물활론 (철학)
물활론(영어: Hylozoism, 物活論) 또는 질료생명론(質料生命論)은 물질에 비실재적 실체 또는 독자적인 사유 체계가 존재한다고 보는 철학적 관점이다. 이 용어는 1678년 영국의 케임브리지 플라톤 학파 철학자인 랄프 커드워스(Ralph Cudworth)가 최초로 사용하였다.
용어 및 역사[편집]
질료를 뜻하는 'hyle'와 생명을 뜻하는 'zoe' 합성으로 만들었다.
물활론적 사고는 고대 인도의 베다 학파 가운데 로카야타(Lokāyata) 학파부터 보였다. 또한, 그리스의 경우는 소크라테스 이전 철학에 속하는 학파 중 적지 않은 자들이 물활론적 사고를 갖고 있었다. 대표적으로 밀레토스 학파의 탈레스(Thales), 아낙시만드로스(Anaximandros), 아낙시메네스(Anaximenes)가 있으며, 에페소스 학파의 일원인 헤라클레이토스(Herakleitos)가 있다.[1]
물질이 바로 영혼(pneuma) 또는 정신(nous)을 포함하고 있거나, 이것을 생동하게 하는 매개자라는 것이 이들 주장의 요지이다. 단, 여기서 영혼은 다양한 의미로 해석될 수 있다. 'pneuma'는 능동적인 의미에서의 영혼, 즉, 귀신을 뜻하기도 하며, 또는 의지 활동의 근본이라고 할 수 있는 정신을 의미하기도 한다. 그러나, 당시 고대 그리스 철학의 사고로 보아, 이 둘은 구별이 되지 않았던 것으로 보인다. 하지만, 점점 인식론이 발달하게 되면서 둘은 의미가 달라지게 되었고, 스토아 학파 및 기타 범신론자들이 물활론 개념을 접수하면서 영혼(pneuma)은 이성(logos)과 차별화되지 않게 되었다.
중세의 물활론은 우주만물의 조화를 가능케 하는 본원적 사유 즉, 일자(一者)가 질료(hyle)에 있다는 주장으로 이어진다. 이러한 관점은 중세 유럽의 기독교 사고관에 대해서는 이단적이었기에 배척을 당하였다. 근세 말기에는 조르다노 브루노(Giordano Bruno)와 같은 신비술사들이 이 개념에 기반하여 우주 운행 원리를 해석하였으나 이 역시도 이단시되어 처형당하게 되었다. 이후 근대에 접어들면서 물활론적 사고는 과학의 발달로 여러 지역에 퍼지게 되었고 이후 적지 않은 철학자들이 물활론적 사고를 갖게 되었다. 근대 시기 초기의 철학은 주로 물활론적 경향과 기계론적 경향 사이의 대립으로 이루어져 있기도 하다.[2]
유사 개념[편집]
물활론(hylozoism)과 유사한 개념은 애니미즘(animism)과 유물론(materialism)이 있다. 물활론은 이 두 개념과 공유하는 부분이 존재하지만, 같은 개념이 아니며, 엄밀히 볼 때 여러 가지 차이점이 존재한다.
애니미즘[편집]
애니미즘은 물질(동식물까지 다 포함하여)에 영혼이 존재한다고 본다는 점에서 물활론과 유사점을 갖고 있지만, 애니미즘의 경우는 고대 원시 신앙에서 비롯되는 사고관이며, 물활론이 주장하는 비실재적 개념을 넘어서, 역동적인 신이라는 개념을 물질에 도입한다. 즉, 사물에는 능동적, 역동적 신이 존재하며, 이 신이 외부에 의지적으로 영향을 미친다는 다신론의 일종이다. 반면, 물활론은 물질에 영혼 즉, 독자적인 관념이 존재하나 그것은 수많은 본질적 법칙 중 일부를 공유해서 작동하는 것에 불과하며, 신이라는 개념은 모든 물질 및 정신을 관통하는 제일 상위의 것으로 간주하고 있다.
유물론[편집]
유물론은 세계에서 궁극적인 존재는 오직 물질(자연세계) 뿐이며, 정신, 의지는 모두 물질에 의한 부차적 작용이라고 보는 인식론적 관점이다. 최소한 자연세계의 물질과, 생명체의 의식 활동의 원인이 되는 정신을 동일한 위치에 놓고, 이 둘을 연결시키려는 유물론자도 존재하나, 이러한 경우에도 본질적인 부분은 자연세계에 가 있다. 이러한 점에서 물활론과 유물론은 일정한 차이점을 갖고 있다. 그것은, 물활론자들은 본질적으로 정신(여기서 정신은 사유, 이성, 추론, 의식 등 수많은 추상적 관념 개념을 포괄한다)의 독립성을 부정하지 않는다는 점이다. 그러나, 정신으로부터 나오는 생명력이 물질에도 있으며, 더 나아가 물질로 구성된 인간도 물질로부터 본질적인 생명력(정신)을 얻는다는 사고로까지 나아간다. 유물론과 물활론은 서로 대치되는 개념일 수도 있으며, 아닐 수도 있기에, 이 두 성격을 모두 가진(바뤼흐 스피노자) 경우가 존재하며, 동시에 유물론을 배격하고 물활론만을 주장한(고트프리트 빌헬름 라이프니츠, 알프레드 노스 화이트헤드) 학자도 존재한다. 또한, 이 두 경계가 모호한 경우(에른스트 헤켈)도 존재한다.
같이 보기[편집]
각주[편집]
Hylozoism
Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which all matter is alive or animated,[1] either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the world-soul (anima mundi).[2] The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity.[3] 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 Ancient Greek Philosophy[edit]
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."[4] 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.[5]
Renaissance period and early modernity[edit]
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.[6]
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[edit]
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.[7]
In the 19th century, Haeckel developed a 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 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.[8][9]
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 theologian Orson Pratt taught a form of hylozoism.
Alice A. Bailey wrote a book called The Consciousness of the Atom.[10]
Influenced by Alice A. Bailey, Charles Webster Leadbeater, and their predecessor Madame Blavatsky, Henry T. Laurency produced voluminous writings describing a hylozoic philosophy.[11]
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.[12] 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".[12]: 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.’"[12]: 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.[12]: 488
Ken Wilber embraces hylozoism to explain subjective experience and provides terms describing the ladder of subjective experience experienced by entities from atoms up to Human beings in the upper left quadrant of his Integral philosophy chart.[13]
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 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.[14]
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.[15]
The metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze has been described as a form of hylozoism.[16]
In popular culture[edit]
Art[edit]
- Hylozoic Series: Sibyl, an interactive installation of Canadian artist and architect Philip Beesley, was presented in the 18th Biennale of Sydney and was on display until September, 2012. Using sensors, LEDs, and shape memory alloy, Beesley constructed an interactive environment that responded to the actions of the audience, offering a vision of how buildings in the future might move, think and feel.[17]
Literature[edit]
- In mathematician and writer Rudy Rucker's novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, the emergent sentience of all material things is described as a property of the technological singularity.
- The Hylozoist is one of the Culture ships mentioned in Iain M. Banks's novel Surface Detail – appropriately, this ship is a member of the branch of Contact dealing with smart matter outbreaks.
MMORPGs[edit]
- The monster "Hylozoist" (sometimes spelled "Heirozoist") in the MMORPG Ragnarok Online is a plush rabbit doll with its mouth sewn shut, possessed by the spirit of a child. Although hylozoism has nothing to do with possession, it is clear that the name was derived from this ancient philosophy.
Music[edit]
- The Hylozoists are a Canadian band.
- Sonic Youth references hylozoism in the second verse of the fourth track on the Sister LP[18]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ McColley, Diane Kelsey (2007). Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 115. ISBN 978-0-7546-6048-4.
- ^ Strauss, Daniel (January 2014). "Hylozoism and hylomorphism: a lasting legacy of Greek philosophy". Phronimon. Pretoria: University of South Africa on behalf of the South African Society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities. 15 (1): 32–45. doi:10.25159/2413-3086/2211. ISSN 2413-3086 – via SciELO.
- ^ Yuasa, Yasuo (2008). Overcoming Modernity: Synchronicity and Image-Thinking. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. pp. 39–40. ISBN 978-0-7914-7401-3.
- ^ Skrbina, David (2005). Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 24. ISBN 0-262-19522-4.
- ^ Skrbina, David (2005). Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 34. ISBN 0-262-19522-4.
- ^ 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
- ^ "Hylozoism and Dogmatism in Kant, Leibniz, and Newton". Archived from the original on 26 March 2007. Retrieved 11 April 2006.
- ^ Comment l’ hylozoïsme scientifique contemporain aborde-t-il la sélection naturelle du parenchyme neurocognitif? (French)
- ^ Crocco, M (2004). "On Minds' Localization". Electroneurobiología. 12 (3): 244–257. ISSN 0328-0446.
- ^ Bailey, Alice A. The Consciousness of the Atom—1922
- ^ "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>
- ^ a b c d Pickering, Andrew. 2009. Beyond design: Cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism. Synthese 168:469-491.
- ^ Wilber Ken A Brief History of Everything, 1st ed. 1996, 2nd ed. 2001: ISBN 1-57062-740-1
- ^ 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
- ^ Latour, Bruno Pandora's Hope: Essays on the reality of Science Studies, 1999: ISBN 0-674-65335-1
- ^ Harris, Wyatt (4 October 2017). "(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". Reviews in Religion and Theology. 24 (4): 643–647. doi:10.1111/rirt.13037.
- ^ "Sibyl by Philip Beesley". Inspir3d. Archived from the original on 27 April 2015. Retrieved 20 April 2015.
- ^ "Untitled Document". Retrieved 20 April 2015.
External links[edit]
- . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
