The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

Abstract

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles -sometimes overt, sometimes masked -throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the 'theorization' of Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated 'vitalism'. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the 'body' than to the 'molecule', is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious 'vitalist' ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, 'go-between' concept -invoked as 'natural' by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of 'nomadic concepts'. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts -as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, 2 a model of order, of regulation, etc. -despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any 'metaphysics of organism', or organismic biology.

Is defining life pointless? Operational definitions at the frontiers of biology

“…The philosophical discussion of whether life is a natural kind or not, we suggest, is not the only, or even most important, aspect of defining life. Rather, we are interested in the concept of life as a practical and theoretical target in research that aims to investigate the origin of life, design life, or address the "salient puzzles about life" (Bedau 1998, p. 125; see also Wolfe 2014).…”

“…Like these concepts, the notion of 'life' can be seen as a conceptual tool for different experimental systems and research programs. It can play an important role in the theoretical activity of comparing, through references to definitions, different types of systems that are considered as limit cases with epistemic implications (Wolfe 2014). Examples are viruses (Forterre 2010) and transient systems at the frontier between Chemistry and Biology (Etxeberria and Ruiz-Mirazo 2009).…”

How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism

“…If they are not, they would have to show that some of the conditions they prefer are superior to evolutionary ones. Secondly, many authors have suggested that different conditions are equal to each other [23,25,81], so one would have to provide a philosophical argument against pluralism. Of course, one can try to build such an argument, for instance following Clarke [53] and argue that for epistemological reasons (like 1 3…”

“…There are many approaches, but two are quite popular and will be outlined below. Both rest on the idea that the concepts of an organism depend on the research aim, with the first explaining it in terms of pragmatism [21,25,81], the other in terms of process ontology [83,84].…”

Psychoneurosis beyond Oedipus: neurophysiology, drive conflict, and the resolution of emotional trauma

“…5 In 1894, after his return to Zurich, Monakow's laboratory eventually became Zurich's Brain Anatomy Institute. Though well known as a committed holist and praised for his functional approach to neuroanatomy (Finger, Koehler, and Jagella, 2004) especially in the visual system, Monakow was a neo-vitalist (see Wolfe, 2014;Normandin and Wolfe, 2013;Harrington, 1996). He privileged neuroplasticity; but he draped it in a teleological philosophy that made his framework increasingly uncomfortable for his successors.…”