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Podstawy filozoficzno-teoretyczne makrobiotyki Ch.W. Hufelanda

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

2004

R. 49, nr 3/4

71--106

The main theoretical problem discussed in ther current paper is Ch. W. Hufeland’s concept of the organism as the seat of vital force, presented in his best known work entitled Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern (1797). The work bears witness to scholarly influences on Hufeland exerted during the earliest period of his activity by the Weimar circle of naturalists, gathered around J. W. Goethe. Hufeland’s times were a #period of force# in the theory of medicine and biology. Many philosophical-theoretical treatises were published at that time in which the categorical concept that was put at the forefront of discussion was that of the idea of force. Hufeland, however, was not particularly attached to the concept of vital force. In fact he never returned to the idea which he had introduced in his Ideen uber Pathogenie and ultimately consolidated in his The art o f prolonging life', he was too busy in his practical activity as physician, teacher and organizer, as well as public activist. The idea simply reflected the everyday observation, quite typical for a physician, that the phenomena occurring in a living organism are radically different from those that occur in the inanimate world. The concept of vital force allowed Hufeland to describe that distinctness, and not to explain its origin. In the animate body Hufeland was dealing with the same kind of physical and chemical phenomena that he was familiar with in inanimate bodies, but the phenomena involved were taking place in different conditions and due to those conditions they took on a specific form. Without getting to know those phenomena as physical and chemical ones, they could not be understood as biological phenomena either. The main cognitive task was to provide a maximally detailed account of the specificity of those conditions. It was for that purpose that the idea of vital force (Lebenskraft), a peculiar kind of descriptive tool, was to be used $ it was not meant to serve for explanation. The force, thus, constitutes a specific property of the building matter of which bodies designated as organic or animate are formed. The property is not generated by any specific spatial structure of matter, and so it does not have a derivative character with regard to such structure; however, some part of matter, namely organic nature, has been primordially endowed with that property. Thus, being derivative with regard to the property of animateness, the spatial structure of an organic body only subjects to modification the manner in which animatcness manifests itself in particular individuals, species and genera. Corresponding to a particular structure is thus a modification of the force that the stmcture generates. In accordance with the conditions in which the vital force operates (or: in which the property of animateness occurs), the force can assume the following three forms: (a) Organic force, which integrates the building blocks of the body and maintains the cohesion between them. This force transfonns the chemical body into an organic body, subordinating it to organic laws, and partially or completely freeing it from the operation of universal chemical laws. Those laws obtain in a body at all times, but the effects of the transformations which they give rise to are different in organic bodies from those in inorganic bodies. This force is thus manifested by all organic bodies, both plants and animals, as well as by their parts, both solid and liquid. (b) Plastic force, which subjects to transformations, taking place over time, a whole that emerges in an organic way, thus ultimately endowing it with a specific form. This force extends its control over all the purposeful morphogenetic processes occurring in an organic body, not only over the processes of the primary generation of the organismic whole (die Generation) and the formation of its parts (Formatio), but also over the incessant processes of regeneration (die Regeneration) that occur throughout life; it is also responsible for pathological morphogenetic processes. This regeneration of the organism, a process in which plastic force is involved, is a state of dynamic equilibrium maintained by the organism in the course of it incessantly exchanging its building matter with the environment, i.e. in the course of the incessant renewal of that substance throughout life. It is in this generation and regeneration of organismic structure that Hufeland was inclined to see the main vital activity. This variety of the vital force, the plastic force, or the peculiar property of an organic body assuming certain form and preserving that form in the on-going transformations, expressed the essence of life more fully than did the organic force. (c) The force-faculty of responding to stimuli (Reizfahigkeit), which could be termed excitability in the broadest sense. The single vital force acts simultaneously in all its three varieties, i.e. at the same time it annuls chemical laws, it controls the morphogenetic process, and it also responds specifically to internal and external stimuli. Although in particular parts of the organic body and in successive stages of its development those varieties manifest themselves in differing degrees, all of the events happening in the body are generated and exist within the field of action produced by that single force. Life phenomena have, according to Hufeland, a cause which has not yet become subject to experience. The needs of scientific praxis, however, make it advisable that the concept of this unknown cause should be given some designation, in order to be able to use such a concept in presenting views on that peculiar phenomenon of life. In their symbolic language, mathematicians have designated the object of their arithmetical operations as x. Physicists, by contrast, have long described the unknown cause of phenomena as a force. Therefore also Hufeland used the same language convention in biology and adopted for the empirically unknown cause of empirically known phenomena the name of vital force (Lebenskraft). It is worth adding that, from time to time, Hufeland felt sceptical with regard to that unknown cause-force: he doubted whether it would ever be possible to know it, but more frequently he took that lack of knowledge to be a temporary, transitional state. Indeed, he described this force in conditional terms as ’’hitherto unknown” or ”as yet not known”. Hufeland sent his treatise Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern to Kant, for whom the treatise became an inspiration for a new, very peculiar dissertation entitled Von der macht des Gemuts durch den blossen Vorsatz seiner krankahften Gefuhle Meister zu sein. Kant incorporated that dissertation as a third part into a larger work that he published: Der Streit der Facultaten, and entitled it Der Streit der philosophischen Facultat mit der medicinischen. Earlier, however, the dissertation had appeared in a medical journal of which Hufeland was an editor. In this way, the physician Hufeland and his Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern led to the appearance of a very peculiar work by Kant, which belongs to the later period of the philosopher’s activity. Luckily, letters between Hufeland and Kant relating to the publication of that dissertation have been preserved: they throw some light on the origin of Kant’s dissertation and document the contacts between Hufeland and Kant, which lasted for over a year. The correspondence also provides some information on the last years of the philosopher’s life. These letters, together with two fragments from the first edition of Kant’s dissertation, form a modest collection of documents, which is presented in Polish translation for the first time in the current paper.