Vitalism held that a special life force animates organisms. Steiner judged that force unobservable, a concept smuggled into the appearances, and replaced it with imaginative cognition.
Vitalism and the Life Force in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's settled verdict on the doctrine that a special force, the Lebenskraft, is added to the physical and chemical forces inside every living body. Steiner set out that verdict in the fourth lecture of The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences (GA 76), given at the Goetheanum in Dornach on 6 April 1921. His objection is methodological rather than doctrinal. The life force never appears as a phenomenon, so the combining intellect has to push it into the appearances from outside, a move the phenomenological science Goethe founded does not permit. Vitalism therefore died out of nineteenth-century biology, and the neovitalism that revived it after 1900 only rewarms the same unobservable factor. Steiner's replacement is imaginative cognition, a trained perception that supplies the observation of life the intellect cannot reach, so the organic sciences work from a phenomenon rather than a construct.
Vitalism and the life force name the nineteenth-century biological doctrine that living bodies carry an extra force, absent from stones and machines, which gathers the ordinary physical forces and drives them toward form. Steiner took the doctrine seriously and still rejected it, not because life lacks a formative principle, but because the vitalists placed that principle where no observation could ever reach it.
In Steiner's Own Words
For if the intellect is to come to terms with life phenomena, then, for the intellect, what takes place within the realm of life phenomena must become observation, must become phenomenon. It cannot do so within sensory observation. The intellect cannot become constitutive for a content of the organic natural sciences. The intellect must also behave combinatively there. But the intuition must be supplied to it. This intuition is supplied to it in imaginative cognition. In the training of imaginative cognition, as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, apart from everything else that can be said about it, the possibility is gained of breaking with the old vitalism, which has provided a changeling of conceptuality, and of replacing it with the imaginative intuition of life.
What it Means Today
The neovitalism Steiner names in this lecture had a face and an address. Hans Driesch, working at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples in the early 1890s, shook apart sea urchin embryos at the two-cell stage and found that each separated cell grew into a whole small larva rather than into half of one. No machine behaves that way, and Driesch said so. In his Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1907 and 1908, published as The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, he borrowed Aristotle's word entelechy for the agent that keeps the embryo whole, and he was explicit that entelechy is not a form of energy and occupies no space.
Steiner's objection lands precisely there. Driesch had a genuine phenomenon, the embryo whose parts each carry the whole, and he answered it with a factor that by his own description could never itself be perceived, a name standing where a perception should stand. Steiner asked of biology instead a cognition trained until the formative activity of the organism becomes visible the way colour is visible, so the researcher reads a fact rather than installing a cause behind it. His own worked example in this same lecture is the heart: not a pump driving the blood, but an organ whose movement follows from the movement of the blood.
Thalira synthesis: vitalism failed not because it was too spiritual for science, but because it was never observational enough to become spiritual science.
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