Hylozoism

Hylozoism is the philosophical point of view that matter is in some sense alive. The concept dates back at least as far as the Milesian school of pre-Socratic philosophers. The term was introduced to English by Ralph Cudworth in 1678.

Distinction from similar theories

Although there is a distinction between possessing a mind (hylopsychism) and possessing life (hylozoism); in practice this division is difficult to maintain, because the ancient hylozoists not only regarded the spirits of the material universe and plant world as alive, but also as more or less conscious. Whereas animism tends to view life as taking the form of discrete spirits, and panpsychism tends to refer to strictly philosophical views like that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, hylozoism refers largely to views such as those of the earliest Greek philosophers (6th and 5th centuries BC), who treated the magnet as alive because of its attractive powers (Thales), or air as divine (Anaximenes), perhaps because of its apparently spontaneous power of movement, or because of its role as essential for life in animals. Later this primitive hylozoism reappeared in modified forms. Some scholars have since claimed that the term hylozoism should properly be used only where body and soul are explicitly distinguished, the distinction then being rejected as invalid. Nevertheless, hylozoism remains logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter.

Ancient hylozoism

Some of the ancient Greek philosophers taught a version of hylozoism, as they, however vaguely, conceived the elemental matter as being in some sense animate if not actually conscious and conative (a directed effort, a striving or tendency; a nisus). Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus all taught that there is a form of life in all material objects, and the Stoics believed that a world soul was the vital force of the universe. It is important to note that these philosophies did not necessarily hold that material objects had separate life or identity, but only that they had life, either as part of an overriding entity or as living but insensible entities.

Hylozoism in Renaissance and early Modernity

In the Renaissance, Bernardino Telesio, Paracelsus, Cardanus, and Giordano Bruno revived the doctrine of hylozoism. The latter, for example, held a form of Christian pantheism. God is the source, cause, medium, and end of all things, and therefore all things are participatory in the ongoing Godhead. Bruno's ideas were so radical that he was entirely rejected by the Roman Catholic Church as well as excommunicated from a few Protestant groups, and he was eventually burned at the stake for various heresies. Telesio, on the other hand, began from an Aristotelian basis and, through radical empiricism, came to believe that a living force was what informed all matter. Instead of the intellectual universals of Aristotle, he believed that life generated form.

In England, some of the Cambridge Platonists approached hylozoism as well. Both Henry More and Ralph Cudworth (the Younger, 1617–1688), through their reconciliation of Platonic idealism with Christian doctrines of deific generation, came to see the divine lifeforce as the informing principle in the world. Thus, like Bruno, but not nearly to the extreme, they saw God's generative impulse as giving life to all things that exist. Accordingly, Cudworth, the most systematic metaphysician of the Cambridge Platonist tradition, fought hylozoism. His work is primarily a critique of what he took to be the two principal forms of atheism. i.e. materialism and hylozoism.

Cudworth singled out Hobbes not only as a defender of the hylozoic atheism "which attributes life to matter", but also as one going beyond it and defending "hylopathian atheism, which attributes all to matter." Cudworth attempted to show that Hobbes had revived the doctrines of Protagoras and was therefore subject to the criticisms which Plato had deployed against Protagoras in the Theaetetus. On the side of hylozoism, Strato of Lampsacus was the official target. However, Cudworth's Dutch friends had reported to him the views which Spinoza was circulating in manuscript. Cudworth remarks in his Preface that he would have ignored hylozoism had he not been aware that a new version of it would shortly be published.

Spinoza's idealism also tends toward hylozoism. In order to hold a balance even between matter and mind, Spinoza in fact combined materialistic with pantheistic hylozoism, by reducing both to the rank of mere attributes of the one infinite substance. Although he specifically rejects identity in inorganic matter, he, like the Cambridge Platonists, sees a life force or living force within, as well as beyond, all matter.

Contemporary hylozoism

Immanuel Kant presented arguments against hylozoism in the third chapter of his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften ("First Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science," 1786) and also in his famous Kritik der reinen Vernunft ("Critique of Pure Reason," 1783). Yet, in our times, scientific hylozoism – whether modified, or keeping the trend to make all beings conform to some uniform pattern, to which the concept was adhered in modernity by Herbert Spencer, Hermann Lotze, and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel – was often called upon as a protest against a mechanistic view of the world.

In the 19th century, Haeckel developed a materialist form of hylozoism, specially against Rudolf Virchow's and Hermann von Helmholtz's mechanical views of humans and nature. In his Die Welträtsel of 1899 (The Riddle of the Universe 1901), Haeckel upheld a unity of organic and inorganic nature and derived all actions of both types of matter from natural causes and laws. Thus, his form of hylozoism reverses the usual course by maintaining that living and non-living things are, essentially, the same and by erasing the distinction between the two and stipulating that they behave by a single set of laws.

In contrast, the Argentine-German neurobiological tradition terms hylozoic hiatus all of the parts of nature which can only behave lawfully or nomically and, upon such a feature, are described as lying outside of minds and amid them – i.e.., extramentally. Thereby the hylozoic hiatus becomes contraposed to minds deemed able of behaving semoviently, i.e.. able of inaugurating new causal series (semovience). Hylozoism in this contemporary neurobiological tradition is thus restricted to the portions of nature behaving nomically inside the minds, namely the minds' sensory reactions (Christfried Jakob's "sensory intonations") whereby minds react to the stimuli coming from the hylozoic hiatus or extramental realm.

Martin Buber, too, takes an approach that is quasi-hylozoic. By maintaining that the essence of things is identifiable and separate, although not pre-existing, he can see a soul within each thing.

The French Pythagorean and Rosicrucian alchemist, Francois Jollivet-Castelot (1874-1937), established a hylozoic esoteric school which combined the insight of spagyrics, chemistry, physics, transmutations and metaphysics. He published many books, one of which was called "L’Hylozoïsme, l’alchimie, les chimistes unitaires" (1896). In his view there was no difference between spirit and matter except for the degree of frequency and other vibrational conditions.

The Mormon theologian Orson Pratt taught a form of hylozoism.

Alice A. Bailey wrote a book called The Consciousness of the Atom.

Influenced by Alice A. Bailey, Charles Webster Leadbeater, and their predecessor Madame Blavatsky, Henry T. Laurency produced voluminous writings describing a hylozoic philosophy.

Influenced by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the English philosopher and mathematician John Godolphin Bennett, in his four-volume work The Dramatic Universe and his book Energies, developed a six-dimensional framework in which matter-energy takes on 12 levels of hylozoic quality.

Ken Wilber embraces hylozoism to explain subjective experience and provides terms describing the ladder of subjective experience experienced by entities from atoms up to Human beings in the upper left quadrant of his Integral philosophy chart.

Physicist Thomas Brophy, in The Mechanism Demands a Mysticism, embraces hylozoism as the basis of a framework for re-integrating modern physical science with perennial spiritual philosophy. Brophy coins two additional words to stand with hylozoism as the three possible ontological stances consistent with modern physics. Thus: hylostatism (universe is deterministic, thus “static” in a four-dimensional sense); hylostochastism (universe contains a fundamentally random or stochastic component); hylozoism (universe contains a fundamentally alive aspect).

Architect Christopher Alexander has put forth a theory of the living universe, where life is viewed as a pervasive patterning that extends to what is normally considered non-living things, notably buildings. He wrote a four-volume work called The Nature of Order which explicates this theory in detail.

Philosopher and ecologist David Abram articulates and elaborates a form of hylozoism grounded in the phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram suggests that matter is never entirely passive in our direct experience, holding rather that material things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus," coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things. In the absence of intervening technologies, sensory experience is inherently animistic, disclosing a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the get-go. Drawing upon contemporary cognitive and natural science as well as the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous, oral cultures, Abram proposes a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology, in which matter is alive through and through. Such an ontology is in close accord, he suggests, with our spontaneous perceptual experience; it would draw us back to our senses and to the primacy of the sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters and weather-patterns that materially sustains us.

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some metaphorical resemblance to hylozoism.

Hylozoism in popular culture

Art

• Hylozoic Series: Sibyl, an interactive installation of Canadian artist and architect Philip Beesley, was presented in the 18th Biennale of Sydney and was on display until September, 2012. Using sensors, LEDs, and shape memory alloy, Beesley constructed an interactive environment that responded to the actions of the audience, offering a vision of how buildings in the future might move, think and feel.

Literature

• In mathematician and writer Rudy Rucker's novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, the emergent sentience of all material things is described as a property of the technological singularity.
• The Hylozoist is one of the Culture ships mentioned in Iain M. Banks's novel Surface Detail – appropriately, this ship is a member of the branch of Contact dealing with smart matter outbreaks.

MMORPGs

• The monster "Hylozoist" (sometimes spelled "Heirozoist") in the MMORPG Ragnarok Online is a plush rabbit doll with its mouth sewn shut, possessed by the spirit of a child. Although hylozoism has nothing to do with possession, it is clear that the name was derived from this ancient philosophy.

Music

• The Hylozoists are a Canadian band.
• Sonic Youth references hylozoism in the second verse of the fourth track on the Sister LP

See also

• Biocentric universe
• Biological naturalism
• Clinamen
• Daoism
• Hyle
• Hylomorphism
• Hylopathism
• Nondualism
• Panpsychism
• Pantheism
• Vitalism

External links

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