The vitality of vitalism in contemporary anthropology: Longing for an ever green tree of life

Abstract

This article aims to unravel the lines that have carried the cosmological conception of ‘life’ in Western culture into our times, and to explore how this trajectory illuminates current philosophical and anthropological thought. Since the 18th-century vitalism has been a major arena of discussion about the phenomena of nature and life, in parallel with broader romantic emphases on flux, totality, dialectics, and preserving the embeddedness of nature and culture, or things and people. Distinguishing between life as the phenomenological experience of existence and the cosmological conception of the vital condition is central to my argument. I focus upon the latter dimension to show that awareness of the long-range history and present complexity of those conceptions contributes to the contextualization of the contemporary interest in life.