Elan Vital – Vital Impetus

I have always had a gut unease about an atomistic worldview. At school we learn that the smallest building blocks of the universe are atoms. Now physics has moved on; we speak of protons, electrons, positrons, quarks and strings, etc.… But at its core, the idea remains the same: the world is composed of the smallest parts of matter. This is such a widespread idea that few people doubt it, that is, doubt the exclusivity of this worldview. I expressly do not want to question physics, chemistry or other natural sciences. I only want to ask why we have accepted for ourselves that, on ultimate questions, this very science has the final word.

There has, of course, always been a counter-narrative. Panta rhei, Heraclitus, a contemporary of Plato, called a principle of eternal flow. We cannot step into the same river twice, everything is in flux, that is, everything changes constantly, there is no fixed structure of the world. We cannot take it apart into its individual components. The universe is a process. Our life is a constant change, and I do not mean only the fact that we grow older every second. If there is something that has always existed, it is change.

Paradoxes

What drives the world? What drives us? Henri Bergson spoke of Elan Vital, a vital impetus, a force that drives all life. Bergson concerned himself with Zeno’s paradoxes, for example, the tortoise, for example, which in a scientific description cannot be overtaken by the fastest runner of antiquity – Achilles. The idea: If the tortoise gets a head start because it is slower, then by the time Achilles arrives where it started running, it has already run a little farther again. Achilles now needs a little more time to get there, and so on… Achilles gets closer and closer to the tortoise, but never overtakes it. Mathematically, this is a correct theory. Only it is simply not the case that Achilles does not overtake the tortoise. This riddle too was formulated in the time of Plato and Heracles. Great mathematicians still break their teeth on it today. Why does our scientific description not fit reality?

Because we think in fixed units instead of perceiving the process. Panta rhei, Elan Vital. Here it became clear to me why the atomistic model gave me a gut unease. We dissect dead bodies to understand life. Science (Science), Scienza, is a technique of taking apart, of dividing. It is reductionist in its nature and explicitly not holistic. But why do we let such a specialized technique as science dominate our worldview, our self-image and our creation of meaning? Just because science is excellent at what it does does not mean it can do everything.

Process and consciousness

For many years I spoke about processes. I had a question there… It was not so clear to me myself, and so it was not surprising that many people I discussed it with were, in the best case, confused at the end. My hobbyhorse was the philosophy of consciousness and art theory. Why did I keep talking about processes – natural processes, technical processes, processes of perception, processes of consciousness. Because there seems to be nothing else, I thought. Art is a process, life is a process, the universe is a process. This was clear to me, only I could not find a theory in which I felt at home (except Alfred North Whitehead, whose mathematics I really cannot keep up with). It seemed to be a topic everyone somehow knows, but no one can explain. Like time. Everyone talks about it, no one understands it.

Everything is consciousness. That would explain it – not only phenomenologically, but spiritually. Elan Vital – vital impetus.