Neofinalism by Raymond Ruyer

Author:Raymond Ruyer [Ruyer, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI075000 Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

15

The Neomaterialist Theories

In a certain superficial sense, we can say that contemporary science has realized the hopes of the old materialism concerning the problem of life. We can say that the problem of the historical origin of life no longer arises. The appearance of life from a geologically “dead” world can no longer be considered as one of the forever-insoluble “enigmas of the Universe.” The modes of emergence of complex organisms are far from being known, but the emergence of life, considered as an absolutely novel mode of being, is no longer a philosophical problem. There is no longer any reason to believe that from a chemical molecule to a bacillus, the abyss is greater than from a bacillus to a vertebrate. Physicochemical sciences and the sciences of the organism are much closer to each other than they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have already blended together in practice. The study of crystallizable viruses, genetic mutations, and large organic molecules in general attracts both chemists and biologists. One physicist after another, from N. Bohr to P. Jordan, L. de Broglie to E. Schrödinger, has his say on the problem of life.

This triumph of “materialism” is illusory. To affirm that microorganisms are molecules is to admit, in the same stroke, that molecules are microorganisms. The universe’s “fibrous structure,” made up of individual lines of continuity, is the capital fact underscored by all the recent discoveries. The physics of “individuals” enters into continuity with the biology of individuals. The living organism can no longer be reduced to a complex of physicochemical phenomena in the ordinary sense of the term, that is, into aggregate and statistical phenomena. Physicochemical phenomena certainly unfold in the organism and are used by it; but they are not the organism itself. One might as well claim to explain the chemical properties of the water or salt molecule through the laws of hydrography or oceanography. Today, the mechanistic1 (or physicochemist in the classical sense) theories of life are nothing more than an archaism.

We will not dwell, therefore, on the old materialism or the physicochemist doctrine. In reality, their many contemporary representatives tend more and more to appeal to “neomaterialist” accounts, as we will define the term further on.2

For example, M. Prenant mixes with the customary accounts of mechanistic materialism, on one hand, “dialectical” accounts and, on the other, arguments drawn from the physics or chemistry of individuals. While claiming that zoology has become a “comparative biochemistry,” J. Needham acknowledges that biology cannot be mechanistic in the strict sense of the term because electrodynamics and the atomic physics of quantum theories do not derive from the principles of classical mechanics. We find similar proclamations among other supporters of the physicochemical reduction: M. Werwon, Schafer, F. H. Marshall, E. B. Wilson, and so on.

Yet a neomaterialism that no longer appeals to ordinary mechanics or to the statistical laws of physics and openly admits the new fact of the physics of the individual, in continuity with the biology of the individual, is apparently possible.

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