Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary,^[1] is

1. a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions
2. a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining

Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy" or "élan vital", which some equate with the "soul".

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: most traditional healing practices posited that disease results from some imbalance in the vital energies that distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition founded by Hippocrates, these vital forces were associated with the four temperaments and humours; Eastern traditions posited similar forces such as qi and prana. It is often contrasted to reductionism, the more mechanistic approach.

Development[link]

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, while Plato points up to the heavens showing his belief in the ultimate truth.

Vitalism is an ancient doctrine found throughout many ancient cultures. A pure vitalistic doctrine, however, can be traced back to Galen of the second century, a physician who became a surgeon for gladiators at Pergamum. When studying the anatomy of the human body, he did not believe that the living organisms could be explained by mindless interplay of atoms, rather he believed there was a vital force that powered the human body. Like Erasistratus he believed a vital force was absorbed through the lungs from the air.^[2]

The notion that bodily functions are due to a vitalistic principle existing in all living creatures has roots going back at least to ancient Egypt.^[3] While vitalist ideas have been commonplace in traditional medicine,^[4][5][6] attempts to construct workable scientific models date from the 17th century, when it was argued that matter existed in two radically different forms, observable by their behavior with regard to heat. These two forms of matter were termed organic and inorganic. Inorganic matter could be melted, but could also be restored to its former condition by removing the heat. Organic compounds "cooked" when heated, transforming into new forms that could not be restored to the original. It was argued that the essential difference between the two forms of matter was the "vital force", present only in organic material.^{[citation needed]}

Aided by the development of the microscope in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, the germ theory of disease eventually challenged the role of the four humours in Western medicine, while the cellular composition of the organs of human anatomy and the ensuing molecular analysis of the maintenance of life slowly became better understood, reducing the need to explain things in terms of mystical "vital forces".^{[citation needed]}

Nevertheless, various quasi-vitalist concepts were still employed by many scientists to explain many matters of human life, development and mind. Jöns Jakob Berzelius, one of the early 19th century "fathers" of modern chemistry, though he rejected mystical explanations of vitalism, nevertheless argued that a regulative force must exist within living matter to maintain its functions. Carl Reichenbach later developed the theory of Odic force, a form of life-energy that permeated living things; this concept never gained much support despite Reichenbach's prestige. As physiology came to be understood increasingly in terms of physical mechanisms, vitalistic explanations for the functioning of the body were refuted one by one. The last holdout for vitalism was the kidney, but it fell into total disrepute after the elegant experiments of Homer Smith in the 1930s demonstrated clearly the filtration and secretory mechanisms of that organ. Vitalism is now considered an obsolete term in the philosophy of science, most often used as a pejorative epithet.^[7] Still, Ernst Mayr, co-founder of the modern evolutionary synthesis and a critic of both vitalism and reductionism, writing in 2002 after the mathematical development of theories underlying emergent behavior, stated:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine... The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. But all their efforts to find a scientific answer to all the so-called vitalistic phenomena were failures... rejecting the philosophy of reductionism is not an attack on analysis. No complex system can be understood except through careful analysis. However the interactions of the components must be considered as much as the properties of the isolated components.

—^[8]

Foundations of chemistry[link]

The concept of vitalism in chemistry can be traced back to Jöns Jakob Berzelius who suggested that in the division of organic and inorganic that a mysterious vital force exists in organic compounds.^[9]

Vitalism played a pivotal role in the history of chemistry since it gave rise to the basic distinction between organic and inorganic substances, following Aristotle's distinction between the mineral kingdom and the animal and vegetative kingdoms.^[10] The basic premise was that organic materials differed from inorganic materials fundamentally; accordingly, vitalist chemists predicted that organic materials could not be synthesized from inorganic components. However, as chemical techniques advanced, Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea from inorganic components in 1828.^[11]

Further discoveries continued to marginalise need for a "vital force" explanation as more and more life processes came to be described in chemical or physical terms. However, contemporary accounts do not support the common belief that vitalism died when Wöhler made urea. This Wöhler Myth, as historian of science Peter J. Ramberg called it, originated from a popular history of chemistry published in 1931, which, "ignoring all pretense of historical accuracy, turned Wöhler into a crusader who made attempt after attempt to synthesize a natural product that would refute vitalism and lift the veil of ignorance, until 'one afternoon the miracle happened'".^[12][13] However, in 1845, Adolph Kolbe succeeded in making acetic acid from inorganic compounds, and in the 1850s, Marcellin Berthelot repeated this feat for numerous organic compounds. In retrospect, Wöhler's work was the beginning of the end of Berzelius's vitalist hypothesis, but only in retrospect, as Ramberg had shown.

Louis Pasteur in his laboratory, painting by A. Edelfeldt in 1885.

In fact, some of the greatest scientific minds of the time continued to investigate the possibility of vital properties. Louis Pasteur, shortly after his famous rebuttal of spontaneous generation, performed several experiments that he felt supported the vital concepts of life. According to Bechtel, Pasteur "fitted fermentation into a more general programme describing special reactions that only occur in living organisms. These are irreducibly vital phenomena." In 1858, Pasteur showed that fermentation only occurs when living cells are present and, that fermentation only occurs in the absence of oxygen; he was thus led to describe fermentation as 'life without air'. Rejecting the claims of Berzelius, Liebig, Traube and others that fermentation resulted from chemical agents or catalysts within cells, he concluded that fermentation was a "vital action".^[14]

Developmental biology[link]

With the rise of mechanism in science in the 16th century there were few vitalistic scientists left. One exception was Francis Glisson (1597–1677) an English anatomist and an Italian doctor Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694).^[15]

Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733–1794) is considered to be the father of epigenetic descriptive embryology, that is, he marks the point when embryonic development began to be described in terms of the proliferation of cells rather than the incarnation of a preformed soul. In his Theoria Generationis (1759), he endeavored to explain the emergence of the organism by the actions of a "vis essentialis", an organizing, formative force, and declared "All believers in epigenesis are Vitalists."

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach established epigenesis as the model of thought in the life sciences in 1781 with his publication of Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte. Blumenbach cut up freshwater polyps and established that the removed parts would regenerate. He inferred the presence of a "formative drive" (Bildungstrieb) in living matter. But he pointed out that this name, "like names applied to every other kind of vital power, of itself, explains nothing: it serves merely to designate a peculiar power formed by the combination of the mechanical principle with that which is susceptible of modification". Therefore early vitalists were aware that the vital forces that they proposed were not capable of standing as positive scientific theories.

Vitalism was revived in the early 18th century by the physician Marie François Xavier Bichat, and the physician John Hunter who recognized a "living principle" in addition to mechanics.^[15]

Between 1833 and 1844, Johannes Peter Müller wrote a book on physiology called Handbuch der Physiologie, which became the leading textbook in the field for much of the nineteenth century. The book showed Müller's commitments to vitalism; he questioned why organic matter differs from inorganic, then proceeded to chemical analyses of the blood and lymph. He describes in detail the circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, nervous, and sensory systems in a wide variety of animals but explains that the presence of a soul makes each organism an indivisible whole. He also claimed the behavior of light and sound waves showed that living organisms possessed a life-energy for which physical laws could never fully account.^[16]

Vitalism was also important in the thinking of later teleologists such as Hans Driesch (1867–1941).^[17]

In 1894, after publishing papers on his experiments on sea urchin eggs, Driesch wrote a theoretical essay entitled Analytische Theorie der organischen Entwicklung, in which he declared that his studies in developmental biology pointed to a "blueprint" or teleology, an Aristotelian entelechy, a scientific demonstration of Immanuel Kant's notion that the organism develops as if it has a purposeful intelligence:

Development starts with a few ordered manifoldnesses; but the manifoldnesses create, by interactions, new manifoldnesses, and these are able, by acting back on the original ones, to provoke new differences, and so on. With each new response, a new cause is immediately provided, and a new specific reactivity for further specific responses. We derive a complex structure from a simple one given in the egg.

His main argument was that when one cuts up a sea urchin embryo after its first division or two, the parts do not become parts of sea urchins, but complete sea urchins. However, later research on cell fate determination has led to some successful mechanistic hypotheses, like growth factors influencing cells. The embryo's cells remain totipotent stem cells for the first few cell divisions, only becoming specialized later.

The vitalists strongly rejected Darwin's theory of natural selection. Because of their teleological leanings, they strongly rejected his selectionism.^[18] As Darwin's theory of evolution denied the existence of any cosmic teleology, the vitalists saw Darwin's theories as too materialistic to explain the complexity of life. Driesch was a strong anti-Darwinian.

Driesch's reputation as an experimental biologist deteriorated as a result of his vitalistic theories.^[17] He moved to Heidelberg and became a Professor of Natural Philosophy.

Other vitalists included Johannes Reinke and Oscar Hertwig. Reinke used the word neovitalism to describe his work, he claimed that it would be eventually verified through experimentation and wanted an improvement over the other vitalistic theories. The work of Reinke was an influence for Carl Jung.^[19]

Alfred Russel Wallace believed qualitative novelties could arise through the process of evolution, in particular the phenomena of life and mind; like the vitalists Wallace attributed these novelties to a supernatural agency.^[20] Later in his life, Wallace was an advocate of spiritualism and believed in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans. He believed that evolution suggested that the universe had a purpose, and that certain aspects of living organisms were not explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes as written in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World of Life, which he later expanded into a book of the same name.^[21]

Two Systematic scientists, Guy Coburn Robson and Owain Richards, rejected both Mendelism and Darwinism and suggested that differences between species were non-adaptive and had nothing to do with natural selection.^[22] Robson and Richards examined all the then known major examples of evolution by natural selection in their book Variation of animals in nature (1936), and concluded that none were sufficient to account for any significant taxonomic characters. They supported a non-adaptive interpretation of taxonomic differences.^[23] Robson and Richards have both been described as vitalists who supported a vitalistic attitude to nature.^[24]

According to Robson and Richards:

In arguing that an element of self-regulation and self-organization has had an influence (as against both natural selection and chance) in evolution we are aware that we are touching certain profound and speculative issues. If this organizing activity is indeed an agent in producing the main adaptive tendencies in evolution, it might be argued that the gradual upbuilding and perfection of adaptions, because they involve a large element of design, must also involve some reference to a purpose independent of survival value and chance, and existing as an end in itself ... for those who believe that all organization is produced by material processes envisaged by traditional theories, the scheme of evolution must seem to be clear, at least in outline. For those with whom the difficulties we have outlined in this work have any weight, it must remain to attempt a clearer definition of the purposeful activity with which we seem confronted.

—^[24]

A number of physicists began to advocate vitalism. Niels Bohr was one of the first to suggest that special laws not found in inanimate matter might operate in organisms. He thought of these laws as analogous to the laws of physics except for their being restricted to organisms. Erwin Schrödinger supported similar ideas, as well as the physicists Walter M. Elsasser and Eugene Wigner.^[25]

John Scott Haldane adopted an anti-mechanist approach to biology and an idealist philosophy early on in his career. Haldane saw his work as a vindication of his belief that teleology was an essential concept in biology. His views became widely known with his first book Mechanism, life and personality in 1913.^[26] Haldane borrowed arguments from the vitalists to use against mechanism; however, he was not a vitalist and he insisted that Hans Driesch’s view of entelechy was unacceptable as it was inconsistent with the law of conservation of energy. Haldane treated the organism as fundamental to biology: "we perceive the organism as a self-regulating entity", "every effort to analyze it into components that can be reduced to a mechanical explanation violates this central experience".^[26] The work of Haldane was an influence on organicism.

By the 1930s vitalism had fallen out of favour by most biologists. In 1931 John Scott Haldane stated:

Biologists have almost unanimously abandoned vitalism as an acknowledged belief.

—^[25]

Haldane also stated that a purely mechanist interpretation can not account for the characteristics of life. Haldane wrote a number of books in which he attempted to show the invalidity of both vitalism and mechanist approaches to science. Haldane explained:

We must find a different theoretical basis of biology, based on the observation that all the phenomena concerned tend towards being so coordinated that they express what is normal for an adult organism.

—^[25]

The demise of vitalism instead of leading to a victory of mechanism lead to a number of new approaches to science. These new approaches to science included holism, organicism, and emergent evolution.

Early in the 20th century Conwy Lloyd Morgan united both vitalism and mechanism in his theory of emergent evolution, according to Morgan the emergence of life and the emergence of mind were both miracles and could not be explained by physics or chemistry or from biological interpretation alone.^[15] Another scientist who held a similar view to this was Jan Smuts who took a holistic approach to science and offered a compromise between mechanism and vitalism with his theory of holism, which he explained in his 1926 book, Holism and Evolution.^[27]

On discussing the history of vitalism in biology Ernst Mayr wrote in 1988:

Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of nonmaterial principle in organisms.^[28]

A modern day example of a biologist and an advocate of vitalism is very rare, however the work of the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has been described as vitalistic. In 1981 in his book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation he developed the idea of nonlocal and nonphysical morphogenetic fields.^[29] Sheldrake has however rejected both materialism and vitalism (although he admits he has had an influence from vitalism) and claims his work fits into organicism.^[30][31]

James Le Fanu has recently defended a form of vitalism in his book Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (2009). According to a review of the book by the New Scientist, Le Fanu argues for the existence of an immaterial "life force".^[32] Le Fanu is not a creationist; he does not argue for God, but instead for a non-physical cosmic force, which he claims could explain where consciousness originates from; he also claims it may explain many of the other mysteries unexplained by material science.^[33][34]

Another advocate that a purposive influence or force is guiding the course of biological evolution was the science writer Arthur Koestler (1967, 1978). Koestler provided examples of evolutionary development that he felt could not be accounted for by the modern synthesis that evolution proceeds through random mutations in genes.^[35][36] Some authors associated with the new age community have also advocated vitalism. Ken Wilber (1996) has argued that a purposive force guides the course of evolution.^[37] David Wilcock in his book The Source Field Investigations (2011) has argued against the modern evolutionary synthesis by claiming that DNA and biological life emerge directly out of an energy source field.^[38]

Relationship to emergentism[link]

A refinement of vitalism may be recognized in contemporary molecular histology in the proposal that some key organising and structuring features of organisms, perhaps including even life itself, are examples of emergent processes; those in which a complexity arises, out of interacting chemical processes forming interconnected feedback cycles, that cannot fully be described in terms of those processes since the system as a whole has properties that the constituent reactions lack.^[39][40]

Whether emergent system properties should be grouped with traditional vitalist concepts is a matter of semantic controversy.^[41] In a light-hearted millennial vein, Kirschner and Mitchison call research into integrated cell and organismal physiology "molecular vitalism".^[42]

According to Emmeche et al. (1997):

On the one hand, many scientists and philosophers regard emergence as having only a pseudo-scientific status. On the other hand, new developments in physics, biology, psychology, and cross-disciplinary fields such as cognitive science, artificial life, and the study of non-linear dynamical systems have focused strongly on the high level 'collective behaviour' of complex systems, which is often said to be truly emergent, and the term is increasingly used to characterize such systems.

—^[43]

Emmeche et al. (1998) state that "there is a very important difference between the vitalists and the emergentists: the vitalist's creative forces were relevant only in organic substances, not in inorganic matter. Emergence hence is creation of new properties regardless of the substance involved." "The assumption of an extra-physical vitalis (vital force, entelechy, élan vital, etc.), as formulated in most forms (old or new) of vitalism, is usually without any genuine explanatory power. It has served altogether too often as an intellectual tranquilizer or verbal sedative—stifling scientific inquiry rather than encouraging it to proceed in new directions."^[44]

Mesmerism[link]

A popular vitalist theory of the 18th century was "animal magnetism", in the theories of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). However, the use of the (conventional) English term animal magnetism to translate Mesmer's magnétisme animal can be misleading for three reasons:

• Mesmer chose his term to clearly distinguish his variant of magnetic force from those referred to, at that time, as mineral magnetism, cosmic magnetism and planetary magnetism.
• Mesmer felt that this particular force/power only resided in the bodies of humans and animals.
• Mesmer chose the word "animal", for its root meaning (from Latin animus = "breath") specifically to identify his force/power as a quality that belonged to all creatures with breath; viz., the animate beings: humans and animals.

In Mesmer's time the word "animal" had different mental associations than today. Specifically there were practitioners of the technique that said of a mesmerized person "the person is back animal"^{[citation needed]} meaning "the person is back in a natural mental state where she/he recovers his/her most primitive part of the mind".^{[citation needed]}

Mesmer's ideas became so influential that King Louis XVI of France appointed two commissions to investigate mesmerism; one was led by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the other, led by Benjamin Franklin, included Bailly and Lavoisier. The commissioners learned about Mesmeric theory, and saw its patients fall into fits and trances. In Franklin’s garden, a patient was led to each of five trees, one of which had been "mesmerized"; he hugged each in turn to receive the "vital fluid", but fainted at the foot of a 'wrong' one. At Lavoisier’s house, four normal cups of water were held before a "sensitive" woman; the fourth produced convulsions, but she calmly swallowed the mesmerized contents of a fifth, believing it to be plain water. The commissioners concluded that "the fluid without imagination is powerless, whereas imagination without the fluid can produce the effects of the fluid." This was an important example of the power of reason and controlled experiment to falsify theories.^[45] It is sometimes claimed^[14] that vitalist ideas are unscientific because they are not testable; here at least is an example of a vitalist theory that was not merely testable but actually falsified.

Psychology and consciousness[link]

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row from left: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung. Back row from left: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Perhaps more than any other area of science, psychology has been rich in vitalist concepts, particularly through the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was a student of the notable anti-vitalist Hermann von Helmholtz, and initially struggled to express his concepts in strictly neurological terms. Abandoning this effort as fruitless, he became famous for his theory that behaviour is determined by an unconscious mind, of which the waking mind is unaware. In 1923, in The Ego and the Id, he developed the concept of "psychic energy" as the energy by which the work of the personality is performed.

Although Freud and Jung remain hugely influential, mainstream psychology has made a determined effort to rid itself of the most mystical of these concepts in an attempt to appear more like the hard sciences of chemistry and physics.^[46] Although research within cognitive neuroscience has made substantial progress in explaining mental processes such as perception, memory and motivational states such as anger and fear,^[47] larger concepts such as mind and intelligence, remain essentially higher level constructs, with observable neural correlates distributed throughout the brain.

In the years after the First World War as the survivors tried to gain to terms with the mass slaughter of a generation, ther nature of death came to be increasingly discussed. The idea that the spirit of the dead lived on was comforting to many survivors and families of the dead. The philosopher C.E.M Joad saw the material world as distinct from matter, and came to see the human 'spirit' living on after death providing a kind of life force or vital essence particularly present in the natural environment where people can feel the vital force of previous generations.(see Mind and Matter: The Philosophical Intrduction to Modern Science, (1925) The Mind and Its Workings (London 1927)

The neuroscientist Roger Sperry, in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1981, described modern scientific concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relation to brain processing and emergent properties as follows:

The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science.

—^[48]

Around the time of Sperry's acceptance of the Nobel Prize the study of consciousness was considered to be outside the realm of science, and serious researchers risked their credibility by broaching the topic. Sperry changed all that, although it didn't happen overnight. Slowly attitudes changed to embrace the possibility of a physical explanation for consciousness, with symposia devoted to the topic beginning in the mid-1990s and interest growing until now there are whole academic departments devoted to the study of consciousness such as the Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson.

Some scholars have attacked vitalism in psychology. Thomas (2001) states that "It is now generally considered that biology had to rid itself of vitalism to enable significant progress to occur. It is suggested that psychology will develop as a science only after it rids itself of anti-reductionistic, 'emergentism'."^[49]

Complementary and alternative medicine[link]

While contemporary conventional medicine has distanced itself from the less reductionistic and more vitalistic approach of traditional medicine, some areas of complementary medicine continue to espouse various guises of vitalistic concepts and worldview. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) classifies CAM therapies into five categories or domains:^[50]

• alternative medical systems, or complete systems of therapy and practice;
• mind-body interventions, or techniques designed to facilitate the mind's effect on bodily functions and symptoms;
• biologically based systems, including herbalism;
• manipulative and body-based methods, such as chiropractic and massage therapy; and
• energy therapy.

The therapies that continue to be most intimately associated with vitalism are bioenergetic medicines, in the category of energy therapies. This field may be further divided into bioelectromagnetic medicines (BEM) and biofield therapies (BT). Compared with bioenergetic medicines, biofield therapies have a stronger identity with vitalism. Examples of biofield therapies include therapeutic touch, Reiki, external qi, chakra healing and SHEN therapy.^[51] Biofield therapies are medical treatments in which the "subtle energy" field of a patient is manipulated by a biofield practitioner. The subtle energy is held to exist beyond the electromagnetic (EM) energy that is produced by the heart and brain. Beverly Rubik describes the biofield as a "complex, dynamic, extremely weak EM field within and around the human body...."^[51]

Acupuncture and chiropractic emphasize a holistic approach to the cause and treatment of disease (see main articles on these subjects). However, it should be noted that today many chiropractors no longer adhere to the concept of vitalism to explain the mechanisms at play, and are more mechanistic in their approach. More traditional or "straight" practitioners, however, adhere to a concept of "innate". For example, in a paper named "The Meanings of Innate", Joseph C. Keating, Jr. says that "Innate Intelligence" in chiropractic can be used to represent four concepts: a synonym for homeostasis, a label for a doctor's ignorance, a vitalistic explanation of health and disease, and a metaphysical premise for treatment.^[52]

The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of disease: "...they are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body." As practised by some homeopaths today, homeopathy simply rests on the premise of treating sick persons with extremely diluted agents that – in undiluted doses – are deemed to produce similar symptoms in a healthy individual. Nevertheless, it remains equally true that the view of disease as a dynamic disturbance of the immaterial and dynamic vital force is taught in many homeopathic colleges and constitutes a fundamental principle for many contemporary practising homeopaths.

Critical opinions[link]

Vitalism has sometimes been criticized as begging the question by inventing a name. Molière had famously parodied this fallacy in Le Malade imaginaire, where a quack "answers" the question of "Why does opium cause sleep?" with "Because of its soporific power."^[53] Thomas Henry Huxley compared vitalism to stating that water is the way it is because of its "aquosity".^[54] His grandson Julian Huxley in 1926 compared "vital force" or élan vital to explaining a railroad locomotive's operation by its élan locomotif ("locomotive force").

Another criticism is that vitalists have failed to rule out mechanistic explanations. This is rather obvious in retrospect for organic chemistry and developmental biology, but this criticism goes back at least a century. In 1912, Jacques Loeb published a landmark work, The Mechanistic Conception of Life. He described experiments on how a sea urchin could have a pin for its father, as Bertrand Russell put it (Religion and Science). He also offered this challenge:

... we must either succeed in producing living matter artificially, or we must find the reasons why this is impossible.

(pp. 5–6). He also addressed vitalism more explicitly (pp. 14–15):

It is, therefore, unwarranted to continue the statement that in addition to the acceleration of oxidations the beginning of individual life is determined by the entrance of a metaphysical "life principle" into the egg; and that death is determined, aside from the cessation of oxidations, by the departure of this "principle" from the body. In the case of the evaporation of water we are satisfied with the explanation given by the kinetic theory of gases and do not demand that to repeat a well-known jest of Huxley the disappearance of the "aquosity" be also taken into consideration.

Bechtel and Richardson^[14] state that today vitalism "is often viewed as unfalsifiable, and therefore a pernicious metaphysical doctrine." For many scientists, "vitalist" theories were unsatisfactory "holding positions" on the pathway to mechanistic understanding. In 1967, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stated "And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow."^[55]

While many vitalistic theories have in fact been falsified, notably Mesmerism, the pseudoscientific retention of untested and untestable theories continues to this day. Alan Sokal published an analysis of the wide acceptance among professional nurses of "scientific theories" of spiritual healing. (Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?).^[56] Use of a technique called therapeutic touch was especially reviewed by Sokal, who concluded, "nearly all the pseudoscientific systems to be examined in this essay are based philosophically on vitalism" and added that "Mainstream science has rejected vitalism since at least the 1930s, for a plethora of good reasons that have only become stronger with time."^[56]

In his book "Kinds of Minds", philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, "Dualism...and Vitalism (the view that living things contain some special physical but equally mysterious stuff—élan vital—have been relegated to the trash heap of history...." (Chapter 2).^[57]

Joseph C. Keating, Jr., PhD,^[58] discusses vitalism's past and present roles in chiropractic and calls vitalism "a form of bio-theology." He further explains that:

Vitalism is that rejected tradition in biology which proposes that life is sustained and explained by an unmeasurable, intelligent force or energy. The supposed effects of vitalism are the manifestations of life itself, which in turn are the basis for inferring the concept in the first place. This circular reasoning offers pseudo-explanation, and may deceive us into believing we have explained some aspect of biology when in fact we have only labeled our ignorance. 'Explaining an unknown (life) with an unknowable (Innate),' suggests philosopher Joseph Donahue, D.C., 'is absurd'.

—^[52]

Keating views vitalism as incompatible with scientific thinking:

Chiropractors are not unique in recognizing a tendency and capacity for self-repair and auto-regulation of human physiology. But we surely stick out like a sore thumb among professions which claim to be scientifically based by our unrelenting commitment to vitalism. So long as we propound the 'One cause, one cure' rhetoric of Innate, we should expect to be met by ridicule from the wider health science community. Chiropractors can’t have it both ways. Our theories cannot be both dogmatically held vitalistic constructs and be scientific at the same time. The purposiveness, consciousness and rigidity of the Palmers’ Innate should be rejected.

—^[52]

Keating also mentions Skinner's viewpoint:

Vitalism has many faces and has sprung up in many areas of scientific inquiry. Psychologist B.F. Skinner, for example, pointed out the irrationality of attributing behavior to mental states and traits. Such 'mental way stations,' he argued, amount to excess theoretical baggage which fails to advance cause-and-effect explanations by substituting an unfathomable psychology of 'mind'.

—^[52]

According to Williams,^[59] "today, vitalism is one of the ideas that form the basis for many pseudoscientific health systems that claim that illnesses are caused by a disturbance or imbalance of the body's vital force." "Vitalists claim to be scientific, but in fact they reject the scientific method with its basic postulates of cause and effect and of provability. They often regard subjective experience to be more valid than objective material reality."

Stenger^[60] states that the term "bioenergetics" "is applied in biochemistry to refer to the readily measurable exchanges of energy within organisms, and between organisms and the environment, which occur by normal physical and chemical processes. This is not, however, what the new vitalists have in mind. They imagine the bioenergetic field as a holistic living force that goes beyond reductionist physics and chemistry."^[61]

Such a field is sometimes explained as electromagnetic(EM), though some advocates also make confused appeals to quantum physics.^[51] Joanne Stefanatos states that "The principles of energy medicine originate in quantum physics."^[62] Victor Stenger^[61] offers several explanations as to why this line of reasoning may be misplaced. He explains that energy exists in discrete packets called quanta. Energy fields are composed of their component parts and so only exist when quanta are present. Therefore energy fields are not holistic, but are rather a system of discrete parts that must obey the laws of physics. This also means that energy fields are not instantaneous. These facts of quantum physics place limitations on the infinite, continuous field that is used by some theorists to describe so-called "human energy fields".^[63] Stenger continues, explaining that the effects of EM forces have been measured by physicists as accurately as one part in a billion and there is yet to be any evidence that living organisms emit a unique field.^[61]

Vitalistic thinking has also been identified in the naive biological theories of children: "Recent experimental results show that a majority of preschoolers tend to choose vitalistic explanations as most plausible. Vitalism, together with other forms of intermediate causality, constitute unique causal devices for naive biology as a core domain of thought."^[64]

See also[link]

Wikiversity has learning materials about Vitalism

References[link]

External links[link]

• Vitalism on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
• Preserving Our Vitalistic Philosophy – Joseph B. Strauss, DC. Straight chiropractic philosophy
• Vitalism at the Skeptic's Dictionary
• Vitalism vs. Scientific Materialism – diametrically opposed worldview themes from Project Worldview

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject, rather than references from independent authors and third-party publications. Please add citations from reliable sources. (February 2010)

Bruce Harold Lipton (born October 21, 1944) is an American developmental biologist, who is best known for promoting the idea that genes and DNA can be manipulated by a person's beliefs.^[1] He teaches at the New Zealand College of Chiropractic.^[2]

Biography & Education[link]

Lipton was born in Mt. Kisco, an affluent town in New York. In 1966 he received a B.A. in Biology from C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University and then his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Virginia in 1971.

Academic Work[link]

In 1973 he taught anatomy as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin School Of Medicine before coming to St. George's University School of Medicine, where he became a Professor of Anatomy for 3 years. From 1987 to 1992 he was involved in research at Penn State and Stanford University Medical Center. Since 1993 he has been teaching in non-tenure positions at different universities.^[3] His publications consist mainly of research on the development of muscle cells.

Books[link]

• 2005 The Biology of Belief – Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles
• 2006 The Wisdom of Your Cells - How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology
• 2009 Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here (co-authored with Steve Bhaerman).

Other Work[link]

Lipton has appeared on several radio shows as well as The Elaine Smitha Show^[4] and The Joe Rogan Experience podcast^[5] episode 165.

In addition to his appearances on radio and television, he has been a speaker at the Institute of Noetic Sciences's 13th international conference,^[6] the Spiritual Science Fellowship International Conference,^[7] and various other conventions.^[8][9]

Lipton was also featured on the documentary Kymatica by Ben Stewart (released in 2009) discussing the concepts of love and fear in their relation to the body.

Awards and honors[link]

• 2009 Goi Peace Award ^[10]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Nature, Nurture, & the Power of Love: Conscious Parenting (part 1 of 2)
• Nature, Nurture, & the Power of Love: Conscious Parenting (part 2 of 2)
• Bruce Lipton - The New Biology - Where Mind and Matter Meet 1of 2.avi
• Bruce Lipton - The New Biology - Where Mind and Matter Meet 2o f2.avi
• Genetics, Epigenetics, and Destiny - Interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton
• The Great Lesson The Great Lesson: A New Film About Mind and Body: Featuring Dr. Bruce Lipton

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou. Fnac Montparnasse (Paris). February 5th, 2010
Born	(1937-01-17) 17 January 1937 (age 75) Rabat, French Morocco
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	French philosophy
School	Marxism Continental philosophy
Main interests	Set Theory, Mathematics, Metapolitics, Ontology, Marxism
Notable ideas	Événement (Event), ontologie du multiple (ontology of the multiple & ontology is mathematics), Un n'est pas ("The One is Not")
Influenced by Plato, Marx, Cantor, Albert Lautman, Mao Zedong, Lacan, Althusser, Paul Cohen, Sartre, Deleuze, Lyotard, Hegel, Mallarmé, Beckett, Fernando Pessoa, Sylvain Lazarus
Influenced Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, Simon Critchley, Ray Brassier, Sylvain Lazarus, Jason Barker, Quentin Meillassoux, Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Oliver Feltham, Justin Clemens, Nina Power

Alain Badiou (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ badju]  (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).^[1]

Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.

Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us".^[2]

Biography[link]

Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1957–1961). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault,^[3] and published a couple of novels before moving to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969.^[4] Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l’Analyse.^[4] By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)",^[4] and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".^[4]

The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly militant groups, such as the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml). To quote Badiou himself, the UCFml is "the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people".^[5] During this time, Badiou joined the faculty of the newly founded University of Paris VIII/Vincennes-Saint Denis which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.

In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline (with Lacan dead and Althusser in an asylum), Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as Théorie du sujet (1982), and his magnum opus, Being and Event (1988). Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works (most notably Petit panthéon portatif/Pocket Pantheon).^[6][7]

He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège International de Philosophie. He was a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which, as mentioned above, he founded in 1985 with some comrades from the Maoist UCFml. This organization disbanded in 2007, according to the French Wikipedia article (linked to in the previous sentence). Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as Ahmed le Subtil.

In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been translated into English, such as Ethics, Deleuze, Manifesto for Philosophy, Metapolitics, and Being and Event. Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History [1] and Parrhesia. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.^{[citation needed]}

Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" – The Uses of the Word "Jew".^[8] This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner, has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.^[9]

Key concepts[link]

Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique. Therefore, he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery. Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou's philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.^[10]

Conditions[link]

According to Badiou, philosophy is suspended from four conditions (art, love, politics, and science), each of them fully independent "truth procedures." (For Badiou's notion of truth procedures, see below.) Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work (but most systematically in Manifesto for Philosophy) that philosophy must avoid the temptation to suture itself (that is, to hand over its entire intellectual effort) to any of these independent truth procedures. When philosophy does suture itself to one of its conditions (and Badiou argues that the history of philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is primarily a history of sutures), what results is a philosophical "disaster." Consequently, philosophy is, according to Badiou, a thinking of the compossibility of the several truth procedures, whether this is undertaken through the investigation of the intersections between distinct truth procedures (the intersection of art and love in the novel, for instance), or whether this is undertaken through the more traditionally philosophical work of addressing categories like truth or the subject (concepts that are, as concepts, external to the individual truth procedures, though they are functionally operative in the truth procedures themselves). For Badiou, when philosophy addresses the four truth procedures in a genuinely philosophical manner, rather than through a suturing abandonment of philosophy as such, it speaks of them with a theoretical terminology that marks its philosophical character: inaesthetics rather than art; metapolitics rather than politics; ontology rather than science; etc.

Truth, for Badiou, is a specifically philosophical category. While philosophy's several conditions are, on their own terms, "truth procedures" (i.e., they produce truths as they are pursued), it is only philosophy that can speak of the several truth procedures as truth procedures. (The lover, for instance, does not think of her love as a question of truth, but simply and rightly as a question of love. Only the philosopher sees in the true lover's love the unfolding of a truth.) Badiou has a very rigorous notion of truth, one that is strongly against the grain of much of contemporary European thought. Badiou at once embraces the traditional modernist notion that truths are genuinely invariant (always and everywhere the case, eternal and unchanging) and the incisively postmodernist notion that truths are constructed through processes. Badiou's theory of truth, exposited throughout his work, accomplishes this strange mixture by uncoupling invariance and self-evidence (such that invariance does not imply self-evidence), as well as by uncoupling constructedness from relativity (such that constructedness does not lead to relativism).

The idea, here, is that a truth's invariance makes it genuinely indiscernible: because a truth is everywhere and always the case, it passes unnoticed unless there is a rupture in the laws of being and appearance, during which the truth in question becomes, but only for a passing moment, discernible. Such a rupture is what Badiou calls an event, according to a theory originally worked out in Being and Event and fleshed out in important ways in Logics of Worlds. The individual who chances to witness such an event, if he is faithful to what he has glimpsed, can then introduce the truth by naming it into worldly situations. For Badiou, it is by positioning oneself to the truth of an event that a human animal becomes a subject; subjectivity is not an inherent human trait. According to a process or procedure that subsequently unfolds only if those who subject themselves to the glimpsed truth continue faithful in the work of announcing the truth in question, genuine knowledge is produced (knowledge often appears in Badiou's work under the title of the "veridical"). While such knowledge is produced in the process of being faithful to a truth event, it should be noted that, for Badiou, knowledge, in the figure of the encyclopedia, always remains fragile, subject to what may yet be produced as faithful subjects of the event produce further knowledge. According to Badiou, truth procedures proceed to infinity, such that faith (fidelity) outstrips knowledge. (Badiou, following both Lacan and Heidegger, distances truth from knowledge.) The dominating ideology of the day, which Badiou terms "democratic materialism," denies the existence of truth and only recognize "bodies" and "languages." Badiou proposes a turn towards "dialectical materialism," which recognizes that there are only bodies and languages, except there are also truths.

Inaesthetic[link]

In Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou coins the phrase "inaesthetic" to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation". Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of "nature", Badiou claims that art is "immanent" and "singular". It is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone. His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them". He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Fernando Pessoa (who he argues has developed a body of work that philosophy is currently incapable of incorporating), among others.

[edit] Introduction to Being and Event

The major propositions of Badiou's philosophy all find their basis in Being and Event, in which he continues his attempt (which he began in Théorie du sujet) to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology, and in particular post-structuralist and constructivist ontologies.^[11] A frequent criticism of post-structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject. Badiou's work is, by his own admission,^[12] an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket. This effort leads him, in Being and Event, to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarmé and Hölderlin and religious thinkers such as Pascal. His philosophy draws upon both 'analytical' and 'continental' traditions. In Badiou's own opinion, this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries, meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up.^[13] Being and Event offers an example of this slow uptake, in fact: it was translated into English only in 2005, a full seventeen years after its French publication.

As is implied in the title of the book, two elements mark the thesis of Being and Event: the place of ontology, or 'the science of being qua being' (being in itself), and the place of the event – which is seen as a rupture in being – through which the subject finds realization and reconciliation with truth. This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory, and specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (with the axiom of choice), to which Badiou accords a fundamental role in a manner quite distinct from the majority of either mathematicians or philosophers.

Mathematics as ontology[link]

	Set theory portal
	Mathematics portal

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory (the axioms of which he refers to as the Ideas of the multiple) such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple'. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set (that is, another set too). What separates sets out therefore is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties validate its presentation; which is to say their structural relation. The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set – for instance, the set of people, or humanity – as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple (the multiplicities of humans) as one consistent concept (humanity), but only in terms of what does not belong to that set. What is, in following, crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such (an original 'one'), but rather the void set (written Ø), the set to which nothing (not even the void set itself) belongs. It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': a multiple is not one, but it is referred to with 'multiple': one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, does not coincide with what is understood by 'terminology', which is precisely difference (thus multiplicity) conditioning meaning. Since the idea of conceiving of a term without meaning does not compute, the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation and not an event of truth. Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation.

Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a 'list of lists that do not contain themselves': if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation – or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity – enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore – against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily – staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets – thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

The event and the subject[link]

The principle of the event is where Badiou diverges from the majority of late twentieth century philosophy and social thought, and in particular the likes of Foucault, Butler, Lacan and Deleuze, among others. In short, it represents that which is outside of ontology. Badiou's problem here is, unsurprisingly, the question of how to 'make use' of that which cannot be discerned. But it is a problem he views as vital, because if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology (the criticism continually leveled at Foucault's discursive universe), or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion.

Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory – Badiou's language of ontology – to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. (If one takes, in binary language, the set with the condition 'items marked only with ones', any item marked with zero negates the property of the set. The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it [cf. p. 367-71 in Being and Event].) Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible (nameable or constructible) set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. (The property 'one' is always dominated by 'not one'.) These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language (where sets and concepts, such as the concept 'humanity', get their names). However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination – in the terms of mathematical ontology – as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing. And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject – about which the ontological situation cannot comment – to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.

Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains in which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) can potentially witness an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place. Through this maintenance of fidelity, truth has the potentiality to emerge.

In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the evental [sic] (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' (the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true'), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo (p. 401):

When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand – ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?

Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach – one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process – backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

L'Organisation Politique[link]

Alain Badiou is a founding member (along with Natacha Michel and Sylvain Lazarus) of the militant French political organisation L'Organisation Politique, which was active from 1985 until it disbanded in 2007.^[14] It called itself a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). In addition to numerous writings and interventions, L'Organisation Politique stressed the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants (les sans papiers), stressing that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.^[15]

Works[link]

English translations[link]

Journals[link]

• The International Journal of Badiou Studies
• "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?", transl. by Bruno Bosteels; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Alberto Toscano with the assistance of Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Lorenzo Chiesa; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• “The Triumphant Restoration", transl. by Alberto Toscano; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "An Essential Philosophical Thesis: 'It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries'", transl. by Alberto Toscano; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847

DVD[link]

Lectures[link]

Further reading[link]

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alain Badiou

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alain Badiou

• Alain Badiou Faculty Page at European Graduate School
• Alain Badiou Bibliography at Lacan Dot Com
• What is a philosophical Institution? or: Address, Transmission, Inscription. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 2, No 1-2 (2006)

Critical Opinions[link]

• Alain Badiou's "Politics of Emancipation": A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World by Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K. J. A.
• On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes by Slavoj Zizek
• The Marxist hypothesis: a response to Alain Badiou's "communist hypothesis" by Chris Cutrone