Our Diagnostic points in the direction we think things on our end at least need to go.

Paul

Over at the ARC, our own CKelty comments on a recent editorial in Nature pertaining to the problem of defining life in an age of synthetic biology. Kelty points to divisions between vitalist and mechanistic epistemologies, between religious and sci…

Since I have been invoked, I will offer the following brief elaboration. The anti-vitalism of the writer of the comment you engage (Dr. Rabinow? I doubt it, unless he wrote it on a Tuesday, his day of the week to be committed to unrelentingly reductionist physical materialism) will not be satisfied with any appeal to the vital as an emergent phenomenon in any sense of being “emergent” that isn’t merely epistemic, which is to say in any sense in which emergence is the condition of a plane or organization or propogation of phenomena or more pointedly properties or entities that do not in principle allow of definitional-causal-explanatory reduction to the “basic” (i.e., physical) level of reality. The issue is not in fact one of vitalism merely as a notion of the structure and dynamics of the cosmos that is not mechanistic vs. any notion of the cosmos that is mechanistic. The issue is rather one of the necessity of positing a force (as the physiscists and scientistic cosmologists would think of it) that in the ultimate analysis is something other than a force belonging to the conceptual-ontological domain of physics. A good many philosophers in the analytical tradition agree with the commentator that vitalism as a doctrine of the emergence or existence of things–not even to mention a whole cosmos–in principle unaccountable in the language and within the ontology of physics is simply misplaced faith, rather like the doctrine of intelligent design. Dr. Tour shares with his eminent predecessor Einstein precisely such a “misplaced faith,” even though Einstein was a mechanist who was sure that God was God precisely in not playing dice with the universe. Latour? His is a classically (post-
Galilean) Catholic, accommodationist position: science is one thing entirely and God another entrirely. Such a position also fits neatly into a Kantian framework, so long as one accedes to Kant’s perhaps religiously unsatisfying dictum that one can have faith in God but never claim to know the slightest thing about Him (Her, It, Them, etc.). Einstein, Tour, the creationists and so on simply aren’t Catholic (in principle, and as a matter of social fact). They do not accept the Catholic and Kantian division between scientific and religious ontology, between physics and theology or (transcendental) cosmology. Theirs is a quite different view of the world–but no more or no less grounded in faith than that of the (obviously unprovable and almost entirely untestable) view of the materialist anti-vitalist of the commentary in question. The moral of this story: cultures may have been blown to pieces, mixed, merged, decontextualized and recontextualized, shuffled like a deck of cards of the whole history of styles of suits, or perhaps amy ahve never existed in the pluralizable form, but The Cultural is Still Out There and It still inhabits even the most otherwise sterile of corridors. To fieldwork!

jdf