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Paper short abstract:

Life – one of the most characteristic romantic convictions – is a loose category to designate the connected virtues of flow, process, striving, and openness against form and stasis. The history and persistence of vitalism is the best track to follow the development of the romantic emphasis in life.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most characteristic romantic convictions has been the pre-eminence of life against form and stasis. Life is a loose category to designate the opposite, connected virtues of flow, process, striving, and openness. The configuration of ideas we call nowadays “vitalism” emerged in the late 18th Century and has persisted until now in Western thought, in spite of a tenacious and recurrent opposition from mainstream scientific establishment. The emphasis on the emergent, specific, qualities of the organic condition defied characteristically the most basic qualities of Western “normal science”.

The emphasis on life is inseparable from a strong sense of totality, a holist attitude to the elements of nature and of humankind in it. The pre-eminence of the whole upon the parts corresponds to a constant emphasis in the relatedness of all cosmological elements, re-establishing partially the sense of universal sympathy that had prevailed in traditional Western cosmology until the historical concrescence of modernity.

Art (and the human sciences) came to express more evidently the disavowal of intellectualist and rationalist models of the human world, and a vibrant bet on the powers of sensibility, subjectivity, creativity and authenticity. Vitalism developed in the parallel world of biological sciences, struggling to describe and confirm similar processes in the organic realm. Vitalist science renders explicit the value of an excess of life as against static, frozen, mechanic worldviews. It backs thus the romantic search for a more open worldview, devoid of present teleological rationalist anxiety.