Some Vitalist Minima

Is vitalism Slim Aarons pictures, black coffee with sugar and Alain Delon? Or is it something more?

“Nietzsche talks about this.”

To establish our conception of social life on its original basis; to reaffirm and, so to speak, renovate its golden values, the values which were created by the fresh and vigorous meditation of the earlier ages of mankind; to find, amidst the thick confusion of moral, religious, and political prejudices, false scientific conceptions, and out-of-date aesthetic formulae, the traces of a life higher than our actual existence; to discover a true life:—this is the task of him who loves mankind, or, rather, of him who loves to see men beautiful, strong, serene and free.

Gioacchino Leo Séra, Vitalism: On the Tracks of Life [Sulle Tracce della Vita] (1907)

Vitalism. What is it? What does it mean?

Honestly, I think most people who use the word right now don’t have a clue. It’s mostly just a vibe: vitality, obviously, and being attractive and young and enjoying yourself and stuff like that. You either get it or you don’t.

There’s something to this, but on reflection, not enough. Vitalism does have an intuitive, unthinking aspect that distinguishes it from other philosophies, but that’s far from all vitalism is about.

Browse Twitter and you’ll discover “vitalism” is Slim Aarons photos, beautiful blonde girls in tennis skirts, cups of espresso and buttery croissants outside a French café, vintage Ralph Lauren, 1990s Range Rovers, Alain Delon, Silvio Berlusconi, Carlos Leder; and it’s words like “aristocratic,” “elite” and, of course, “Nietzschean.”

There’s a long-running joke on Twitter, usually in the form of a dialogue between Gigachad and his mirror-image, that neither one has ever read a page of Nietzsche, despite referring to more or less everything as “Nietzschean” or commenting “Nietzsche talks about this” on every kind of absurd triviality you can imagine. “Nietzsche talks about this” [drinking black coffee with sugar]. For most of Twitter’s wannabe vitalist right, their introduction to Nietzsche will have been through Bronze Age Pervert and his book Bronze Age Mindset—although I’m not sure BAP uses the word “vitalism” or its cognates in the book—but even then many of these people don’t seem to have read Bronze Age Mindset, or not properly, anyway.

The confusion about vitalism can be cleared up neatly by consulting Gioacchino Leo Séra’s Sulle Tracce della Vita, republished this year as Vitalism: On the Tracks of Life by my friend Semmelweis at Rogue Scholar Press. In a helpful introduction, Semmelweis lays out the history of vitalism and how it differs from other philosophies of life, chiefly mechanism.

Vitalism is a philosophy with deep roots. In fact, vitalism is something like the default paradigm of Western philosophy and proto-science. For most of Western history, thinkers have posited a “non-material life energy”—a vital force—of some kind that animates living creatures and distinguishes them from things. Mechanism, by contrast, as the Catholic Encyclopedia describes it,

“seeks to explain ‘vital’ phenomena as physical and chemical facts; whether or not these facts are in turn reducible to mass and motion becomes a secondary question, although mechanists are generally inclined to favour such reduction.”

Vitalists maintain that such a reduction is impossible. The laws that govern inanimate objects can never explain life in all its fullness, even if they can explain aspects of it.

In antiquity, mechanists like Democritus and Lucretius were in the minority, and even into the modern period, but it was their descendants—Descartes, Newton, Darwin—who would eventually win out. In the nineteenth century, despite attempts to give greater depth to vitalism, it was largely dismissed by the scientific community as a kind of circular philosophy. Julian Huxley famously said “life energy” could no more explain life than “locomotive energy” a train. The remark is catchy and witty, and remembered as being devastating—but that doesn’t actually make it right.

Friedrich Nietzsche looms large as the most important vitalist of the modern age. He derived his vitalist emphasis from Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an enormous influence on his early work, especially The Birth of Tragedy. For Nietzsche, life power was the “will to power,” a will that is totally separate from consciousness or reason and immanent in reality.

Nietzsche is generally considered to be the forerunner of lebensphilosophie or “life philosophy,” a movement of mostly German philosophers that shares important similarities with Nietzsche’s work and continued into the twentieth century. Among those similarities are a focus on immanence at the expense of the transcendent; individualism and relativism in ethics; and an affirmative attitude towards life.

Lebensphilosophie had right- and left-wing branches. Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, who were both contemporaries of Nietzsche’s, were liberals, unlike Nietzsche. Twentieth-century left lebensphilosophers include Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Antonio Negri. Right-wing elements of lebensphilosophie, and right-wing thinkers themselves, were purged after the Second World War. Nietzsche, for example, was christened the “New” Nietzsche by a 1977 compendium of essays that placed him at the forefront of postmodernism in philosophy and linguistic theory.

Within the mostly left-wing lebensphilosophie of the twentieth century, there is another division, between those, like Foucault, who follow Nietzsche with his emphasis on (the will to) power, and those, like Bergson and Deleuze, who focus instead on perception and sensation.

There are other important influences on contemporary vitalist thought and lebensphilosophie, most notably the Romantic movement. According to Gerald Spring, who wrote an account of the Count de Gobineau’s philosophy entitled, The Vitalism of Count de Gobineau (1932), the Romanticism of the German poets and philosophers “amounts practically to a generalization of the vitalism of the biological theorists.” Romantics praised “vital impulse” and deplored “mechanism” and “cold intelligence.” Spring provides a useful definition of vitalism, which is worth considering in full. According to Spring, vitalism has the following characteristics:

i) It is anti-ascetic, “opposing all asceticism in religion and philosophy and destructive or negative intellectualism.”

ii) It values intuition more than intellect. This also extends to the social plane, with vitalists generally being for tradition and against intellectual interference in social life, such as the social theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and events like the French Revolution inspired by them.

iii) It glorifies life as the ultimate reality, and denies the concept of absolute truth.

iv) It is a pragmatic philosophy, seeking to “heighten life and further it in every way.”

v) It advocates intense living and strength of character.

As Semmelweis notes, what Spring is describing is really the “vitalism of the right,” which, as I’ve already noted, was largely suppressed or simply forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century. Writers such as the Count de Gobineau, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler and the “aristocratic radical” Nietzsche, rather than the postmodern “New” Nietzsche, have now returned to prominence after decades in the wilderness.

As a final note, Semmelweis adds that “leftist vitalism” is really something of a misnomer, as you might suspect. Although both right- and left-wing vitalism draw heavily on Nietzsche and especially his “immoralism,” they do very different things with it. For the right-wing vitalist, immoralism means “war, slavery, exploitation and cruelty must be seen anew, not with the condemnatory eye of a moralist but with a biologist’s and anthropologist’s eye, in order to understand their functions in the life process.” The leftist, by contrast, means something more along the lines of Aleister Crowley’s injunction, “Do what thou wilt.” Semmelweis uses the example of André Gide’s 1901 novel, The Immoralist, whose protagonist takes Nietzsche’s philosophy simply as an excuse to fuck other men and kids. While right-wing vitalism champions nature and sees it as the ultimate guide, leftist vitalism sees it as “something to be overturned”—“the enemy.”

So that’s one vitalist minimum: knowing what vitalism is.

Here’s another. Vitalism today, in my opinion, needs to have a limited focus. It must attend, first of all, to very basic facts about bodily existence in the 21st century. Ill health is near-universal. Man exists in a degraded state and the degradation is only getting worse. Vitalism needs to guarantee the integrity of the body, to fortify it, if there is any chance at all to be beautiful, strong, serene and free, in Séra’s words.