Hylozoism

"Hylozoists" redirects here. For the Canadian band, seeThe Hylozoists.

Not to be confused withPanpsychism.

Sphera volgare,featuring theSun,theMoon,thewindsand thestarsas living. Woodcut illustration from an edition ofDe sphaera mundi,Venice,1537.

Hylozoismis thephilosophicaldoctrineaccording to which allmatterisaliveor animated,either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually theworld-soul(anima mundi).The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity.The word is a 17th-century term formed from theGreekwords ὕλη (hyle:"wood, matter" ) and ζωή (zoē:"life" ), which was coined by theEnglish PlatonistphilosopherRalph Cudworthin 1678.

Hylozoism in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Main article:Ancient Greek philosophy

Hylozoism in Western philosophy can be traced back to ancient Greece. The Milesian philosophersThales,Anaximander,andAnaximenes,can be described as hylozoists. Philosopher David Skrbina states that hylozoism was implicit in early Greek philosophy, and was not a doctrine that was typically challenged. "For the Milesians, matter (hyle) possessed life (zoe) as an essential quality. Something like hylozoism was simply accepted as a brute condition of reality. "Though hylozoism was implicit in early Greek thought, the philosopher Heraclitus specifically used the termzoe,making him explicitly hylozoist. The hylozoism of the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales and Heraclitus influenced later Greek philosophers such asPlato,Aristotle,and theStoics.

Though hylozoism was common in ancient Greek thought, the term had not been coined yet. In modern literature, hylozoism has tended to carry a negative connotation, and labeling a Greek philosopher as a hylozoist might be a vague disparagement of their thought.

Renaissance period and early modernity

Main article:Renaissance philosophy

During theRenaissance periodinWestern Europe,humanist scholars and philosophers such asBernardino Telesio,Paracelsus,Cardanus,andGiordano Brunorevived the doctrine of hylozoism. The latter, for example, held a form ofChristianpantheismwhereinGodis conceived as 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 wasexcommunicatedby theCatholic Churchwith the accusation ofheresy,as well as from a fewProtestantdenominations,and he was eventuallyburned at the stakefor various other beliefs that were regarded as heretical. Telesio, on the other hand, began from anAristotelian basisand, through radicalempiricism,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 theKingdom of England,some of theCambridge Platonistsapproached hylozoism as well. BothHenry MoreandRalph Cudworth(the Younger,1617–1688), through their reconciliation of Platonicidealismwith 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—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 ofProtagorasand was therefore subject to the criticisms which Plato had deployed against Protagoras in theTheaetetus.On the side of hylozoism,Strato of Lampsacuswas the official target. However, Cudworth's Dutch friends had reported to him the views whichSpinozawas circulating in manuscript. Cudworth remarks in hisPrefacethat 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 combined materialistic with pantheistic hylozoism, by demoting both to mere attributes of the one infinite substance. Although specifically rejecting identity in inorganic matter, he, like the Cambridge Platonists, sees a life force within, as well as beyond, all matter.

Contemporary hylozoism

Immanuel Kantpresented arguments against hylozoism in the third chapter of his 1786 bookMetaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften( "First Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science" ) and also in his 1781 bookKritik der reinen Vernunft( "Critique of Pure Reason" ). 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 inmodernitybyHerbert Spencer,Hermann Lotze,andErnst Haeckel– was often called upon as a protest against amechanisticworldview.

In the 19th century, Haeckel developed amaterialistform of hylozoism, specially againstRudolf Virchow's andHermann von Helmholtz's mechanical views of humans and nature. In hisDie Welträtselof 1899 (The Riddle of the Universe1901), 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 nonliving 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-Germanneurobiologicaltradition termshylozoic hiatusall 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 Bubertoo 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, including the 1896 publication "L’Hylozoïsme, l’alchimie, les chimistes unitaires". In his view there was no difference between spirit and matter except for the degree of frequency and other vibrational conditions.

TheMormon theologianOrson Pratttaught a form of hylozoism.

Alice A. Baileywrote a book calledThe Consciousness of the Atom.

Influenced by Alice A. Bailey,Charles Webster Leadbeater,and their predecessorMadame Blavatsky,Henry T. Laurencyproduced voluminous writings describing a hylozoic philosophy.

Influenced byGeorge Ivanovich Gurdjieff,the English philosopher and mathematicianJohn Godolphin Bennett,in his four-volume workThe Dramatic Universeand his bookEnergies,developed a six-dimensional framework in which matter-energy takes on 12 levels of hylozoic quality.

The English cyberneticianStafford Beeradopted a hylozoism position, arguing that it could be defended scientifically and expending much effort onBiological computingin consequence.This is described as Beer's "spiritually-charged awe at the activity and powers of nature in relation to our inability to grasp them representationally".Beer claimed that "Nature does not need to make any detours; it does not just exceed our computational abilities, in effect it surpasses them in unimaginable ways. In a poem on the Irish Sea, Beer talks about nature as exceeding our capacities in way that we can only wonder at, ‘shocked’ and ‘dumbfounded.’"In partnership with his friendGordon Pask,who was experimenting with various chemical and bio-chemical devices, he explored the possibility for intelligence to be developed in very simple network-complex systems. In one possibly unique experiment led by Pask, they found that such a structure would 'grow' a sensing organization in response to the stimuli of different audio inputs in about half a day.

Ken Wilberembraces hylozoism to explainsubjective experienceand provides terms describing the ladder of subjective experience experienced by entities fromatomsup toHuman beingsin theupper left quadrantof hisIntegral philosophychart.

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).

ArchitectChristopher Alexanderhas 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 calledThe Nature of Orderwhich explicates this theory in detail.

Philosopher and ecologistDavid Abramarticulates and elaborates a form of hylozoism grounded in thephenomenologyof sensory experience. In his booksBecoming AnimalandThe 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," coa xing 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 calls 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'sactor-network theory,in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some metaphorical resemblance to hylozoism.

The metaphysics ofGilles Deleuzehas been described as a form of hylozoism.

In popular culture

Art

• Hylozoic Series: Sibyl,an interactive installation of Canadian artist and architectPhilip Beesley,was presented in the18th Biennale of Sydneyand 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 writerRudy Rucker's novelsPostsingularandHylozoic,the emergent sentience of all material things is described as a property of thetechnological singularity.
• TheHylozoistis one of the Culture ships mentioned in Iain M. Banks's novelSurface Detail– appropriately, this ship is a member of the branch of Contact dealing withsmart matteroutbreaks.

MMORPGs

• The monster "Hylozoist" (sometimes spelled "Heirozoist" ) in theMMORPGRagnarok Onlineis 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

• TheHylozoistsare a Canadian band.
• Sonic Youthreferences hylozoism in the second verse of the fourth track on theSisterLP

See also

• Biocentric universe
• Biological naturalism
• Clinamen
• Daoism
• Hyle
• Hylomorphism
• Hylopathism
• Organicism
• Pantheism
• Pathetic fallacy
• Vitalism

External links

• "Hylozoism".Encyclopædia Britannica(11th ed.). 1911.