewed, as I will show in the following pages, was a complex, perhaps a bit frustrating alternative to materialism by both secular and religious intellectuals in the Czech case (discussions of the Slovene case will be more limited). The relative openness to vitalism (of all kinds) and to understanding vitalism in their late nineteenth century present as a historical development of scientific inquiry in the Czech case, especially, allows for a discussion of the richness of international conceptual inquiry. As importantly, the virulent reaction of Czech writers to materialism, from the very mainstream of the literary and cultural ‘national awakening’ and national literature, as well as the unity of Catholic religious opinion from the 1840s and 1850s to the First World War presents a reasonable explanation for the openness of Czech writers from the 1840s to the First World War to sophisticated accounts of vitalism. As importantly, there is a never articulated sense that materialism was connected (at least in the latter portion of the nineteenth century) with “Hapsburg” or “Germanness,” and this cultural eversion, while not sufficient, perhaps contributed.

A full study of anti-materialism in Catholic thought in so-called “Eastern Europe” remains to be written. If anything, the rather colorful language used to describe materialism and its social, political and spiritual consequences would provide resources for rhetorical analysis and its function in scientific polemic. To take one example, perhaps the most important Polish Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century, Piotr Semenenko (1814–1886) described philosophical materialism as an “enemy” (nieprzyjaciel) “who is in our houses” who uses his “poisoned sorcery” to make the faithful believe it was not God who created the world out of nothing. Materialism, he continued, which Semenenko often conflates with pantheism, was “a bad taste, a rotten consolation” (zgnila pociecha) “which does not dare come to an honest tongue, but lives there in a despondent heart” (Semenenko 1885: 116–118). On ‘materialism’ Semenenko is somewhat vague. Materialism and pantheism were “that unhealthy science” “mainly from Germany” “smuggled to us mostly through France” (Semenenko 1885 :119). Regarding materialism (most probably Büchner’s), Semenenko underscored that modern materialism (as opposed to the materialism of the Greeks) is much more “audacious” or “brash” (zuchwały) as it “combines atoms and motion, matter and force into one…thereby abolishing the core difference between what is passive and what is active in itself, the most intrinsic and aboriginal difference of all” (ibid, 124.)

For Semenenko,“Materialism wanted to derive the whole world from atoms” and in order to do so, according to Semenenko, it “begins with a core intellectual contradiction” which “endows atoms with motion, and makes passive things active without any reason or law” (żadnej racyi i prawa) only because the materialist wishes it. According to Semenenko, a body cannot have the properties of matter and force at the same time; it is either matter or force, not both. He declared: “If the materialist choses the active atom, [it is] a motion endowed by itself….it is motion (ruch), it is force, it is a center (srodek) of force, but it is not atoms!” (ibid, 129.)

Czech writers were no less sparing and colorful regardless of religious observance. Josef Durdík (1837–1902) was among the most important philosophers of the natural and the biological sciences in the nineteenth century. He produced, among other texts, one of the first history of philosophy in the Czech language in 1870, the “Historical Outline of Modern Philosophy” (Dějepisný nástin filosofie novověké). He observed in his “On the progress of the natural sciences” that Darwin was “as little a materialist as all men who have faced the truth…matter is a mystery, therefore materialism does not explain anything” (Durdík 1874: 232). Durdík understands modern materialism as emerging in part from the “naturalism” of Ludwig Feuerbach (or more accurately Feuerbach exemplifies for Durdík the naturalism of the day). This “war over the soul” with Rudolf Wagner struggling against Karl Vogt, and Moleschott against Liebig. But for Durdík, materialism was exemplified by its “Bible” Buchner’s “Kraft und Stoff” (Síla a hmota) (Durdík 1876: 25).

Durdík responded to the work of the materialist philosopher George Stiebeling. Stiebeling wished to refute Hartmann’s “philosophy of the unconscious” and to a certain extent, to promote “realism” in philosophy. Durdík observed that Stiebeling’s work Natural Science Against Philosophy made the intentions of materialism clear, to conflate natural science and the scientific method with materialism. Durdík contended that this was not true (as many branches of science did not depend upon materialism) and many scientists were not themselves materialists (Durdík 1876). As importantly Durdík also observed that Stiebeling when discussing philosophy had a very narrow account of philosophizing in mind, namely, the philosophy of Hartmann and the dialectic of Hegel. Durdík underscored, contra Stiebeling, that “Philosophy is broader,” containing not only the metaphysics of Hegel but others (albeit equally problematic). Stieberling, moreover, constructs his own system, in many ways equally obtuse. Durdík observed that Stieberling “mechanizes a view of the world, and zealously upholds it, glorifying it as a panacea for future prosperity” as have many philosophers of a “lesser order” (Durdík 1876: 12).

Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) was a Moravian church historian and social philosopher. In his rather polemical work for high school students (approved by his colleague and close collaborator Antonín Lenz (1829–1902) whom I will say more about below) he opened: “In our times, materialism makes brazen attacks on the fundamental truths of religion, an odd enlightenment forgetting of spirit for matter, an unwillingness to believe anything that they can not see, hear, or taste; (materialism) wages war (brojí) against the teachings of the Church about God, about creation, about man, about redemption….” Of materialism itself Procházka complains that the doctrine is (literally) “full of resistors” (plno odporů). He continued that “Materialists” (such as Vogt) claim that “atoms are eternal (without transformation), that they do not have certain properties, but that they are different from each other, that they are unconditional in themselves, and yet that they co-condition, that is, they are conditioned” (Procházka 1876: 9).

For Procházka, as for Lenz, materialism was the doctrine not only attacking the Catholic faith, but the ideology confronting both the political order as well as the order of nature. For Procházka, materialism was synonymous with Darwinism and liberalism. He declared that “odd liberalism” (lichý liberalismus) “is holding the scepter of government” and where materialism has “reached its zenith” it has begun “terrorizing in an imperial tone all naturalists and other writers in other fields of science, proclaiming all scientists as idiots and fools who do not yet proclaim: Omnia in majorem Darvini gloriam!” and whom do not “ wish to venerate the golden calf of matter” (se klaněti zlatému teleti hmoty) but to recognize the existence of a higher world (Procházka 1876: 17).

Materialism too according to Procházka could not explain the basic phenomena of life and consciousness. He observed “by what right can materialists just style mere movements or brain tremors (záchvěje mozku) thoughts?” What was the connection, Procházka asked, between thought and “brain matter”? How was it possible that a “mere physical process at once and immediately be transformed into a spiritual process, so that mere movements of matter can be transformed immediately into movements of spirit, i.e. into thoughts, feelings, and desires?” What, Procházka asked, was occurring in this transformation, in which for him, the cause of this transformation from matter into spirit was also its effect? (Procházka 1876: 328–9).

But what was as concerning as the political, Darwinian, and reductionistic dimensions was materialism’s theological connotations. Against the “murderous attacks” of materialism against the Catholic faith, Procházka and others such as Lenz had written a number of works. Just how disturbing Procházka believed materialism to be was revealed by his catechismal discussion of the Book of Genesis where he described in a long footnote how materialism led to pantheism and bestiality. Footnoting a discussion of how God himself created the world “by the freest will” (nejsvobodnější vůlí), Procházka argued that materialism and its close corollary pantheism were both equally pernicious. Procházka wrote that while “ancient teaching” sought to “elevate man”, the school of pantheism and materialism “drives him directly into bestiality (zvířeckosti)” (Procházka 1876: 3, 35).

The association between “bestiality” and materialism was a serious association for Catholic theologians in Czech speaking lands. Their furor came from two sources: theological and political. On the first, according to Lenz, a materialist could not philosophically believe in the miracle of transubstantiation or in the divinity of the person, of in life after death. Materialism then threatened for Czech Catholic theologians (and others) both sacramentology and philosophical anthropology. According to Lenz, “Man is a compound ex materia et forma”, he is not simply matter but whose “essential form” was an “intellectual or immortal soul.” And it was this immortal soul which is the principle of a “a living, psychic, and spiritual human life.” The doctrine of materialism and the materialist does not make a real, substantial difference between things and beings (mezi věcmi a bytostmi) or between a plant, an animal and a human being” (Lenz 1889: 28).

Because of the lack of distinction between these elements, materialists could not believe in the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the eucharist, whereby the eucharistic wafer and wine becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. As Lenz explained, it was through transubstantiation that the bread and wine are changed “on the altar” (na oltáři) into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. On the altar, the bread and wine underwent a change in substance (where the accidental features of the bread and wine itself remained unchanged) where “a new essence arises after the change” while the matter, the material of the bread and wine stay the same. This was very different, according to Lenz, than a transformation of the bread and of the wine as it enters our blood, and there was a great distance between a natural change and a miraculous one (Lenz 1889: 28–9). According to Lenz, it was this kind of fundamental change which the materialist could not understand nor could his philosophy address. Drawing on the trope which connected materialism with bestiality too when turning to the political, Lenz thundered that any adoption of the materialist doctrine and acceptance of its “lies” “would lead to…atheistic and rationalistic stupidity [and] barbarism, which seeks to drive humanity to the troughs (žlebům, old Czech koryto,) of beasts and cattle” (Lenz 1878: 11).

Lenz, again discussing the political implications of materialism, commented on the syllabus of Pius IX “on errors” promulgated in 1864, underscored that materialism, pantheism, liberalism, atheism will all “unite…” against “the dogmatic, social, moral and political direction of the Church.” Lenz continued that there was a “war of Christian civilization against materialism” in which Darwinism and atheism, along with materialism “have no truths in themselves.” All of these doctrines, along with various political and philosophical systems (including the systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which had nothing to do with materialism but were viewed, by Lenz and others as introducing a naturalistic and then a pantheistic view of the world) according to Lenz were to be rejected because they either “rejected the Divine Being” or imposed on God Himself qualities which he cannot possess (Lenz 1889: 37–38). For writers such as Lenz and Procházka any stance towards nature which was either materialist, atomist, “dynamist”² was a stance towards politics and immortality.

For Lenz, as for Procházka, there was also an intimate connection between materialism, atheism, and political liberalism. For Lenz, both liberalism and nihilism were “modern heresies” and intimately connected to the reformation of Martin Luther (who according to Lenz paved the way for all other modern revolutions). For Lenz materialism, Lutheranism, and nihilism were all political-theological heresies, such as those which bedeviled the early Church, presenting views of nature and of politics which were untenable to Catholic dogma, insofar as it reduced soul and consciousness to base matter and motion, and could not admit any change of substance without fundamental change in accident (Lenz 1889, 5). Discussing in detail Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors”, published in 1864, now infamous for its condemnation of liberalism, modernism, secularization and other modernizing forces, Lenz underscored that materialism and liberalism were “incompatible with the Christian” (Lenz 1891: 3).

For both authors, if one did not believe in the “miracle” of the Eucharist, or in the immortality of the soul, then one was radical and subversive politically. In the case of both authors, theology, politics and morality were intertwined. For both authors, whose rhetoric underscored their convictions, materialism was a philosophy (or even ideology) which not only exhibited an untrue view of the natural world, but which also would lead to moral depravity and bestiality.

The association between materialism, pantheism and “bestiality” was not merely a connection made by Catholic theologians. The Czech politician and writer, one of the founders of the Czech “national awakening,” František Palacký, whose work and writings have influenced generations of Czech writers and statesmen (including Thomas Masaryk), also conjoined, as it was then understood, “bestiality” (zvířeckosti), materialism in order to denigrate his opponent Alfons Šťastný (Baár 2010; Trencsenyi et al. 2018; Baran-Szołtys et al. 2020).

Šťastný was a writer and political theorist who supported the agrarian movement in the Czech lands, meaning that he was a political and economic liberal, e.g. demanding a reform to agricultural laws and customary duties, education for farmers, and the relaxation of property regulations (Miller 1999: 19). Šťastný’s “Concerning Salvation After Death” (O spasení po smrti) was part of a larger program which combined elements of materialism and a philosophical anthropology which attempted to ground man as a reasoned and thinking being without any reference outside of the human self (as he explained in his “Concerning Intellectual Morality” (O mravnosti rozumove- Über die Verstandesmoral)) Drawing upon Spinoza and others, Šťastný attempted to articulate an account of morality in the nineteenth century which did not depend in any way upon the external notion of salvation.

Paraphrasing Spinoza, Šťastný declared that “Man can only want his own good and he cannot wish for his own doom, assuming a man of common sense and sound reason.” He argued that morality and reason could both exist without the immortality of the soul or without life after death (Šťastný 1874: 5, 6). Šťastný wanted to construct a morality based on entirely common-sense and empirical foundations, based upon his supposition that any reform of government and of society would have to begin with an account of man that did not depend on any theological structures.

Šťastný too believed that the God of Christianity was too anthropomorphized (echoing in many ways Feuerbach). Šťastný reasoned that if God created man and the world out of his own beatitude, rapture or blessedness (blaženost), then there was a fundamental contradiction between the attributes of God or a deity and his works, as a thing with needs could only be something which is mutable, changeable, and alive. As God had no needs this fundamentally pointed to a higher being, if he existed, which possessed the characteristics of non-life rather than life (není života nýbrž neživot) (Šťastný 1874, 90)

For this František Palacký accused Šťastný of not only political and social radicalism but amoralism and “bestiality.” Palacký accused Šťastný of “denying everything that mere reason does not understand” not wanting to know “God as a personal being” nor giving humanity a “moral vocation.” Šťastný ‘s teachings and the school of materialism “drives man directly into bestiality ( zvířeckosti )”.

Šťastný immediately objected that it was not at all true that materialism and pantheism lead to bestiality, rather pantheism and materialism lead not to “bestiality” nor to atheism, but to “humanity”, in the sense of humane feeling of togetherness, brotherhood and humanity (lidskost). Pantheism as such was for Šťastný “a safe harbor or haven (útulek) for those who can no longer defend God as a being, but who wish to have God in name at least” (Šťastný 1874: 91, 92).

Very different was the reception of vitalism in the Czech context. In a 1906 issue of “Czech Mind” a review of Driesch’s Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre was favorable, although it complained of Driesch’s obtuse style. The reviewer approvingly described Driesch’s “entelechy” (which incidentally had normal declension rules and was thus part of the accepted Czech scientific vocabulary, there was addition of a Latin or German word in order to clarify the scientific meaning, and the word appears to have a normal declension pattern, which suggests wide usage.) The “entelechy” was a self-regulating, autonomous (svézákonnost) body, meaning the “autonomy of living bodies” where the entelechy “in the broadest sense” was a “real elementary natural agent that appears in living bodies.” The entelechy was moreover a “constant,” “an elementary constant” and “as such is (fundamental) element of natural extended reality.” As such “vitalism has a place of honor in the history of the natural sciences.” The reviewer continued that entelechy must be subject to the “general principle of causality” and was in the broadest terms “a real, natural, elemental agent which appears in living bodies” (Čáda et al., 1906: 455).

For the reviewer, however, “Nothing definite could be said about the relation of the entelechy to the theory of descent.” Nonetheless, the reviewer observed that “vitalism has a place of honor in the history of the sciences” having both roots in antiquity and a new phase called “neo-vitalism.” The older vitalistic tradition, of which its very first representative was Aristotle, “culminated in Blumenbach” and ended with the work of Johannes Müller. For the reviewer, the vitalistic tradition found new life in the critique of Darwin (Čáda et al., 1906: 456).

“Neo-vitalism”, while having some roots in “older vitalism” was nonetheless a new movement. Able representatives of this new inquiry were scientists like Bunge, Hartmann and Otto Liebmann. Edmund Montgomery deserved particular mention for his solving “of the problem of the self and of individual organization, where Montgomery, approvingly turns against “any theory of mechanism” (ibid, 558).

The reviewer continued that so called “neo-vitalism” had “overcome the era of materialism” and could serve as a critique of Darwinism. This was among the most favorable attributes of vitalism in the years before the First World War. The reviewer continued that of the major problems which attracted the attention of neo-vitalists (such as Driesch, Fritz Noll, Eugen Albrecht) was the “psychological and organization problem of integration.” The reviewer concluded that Driesch’s work was “the best work on the nature of vitalism and its historical development” and although it was not appropriate for a general audience, for naturalists this was “an essential text” (Čáda and Krejčí 1908: 457–8).

For the physiologist and philosopher František Mareš, vitalism was a specific antidote to both materialism and the various kinds of mysticism (spiritualism) which had propagated in the years before the First World War. For Mareš (1857–1942) there was a great “mystery” to life which was not appreciable by our external senses. As thinking, feeling beings we were only able to understand the phenomenon of life by appealing to our “inner sense” (Mareš et al. 1897: 165). He declared ,“Naturalists cry out: old mysticism, old vitalism is returning to physiology. No gentlemen. The nature of these phenomena cannot be determined empirically. It is only possible to describe the phenomena and determine their lawfulness, empirical exactness is no longer possible (Mareš et al. 1897, 167).

Mareš noted elsewhere, referring to the controversy that his writings on vitalism inspired, that the magazine “Life or Liveliness (Živa) wanted him to conclude that life was nothing more than a “very complex chemical process.” Now Mareš was more than happy to admit that certain aspects of metabolism could be reduced to chemical analysis, and such analysis was essential for the science of physiology. However, Mareš quipped “even the world’s physiologists are also living bodies, and I don’t think they would recognize themselves as mere chemical processes.” Mareš continued that “The living entity (zivá bytost)” while approachable and cognizable to physio-chemical analysis, “is also as yet something more.” The analysis of the “living being” while of course belonging to physio-chemical research, cannot proceed only through physio-chemical analysis (Mareš 1904: 11).

Mareš also observed that “Mechanical-causal beliefs have dominated biology for the past half-century, and only in the last decade has there been strong opposition to it in the form of vitalism.” Moreover, the dispute (spor) between mechanism and vitalism “was coming to an end” with the numbers of supporters of vitalism increasing, where, in the last few years supporters of vitalism outnumbered proponents of materialism and mechanism (Mareš 1904: 12).

Mareš specifically singled out the work of Wilhelm Roux. Roux was a celebrated anatomist but who according to Mareš “also places great emphasis on inorganic experiments as explanatory analogies of life-forming processes.” Roux “rejects vitalism” and like all other mechanists and materialists, “based [his] beliefs not on scientific facts” since according to Mareš, “not the slightest process of life has been explained physio-chemically, or mechanically,” not even the “circulation of blood” for example.

Mechanists, according to him, based this rejection of vitalism on the simple logical error that there is no action which is not “physio-chemical” and no action which is not “mechanical.” However, in the natural world “concepts such as: power, action, cause, and so on, are vitalist in nature.” The neo-vitalism of the present, according to Mareš, understood that physio-chemical explanations were indeed needed, but that mechanism and materialism did not capture all of the happenings (dění) of life such that “…life demonstrated its own specific laws, which are not in inanimate nature” (Mareš 1904: 12).

The better-known (than the other Czech figures discussed here) philosopher and historian of biology Emanuel Rádl (1873–1942) was discussed by Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem underscored in his discussion of vitalism, with reference to Rádl, “that vitalism was an imperative rather than a method and more of an ethical system, perhaps, than a theory” (Delaporte 1994: 292). This is certainly true, but Canguilhem’s discussion reduced the depths of Rádl’s engagement with vitalism. Rádl, in his discussion of the history of vitalism from Leibniz to Stahl, observed that there was a great difference between “organism” and “mechanism” where movements occur upon a mechanism, while upon an organism, those movements happen within an organism and are due to its own cause (způsobovány). This corresponded for Rádl to the distinction between facere (something else doing or making) and efficere (agent-activity working out, causing to occur). The latter is willed while the former is not as the latter supposes an agent which is doing, making, producing, or carrying out (Čáda and Krejčí 1905: 264).

For Rádl, this conforms to the Kantian account of the organism whereby anything which is “caused” in the domain of the organism “does not make sense in and of itself, but only makes sense for the purpose for which it takes place” (Čáda and Krejčí 1905: 265). Because of this presence of purposefulness which is intrinsic to the organism, the sciences of physics and chemistry “obscure (zastírá) the true essence of biology.” Physics as well only addresses “the most general descriptions of matter, and these abstractions only cover only a few real phenomena.”

Physics, unlike biology does not address “the true and active causes (pravé a činné příčiny) of these phenomena.” Rádl wrote that “today’s physics places its emphasis on matter…but it ignores movements, forces and actions….the intensity of these movements and their changes” (Čáda et al. 1906: 265). He observed that the old adage of “where the physicist ends, the doctor beings” should be supplemented with the observation that today the physicist “does not care” where at the “very least” they would do well to tell us how the body “could be damaged (poškozeno) at all” (Čáda and Krejčí 1905, ibid).

In a similar way, Rádl noted that “it was not possible to build a general theory of life on chemistry, as there existed foundational differences between chemical processes and life processes.” Living bodies, he continued, “are never sustained for an unlimited amount of time (po neomezenou dobu)” (ibid.) Living bodies moreover sustained themselves much longer than predicted by the chemical elements which compose them and while chemical processes in inorganic nature only depend on the chemicals themselves, in living organisms there was a process of regulation to keep the organism alive and “in its entirety” (a ve své celosti) (ibid, 266).

Writing a bit later in 1909, Radl observed that after 1880, the most current form of vitalism underscored that “the purposefulness of life is a phenomenon sui generis” which “cannot be explained as the result of a summation of chance effects.” The organism, according to Radl, “is quite different in kind from any inorganic substance.” The organism is “not an aggregate…but it is a unit which exerts definite control over the actions and reactions between itself and its environment.” Radl wrote that Driesch, reacting against the “decline of naturalism” and the rise of materialism and the mechanistic account of life, came into the view that “life ‘is a law unto itself.’” Rádl, mirroring Mareš’ language, noted approving that Driesch rejected that view that life “is only a very complicated chemico-physical process” and that he underscored the “autonomy of living processes” (Rádl and Hatfield 1930: 356–7, 382).

Continuing with Driesch and contemporary vitalism specifically, Rádl underscored that Driesch went further and was more successful than other vitalists. Driesch was ignored, according to Rádl, because of his opposition to Darwinism. Rádl is quick to observe later that Driesch adhered to the same critique of Darwinism as that of Otto Liebmann. For Liebmann, fundamental error of Darwin’s theory was that although it served as a theory of development, such a theory of development, the concepts of reproduction, heredity and variability, upon which that theory is based “are completely unclear” (jsou úplně nejasny) (Rádl 1908: 35).

Driesch commanded Rádl’s respect because he conducted his own experiments and also examined the philosophical consequences of his work (Rádl 1908: 36). Rádl underscored that in his break with Roux, Driesch first attempted to explain living phenomena only through reference to physics and chemistry, but eventually had to abandon that scheme and then, in his articulation of vitalism opposed “the whole of modern biology” (proti celé moderní biologii).

In opposition to other vitalists (Bunge and Crossman) whose doctrines he calls “static teleology,” Rádl underscored that for Driesch biological phenomena needed both causal and teleological explanations, and in this sense Rádl believed Driesch to be greatly indebted to Kant, although this indebtedness changed throughout his career (Rádl, 1908: 37). For Driesch, although some of life’s processes could be explained through recourse to physics and chemistry, many organic phenomena are subject to “a special, pure vital lawfulness and demonstrate the autonomy of living actions” (ibid, 38.) Empirical evidence from among other subjects, sea urchins, underscored for Rádl the correctness of Driesch’s “dynamic vitalism” which among other characteristics, yielded the specific qualities by which living organisms differ from non-living entities.

Driesch’s dynamic vitalism was also defined by his attempt to describe those laws which only pertained to living processes (ibid, 39.) For example, for Driesch (and Rádl) the organism was itself a constant, and as such, the organism had differing properties than the inorganic. Rádl noted that as a developing entity, the chicken egg (and later chick, and then adult chicken) had not only a capacity to respond specifically to external stimuli, but also as a developing organism, could change its reactions over time. This was unlike inorganic matter, which exhibited the same reactions to environmental changes, i.e. an iron always becomes hot in the presence of heat (ibid, 40.)

Among the most important ideas that Driesch articulated was the principle of holistic organization. Driesch compared an organism to an army (armade) and understood that both the organism and the body have a hierarchy which followed a strict chain of command for organization, movement, and other activities. Driesch viewed the soul as a kind of “commander-in-chief” of the organism, in the same way that a commander is at the top of the chain of a particular army. The organism in its functions was controlled by a number of entelechies, some higher and some lower, some very specialized (though some are governed by merely mechanical processes, i.e. the action of the lens in the eye) (ibid, 41.)

Methodologically, Rádl noted that Driesch was against induction. For Driesch, conceptual analysis and science made progress by being against induction. Like Kant, Driesch wished to exclude all ‘metaphysics’ and to place science on a true foundation. However, such a stance against metaphysics and in support of Kant made the move back to Aristotle more surprising.

This was the case since, for Rádl, Driesch’s “Naturphilosophie” (naturfilosofie), a kind of metaphysics,³ represented the progress of a philosophy of development. For Rádl, Hegel understood development in too metaphysical a sense, divorced from experiment and from empirical data. Darwin understood life in too mechanical a way, and too materialistically (Rádl here was at odds with Durdík). Because of this, Driesch took the “radical step back to Aristotle” passing through Naturphilosophie. Because Driesch represented the culmination of the doctrine of development, it would “have great consequences for the future” (ibid, 123–124). This was the case since Driesch was able to develop an account of development which was neither dialectical nor metaphysical, rooted in empirical data, but against induction. In this way, Rádl believed that Driesch’s vitalism had been purified through its overcoming of the prior limitations of numerous systems of thought and inquiry, made possible through a return to the Greeks. This is a challenging account of Driesch’s work which almost presumed a Heideggerian turn.

Rádl’s vitalism, and his appreciative, detailed glosses on Driesch make more sense if one considers Mareš and Rádl as working within a nineteenth and early twentieth century space (which was appreciative of vitalism as an inquiry, and for the autonomy of biology as subject to its own specific laws). Both men’s vitalism underscored, some rhetoric aside, that while mechanism and physics and chemistry were able to explain some organismal properties, there was an additional modality to life and to the organism which could not be explained through reference to physics and chemistry alone.

Both Rádl and Mareš’ hostility to mechanism and materialism and their insistence on the autonomy of organism, biology and physiology is rendered more explicable when it is understood that there exists a tradition against materialism in Czech philosophy and theology. As discussed above there was a continual emphasis placed on the supposed connections between materialism, liberalism, barbarism and bestiality. This was fertile soil for vitalism in Czech and Slovene speaking lands.

Josef Durdík and Rádl (though writing a bit later) differed in their reception but not in their engagement with Darwin, both were united in their understanding of life as not subject to materialist explanations. For Durdík, the inquiry into man and organic nature was moving further and further into a knowledge of the whole. He declared that as these sciences become more refined “the more they realize the detail does not destroy the whole.” He continued that “life, organism, development” have been met with similarly spectacular social and political developments (Durdík 1876: 21).

For Durdík, Darwin’s theory and the theory of evolution, was unlike the rest of the natural sciences, for he understood Darwin’s theory as an aesthetic and artistic one as well, as opposed to other explanations of the modern world. For Darwin not only depicted an animal form as a naturalist, but also much like a painter or a poet, ensured that the specific features of the horse are well-represented in their distinctiveness. The horse, or any creature, will be considered more beautiful the more it was distinctive (Durdík 1876: 38). It was much the same with man, where man, especially in the realm of Darwinian theory, was both an aesthetic as well as a biological subject. It is worth noting here that the union of aesthetics and nature, art and biology was one of the main premises of Kant’s Critique of Judgement.

Durdík’s statement that “materialism explains nothing” was quite like Matěj Procházka’s famous observation that materialist theories were a “mountain of nonsense” (Procházka 1876). Perhaps most importantly, Czechs believed themselves to not be Germans (or more correctly Hapsburgs) and rejecting “German materialism”; this is clear in the writings of Jaroslav Goll (1897) and in the writings of Palacký.

The writings of Slovenian theologians and intellectuals were not as colorful as Piotr Semenenko’s, and their discussion of vitalism was more subdued than their Czech counterparts, but with a discussion of both there appears to be a pattern of acceptance of vitalism in “eastern Europe” for reasons that remain a bit mysterious. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) writing in “Čas” (The Times) observed in his review of Boris Zarnik’s “Concerning the Essence of Life” (O bistvu življenja) that the choice in modern times really was between mechanism and vitalism. Ušeničnik, after surveying the discussions of vitalism and materialism since Aristotle, observed that vitalism must have some power to it, otherwise it would not keep returning to the surface (površje). Scientists like Driesch are to be commended, he continued, are to be commended because they are not simply “rechristening” older scientific worldviews.

Life cannot be understood, except according to a “super-mechanical principle,” that is, according to other principles than the “mechanical.” Vitalism was then in many ways a negative concept based on its embrace of non-mechanical explanation. Vitalists were correct, Ušeničnik observed, that living beings do indeed have something quite unique “that is nowhere to be found in inanimate matter.” Life, Ušeničnik continued, and living organisms had individuality, while “inanimate substance is indifferent.” Life itself, according to modern science, is highly organized at the level of even the most simple cell, “it has different parts with different functions, all of which are in the service of the whole.” (Ušeničnik 1914: 140–144). But for all of his agreements with vitalism Ušeničnik was clear that when vitalism morphed into a kind of pantheism, “where all nature is one”, as it did in the writings of Zarnik, then the philosophy was “charlatanism” (Ušeničnik 1914: 152).

One of the consistent frustrations in the history of science is the limitation of science to one kind of practice (physics or chemistry) and to limit locality. Existing narratives which depend on a truncated account of “Europe” or the “West” or science itself tend to obscure the complex realities of those intellectual movements outside of self-imposed scholarly boundaries. The Czech and Slovene literature on vitalism is rich and especially illustrative, not least because it mirrors those debates going on elsewhere in Europe and the United States at the same time.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Czech theologians especially were concerned with “materialism from Germany” which must be understood not only with the European-wide debate for and against modernizing forces but meshed with developing Czech national consciousness which was anti-German (and anti-Habsburg).

This intersected, in Czech speaking intellectual circles, with a deep understanding of German philosophy and a reliance on the German language itself as a medium of international philosophical communication. Slovenian theologies were certainly engaged in the same work against modernism, liberalism and secularism, as well as Darwinism and atheism, but this anti-German element (because of the particularities of language, culture, and history) was less strong than in the Czech case.

In the case of Czech intellectuals such as Durdík, Rádl and Mareš there was undoubtably a reception of eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophy, but as in the Slovenian case, vitalism and the critique of materialism, the rejection of modernism and liberalism, was in a clear sense an effort to develop a specifically Slovene or Czech intellectual life and scientific program. Although the reception of Darwinism was mixed in the Czech context, Rádl’s suspicion of Darwinism melded well with Driesch’s own anti-Darwinian stance. The combination of the critique of mechanism and Darwinism provided fertile soil for vitalism in Czech intellectual and scientific circles.

This stance towards vitalism melded with tradition not in the reductive sense, but with the very individual opinions of Czech and Slovene intellectuals at the time. Vitalism and the critique of materialism not only had deep roots in the Czech and Slovene cases, but also allowed for a specifically Czech and Slovene philosophical contribution, which melded well with social and political commitments. In an era were politics and philosophy and theology were indistinguishable, the position against a doctrine or ideology was also productive (i.e. anti-Darwinism) insofar that a position against Darwinism or against materialism, was also for vitalism or for a particular view of life. Thus, intellectuals in “Eastern Europe” were not merely reactive but developed those reactions into a positive program which developed alongside full expressions of scientific and philosophical systems, which had their roots in the many enlightenments of Europe, the many romanticisms and the many industrial revolutions.