The Ontological Aporia in Andreas Röschlaub’s Dynamic Medicine: The Vital Principle as Dialectical Residue
In the vast abysses of medical philosophy, amid the disjointed echoes of Paracelsian alchemy and Stahlian animism, there erupts the singular figure of Andreas Röschlaub (1768–1835), a physician-philosopher whose convergence of Naturphilosophie and early physiological theory remains scandalously understudied. Known chiefly as the German interlocutor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in matters of dynamic medicine, Röschlaub’s influence is often situated in a biologico-medical register, his theoretical constructs deployed to support or oppose the mechanical tendencies of modern biomedicine. Yet, what escapes both hagiography and polemic is a subtle, ontological anomaly situated deep within Röschlaub’s conception of the vital principle—a detail whose implications destabilize the very coherence of organismal unity and the metaphysical categories upon which it rests.
Röschlaub’s pivotal contribution lies in his dynamic reinterpretation of Johann Christian Reil’s conception of ‘Bildungstrieb’—that inner formative drive which organizes organic matter toward structured life. In Röschlaub’s system, this vital drive is not merely an immanent teleology in biological development but a concrete interface between inner nature (das Innere der Natur) and Geist—between life and spirit. Thus, Röschlaub reconfigures the organism not as a passive result of natural laws but as a site of dialectical tension, a field wherein autonomy and external determination contest one another. This perspective assumes a paradoxical duality of the vital principle: it is both the agent of organic self-shaping and the residue of a metaphysical rupture between spirit and matter.
It is in the underexplored 1810 manuscript fragment preserved in the Regensburg archives, entitled “Zur dialektischen Organisation der Lebenskraft,” that Röschlaub introduces a most peculiar formulation. Therein, he characterizes the vital principle not as unity but as a “Differenzquale,” a qualitative difference that constitutes life not through its presence but by its structural absence. Röschlaub writes:
> “Die eigentliche Lebenskraft ist kein Sein, sondern ein Schwanken im Sein; ein hiatus, der das Organische umklammert und doch nicht zu ihm gehört, als wär’ sein Wesen durch Mangel gestiftet.”*
Here, the vital principle is revealed to be not a substance but a hiatus, not a positive energy but a fluctuation of being—what he elsewhere calls a “dynamische Irritation des Organischen.” This metaphysical subtlety, reminiscent of Schelling’s potentiated identity and yet more despairingly ambiguous, ought to detain our attention. For Röschlaub, life as a process is not founded on a stable ontic ground but constituted by a dialectical disjoint: being as lack, as ontological flutter.
This manner of conceiving life as a metaphysical aporia differentiates Röschlaub sharply from his contemporaries in Romantic physiology. Reil, for instance, remained committed to a developmental teleology that saw the Bildungstrieb as oriented toward perfection; Carus and Oken, influenced excessively by Naturphilosophie mysticism, equated the vital principle with cosmic soul. But Röschlaub’s formulation recovers neither soul nor aim; it gives us instead a differential abyss at the core of being. Thus, he anticipates—uncannily—the différance that would much later form a cornerstone of deconstructive metaphysics. Life, in Röschlaub’s view, is neither identity nor synthesis, but ceaseless disequilibrium—a rhythmic interruption within the processual.
Why has this insight received so little acknowledgement? One answer lies in Röschlaub’s affective writing style, compounded by a sepulchral Teutonic lexicon and an uncanny insistence on mixing physiological detail with metaphysical speculation. But more profoundly, the modern predilection for systematized knowledge renders opaque any perspective organized around hiatus rather than coherence. Röschlaub, by positing life as a non-being that insists within being, advances a thesis that directly contravenes not only Cartesian substance dualism but also Hegelian dialectic. For neither res extensa nor abstract Geist can subsume a fluctuation; nor can the negative be fully aufgehoben if it remains constitutive as such.
Let us explore the exact metaphysical valence of Röschlaub’s hiatus. It is not merely an empirical gap in our understanding of vitality, nor even a cognitive limitation, but a real ontological dimension within the living organism. The hiatus is rhythmic, yet not cyclical; it is processual, yet without teleology. It is, in his words, the “Zweifel des Seins” (“doubt of being”)—a phrase that ought to be considered tantamount to Heidegger’s “clearing” or even to Schelling’s unprethinkable ground (der unvordenkliche Grund). But unlike Heidegger, Röschlaub situates this doubt not in Dasein’s thrownness but in the very tissue of the corporal: the living heart palpitates not just physically but metaphysically through this interval of unbeing.
Furthermore, Röschlaub’s hiatus sheds light upon the philosophical status of illness, a subject he treats with marked originality. Disease, in this frame, is not merely a deviation from order; it is the irruption of the ontological hiatus into manifest expression—a kind of metaphysical exteriorization. Health, then, is not equilibrium but a managed disequilibrium, an articulated rehearsal of the hiatus within limits. Thus, a Röschlaubian medicine would not solely aim to restore function but to shepherd the organism through its own inner dislocation, much as a philosopher must escort thought through aporia.
In closing, this subtle detail—life as ontological hiatus—marks Röschlaub not as a lesser forerunner of Romantic physiology, but as a metaphysician in his own right, and one who anticipates several of the most radical insights of late 20th-century thought. His understanding of the vital as a “fluctuation within being” uncovers life not as presence but as withdrawal, not as given but as torn. That this has gone unnoticed is not the consequence of historical whimsy but is indicative of our own metaphysical incapacity to think being outside the frameworks of plenitude and identity. Röschlaub, embalming absence in the very tissue of vitality, offers us an unprecedented—not to say heretical—vision of life itself: as the failure of synthesis, as dialectic that never concludes.
May we someday possess the fortitude to tarry with this hiatus as he did.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
medicine, vitalism, romanticism, dialectics, ontology, hiatus, metaphysics
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*“The true vital force is not a being but a wavering within being; a hiatus that clasps the organic but does not belong to it, as though its essence were founded in lack.” Translation mine.
1. See Reil, J.C., “Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode bei Geisteszerrüttungen” (Halle, 1803) for contrastive vitalist formulations based upon teleological principles.
2. Hay, Charles, “The Romantic Body: Anatomy, Spirit, and the German Psyche” in *Studies in European Medical Thought*, Vol. 12, 1983.
3. Giglioni, Guido. “Vitalistic Theories from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment” in *The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Medicine*, ed. Solomon et al., Routledge, 2016.
4. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. *Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life*, 1848. Coleridge’s understanding of the ‘life-principle’ is deeply indebted to Röschlaub’s dynamic tension model.