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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability in the History of Life and Death

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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability in the History of Life and Death Chapter 2 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability in the History of Life and Death Guido Giglioni M. de Lamarck séparait la vie d’avec la nature. La nature, à ses yeux, c’était la pierre et la cendre, le granit de la tombe, la mort! La vie n’y intervenait que comme un accident étrange et singulièrement industrieux, une lutte prolongée, avec plus ou moins de succès et d’équilibre çà et là, mais toujours fi nalement vaincue; l’immobilité froide était régnante après comme devant. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Volupté, 1834 Et metuunt magni naturam credere mundi exitiale aliquod tempus clademque manere, cum videant tantam terrarum incumbere molem! Lucretius, De rerum natura, VI, 565–567 Abstract In the history of philosophy and science, vitalism has a bad reputation, for the very defi nition of life remains remorselessly murky. And yet life also resists all attempts at reduction carried out by the logic of mechanical reason. While on a superfi cial level, life smacks of irrational exuberance, on a deeper level, it is in the very uncomfortable company of death. In this chapter, I argue that this ambivalence is particularly evident in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s natural philosophy. In his chemi- cal, geological, botanical and zoological views, Lamarck advocated a theory of decaying rather than living matter. He characterized orgasm, irritability and sensi- bility – the forms which life takes on in the physical universe – as momentary inter- ruptions of nature’s ordinary course toward death and destruction. This chapter examines Lamarck’s notion of irritability, paying special attention to his concept of “intussusception.” By intussusception, Lamarck meant a universal mechanism of G. Giglioni () Warburg Institute , Woburn Square , WC1H 0AB London , UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Normandin and C.T. Wolfe (eds.), Vitalism and the Scientifi c Image 19 in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 2, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2445-7_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 20 G. Giglioni organic mutability through which organisms were able to calibrate their reactions to the environment. He argued that through increasingly more complex reactions, living beings could resist the universal tendency to disintegration and breakup by internalizing pressures coming from the environment. Keywords Death • Evolution • Irritability • Life • Matter • Sensibility 1 The History of Life and Death In one of the most important natural histories written in the last years of his life, the Historia vitae et mortis (1623), Bacon presented death as an essential attribute of all living beings. After all, living things can be said to be alive precisely because they are not dead yet and sooner or later are going to die. Bacon advocated a negative view of life (life as a form of tenacious and secret resistance to death), not a positive one (life as expansion and full actuality). It is for this reason that he saw the natural process of decay in all its forms as part of the very essence of life described as a primordial reaction to a pervasive tendency to restore an original condition of rest and immobil- ity (Bacon [1620] 2004 , 412; Bacon [1623] 2007 , 346–354). Life, in this picture, manifested the unmistakable traits of uneasiness, discomfort and irritability rather than those of a placidly self-fulfi lling activity. 1 Bacon’s notion of life as a reaction, diffused at every level in the universe (bodies, souls and minds), against the unstop- pable decay of material organizations exercised a deep infl uence on Francis Glisson (1598–1677), a physician and a philosopher who, especially in his De natura sub- stantiae energetica ( 1672 ) and De ventriculo et intestinis ( 1677 ), had Bacon in mind when he defi ned irritability as a reaction to the force of inertia. The difference was that, while Bacon’s account of life and death hinged on blind appetite, Glisson defended the original character of knowledge as prior to any aimless drive in nature.2 Both Bacon’s Historia vitae et mortis and Glisson’s De ventriculo et intestinis dem- onstrate how closely intertwined the histories of irritability and living matter could be. Glisson, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, who fi rst came up with the term “irritability” ( irritabilitas ), considered the tendency of natural 1 On Bacon’s notions of matter and death, cf. Giglioni ( 2005 , 2011 , 74–75). On Bacon’s Historia vitae et mortis and its later fortuna, cf. Gemelli ( 2010 , 191–205). Francis Glisson, referring to Jan Baptiste van Helmont’s treatise Ignota actio regiminis , called this tendency to be irritated as ‘dis- quietude’ ( inquietudo ). Cf. British Library, MS Sloane 574B, f. 67 r . 2 Cf. Glisson ( 1677 , 365–368). In defending the primacy of perception over appetite, Glisson sides with Helmont rather than Bacon: “Non me latet, Illustrissimum. D. Dominum Franc. Baconium , VicecomitemVerulamii , Tractatu de Principiis pag. 211, 212, etc. negare antiquissimum Cupidinem habere causam se priorem. Respondeo, eum proculdubio, sub persona Cupidinis, naturalem quo- que perceptionem, absque qua ille subsistere nequit, includi supposuisse. Ipse expressis verbis agnoscit, dari perceptionem generaliorem ea quae est sensuum , quae nihil aliud esse potest nisi perceptio naturalis.” Cf. Bacon ([1653] 1996 ), Bacon ( 1857 –1874, I, 610; II, 602). 2 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability in the History of Life and Death 21 bodies to respond to external and internal stimuli to be the manifestation of a more general property of matter (i.e. its inherent reactivity). One year after Glisson had published his treatise on irritability, a colleague of his at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), Regius Professor of Hebrew, sent his True Intellectual System of the Universe to press (1678). Here he coined the term “hylozoism” to expose what he thought was a form of atheistic materialism hidden within the principal arguments of Glisson’s philosophical treatise, De natura substantiae energetica . 3 In this chapter, I adopt Cudworth’s term “hylozoism” to refer to materialistic views of irritability (such as the one originally set out by Glisson following Bacon’s theory of the natural motions of matter). As I argue elsewhere, the term hylozoism is still used in contemporary philosophical discourse to denote any form of thor- oughgoing vital materialism and I prefer to employ that term rather than the more problematic “vitalism” (Giglioni 1994 ). 4 Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), who in the eighteenth century adopted Glisson’s notion of irritability, altered its meaning in quite a dramatic way, cutting its original ties with hylozoism and turning the power of irritable responsiveness into a quasi-mechanical property. Despite the success of Haller’s operation, Glisson’s suggestion that the irritable reactions of the body evi- denced a deeper vital nature in matter was developed in various forms by a number of eighteenth-century natural philosophers and physicians. In different ways, Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Paul-Joseph Barthez (1734–1806), Anthelme Richerand (1779–1840) and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1801) all embraced the view that an original source of material vitality displayed itself in nature in various forms and degrees. At the end of the eighteenth century, as the complementary concepts of irritability and sensibility came to shape the fi eld of physiology, Lamarck appropriated the notion of irritabil- ity in the revised version that had been popularized by Haller. In this chapter, I focus on those aspects in Lamarck’s theory of organic mutability that link the interrelated notions of irritability, evolution and materialism. During the eighteenth century, Glisson’s original attempt to associate hylozoism with irritability developed into broader explanatory frameworks involving questions of evolution, medical environmentalism and geological change. Natural philosophers and physicians focused their attention on innumerable phenomena betraying a perva- sive tendency to react: tension, tone, quiver, palpitation, orgasm, erethism, erection, motility, contractility, excitability, incitability and sensibility. In different ways, they all wondered whether irritable responses in matter followed random or teleological patterns, whether they were based on purposive or mechanical organizations of life. What is more, none of them could shun any longer the question concerning the ultimate motor behind vital reactivity in nature. As pointed out by Lester Crocker, “a theory of 3 Cudworth ([1845] 1995 , III, 405). Cf. Giglioni ( 2002 ). 4 On the complex issue of the relationship between vitalism and materialism in the early modern period, see the excellent account in Wolfe and Terada (2008 ). In contemporary discourse, panpsy- chism is often mistaken for hylozoism. From this point of view, the early modern discussion on life, matter and mind was more accurate than the contemporary one. 22 G. Giglioni transformism could scarcely have been conceived without the belief that matter, and living organisms in particular, possess a self- organizing power or impulse.”5 A further element contributed to joining doctrines of irritability with theories of evo- lution, that is, a growing awareness that the environment played a crucial role in turning the universe into one interrelated system. It was certainly no accident that Hippocrates’ infl uential Airs, Waters and Places had become an increasingly popular text in the early modern fi elds of medicine, history and natural philosophy, and the rediscovery of Hippocratism in general reinforced the bond – already well- established – between environmental (geography, earth sciences, and meteorology) and biomedical disci- plines. All this led to a synthesis of the earth sciences and the long established tradition of environmental medicine. 6 In stressing the link that connected organisms to their environments, for instance, Barthez had referred to the “endemic modifi cations” that the principe vital has “in each place of the earth” (Barthez 1778 , 286–287).
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