ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

83
THE TWO CULTURES
simply the sum of that of its parts, just as a swarm of bees with
its globally coherent behavior is the result of interactions between
one bee and another; and, Diderot thereby concludes,
the human soul does not exist any more than the soul of the
beehive does. s
Diderot's vitalist protest against physics and the universal
laws of motion thus stems from his rejection of any form of
spiritualist dualism. Nature must be described in such a way
that man's very existence becomes understandable. Otherwise,
and this is what happens in the mechanistic world view,
the scientific description of nature will have its counterpart in
man as an automaton endowed with a soul and thereby alien to
nature.
The twofold basis of materialistic naturalism, at once chemical
and medical, that Diderot employed to counter the physics
of his time is recurrent in the eighteenth century. While biologists
speculated about the animal-machine, the preexistence of
germs, and the chain of living creatures-all problems close to
theology6-chemists and physicians had to face directly the
complexity of real processes in both chemistry and life. Chemistry
and medicine were, in the late eighteenth century, privileged
sciences for those who fought against the physicists'
esprit de systeme in favor of a science that would take into
account the diversity of natural processes. A physicist could
be pure esprit, a precocious child, but a physician or a chemist
must be a man of experience: he must be able to decipher the
signs, to spot the clues. In this sense, chemistry and medicine
are arts. They demand judgment, application, and tenacious
observation. Chemistry is a madman's passion, Venel concluded
in the article he wrote for Diderot's Encyclopedie, an
eloquent defense of chemistry against the abstract imperialism
of the Newtonians.7 To emphasize the fact that protests raised
by chemists and physicians against the way physicists reduced
living processes to peaceful mechanisms and the quiet unfolding
of universal laws were common in Diderot's day, we invoke
the eminent figure of Stahl, the father of vitalism and inventor
of the first consistent chemical systematics.
According to Stahl, universal laws apply to the living only in
the sense that these laws condemn them to death and corruption;
the matter of which living beings are composed is so frail,
so easily decomposed, that if it were governed solely by the