One can interpret contemporary expressions of vitalism in the form of some process philosophies or object-oriented ontologies as a kind of metaphysical expression of commodity fetishism — it has been critiqued that way before. I am all for continuously uncovering all the ways in which our discourses contribute to the mystification and obscuration of the real socio-ecological relations that actually make up our world. De-reification is an inextricable part of the process of liberation that demands some kind of revolutionary transformation or even unbinding of the base of our existence.
Yet at the same time the usual mechanistic or eliminativist alternative completely undermines the possibility of the kind of praxis I engage with as a Buddhist who deploys tantric methodology on her path to liberation, in which something like an élan vital (i.e. rlung or prana) is at the foundation of understanding how the mind functions, how it limits or frees itself and how one can change or influence its trajectory by working with the subtle body channels through which it operates.
So far the way I reconcile these two dispositions is by recognizing that “objects” or “things” are always abstractions in the last instance and for that reason are necessarily lifeless and without an independent essence or inherent existence of their own. But it is not “abstractions all the way down” because these abstractions are always abstract-ed from concrete relations which themselves exceed or escape determination by the abstractions derived from them. But we have to resist the temptation to impute certain qualities onto these concrete relations precisely because they exceed determination by our abstractions, since any imputation will itself just be another abstraction. Imputing an inherent vitality or inner essence onto “objects” or “things” is always going to be a useful metaphor at best, or a reified mystification at worst.
Yet first-person experience is fully imbued with a sense of vitality. We can actually sense and feel its functioning: its depletion and its increase, its obstruction and its release. Such a vital essence is categorically inexpressible in its ultimate nature because it functions as a condition for the very possibility of expressibility and for that same reason it is categorically undeniable. To deny this is to fundamentally fail to account for the most obvious aspects of our experience and at this point the critique of fetishism itself becomes a kind of fetish, failing to perform the analytic (and ultimately liberatory) function it was supposed to perform.
So we’re left with a kind of “dual power,” where we wield a qualified vitalism or panpsychism for the “inner” elements of experience and qualified mechanism or eliminativism for the “outer” elements of experience. This framework itself is predicated on a distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” which breaks down in the final analysis at the level of concrete metabolic relationship between self and other, which means that it is only useful insofar as we are reflecting upon our experience with the world and our body, but no longer useful when we are in direct engagement with them. This dualistic “reflective knowledge” is useful insofar as it obstructs further reification about the nature of external phenomena and helps organize the relationships between internal phenomena for the purpose of configuring the contours of successive praxis, but at the time of actual direct engagement, it is a non-dual “embodied knowledge” or gnosis which reigns supreme, and this gnosis knows its constitutive “other” or correlate to be non-different in nature to itself, like the meeting of mother and child, therefore including and transcending the contrast between vitalism and mechanism.
Holopoiesis 