Week 8 Readings

HISTORY 60

Department of History
University of California, Irvine
Instructor: Dr. Barbara J. Becker

Week 8. Living Machines

Mechanism vs. Vitalism

Supplementary readings for Week 8's lectures include excerpts from:

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (525-455 BCE);

The Golem, Legends of the Ghetto of Prague;

Man a Machine (1748) by Julien de la Mettrie (1709-1751);

The Sandman (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822);

The Temple of Nature; or, the origin of society (1803) by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802);

Zoonomia; or, the laws of organic life (1803) by Erasmus Darwin;

Galvanic Experiments, from the Times of London; and

Philosophical Zoology, Vol. 1 (1809) by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829);

Mechanical philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries viewed the world as a magnificent clockwork--anything could be understood if taken apart, exposing all its inner workings. For others, however, the mechanical philosophy was a source of deep despair:

For one thing, there was the inability to know anything with any certainty. One could only describe outward appearances--the "what" of things, but not the "why."

For another, there are many instances in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Taking a thing apart destroys what it was when it was whole. Understanding the individual components reveals nothing about how they really work together.

In the early nineteenth century, the prevailing metaphor for natural phenomena began to change from machine to organism. The method of analysis gave way to intuition and experiment became viewed as a futile investigative procedure: Because it forces nature to act abnormally, experiment reveals only what the apparatus is designed to show.

What is it that distinguishes between living and non-living things? What animates living things? Where does this vital spirit reside? Is it, perhaps, something we've been defining as mechanical all along? What do we do with this knowledge if and when we find it?

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