Concept
Vitality
Overview
Vitality (from Middle French vitalité, from Latin vītālitās, from Latin vīta 'life') is the capacity to live, grow, or develop. Vitality is also the characteristic that distinguishes living from non-living things. To experience vitality is regarded as a basic psychological drive and, in philosophy, a component to the will to live. As such, people seek to maximize their vitality or their experience of vitality—that which corresponds to an enhanced physiological capacity and mental state.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Vitality is discussed.
Vitality is rather a physiological than a mental characteristic; it is presumably always present where there is perfect health, but it tends to ebb with advancing years, and gradually dwindles to nothing in old age. In vigorous children it quickly rises to a maximum before they reach school age, and then tends to be diminished by education.
Bertrand Russell, Education and the good life
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
And here, as the best mode of determining what are the traits which distinguish vitality from non-vitality, we shall do well to compare the two most unlike kinds of vitality, and see in what they agree. Manifestly, that which is essential to Life must be that which is common to Life of all orders.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
names the idea; opens on it
There lies the stumbling-block of the vitalistic theories. We shall not reproach them, as is ordinarily done, with replying to the question by the question itself: the "vital principle" may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance,…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may…
Bertrand Russell, The conquest of happiness
names the idea; opens on it
This supreme vitality is the distinguishing mark of the great artist.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Vitality
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Lebensphilosophie.