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Hans driesch Biography

Hans Driesch

(Bad Kreuznach, 1867-Leipzig, 1941) German zoologist, naturalist and philosopher.He was a disciple of Haeckel, with whom he carried out the rearing of sea urchin larvae from pieces of an embryo.Promoter of the zoological stations of Trieste and Naples, he developed his own embryogenetic theory, known as neo-ovitalist theory, for whose development he turned to philosophy (first to mechanism and then to vitalism).He is the author of Philosophy of the organic, The concept of organic form (1919), Logical studies on evolution (1918-1919) and Metaphysics of nature (1926).He ended up directing his research towards parapsychology ( Parapsychology: the science of "hidden" phenomena, 1932).

Hans Driesch

Hans Driesch began his scientific activity in the field of mechanism, but later became one of the strongest defenders of neo-ovitalism.After having studied philosophy and natural sciences in Freiburg, Munich and Jena, between 1891 and 1900 he devoted himself to biological research at the Naples zoological station.His work on experimental embryology (called developmental physiology) and on equine eggs date back to this time, studies that have become classical.

To explain the results of his work, he abandoned the mechanistic hypothesis of Ernst Haeckel, who had been his teacher, and opposed that of an immaterial principle, immanent with respect to the germ.The problem of a philosophical justification of biological vitalism in a general theory of reality later attracted all his interest, and in 1907 he abandoned biology and turned to theoretical and philosophical studies.He managed to be qualified for free teaching in Heidelberg in 1909, and was requested as a professor of philosophy at the University of Cologne in 1919, and then, in 1921, at the University of Leipzig.

Driesch sought a confirmation of the vitalist theory in the study of parapsychological manifestations, to which he dedicated the work Parapsychology: the science of "hidden" phenomena , published in 1932 This treatise is, as the author already warns, "a kind of guide for those who want to work successfully in this field, both for the eventual study of the facts and for the eventual elaboration of explanatory theories." The work opens with a complaint against official science, absent from this field to the point of confusing parapsychology with spiritism, which is nothing more than an interpretive hypothesis of the phenomena, and of ignoring all the work carried out by researchers serious, without realizing that we are perhaps on the eve of a total revolution of our ideas about the world.

The treaty is divided into two parts.In the first, "Method of Parapsychology", the author warns against voluntary and involuntary fraud.He distinguishes spontaneous phenomena from provoked ones, the paraphysical , for which he still feels a certain distrust, from the paramentals , the less susceptible to mystification; and strives to simplify their classification.In the second, "Theories of Parapsychology", after having demonstrated the insufficiency of materialistic theories in relation to these phenomena and the confirmation that they have given to their vitalism, he especially examines animism, which wants to explain all paranormal phenomena with patent or latent "faculties" of living man, without affirming anything regarding his survival or the form of this survival, and spiritism (called by him "monadism"), which wants to explain at least a good number of those phenomena with the activity of spirits, conceived as individual surviving personalities.

Even recognizing that the state of the research does not allow the question to be resolved in favor of either of the two theories, Driesch tends to consider the animistic hypothesis as more artificial than the spiritualist one, by which it shows its preference.It concludes, however, recognizing that what is urgent is to carry out clear and indisputable experiences, which is the only thing that will allow a selection between the different proposed theories, which meanwhile are nothing more than simple "hypotheses of work ".

The studies of abnormal psychology led Hans Driesch decisively towards the critique of materialism, which found its fullest expression in The defeat of materialism (1935).Against materialist theories are widely developed in this work.The author examines a large number of biological, psychological and metaphysical phenomena to base his refutation of materialism on them.For the biological phenomenon he invokes the Aristotelian concept of "entelechy", an immaterial finality , immanent in every living being, which organizes matter fulfilling a teleological function.The psychological phenomenon demands more: an immaterial principle, a soul.Feeling, ideas, memory-irreducible to a chemical process, especially as regards to the chronological record-they all manifest some immaterial principle, as well as the unconscious or subconscious, that without the intervention of the conscious will Being heals a wound through a wisely regenerative process.

After having examined in Parapsychology the phenomena that at first had seemed apt to demonstrate the inconsistency of the materialistic theories of EA Haeckel, Hans Driesch came to the conviction that everyday life presents psychological problems no less enigmatic than metapsychic ones.In Everyday Enigmas of Psychic Life (1938) he wanted to demonstrate precisely how many fundamental questions and questions remain mysterious or even obscure in general psychology itself, when perception, memory, the concept of psychic causality, some instinct theories and McDougall's conceptions.In this way he comes to formulate his doctrine on the "trinity" of the human being, which would consist of what he calls the "vital entelechy", the unconscious soul and the conscious self.

The relationships between these three factors are extremely complex and escape our analysis, so that nothing should be considered natural in the field of perception, memory and the self, understood as "natural" what appears clear and evident to the mind, such as mathematical propositions.An attempt to understand psychic life can be teleological, that is, from the point of view of purpose, although it is always an interpretation rather than a scientific explanation.While realizing how problematic such a conception is, Driesch affirms that it must be considered a superior expression of the philosopher's concern.In any case, the fundamental enigma remains; And it is that humanity comes to know much more about distant planets than about its own psychic life.

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