Hylozoism

Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which all matter is alive or animated, either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the world-soul (anima mundi). The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity. The word is a 17th-century term formed from the Greek words ὕλη (hyle: "wood, matter") and ζωή (zoē: "life"), which was coined by the English Platonist philosopher Ralph Cudworth in 1678.

Hylozoism in Western philosophy can be traced back to ancient Greece. The Milesian philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and 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." 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.

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 Christian pantheism wherein 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 excommunicated by the Catholic Church with the accusation of heresy, as well as from a few Protestant denominations, and he was eventually burned at the stake for various other beliefs that were regarded as heretical. Telesio, on the other hand, began from an 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. 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.

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.

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 Haeckel – was often called upon as a protest against a mechanistic worldview.