The Spirit of Vitalism

The Spirit of Vitalism PDF

Author: Gertrud Hvidberg-Hansen

Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 8763531348

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This richly illustrated book outlines the strong Vitalistic movement in Denmark during the period 1890-1940. This movement emerged as a response to the rationalism and one-sided intellectualism of a rigid, bourgeois, or decadent culture of the 19th century. It constituted a number of cultural currents that were manifested in philosophy, art, and everyday life, with an emphasis on the energy of youth, the dynamic personality, and the potential of the body. Viewed in the wider perspective, the aim of Vitalism's cult of the body was a revitalization that was to benefit not only the individual human being, but the whole of culture. Although the Vitalistic themes emanated from modern life, they also drew artistic sustenance from Nordic mythology and Greek antiquity, which served as the most important ideals in the modern pursuit of both physical and spiritual beauty. Additionally, the book highlights the prevalence of the interest in health and exercise and an increased attentiveness to hyg

The Fundamentals of Vitalism

The Fundamentals of Vitalism PDF

Author: Gregoriy Shifrin

Publisher: Clink Street Publishing

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9781913340469

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Recognition of the energy, the evolutionary essence of Nature, allows us to believe that vitalism - the power of life - is not determined by the divine spirit in living organisms, but by bioenergetics. It is the totality of the processes of converting incoming external energy into biologically useful work of living systems.

Vitalist Modernism

Vitalist Modernism PDF

Author: Fae Brauer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1000826910

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This book reveals how, when, where, and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them, Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby, water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously Vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Moholy-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson’s theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage’s concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson’s philosophies and Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors, plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze PDF

Author: John Marks

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 1998-05-20

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780745308746

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A guide to the work of Gilles Deleuze

Eighteenth-Century Vitalism

Eighteenth-Century Vitalism PDF

Author: C. Packham

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0230368395

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This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.

Out of Character

Out of Character PDF

Author: Omri Moses

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2014-05-07

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0804791236

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"Characters" are those fictive beings in novels whose coherent patterns of behavior make them credible as people. "Character" is also used to refer to the capacity—or incapacity—of individuals to sustain core principles. When characters are inconsistent, they risk coming across as dangerous or immoral, not to mention unconvincing. But what is behind our culture's esteem for unwavering consistency? Out of Character examines literary characters who defy our culture's models of personal integrity. It argues that modernist writers Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot drew inspiration from vitalism as a way of reinventing the means of depicting people in fiction and poetry. Rather than regarding a rigid character as something that inoculates us against the shifting tides of circumstance, these writers insist on the ethical necessity of forming improvisational, dynamic social relationships. Charting the literary impact of William James, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in particular, Henri Bergson, this book contends that vitalist understandings of psychology, affect, and perception led to new situational and relational definitions of selfhood. As Moses demonstrates, the modernists stirred by these vital life lessons give us a sense of what psychic life looks like at its most intricate, complex, and unpredictable.

A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier

A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier PDF

Author: Elizabeth A. Williams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1351962566

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One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eighteenth century scientists and physicians believed that such universal laws could be found, particularly in relation to the differences between living and inanimate matter. From the 1740s physicians working in the University of Medicine of Montpellier began to contest Descartes's dualist concept of the body-machine that was being championed by leading Parisian medical 'mechanists'. In place of the body-machine perspective that sought laws universally valid for all phenomena, the vitalists postulated a distinction being living and other matter, offering a holistic understanding of the physical-moral relation in place of mind-body dualism. Their medicine was not based on mathematics and the unity of the sciences, but on observation of the individual patient and the harmonious activities of the 'body-economy'. Vitalists believed that Illness was a result of disharmony in this 'body-economy' which could only be remedied on an individual level depending on the patient's own 'natural' limitations. The limitations were established by a myriad of factors such as sex, class, age, temperament, region, and race, which negated the use of a single universal treatment for a particular ailment. Ultimately Montpelier medicine was eclipsed by that of Paris, a development linked to the dynamics of the Enlightenment as a movement bent on cultural centralisation, acquiring a reputation as a kind of anti-science of the exotic and the mad. Given the long-standing Paris-centrism of French cultural history, Montpellier vitalism has never been accorded the attention it deserves by historians. This study repairs that neglect.

Spirit Matters

Spirit Matters PDF

Author: J. Jeffrey Franklin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1501715461

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Orthodox Christianity, scientific materialism, and alternative religions -- The evolution of occult spirituality in Victorian England and the representative case of Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- Anthony Trollope's religion : the orthodox/heterodox boundary -- The influences of Buddhism and comparative religion on Matthew Arnold's theology -- Interpenetration of religion and national politics in Great Britain and Sri Lanka : William Knighton's Forest life in Ceylon -- Identity, genre, and religion in Anna Leonowens' The English governess at the Siamese court -- Ancient Egyptian religion in late-Victorian England -- The economics of immortality : the demi-immortal Oriental, Enlightenment vitalism, and political economy in Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Conclusion : from Victorian occultism to new age spiritualities