THE RETURN OF ANIMAL SPIRITS:

TOWARD A VITALIST NARRATIVE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RISK

Professor Jackson Lears (Rutgers University)

[Delivered as a Public Lecture, September 7th, 2017, as part of the project: Fate, Luck and

Fortune: Narratives of Environmental Risk (funded by the AHRC) at University of

Liverpool in London, 33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG For more information see

the project website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/fate-luck-fortune/]

From K, “My Early Beliefs” (1938)—JMK and DHL at Cambridge—a breakfast party in

Bertie’s rooms (Bertrand Russell) —DHL sitting apart, finding Cambridge rationalism

and cynicism “repulsive”—The older Keynes, in recalling his younger self, had begun to

see himself and his fellow rational cynics through Lawrence’s eyes.

K does give the Cambridge lads some credit: we were “amongst the first of our

generation . . . to escape from the Benthamite tradition . . . . the worm which has been

gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and has been responsible for its present

moral decay”—still we had not escaped from the equally pernicious doctrine of “rational

self-interest” –“we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of their being

insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men”—didn’t realize that civilization

was a mere crust . . . .

But in 1938, “The attribution of rationality to human nature . . .now seems to me to have

been impoverished.” It ignored not only “powerful and irrational springs of wickedness”

but also more benign and necessary “springs of feeling”—“more various, and also much

richer, than we [rational cynics] allowed for”—we were “water-spiders, gracefully

skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at

all with the eddies and currents underneath”—“that is why I say that there may have

been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said in 1914 that we were ‘done for.’”

JMK’s self-criticism here coincided with his emphasis on animal spirits in GT, which he

had just completed the year before—animal spirits the core of his brief against rational

self-interest—Most investment decisions, he argued, were “a result of animal spirits—of

a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,” rather than “an exact calculation of

benefits to come.” Venturesome enterprise was rooted in visceral feelings and only a

little more rationally motivated than “an expedition to the South Pole.” These

observations reveal Keynes to be far more psychologically sophisticated than Joseph

Schumpeter, the economist who is usually credited with displacing Keynes as the

presiding spirit of our entrepreneurial age, whose ideal entrepreneur turns out to be little

more than a capitalist embodiment of conventional male will. Keynes’ speculations about

animal spirits are far richer than Schumpeter’s familiar notion of “creative destruction,”

and they lead us in far more fruitful directions than Schumpeter’s hymn to

entrepreneurial genius and technological innovation—directions that might even

counteract the looming catastrophe created by creative destruction. The concept of

creative destruction has in fact become a capitalist version of Providence, assuring us that

the most apparently calamitous developments will somehow all work out for the best.

[Do the names “Harvey” and Irma” mean anything to you? ]

To change course we need [platitude alert] a fundamental rethinking of our relationship

with the rest of the non-human world. Well, there’s a reason for platitudes.

Bottom line is this: concept of animal spirits leads us to ways to expand that

rethinking. The concept is about far more than investors’ motives—it has links with

longer vitalist tradition—fasc. with vitality, life as an end in itself—roots in centuries of

animistic folk beliefs but takes formal shape in early modern religious thought (Milton,

Donne) and in vernacular medicine as a precursor/stand-in for nerves (Sterne)----19th,

20th c.: synonym for life force—romantic, modernist traditions—at the center of lit but

also sci. ferment—Lamarck, E. Darwin, even (as we’ll see) C. Darwin—V. waxes and

wanes in legitimacy—decline in mid-19th c. w. emergent hegemony of positivism—

Huxley et al.—machinelike animals, inert matter—revival of v. in late 19th early 20th c.—

recoil from bloodless utilitarian ethos—yearnings to recover deeper “springs of

feeling”—pervades the modernist maelstrom which swept up Lawrence (who is almost

embarrassing in his vitalist worship of instinctual life) but also the urbane Keynes and

some of his Bloomsbury friends. . .

Year 1913 as vitalist moment—vogue of Bergson etc.—but also eugenics, “national

vitality”—celebrating primal energy but also assimilating it to corporate and government

institutions

WWI and after—growing recognition that vital force could include what K called

“irrational springs of wickedness”—by 1938, evidence of vitalist-fascist link impossible

to ignore—vitalist politics tainted by assoc. with cult of the Leader, vitalist science

tainted by assoc. with Nazi eugenics, Soviet “new man” –it also conflicted with modern

genetics, which was based on the Weismann barrier [between somatic cells and heritable

germ plasm]— Weismann Barrier meant that bodily changes could not be passed on to

next generation—“new men” could not be created through changes in the physical or

political environment

But in recent decades, vitalism has been making a comeback –not only in literature and

the arts (where it never really went away) but also among inhabitants of more austere

academic terrains, where the word vitalism itself can never be uttered, though key ideas

in the tradition can: I’m thinking of political philosophers (Jane Bennett), historians of

science (Jessica Riskin) –and philosophers of science (Thomas Nagel)—not to mention

scientists themselves, particularly those labouring in the burgeoning field of epigenetics.

Epigenetics emphasizes the whole context in which genetic material functions, from the

cell outside its nucleus to the organism and its environment. Epigenetics also shows how

unpredictable contingencies [dare I say luck?] can shape the course of evolution.

So at the risk of dilletantism [always a menace] I’m going to use the notion of animal

spirits to enter the vitalist tradition and provide an aerial view of this way of thinking

about the world—a way that links scientists and poets, vernacular and expert observation.

Animal spirits are epitomized by animal (or human) play, which positivists and

Darwinian fundamentalists have repeatedly tried to reduce to something else—something

adaptive, utilitarian, and consistent with a narrow notion of self-interest. But they have

never produced a convincing reductive interpretation: Play continues to assert itself as an

irreducible activity, a thing done for its own sake. Its origins remain a mystery. Johan

Huizinga recalled “Plato’s conjecture that the origin of play lies in the need of all young

creatures, animal and human, to leap,” but neither Plato nor Huizinga pretended to know

where that need came from. -- More broadly, a notion of animal spirits as irreducible play

illuminates what humans have in common with non-human creatures: unpredictability,

spontaneity—an impulse to exert energy for the hell of it, for fun.

That impulse links us with a vitalist understanding of natural world—So I am

going to shuttle back and forth between concept of animal spirits and broader currents of

vitalism—which are both part of the same alternative to our dominant [Anglophone]

utilitarian perspective, the perspective Keynes found so abominable. Utilitarian outlook

based on a Cartesian understanding of matter as inert and manipulable—it promotes the

reduction of some humans—and all non-humans-- to manageable populations,

quantifiable capital, and ultimately to mere instruments of powerful humans’ will. For

centuries the utilitarian understanding of nature has dominated Western thought, but

vitalism has always played a crucial contrapuntal theme—at some times more insistently

than others. One of those times was the period from the late 18th to the early 19th century,

when what we call Enlightenment began to give way to Romantic thought.

1760s- 1830s: Efflorescence

Part of what encouraged interest in animal spirits was the emerging search for a holistic

life force—an enterprise that engaged scientists as well as poets.

Let’s start with the poets:

Blake: Fairy who dictates Europe: a Prophecy to Blake undertakes to show him

“all alive/ The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy”

in Milton) “even the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer/ Upon

the sunny brooks and meadows; every one the dance \/Knows in its intricate

mazes of delight artful to weave . . . .”

Wordsworth:

I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still. . . .

O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,

O’er beats the gladsome air, o’er all that glides

Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not

If such my transports were: for in all things,

I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

Yet also cf. WW’s Intimations Ode, Tintern Abbey, etc.—life is growth,

but growth means loss-- Hegel on the superiority of life to philosophy—

immediate experience to retrospection—“When philosophy paints its gray on gray,

a form of life has grown old, and this gray on gray cannot rejuvenate it, only

understand it. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only when the shades of dusk

have fallen.”

To counter this gloom:

Schiller on play: “the highest enjoyment is the freedom of the spirit in the living

play of all its powers”

Coleridge vs. Descartes : sum qui sum-- a generative creative principle pervading

existence at all levels from the cosmic to the individual.

The key to Romantic form, says Denise Gigante, was epigenesis—29: “Biology

confirms . . . that organic forms cannot mechanically add up to a life. Material factors

beyond genetics have some part in determining a, in a completely unpredictable way,

which of the many millions of hereditary factors an organism will express and which it

will not. . . “By resisting the predictive power of scientific formulas, living matter kept

alive the fortuitous developmental chance: the contingency which entailed not only the

chance of going ‘wrong’ within a system but of veering out of systematicity altogether.”

All this anticipates certain discoveries in 21st century biology but it is also compatible

with some of the leading ideas in natural philosophy during the middle and later

eighteenth century. The French naturalist Buffon observed an “active power” at work in

nature--the tendency of living organic matter to organize itself. Erasmus Darwin,

Charles’s grandfather, advanced the notion of a vibrant, growing cosmos where living

organisms, including humans, could be the result of a gradual process; nature could be a

kind of self- renewing machine; and humans had sentient self-development in common

with the rest of brute creation. “Go, proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!”

Darwin wrote in Zoonomia (1794). Neither he nor Buffon nor their other proto-

evolutionary contemporaries viewed humans as the unique culmination of a linear,

progressive process. About progress, they were agnostic.

The most famous—now notorious--proto-evolutionist was Jean Baptiste Lamarck,

who in 1802 appropriated the word biologie to describe the study of living beings and

postulated an intrinsic pouvoir de vie that animated them. Plants and animals enacted this

life force, composing themselves, elaborating and complicating their organization across

generations. This process unfolded over an “incalculable series of centuries,” Lamarck

wrote. All plants and animals developed and transformed as a result of the movements of

fluids within them. The more complex animals added will to the mix, forming “habits”

and “ways of life” in response to circumstance.

This was an essentially historical view of nature, in keeping with the broader

sense of history emerging during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “a

secular, material transformation driven from within by internal agencies,” rather than by

God. History was a way of knowing the natural world, as well as apprehending the nature

of past human societies—a focus on purposeful actions in a web of interdependent

contingencies.

For Lamarck, the habits adopted by humans and higher animals led to changes in

their bodies—including their brains, which, like any organ, differed according to the uses

and exercise it got. “The brain of a man of labor, who spends his life building walls or

carrying burdens,” was not “inferior in composition or perfection” to those of our greatest

thinkers, said Lamarck: It simply had not been exercised in the same way. By the early

nineteenth century, for Lamarck and his followers, any living being was an agent, capable

of constant, self-generated motion and the transformation of its material parts.

For decades if not centuries, these ideas have been consigned to the dustbin of

failed science. Yet as Jessica Riskin and other historians of science have begun to show,

Charles Darwin was a good deal more of a Lamarckian than contemporary neo-

Darwinians [the usual suspects] have acknowledged. He was torn between the mandate to

banish agency from nature and the impulse to make agency synonymous with life. In key

passages of his Origin of Species, Darwin postulated an innate power of self-

transformation within organisms. Later in the same book he labeled this tendency

“generative variability.”

The tendency to vary could not be equated with development in a particular

direction—and least of all teleological schemes of progress: adaptation was a haphazard

process, dependent in part on contingent circumstances that changed over time. On

history, in other words.

Vitalist thinking flowed in many directions. It influenced the young Karl Marx,

who reshaped it to suit his developing critique of political economy. As Dipesh

Chakrabarty observes, Marx often turned to the vitalist tradition when he described labor

power as a “commodity that exists in [the laborer’s] vitality,” which the capitalist

purchases and deploys for profit. When the worker receives his wages, “capital has paid

him the amount of objectified labor contained in his vital forces.” Capital feasted on life;

no wonder Marxists and later anti-monopolists would rail against capitalist vampires,

sucking the lifeblood from individuals and communities. Said Marx: “Capital absorbs

labor into itself, as though it were by love possessed.” [quoting Goethe, appropriately]

Yet by 1880s, both Marx and Darwin had been transformed into poster boys for a

mechanistic, positivistic view of nature.

Decline and Revival: 1840s- 1890s

Positivist certainty depended on a re-assertion of a mechanistic vision of the non-human

world and an explicit rejection of vitalism. “Is Vitality Vital?” Scientific American asked

in 1874: “As indicating a force inherent in and wholly peculiar to living matter,

something sui generis, so to speak, [the concept of vitality] is doomed.” About the same

time, Thomas Henry Huxley, the positivist apostle of Darwinism, was reasserting the

Cartesian view of the “lower animals”: “Though they feel as we do, yet their actions are

the results of their physical organization . . . . They are machines.”

This view portended the shape of things to come in the life sciences. By the

beginning of the twentieth century, biologists had turned their science into a mechanistic,

anti-historical enterprise. They held that nature was rote and timeless: evolution involved

a combination of random and determined events, but no contingency—no limited

agencies working in particular, changing situations. As Charles Darwin was remade into

a mechanist, Lamarck became a joke: a romantic vitalist strawman to contrast with a real

scientist. The German biologist August Weismann epitomized the new attitude. He

attacked a caricature of Lamarck by ridiculing the inheritance of accidental deformations

(severed tails, twisted limbs, etc.) and ignoring the fundamental point of agreement

between Lamarck and Darwin: that the habits and circumstances of animals reshape their

organisms over time. Weismann debunked purposefulness in nature even as he insisted

that variations were not random but directed by utility and movement toward greater

fitness. This was a Darwinian version of Providence that persists to our own time.

Thus were the ideas of Providence and progress married to the strict adaptationist

program, which became the core of the twentieth century neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Weismann also helped shape that synthesis by creating the “Weismann Barrier” between

somatic and genetic material, which appealed to modern geneticists like Watson and

Crick: for them, it meant that bodily changes could not inscribe themselves in DNA.

This anti-Lamarckian version of heredity became conventional wisdom, based on the

(allegedly) complete inability of the organism to influence genetic material passed on to

the next generation. This was another nail in the coffin of 19th century vitalism.

Yet Huxley’s admission that animals “feel as we do” suggested the emergence of

an inchoate challenge to orthodoxy—a dawning recognition of similarity between the

human and non-human worlds. Empirical observation suggested that animals’ behavior

was not as easily explained as Huxley thought. Among the observers was Charles Darwin

himself, who wrote “never say lower to higher” in the margin of a page in one of his

popularizers’ books, and who noted in 1883 that some animal instincts “one can hardly

avoid looking at as mere tricks, and sometimes as play,” such as “an Abyssinian pigeon

[that] when fired at, plunges down so as to almost touch the sportsman, then mounts to an

immoderate height.” Indeed, Darwin admitted that there were many self-destructive and

pointless “instincts” that could only be explained by natural selection if they were

reduced to “the grossest utilitarianism”—this is the sort of admission that contemporary

Darwinian reductionists (gross utilitarians all) ignore.

This was a straw in the wind. By the 1890s, vitalist impulses were proliferating

again, promoting new challenges to mechanistic science and utilitarian thought.

Outside the Lab: Apotheosis and Eclipse: 1890s-1940s

Part of this is what I call imperial primitivism—the dawning recognition that

indigenous, colonized, often nearly exterminated and allegedly primitive cultures had

some regenerative resources on offer. . .

[Often the first thing people say when I tell them I’m working on animal spirits is:

“Oh! Spirit animals!”—links with popular New Age thought, etc.] There is a link

stretching from Swami Vivekenanda at the Chicago World’s fair in 1893 to the Harlem

renaissance and the negritude movement—strategic essentialism (Spivak)—a

transvaluation of values.

Modernism arises amid this ferment--a “second flood” of the same Romantic tide

(E. Wilson)—resurgence of literary vitalism—Va. Woolf’s “moments of vision,” the

“little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”—JJ’s

epiphanies--Pater and the danger of habit, that inures one to the ecstasy of the intense

moments—Christian version: GM Hopkins and his poems of “inscape”—a stale

phenomenon abruptly “will flame out, like shining from shook foil” to reveal “the dearest

freshness deep down things” which in turn reflects the glory of Our Lord—“He fathers

forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him.”

This was a powerful idiom in many religious traditions—the song of praise for God’s

creation—and it has continuing relevance for the environmental movement in our own

time—as Ruth Davis writes in her contribution to the important anthology Blue Labor.

But most vitalists spoke a non-religious (though often “spiritual”) idiom, and claimed a

scientific basis for life worship. Growing chorus reached a crescendo in 1913. Thus

Randolph Bourne, Youth and Life:

“…there has been a spiritual expansion these recent years which has created new

atmospheres to breathe. [Note recurring theme of asphyxiation in 20th century US

intellectual life] It has been discovered that the world is alive, and that discovery has

almost taken away men’s breaths; it has been discovered that evolution is creative and

that we are real factors in that creation.” (179)

RB referring to Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution--a smash hit on the bestseller lists

after appearing in English translation in 1911. . . B arrives in NYC Feb. 1913 – series of

lectures at Columbia University and City College—rock star welcome—the first traffic

jam in American history, on upper Broadway.

NY Times: “Five hundred women and men, the women outnumbering the men about

ten to one, who went yesterday through the rain and slush to Columbia, heard the first of

six lectures in French by the philosopher, Prof. Henri Bergson. Hundreds more could not

get into the lecture hall. There were all sorts in the audience—distinguished professors

and Editors, well dressed women and overdressed women.—one of whom fainted and

created a sensation.”

So what was all the fuss about?

At the risk of oversimplification, possible to say this: Bergson had discarded idealist and

materialist ontologies by melding them into a new vitalist synthesis. He was the

consummate anti-mechanist and (as WJ noted with admiration) the consummate anti-

intellectualist. He redefined time as “duration,” against the quantitative imperatives of

industrial capitalism—the “standard time” introduced by the railroads, the “scientific

management” of workers’ time promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor to maximize

productivity. Indeed B’s very definition of “the comic” in his book on laughter was the

“idea of regulating life as a matter of business routine. . . .something mechanical

encrusted upon the living” –these were phrases which epitomized Taylor’s aim in life.

(29) Bergson was, in effect, the anti-Taylor. The notion of duration fed into a sense of

experience as flow, which in turn informed his fluid vision of Creative Evolution—an

evolutionary process governed not by mechanistic determinism (as Darwin’s popularizers

had claimed), but animated from within by an elan vital, a vital force. Bergson teetered

on the brink of an aphoristic, Nietzschean style:

“The task of elan vital is to shake awake that lazy bones of matter and insert into

it a measure of surprise: ‘At the root of life there is an effort to engraft on to the necessity

of physical forces the largest possible amount of indeterminacy’” (CE, 114)

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which by itself, it will

never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.

Life, we have said, transcends finality as it transcends the other categories. It is

essentially a current sent through matter.

The last reference is especially resonant—by referring to elan vital as an electric current,

Bergson paired his concept with the form of force most fascinating to Americans at that

moment—electricity—silent, invisible, omnipresent, and apparently limitless. [recall HA

knelling before the dynamo—by 1913, not as idiosyncratic a gesture as it seemed in

1900—cf. Herbert Quick of the Tacoma Times , “The Only Thing Worth Worshipping—

Force”]

All of this was consistent with the Jamesian pragmatic ethos, and radically inconsistent

with older, static ontologies, idealist or materialist. The invocation of Life (often

capitalized) was a kind of magic wand that awakened disembodied ideas and inert matter

from their dogmatic slumbers. It also reasserted human agency against the allegedly iron

laws of determinism. [the TINA of the time]

Yet Bergsonian vitalism could also be assimilated to a corporate culture of control.

Consider the career of the economist Irving Fisher. A brush with TB as a young man put

Fisher on the path to a lifelong obsession with health through regular exercise and

abstention from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea. He believed he was an example of

William James’s “religion of healthy-mindedness,” but his wife, in moments of

impatience, sometimes referred to him as a “health prude.” He admitted the justice of the

phrase: “As you say, it’s all wrong to make a burden of Hygiene. True Hygiene means

serenity and unconcern.” Yet Fisher’s quest for vitality never quite brought him serenity,

despite his constant self-admonitions to cultivate it. When his daughter died of

mysterious causes after an equally mysterious nervous breakdown, he announced with

“fierce determination”: “There aren’t going to be any more deaths in this family!” He

thought he was a Jamesian, but he clung to a monistic conception of the universe that J

would have found profoundly unsatisfying. Whatever the meaning of life, he wrote in

1903, “of one thing I am convinced: that it is for us to approve and not disapprove. It is

perfect because it is impossible of variation by a hair’s breadth. The wheels of time

never jump the track. . . . .The program of Fate is never altered.” [BUT cf. WJ: “ ‘Ever

not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining

all-inclusiveness.”] Twenty years later, Fisher wrote his wife: “I’ve been reading a

biography of Frederick Taylor and felt throughout as if I were reading my own

biography.” His kinship with the father of scientific management came across in his

prescription for ending the strife between capital and labor. The rebellious worker, he

wrote, is “the naughty boy of American industry”—we should treat him as we do our

bumptious street urchins, finding healthy outlets for their animal spirits, turning them

from potential hooligans into model workers.

So the vitalist impulse, which seemed a resource for resistance to routine, became

a means for accommodating to it.

It also became a seedbed for fascism. Or as it’s been called, reactionary

modernism. Longings for spontaneous vitality flowed into the cult of the leader.

Rejection of bloodless utilitarian ethos took monstrous if also clownish forms. Donald

Trump waiting in the wings, depending on his animal magnetism, which even his critics

acknowledged gave him an edge over the stilted scripted persona of his opponent.

Post-WWII: The Return of Vitalism

Yet vitalism keeps coming back.

I’ll begin with the most superficial and misleading example—the apparent revival

of JMK’s ideas in behavioral economics—Shiller and Akerloff defang animal spirits,

reduce them to mere confidence, the sort of emotion that seems quantifiable in surveys,

not to mention assimilable to no-classical economics. Irving Fisher would be pleased.

But deeper meanings of animal spirits have persisted and resurfaced as well--

Yearnings to reconnect body and mind remain as fervent as Donne’s need to connect

body and soul—and often as imbued with spiritual longing. Much of this ferment has

been associated with holistic medicine, from the psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck’s

postulate of the It (later the Id)—“a great unconscious force that exists within every

person”—to contemporary explorations of qi and other energies. There has also been a

strain of vitalist feminism—prominent in the early novels of Margaret Atwood among

other places—that positions its critique of patriarchy as part of a broader challenge to

human domination of the non-human world.

More recently, animal spirits have acquired more academic legitimacy—e.g. Jane

Bennett, thing-power—“bears a family resemblance to that Wild or that uncanny

presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount Ktaadn . . . a not-quite

human force that addled and altered human and other bodies . . . . an irreducibly strange

dimension of power, an out-side.” Elsewhere she writes of “a materiality that is as much

force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension.” She realizes

she has allies in other disciplines: “The machine model of nature, with its figures of inert

matter, is no longer even scientific.” It has been challenged by theorists and researchers

in many fields: all propose a reanimated—though still naturalistic—vision of the

universe. They resist dualism without falling into physicalist reductionism as they explore

more fluid ways of thinking about mind-body and self-world relationships.

Although they avoid the word vitalism, these writers employ sophisticated vitalist

arguments to challenge the reduction of nature to inert matter. They are concerned to

bring the conscious mind back into a world picture from which the mechanistic tradition

had excluded it—to meld mind and body, and not merely to reduce mind to body. This is

an uphill battle, against entrenched adversaries. It turns out that the contemporary revival

of nineteenth-century economic thought has been accompanied by a revival of

nineteenth-century philosophical thought, particular the reductionist assumption that a

reified science has answered (or is about to answer) all ultimate questions with

quantifiable precision.

The reductionist model of mind requires its devotees to reject any vestiges of

vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere. As Steven Pinker says,

“Intelligence. . .has often been attributed to some kind of energy flow or force field”—a

point of view he derides as is little more than “spiritualism, pseudo-science, and sci-fi

kitsch.” Pinker is here playing the classic custodian of conventional wisdom, policing the

boundaries of responsible opinion with any ideological weapons available—including the

rhetoric of scientific expertise. But the reason for Pinker’s disdain is simply that the view

he is dismissing “violates the classical mechanist ban on agency in nature.” Pinker is a

faithful servant of intellectual fashion.

It would be easier for the reductionist worldview if its defenders faced opposition

from a handful of New Age airheads, clinging to their ridiculous ideas with sentimental

tenacity. But in fact the notion of agency in nature has gained extraordinary ground

among scientists themselves in recent decades. The Viennese physicist Erwin

Schrodinger pointed the way in 1944 by asking What Is Life? (No accident that

Schrodinger, like Marx, was a faithful reader of Goethe who attached Goethean epigraphs

to all his chapters.) He proposed a quantum theory of evolution, and speculated that

mutations were “quantum jumps in the gene molecule,” rather than the millions of tiny

accidents imagined by conventional neo-Darwinians. In this version of evolution, natural

selection worked in collaboration with the behavior of individual organisms, which

would reinforce and enhance the usefulness of the mutation, leading to further physical

change. Natural selection was “aided all along by the organism’s making appropriate use”

of the mutation, Schrodinger insisted. Selection and use “go quite parallel and are . . .

fixed genetically as one thing: a used organ—as if Lamarck were right.” The

complicating force at the heart of evolution was the organism’s inner tendency to use

what it had—its agency.

Schrodinger’s phrase “as if Lamarck were right” has acquired more palpable

meaning in recent decades, with the rise of epigenetics. This is a field (to repeat) that

emphasizes the whole context in which genetic material functions, from the cell outside

its nucleus to the organism and its environment. Several decades ago, the biologist

Barbara McClintock discovered what she called “transposons”: mobile elements in a

cell’s genome that respond to stress such as starvation or sudden temperature changes by

rearranging the cell’s DNA. McClintock first found transposition in maize, but it has

turned out to be important in other organisms as well. Current research suggests, that

bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, “not through a purely random process of

mutation followed by natural selection, but in important part by moving their DNA

around.” James Shapiro, a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, has

extended McClintock’s work by showing that nearly all cells possess the biochemical

tools for changing their DNA, and they use them “responsively, not purely randomly.”

Other examples of epigenetic research: Marcus Pembrey on life expectancy of

Swedish villagers shaped by life expectancy of parents and grandparents—importance of

nutrition or malnutrition across generations—genetic expression controlled by complex

system of on/off switches—“non-mutational transformations”—Michael Skinner:

exposure to fungicide and its effects on four generations of rats—gene not an island but

part of a multidimensional main—boundaries of our genetic identity more porous than

strict neo-Darwinism would allow—DW Smithers: cancer no more a disease of cells

than a traffic jam is a disease of cars—malignancy not the result of a rogue cell but a

disorder of cellular organization—Bonnie Bassler—bilingual bacteria—one set of

chemical signals for its own species and another to co-ordinate with other species for

mutural benefit—e.g. 600 varieties of bacteria organize themselves into dental plaque

Epigeneticists are moving toward the ideas of adaptive or directed mutation, but

cautiously because such notions breach the Weissman Barrier between somatic and

genetic change—a breach that in Richard Dawkins’s view would open the floodgates of

“fanaticism” and “zealotry” (by which he means Lamarckism.) Somewhere, Lamarck is

smiling.

In recent years, epigeneticists have begun addressing larger ontological questions.

Eva Jablonka has emphasized “the restlessness of matter,” while Gerd Muller and Stuart

Newman have gone further, arguing that random variation and natural selection alone do

not account for the presence of organic forms in nature. Instead they invoke an “inherent

plasticity” in living matter, an active responsiveness to the physical environment.

Plasticity and responsiveness combined to create the capacity for generating new organic

forms, though in more complex organisms these “inherent material properties” may have

ceded importance to genetic factors, which have obscured the importance of earlier, more

primitive epigenetic mechanisms. Given this possibility of change over time, the effort to

locate the sources of organic form requires an archeological, historical dimension.

Evolution, which we might as well call biological history, is neither designed nor random,

but contingent.

The implications of this conclusion are fundamentally transformative.

Emphasizing what humans have in common with the rest of the natural world does not

reduce humans to passive mechanisms—not if the rest of the natural world is an animated,

active entity. And a clearer understanding of our relationship to that world requires more

than masses of Big Data; it also demands a sensitivity to the ways that organisms engage

with the contingent circumstances of their environment in historical time. That

environment includes religions and ideologies and economic systems as well as air and

soil and water. Who knows? Maybe scientists will have something to learn from

historians, as well as the other way around.

The consequences of a fresh perspective might be political and moral as well as

intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper

mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth,

even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of possessive individualism and mastery

over nature. Schrodinger’s question—what is life?—leads us to reconsider what it means

to be in the world with other beings, like but also unlike ourselves. The task could not be

more timely, or more urgent. A focus on animal spirits—and vitalism more broadly—

offers a way to re-assert the role of contingency and unpredictability in human and non-

human affairs. Against positivist claims of certainty, animal spirits remain a challenge to

techno-determinist predictions of an inevitable future, a reminder that every new deal

contains the possibility of a wild card.

Now in deference to my audience and my setting, I want finally to return to

Cambridge, where Ludwig Wittgenstein returned in 1929 after a fifteen year absence—

JMK tense but glad--to Lydia: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”

Wittgenstein proceeded to complete his degree (the Tractatus) and join the philosophy

faculty—But the most interesting thing to me about W’s return is that in November 1929

he gave a Lecture on Ethics, which came to this conclusion:

“If I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value. . . .one particular

experience presents itself to me. . . .I believe the best way to describe it is to say that

when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. . . . It is the experience of seeing

the world as a miracle.”

We are back with the core of the vitalist tradition—the dearest freshness deep down

things, the miraculous aliveness of the world. In this fraught and fateful historical

moment, there is no more compelling affirmative vision.