Vitology

Vitology is the discipline Marsh proposes and its absence is the complaint the whole series is built around. The study of life should include power, gerontology and geroscience, physics, medicine, neuroscience and sociology, which is a deliberately cross-disciplinary list, and she holds it ought to replace psychology as a better foundation for understanding emotions and motivation. The argument for its necessity is that the current arrangement has no coherent account of its own subject. All institutions are built according to the dictates of an inconsistent definition of life, academics debate contradictory attributes with no consensus, and the marginalization of life as something that cannot be known coincided with the rise of corporate industrialization. She holds that vitology is a necessary foundation for every scientific or academic study from economics to climatology, and that the lack of an established science of it is not due to a lack of material for research, since the study already forms part of physics given that the laws of physics apply to all force. A great deal of relevant work is skirted around in the study of consciousness, which appears regularly and awkwardly in physics with no clear definition of what it is. Her charge is that the gap is maintained rather than discovered, since scientific superstition produces refusal to study anything associated with the negative image or with rival endogroups, and the study of vitology ought to formulate the guidelines for the structures of all social institutions.

Vitalism, the position that life involves a principle not reducible to physics, was abandoned in the 1800s after the synthesis of urea and the rise of biochemistry, and the word is now largely pejorative in scientific writing. Origin of life research and the definitional problem in astrobiology keep the question of what life is genuinely open. Schrodinger's What is Life proposed that organisms sustain order by exporting entropy. Marsh's proposal is a deliberate return to something vitalism-adjacent, argued not from the inadequacy of biochemistry but from the observation that every culture outside one recent tradition has described life as a force, which is a historical argument rather than an experimental one.