Metaphysics and “vital” materialism

The philosophical innovations developed by German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in opposition to Cartesian-style biomechanism, and the development of these views by Christian Wolff, offered the middle Enlightenment a complex theory of the organism grounded upon the introduction of the concept of dynamic “substance” that underlay the phenomenal conception of “matter.” This also carried with it a teleological and metaphysically grounded conception of life grounded in immaterial force and the monad theory. As these conceptions were restated in a French context by Gabrielle du Châtelet in her important Institutions de Physique (1740), she maintained this distinction of “simple beings” – her translation of Leibnizian monads – and matter. This maintained the conception of living beings as underlain by teleological force. However, the interpretation of these Leibniz-Wolffian concepts expounded by du Châtelet within her group of intellectual associates – Pierre de Maupertuis, Buffon and Julien Offray de la Mettrie in the late 1730s and 40s – resulted in the adoption but also the transformation of some of these principles. The critical Leibnizian distinction between “substance” and “matter” was conflated. This provided the opening to a “vital” materialism that was applied to issues of generation, function and vitalization. This also dispensed with the strongly metaphysical and teleological premises of the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy. The result was a bifurcation in the philosophical biology of the late Enlightenment between those German philosophical biologists whose arguments were eventually developed in a “critical” framework by Kant, which maintained aspects of these Leibnizian metaphysical distinctions, and the French, who rejected them. In this chapter I develop this framework and detail the importance of these developments for the emerging conception of a science of “biology” in the late eighteenth century.

Epistemology · Materialism · Metaphysics · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought