Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett

Author:Jane Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

6

Stem Cells and the Culture of Life

When, at the turn of the twentieth century, Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson defended their notions of vital force, they were participating in a debate that also engaged a larger public. In response to new discoveries in cellular biology and in embryology, the American public had become fascinated with the question of developmental growth: just how did change happen inside plants, animals, psyches, cultures, or other self-sustaining wholes? The ensuing debate was simultaneously moral and scientific: the vitalist-mechanist controversy combined discourses of freedom and life with studies of morphology and matter.

In the early twenty-first century, Americans were again participating in debates of this hybrid kind, debates also premised on a fundamental distinction between life and matter. One powerful voice in these debates—over abortion, artificial life support, and embryonic stem cell research—was the “culture of life” position advocated by evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics, including President George W. Bush. This position is, I will contend, a latter-day vitalism. The culture-of-life movement echoes a claim made by Immanuel Kant, Driesch, and Bergson: there exists a vital force inside the biological organism that is irreducible to matter because it is a free and undetermined agency. Like the vitalists who preceded them, defenders of the culture of life believe there to be something profoundly inadequate about a mechanistic metaphysic.

But not all vitalisms are alike. For Bush and other evangelicals, the vital force is a divine spirit that animates the matter of the embryo; they affirm what Kant, Driesch, and Bergson each rejected as a vitalism of soul. Driesch especially took pains to distinguish his entelechy from religious notions of a disembodied spirit. Persuaded by Kant’s critique of dogmatic philosophy, he gave methodological priority to naturalistic explanation: Driesch sought to make the laboratory the final court of appeal with regard to questions of embryonic development. And because Driesch sought to avoid scientific as well as religious dogmatism, he emphasized that the verdicts of the lab were subject to revision as new data emerged.

Driesch believed that empirical experimentation in the lab on non-human systems would shed light on truths that applied also to human systems. The “formative” power (entelechy) was present in sea urchin embryos, human embryos, the larger organic whole called history (that “suprapersonal process which [is] . . . unique and not yet finished in [its] uniqueness”), and even perhaps in inorganic systems: “There is the material world as the world of chance, but there is also a world of form or order that manifests itself in certain areas of the material world, namely, in the biological individual, and probably, in another way, in phylogeny and history also; there may even be formlike constellations in what we call the Inorganic.”1

Driesch was a secularist in that he tried to bracket his religious convictions when engaging in public reasoning. But this is not to say that he believed science to be irrelevant to public morality. Quite to the contrary, when the Nazis invoked entelechy to support their claim that some

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