Charles T. Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie. Une histoire du vitalisme
Charles T. Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie. Une histoire du vitalisme, Classiques Garnier, Paris, 2019, p. 514. https://doi.org/10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-08074-9. ISBN 9782406080725/32, € 56.00, € 93,00.
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1The first point that a reviewer must inescapably avouch about this book is that the Author is the best specialist of the subject matter and that the opus was long awaited. The book opens with the grande révolution dans les sciences that Diderot announces in his Thoughts on the interpretation of Nature (1753). This happens to happen at the same time as the birth of a volatile but specific language for a series of phenomena pertaining to living things, and in particular to ‘living matter’. This historical juncture is, according to the Author (who has an infinity of documental pièces d’appui up his sleeve to support this stance), a kind of—Koselleck-style—Sattelzeit of biology: a period that predates the formal constitution of the science and of its conceptual framework, yet contains both its seeds and the urging need for its development.
2Is this “revolution” part of that ‘Scientific Revolution’ that science historians have depicted, then celebrated, finally undone, in their 20-century debates? The Author refuses to cast his enterprise as the request of a place at the table, of a more or less ample addition to some ‘Canon’. This would beg the real question, which according to him revolves around the “crisis”, the “challenge”, the “scandal” that is brought about when the living becomes, as in vitalist materialism, the theoretical pivot of a new, deeply problematic subject field (the Author quotes Jacques Monod as an inspiration for the apt expression “scandale du vitalisme”).
3Now when materialism crosses this new focus on the autonomous nature of life and living things, philosophy and experimental science become, in the Author’s view, permeable. Not only a new science, but a new philosophy emerges: after a century of clockwork universes and clocksmith gods, living things provide the intellectual sphere with a subversive indeterminacy.
- 1 It might be noted that determinism, just like talent, does what it can: thus, to conceive of the un (...)
4This indeterminacy notwithstanding, moreover, in the vitalist aleatory materialist field, according to the Author, lives, even thrives a different, clandestine sort of determinism, that in various forms escapes the usual definition of Laplacian-daemon-inspired determinism, which indeed is, at the birth time of the philosphy of biology before biology, conspicuous by its absence.1 But just like for ‘revolution’, also in the case of ‘determinism’ the point is not what might be undone, enlarged, integrated, but what can be discovered when the historian sees what was unseen.
5A book on an ‘-ism’ could easily get lost in ‘-isms’. There is a second part, more theoretical and more concerned with current debates and technicalities. This enterprise should not be judged by how much it is academically up-to-date. When you bring together history of thought and present-day, à-la-page debates, something that most of us will do at least once in a while, you are setting side by side, so to say, a geomorphological study of a landscape with the photograph of yesterday’s plaza. The Author’s way out of this conundrum is Canguilhem, as a philosopher of biology who somewhat escapes, and allows to escape presentism, and not only because he’s dead. To him are devoted the most interesting and robust sections of the ‘contemporary’ part, just like a very good section on Maupertuis, Diderot, and their relation, forms, it seems to me, the spine of the first part.
6From the historiographic point of view some question could be raised concernig the very features of the landscape. At times differences (both in quality and in weight) are sacrificed to fanciness. It is not uncommon in recent scholarship to be partial to trouvailles—but, for instance, it is simply not true that Condillac’s Dissertation sur les monades starts the move of Leibniz’s ideas to France, at least because it is apparent that no one reacted to it. Similarly, one might feel just a tad of fastidium in seeing, not only in the Author’s ultimately appropriative but mostly measured approach, how historically marginal debates—like that between Leibniz and Stahl—rise to some essential status because they raise the interest, or rather meet the present expectations of historians. But this is marginal. The book is uncommonly rich in information, and in acute discussions thereof. Language barriers apart, it will stay a must-read for long.
Notes
1 It might be noted that determinism, just like talent, does what it can: thus, to conceive of the universe as an entirely describable mechanical system requires some idea of the possibility and means of such description: and indeed, determinism in Laplacian form might be absent before the years of Laplace and Lagrange because of a lack of mathematical furnishings.
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Enrico Pasini, “Charles T. Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie. Une histoire du vitalisme”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas [Online], 17 | 2020, Online since 12 August 2020, connection on 19 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jihi/1231
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