Purpose and Desire Page 5

  Bernard’s fame, therefore, rests on two foundations. The first is the one we celebrate today: he is the brilliant experimentalist who teased out the mechanisms of living things. This legacy is what underpins our modern conception of life as a mechanism. The other comprised the more philosophical speculations that grounded Bernard’s thinking about the nature of life. Today we greet these with, at best, a perfunctory nod. Our modern diffidence streams from Bernard’s inconvenient vitalism and his solution to vitalism’s fundamental question: if life is a unique phenomenon of nature, what is it that makes it distinct? To Bernard, life was irreducibly unique, and what set it apart was homeostasis. This is where we encounter the modern misconception about homeostasis: it is not a statement of rational mechanism; rather, it is a profoundly vitalist idea.

  Bernard’s conception of homeostasis traces its roots back to the previous century’s fertile turmoil over essentialist versus process vitalism. Among the eighteenth-century vitalists was a growing difference of opinion on what an organism’s “many little lives” were. Some thought they were the innumerable (and recently discovered) cells of the body. Some thought they were the organs of the body. And some, like Bordeu, saw the “many little lives” existing at multiple scales, even among assemblages of organisms like bee colonies. Despite this, there was a broad consensus among the process vitalists that life’s distinct quality emerged from the negotiation and accommodation of the organism’s innumerable “little lives” to one another.

  One of the outward signs—what we might today call an “emergent property”—of this ongoing mutual accommodation was adaptation. Organisms can exist in a variety of circumstances and respond in predictable and repeatable ways to ensure their continuing “good fit” to whatever environment they are in: thicker fur in the winter, increased strength when worked, and so forth. This is the meaning of adaptation: a tendency of living things to “apt function,” to have an aptitude, if you will, to persist in the face of a whimsical environment.

  Bernard’s novel take on the “many little lives” metaphor was to internalize the phenomenon of adaptation. The persistence of a life in the face of environmental perturbation had to involve a certain independence from the environment: Bernard’s “free and independent life.” Thus, body temperature would be steady even as outside temperature varied, intervals of starvation and thirst would be tolerated, and so forth. This independence could be disrupted experimentally. Cut a nerve here, occlude a blood vessel there, remove this or that organ, and the innumerable internal conversations between the organism’s “many little lives” would be disrupted and their striving to mutual accommodation thwarted: body temperature would fall, the heart would race, the stomach would cease to churn.

  To Bernard, there had to therefore be a process of mutual accommodation operating within the body that mirrored the adaptation of the body itself to the fickle and variable external environment. Just as the body was immersed in an external environment, so too were the body’s “many little lives” immersed in an internal environment, namely, the medium of the body’s internal fluids. And if adaptation to the external environment sustained the organism, perhaps the adaptation of the body’s “many little lives” to one another, whatever those little lives might be, produced a sustained internal environment. Bernard sought to untangle all this mutual accommodation through the study of this internal environment, the milieu intérieur of his aphorism, which he did brilliantly in his experimental work. But hovering over it all was the core of nineteenth-century process vitalism: life as the mutual accommodation of “many little lives.”

  Bernard’s skill at dissection and experimental design made him the master of asking and getting credible answers to the “how” questions of the “many little lives,” and his tenacity at running the questions to the ground until they yielded an answer is why he is justly remembered as the founder of experimental medicine. In this sense, Bernard was indeed the nemesis of vitalism, but only in the limited sense of the dwindling metaphysical variety: once he was done with it, that form of vitalism would never come back. Yet Bernard’s approach to experimental medicine cannot be understood independently of the larger motivation behind his work: to vindicate a profound truth about life, that life is a special quality, that chemistry might be a tool for studying life but it is not life itself. It is matter that serves life and not the other way around. In short, Bernard’s work was actually a strong empirical defense of the process vitalist thought of his day.15 Bernard was not vitalism’s nemesis—far from it—but its vindicator.

  Let us now step back a bit and consider where we have been, because it will help make sense of what is to follow. Bernard’s story is that of the double-edged sword of the Hobson’s choice that sits at the heart of modern biology, which we may now rephrase: can one be a scientist and a vitalist at the same time? Modern biology’s answer to this is “no.” To be a scientist who studies life, you must also be a mechanist and a materialist. You emphatically may not be a vitalist. To do so is to don the scarlet V.

  Claude Bernard stands as a striking refutation of this assertion. This is inconvenient to the modern, and it must be said, essentially philosophical stance of materialism as the only credible way to think scientifically about life. When we are confronted with someone like Bernard, two things commonly happen. We might find, for example, that a clean narrative begins to assume precedence over the complicated truth. If Bernard was a brilliant practitioner of the experimental arts, then his vitalism becomes simply inconceivable and cannot be part of the narrative. This is an essentially political dynamic—a dynamic we will encounter again and again throughout this book—because narratives are enforced through political means. There is another motivation at work, this one at least having the virtue of intellectual credibility. To wit: is there a way to reframe what is essentially a vitalist idea into credible mechanism? In short, is there a way to render vitalism irrelevant? Can we explain away life’s unique nature as illusory? We also will encounter this dynamic throughout this book, starting with what comes next: the revival of Bernard’s vitalist conception of homeostasis in the triumphant materialism of the mid-twentieth century.

  4

  A Clockwork Homeostasis

  If Claude Bernard was vitalism’s vindicator, then why did vitalism become the V-word? It’s not as if Bernard or others like him were proposing a science of angels and demons. What explains the opprobrium? Answering that question could fill volumes, but the basic motivator was a tectonic shift in the metaphysical universe that began in the latter years of the nineteenth century and built for several decades into the twentieth. In the end, our modern attitudes toward the value and reach of science came to be cemented into place, setting modern biology on its trajectory toward its impending crisis.

  The shift was driven by a tension that has riven Western philosophy ever since Socrates. It turns on a ten-dollar word: epistemology, or how we come to know and understand the world. How we proceed on that quest turns on whether we think the world is all mechanism, including the life that inhabits it, or whether a broader organizing principle makes it all what it is.1 If we think it is the first—all mechanism—then understanding comes from drilling down to the uttermost tiny details: reductionism, materialism, mechanism, in other words. Transcendence is called for in the second case, the willy-nilly details of mechanism being just that—willy-nilly details. Understanding from that perspective comes through identifying principles that transcend matter and mechanism and impose order upon it. The organizing principle could be God, the demiurge, vital stuff, or intelligence of some sort. Whatever it is, it will be metaphysical, that is, beyond the mere physical.

  On the question of life, these opposed viewpoints swept like tides through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trending one way, then the other, from the rational to the romantic then back, from the vitalist to the mechanist then back, endlessly surging but never seeming to settle on a “right” answer.2 Bernard’s form of vitalism pointed a way out of this see
mingly Sisyphean state—a middle path that was not quite mechanism and not quite vital essence, but a hybrid, and an extraordinarily fruitful hybrid at that. But in the end, biology in the twentieth century did not follow Bernard’s lead, choosing instead to simply try to stay the tide, never mind the surging. There’s a ten-dollar phrase for this as well—epistemic closure—where everyone simply agrees that we will think only one way about the universe—one form of epistemology—and not bother to engage other ways.

  Epistemic closure has a rather bad odor about it, because it implies closed-mindedness—the phrase has lately been thrown around to smear one’s political opponents as close-minded ignoramuses3—but closed-mindedness is not actually its problem. Indeed, epistemic closure can be a form of mental discipline, a kind of Tao that, if followed scrupulously, can be immensely satisfying and rewarding. The rewards are aesthetic (seductive beauty revealed) and intellectual (captivating internal logical consistency), and chasing those rewards can engender extraordinary intellectual energy and creativity. This is why the twentieth century was a golden age for biology, even as biology became epistemically closed, that is, became mechanistic and reductionist to the exclusion of other ways of thinking about it.

  There is a problem with epistemic closure, though: it can become a form of intellectual narcissism. Those living within an epistemically closed world become so engrossed in their beautiful, self-referential, and internally consistent universe that mental discipline easily lapses into mental blindness, followed by intellectual pathology and ultimate downfall. Among those pathologies is fractiousness, with intellectual energy directed to ever smaller problems or questions: you start by admiring the face, then focus on the slant and color of the eyes, then move to the intricate patterns of iridescent colors of the iris, and end up enthralled with the exquisite curvature of a single eyelash. In the sciences, we prefer to call this “specialization” rather than narcissism, but the dynamic is the same no matter what we call it: highly learned people coming to know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing at all.* We see this trend rampant in biology today: there might be something we call “biology” that we teach to students; there might be academic departments of “biology” in our colleges and universities; but there are, in fact, dozens of “biologies” out there, with new ones coming along annually.*4 Faced with this proliferation, it is reasonable to ask: is there such a thing as a coherent science of life anymore?

  Another common pathology of epistemic closure is an increasing reliance on politically enforced orthodoxy. Narcissism demands that everyone admire the same thing, with unpleasant consequences for those who demur. The means to enforce orthodoxy can range from credentialing systems that ensure that only “right” thinkers are allowed to think professionally (which describes the modern university system), to sustaining agreed-upon myths by ridicule or expulsion of those who depart from the “correct” thinking, to exercising naked political power over dissidents through governments and courts of law.5 The end-point, as it was for Narcissus himself, is isolation and alienation—of specialist from specialist, of scientist from artist or theologian, of scholar from public, of the science of life from the phenomenon of life itself.

  Fortunately, narcissism normally is self-limiting: we snap out of it because reality tends to breach even the most assiduously built epistemic wall. What made the epistemic closure of the twentieth century distinctive was its reach and staying power. Once Friedrich Nietzsche declared in 1882 that God was dead, something had to fill the gap, and scientists came rushing in. This was the rise of scientism—science now as God—with claims to be the sole legitimate basis for thinking about all aspects of the world.6 What followed was the predictable rise of “scientific” theories of history, economics, sociology, education, and politics. This was the era of the technocrats and the progressives, of rule by the credentialed over the incompetent uncredentialed, all inspired by the glittering phantasm of politics, economics, and even morality that could be made scientific, sensible, predictable, and rational—and therefore controllable.7 We have never entirely snapped out of this latest venture into intellectual narcissism, an adventure that has endured for at least a century now.

  Debate continues about whether we are better off or worse off as a result. We will not resolve that debate here. Suffice it to say that chasing that utopian promise jostled many long-standing verities off the stage—some that deserved to go, some less deserving of this fate—and an honest understanding of that time demands we sort out which were which. I am arguing that among the undeserving casualties was the novel form of nineteenth-century vitalism championed by Bernard and many others. The story of how Bernard’s fundamentally vitalist conception of homeostasis became transformed into its modern anodyne, tamed, and neutered form of mechanism—a clockwork homeostasis, if you will*—illustrates the most pernicious feature of epistemic closure: its ever-increasing reliance on narrative, rather than evidence, to sustain it. This narrative can take many interesting and creative turns, as we shall see, but ultimately these run out, and a crisis follows. That is where we are today with respect to Bernard’s “dangerous idea” of homeostasis and its implications for the “why” of life.

  In biology, the new century’s intellectual fashion was made manifest in what Ernst Mayr has called “physics envy”—the idea that, to be a “proper” science, biology had to make a decisive break from its vitalist past and biologists had to look to physicists and chemists for proper role models of how to do “real” science.8 And that, in a very compact nutshell, is how biology came to be transformed nearly completely into the materialist and mechanistic discipline that is familiar to us today. It is also how the innocuous claims of the nineteenth-century scientific vitalists, Bernard included, came to be outré.

  In physiology, where Bernard’s conception of homeostasis should have found its safest refuge, physics envy prevailed as physiologists came to focus on the captivating details of mechanism being uncovered by new techniques in chemistry and microscopy. Physiologists—Bernard’s heirs—thus turned Bernard’s aphorism on its head. Life’s chemistry was no longer a tool to probe life’s special quality, as Bernard had done. Now, the chemistry of life became the end in itself, with physiology morphing into “physiological chemistry,” as this new approach came to be called.* The name sums up the not-so-subtle shift of attitude: we are chemists, “real” scientists, not stamp collectors, to echo the physicist Ernest Rutherford’s infamous put-down of biologists and other nonphysicists.* We are not troubled anymore with vitalist obscurantism; life is chemistry, nothing special about it. Quasi-philosophical ideas, like Bernard’s musings about the milieu intérieur, are distractions in the way of doing “real” science, mere philosophical decoration to what had become, in the fashion of the day, the repudiation of philosophy.

  Despite the physiological chemists’ efforts to get us all to look away, that nagging problem of the “many little lives” that had obsessed the process vitalists, including Bernard, kept popping up. In the early twentieth century the American physiologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson, for example, showed how regulation of the blood’s acidity* involves a cooperative interaction between nearly every organ and cell type in the body; the “many little lives” phenomenon was thus embodied and personified, impossible to capture in glass culture tubes but glaringly evident in the arena of the whole organism.9 Henderson’s contemporary, Walter B. Cannon, saw the same propensity in the regulation of blood sugar, stress, and adaptive response to a changing environment. Indeed, he found this phenomenon so compelling that he did what Bernard, in his Gallic loquaciousness, had never done: he coined a single elegant word to capture it—“homeostasis.”*10 In the end, though, both Henderson and Cannon cast their lots with the surging materialist tide, leaving the more philosophical side of Bernard’s legacy to drift in the twentieth century’s intellectual backwaters. It would pop up here and there as eructations of the old vital essence—élan vital, entelechy, omega points, and
so forth—and would inspire fringe schools of medicine such as homeopathy, which still lionizes Bernard as the inadvertent visionary founder of its curious philosophy of medicine.11

  What sealed biology’s materialist fate, though, was not physiological chemistry, but the rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century of the “atoms of heredity” of Gregor Mendel (1822–1884).* These had languished in obscurity after their discovery nearly sixty years previously, but once rediscovered, the big prize in biology became the hunt for the material nature of heredity: what it was, how it worked, how it was encoded in the newly named genes. To embark on this quest, you didn’t need to be a physiologist or indeed a biologist of any kind. You needed to be a chemist or a physicist.*

  Along with this came a sea change in how physiologists looked at the phenomenon of homeostasis. Where Bernard had proposed a radical insight into the nature of life itself, his successors saw mainly mechanism to be teased out. Now drained of its vitalist core, Bernard’s idea became a dried husk, roped in, tamed, and enervated.

  It is somehow fitting, therefore, that it was physicists and engineers, not physiologists or biologists, who did the most to carry the idea of homeostasis forward into the twentieth century. As is often the case, the needs of war provided the impetus. The technological transformation of war through the early twentieth century is a well-known story, as machines, not human beings, increasingly became the means of war. Traditionally, war had been motivated by the intelligence and bravery of warriors acting alone or en masse, and by the tactical and strategic genius of generals;12 but war in the twentieth century became a contest between brute machines, transforming the valiant warrior into meat for a cruel and impersonal grinder. Wars still had to be won or lost, though, and military visionaries realized this meant that the ineffable human element of war had to be brought back into control over the war machines’ brutal lethality.13 So, entirely new kinds of mechanized war needed to be developed. No longer was it sufficient that a machine could apply brute force to an adversary. Rather, it had to apply force with the same intelligence, tactics, and strategy of the warrior, and do it faster, more accurately, and with less risk to living warriors and their comrades.