View source for Hylozoism

{{Short description|Philosophical doctrine which holds that all matter is alive}}
{{Redirect|Hylozoists|the Canadian band|The Hylozoists}}
{{Distinguish|Panpsychism}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2019}}

[[File:Sphera volgare novamente tradotta.png|thumb|upright=1.3|''Sphera volgare'', featuring the [[Sun]], the [[Moon]], the [[winds]] and the [[stars]] as living. Woodcut illustration from an edition of ''[[De sphaera mundi]]'', [[Venice]], 1537.]]

'''Hylozoism''' is the [[philosophical]] [[doctrine]] according to which all [[matter]] is [[Life|alive]] or animated,<ref>{{Cite book|last=McColley|first=Diane Kelsey|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=B1wkYMO2564C&q=hylozoism+matter+alive&pg=PA115|title=Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell|publisher=Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.|year=2007|isbn=978-0-7546-6048-4|location=Hampshire, UK|pages=115}}</ref> either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the [[Anima mundi|world-soul]] (''anima mundi'').<ref>{{cite journal |last=Strauss |first=Daniel |date=January 2014 |title=Hylozoism and hylomorphism: a lasting legacy of Greek philosophy |url=http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-40182014000100003 |journal=Phronimon |location=[[Pretoria]] |publisher=[[University of South Africa]] on behalf of the South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities |volume=15 |issue=1 |pages=32–45 |doi=10.25159/2413-3086/2211 |issn=2413-3086 |via=[[SciELO]]|doi-access=free }}</ref> The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Yuasa|first=Yasuo|title=Overcoming Modernity: Synchronicity and Image-Thinking|publisher=SUNY Press|year=2008|isbn=978-0-7914-7401-3|location=Albany, New York|pages=39–40}}</ref> The word is a 17th-century term formed from the [[Ancient Greek language|Greek]] words ὕλη (''hyle'': "wood, matter") and ζωή (''zoē'': "life"), which was coined by the [[Cambridge Platonists|English Platonist]] philosopher [[Ralph Cudworth]] in 1678.

== Hylozoism in Ancient Greek Philosophy ==
{{Main|Ancient Greek philosophy}}

Hylozoism in Western philosophy can be traced back to ancient Greece. The Milesian philosophers [[Thales]], [[Anaximander]], and [[Anaximenes of Miletus|Anaximenes]], 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."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Skrbina|first=David|title=Panpsychism in the West|url=https://archive.org/details/panpsychismwestb00skrb|url-access=limited|publisher=The MIT Press|year=2005|isbn=0-262-19522-4|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=[https://archive.org/details/panpsychismwestb00skrb/page/n46 24]}}</ref> Though hylozoism was implicit in early Greek thought, the philosopher Heraclitus specifically used the term ''zoe'', making him explicitly hylozoist. The hylozoism of the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales and Heraclitus influenced later Greek philosophers such as [[Plato]], [[Aristotle]], and the [[Stoics]].

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.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Skrbina|first=David|title=Panpsychism in the West|url=https://archive.org/details/panpsychismwestb00skrb|url-access=limited|publisher=The MIT Press|year=2005|isbn=0-262-19522-4|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=[https://archive.org/details/panpsychismwestb00skrb/page/n46 34]}}</ref>

== Renaissance period and early modernity ==
{{Main|Renaissance philosophy}}

During the [[Renaissance period]] in [[Western Europe]], humanist scholars and philosophers such as [[Bernardino Telesio]], [[Paracelsus]], [[Cardanus]], and [[Giordano Bruno]] revived the doctrine of hylozoism. The latter, for example, held a form of [[Christianity|Christian]] [[pantheism]] wherein [[God in Christianity|God]] is 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 was [[Excommunication in the Catholic Church|excommunicated]] by the [[Catholic Church]] with the accusation of [[Heresy in Christianity|heresy]], as well as from a few [[Protestantism|Protestant]] [[Christian denominations|denominations]], and he was eventually [[Death by burning|burned at the stake]] for various other beliefs that were regarded as heretical. Telesio, on the other hand, began from an [[Aristotelian philosophy|Aristotelian basis]] and, through radical [[empiricism]], 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 the [[Kingdom of England]], some of the [[Cambridge Platonists]] approached hylozoism as well. Both [[Henry More]] and [[Ralph Cudworth]] (''the Younger'', 1617–1688), through their reconciliation of Platonic [[idealism]] with 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 of [[Protagoras]] and was therefore subject to the criticisms which Plato had deployed against Protagoras in the [[Theaetetus (dialogue)|''Theaetetus'']]. On the side of hylozoism, [[Strato of Lampsacus]] was the official target. However, Cudworth's Dutch friends had reported to him the views which [[Spinoza]] was circulating in manuscript. Cudworth remarks in his ''Preface'' that he would have ignored hylozoism had he not been aware that a new version of it would shortly be published.<ref>''The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First part; wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated''. By Ralph Cudworth, D.D. London, Printed for Richard Royston, 1678</ref>

[[Baruch Spinoza|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 Kant]] presented arguments against hylozoism in the third chapter of his 1786 book ''Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften'' ("First Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science") and also in his 1781 book ''Kritik 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 in [[modernity]] by [[Herbert Spencer]], [[Hermann Lotze]], and [[Ernst Heinrich Haeckel|Ernst Haeckel]] – was often called upon as a protest against a [[Mechanism (philosophy)|mechanistic]] worldview.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/phil/kantkongress/14/look.html |title=Hylozoism and Dogmatism in Kant, Leibniz, and Newton |access-date=11 April 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070326200634/http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/phil/kantkongress/14/look.html |archive-date=26 March 2007 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In the 19th century, Haeckel developed a [[materialism|materialist]] form of hylozoism, specially against [[Rudolf Virchow]]'s and [[Hermann von Helmholtz]]'s mechanical views of humans and nature. In his ''Die Welträtsel'' of 1899 (''The Riddle of the Universe'' 1901), 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-German [[Neuroscience|neurobiological]] tradition terms ''hylozoic hiatus'' all 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.<ref>[http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/commentl.htm Comment l’ hylozoïsme scientifique contemporain aborde-t-il la sélection naturelle du parenchyme neurocognitif?] (French)</ref><ref>{{cite journal|url = http://cogprints.org/4662|title = On Minds' Localization|access-date = |last = Crocco|first = M|date = 2004|issn = 0328-0446|journal = Electroneurobiología|volume = 12|issue = 3|pages = 244–257|archive-date = 10 January 2015|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20150110134838/http://cogprints.org/4662/|url-status = dead}}</ref>

[[Martin Buber]] too 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.

The [[Mormon theology|Mormon theologian]] [[Orson Pratt]] taught a form of hylozoism.

[[Alice A. Bailey]] wrote a book called ''The Consciousness of the Atom''.<ref>Bailey, Alice A. ''The Consciousness of the Atom''—1922</ref>

Influenced by Alice A. Bailey, [[Charles Webster Leadbeater]], and their predecessor [[Madame Blavatsky]], [[Henry T. Laurency]] produced voluminous writings describing a hylozoic philosophy.<ref>"Introduction to the Works of Henry T. Laurency". ''The Official Website of the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation''. Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation. 12 July 2009 <http://www.laurency.com/introduc.htm></ref>

Influenced by [[George Ivanovich Gurdjieff]], the English philosopher and mathematician [[John Godolphin Bennett]], in his four-volume work ''The Dramatic Universe'' and his book ''Energies'', developed a six-dimensional framework in which matter-energy takes on 12 levels of hylozoic quality.

The English cybernetician [[Stafford Beer]] adopted a hylozoism position, arguing that it could be defended scientifically and expending much effort on [[Biological computing]] in consequence.<ref name=picker >Pickering, Andrew. 2009. Beyond design: Cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism. Synthese 168:469-491.</ref> 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".<ref name=picker />{{rp|p=489}} 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.’"<ref name=picker />{{rp|p=488}} In partnership with his friend [[Gordon 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.<ref name=picker />{{rp|p=488}}

[[Ken Wilber]] embraces hylozoism to explain [[subjective experience]] and provides terms describing the ladder of subjective experience experienced by entities from [[atom]]s up to [[Human being]]s in the ''upper left quadrant'' of his [[Integral theory (Ken Wilber)|Integral philosophy]] chart.<ref>Wilber Ken ''A Brief History of Everything'', 1st ed. 1996, 2nd ed. 2001: {{ISBN|1-57062-740-1}}</ref>

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).

Architect [[Christopher Alexander]] has 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 called ''[[The Nature of Order]]'' which explicates this theory in detail.

Philosopher and ecologist [[David Abram]] articulates and elaborates a form of hylozoism grounded in the [[Phenomenology (psychology)|phenomenology]] of sensory experience. In his books ''Becoming Animal'' and ''The 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," coaxing 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.<ref>Abram, David ''The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World'', Pantheon, 1996; Vintage 1997: {{ISBN|978-0-679-77639-0}} and Abram, David: ''Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology'' Pantheon, 2010; Vintage 2011: {{ISBN|978-0-375-71369-9}}</ref>

[[Bruno Latour]]'s [[actor-network theory]], in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some metaphorical resemblance to hylozoism.<ref>Latour, Bruno ''Pandora's Hope: Essays on the reality of Science Studies'', 1999: {{ISBN|0-674-65335-1}}</ref>

The metaphysics of [[Gilles Deleuze]] has been described as a form of hylozoism,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Harris |first1=Wyatt |title=(Review) Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze: A New Cartography, Brent Adkins and Paul R. Hinlicky, Bloomsbury, 2013 (ISBN 978-1-4411-8825-0), viii + 253 pp., hb £65 |journal=Reviews in Religion and Theology |date=4 October 2017 |volume=24 |issue=4 |pages=643–647 |doi=10.1111/rirt.13037 |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rirt.13037|url-access=subscription }}</ref> and is one of the main criticisms of the [[Rhizome (philosophy)|rhizome theory]] put forward by the [[Slovenia|Slovenian]] philosopher [[Slavoj Žižek]].<ref>[https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_sinnerbrink.pdf?utm_source=perplexity https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_sinnerbrink.pdf]</ref>

== See also ==
{{div col|colwidth=26em}}
* [[Biocentric universe]]
* [[Biological naturalism]]
* [[Clinamen]]
* [[Daoism]]
* [[Hyle]]
* [[Hylomorphism]]
* [[Hylopathism]]
* [[Organicism]]
* [[Pantheism]]
* [[Pathetic fallacy]]
* [[Vitalism]]
{{div col end}}

== References ==
{{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}

== External links ==
* {{Cite EB1911|wstitle=Hylozoism |short=x}}

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[[Category:Metaphysical theories]]
[[Category:Natural philosophy]]
[[Category:Nonduality]]
[[Category:Pantheism]]
[[Category:Renaissance philosophy]]
[[Category:Vitalism]]