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A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings of Georges Canguilhem
Georges Canguilhem is one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.
A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.
A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.
- GenresPhilosophyTheory
481 pages, Hardcover
First published January 18, 1994
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About the author
Georges Canguilhem
47 books36 followersGeorges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
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June 12, 2020
Yet more from the master about how the concept of the normal was assembled in the nineteenth century via a codicilification of deviation and pathology.
Anti-individualism: "If only individuals exist, then there is no species of disease, only sick individuals. Nominalists... shared one common purpose -- to show that universals are merely a way of using singular things and not in the nature of things themselves. Nominalists look upon shared properties of individual things as an authentic equivalent to universals.... For the nominalist, diverse things must exhibit some minimal degree of similarity before one can construct the concept of that similar property which is supposed to take the place of universal essences." (307-8)
"In what sense is an organism organized? This was not a question that lent itself to easy solution in terms of mechanical models. Preformationism, the theory that the growth of the adult organism from the original seed is simply a matter of enlargement of structures already contained in miniature in the seed... referred the whole issue of organization back to Creation. The rise of embryology as a basic science in the 19th century made it possible to reformulate the question.... Bernard was possessed by one idea: that the organized living thing is the temporary manifestation of an idee directrice, a guiding idea." (312)
"Bernard seems to have sensed that biological heredity consists in the the transmission of something we now think of as coded information." (314) Modern biology "has dropped the vocabulary and concepts of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry, all more or less directly based on geometrical models, in favor of the vocabulary of linguistics and communications theory." (316)
"The germ theory of contagious diseases has certainly owed much of its success to the fact that it embodies an ontological representation of sickness.... By contrast, Greek medicine offered a conception of disease which was not ontological, but dynamic, no localizationist, but totalizing." (322)
"Every conception of pathology must be based on the prior knowledge of the corresponding normal state, but conversely the scientific study of pathological cases becomes an indispensible phase in the overall search for the laws of the normal state." (329) "A pathological symptom, considered by itself, expresses the hyperactivity of a function whose product is exactly identical with the product of the same function in so-called normal conditions.... The pathological can be distinguished as suchm that is, as an alternative of the normal state, only at the level of organic totality." (335)
"Knowledge is better than ignorance when action is required."
Quotes Victor Prus (1821): "It is through the changes which the disease of an organ and sometimes the complete suspension of its activity transmit to its functions that we learn the organ's use and importance." (341)
"Because life is activity of information and assimilation, it is the root of all technical activity." (343)
"Any normality limited to maintaining itself, hostile to any variation in the themes that express it, and incapable of adapting to new situations is a normality devoid of normative intent." (352) "A mutant individual, as the point of departure for a new species, is both pathological, because it is a divergence, and normal, because it maintains itself and reproduces." (353) "The pathological is not the absence of biological norm; it is another norm, but one that is, comparatively speaking, pushed aside by life." (354)
KEY POINT: "An environment is normal when it allows species to multiply and diversify within it." This represents the core value with the Canguilhem's analytic system: a bias in favor of complexity, and the circumstances that enable the elaboration of complexity, which is to say resilience.
"Health becomes perceptible on in relation to diseases... Health is a margin of tolerance for the inconstancies of the environment." (355)
"Artists, whose function is to dream for mankind beyond what is known, to scorn the real, to make the need for change imperative, found a treasure trove in the thought of children." (359)
"Try as one will, a plurality of norms is comprehensible only as a hierarchy. Norms can coexist on a footing of equality only if drained of their normative intent.... A norm cannot be normative without being militant, that is, intolerant. In intolerance, in aggressive normativity, there is of course hatred, but in tolerance there is contempt." (364)
"Rationalist and positivist norms: reason is superior to mysticism; noncontradiction is superior to participation; science is superior to myth; industry is superior to magic; faith in progress is superior to the progress of faith." (367)
"Modernity is not normal in the sense of having achieved a definitive superior state; it is normative, however, because it strives constantly to outdo itself." (368)
"Science is a contemplative possession of reality through exclusion of all illusion, error and ignorance, whereas Wisdom is the use of principles of appreciation provided by science for the purpose of brining human life into a state of practical and affective perfection, that is, happiness." (379)
Anti-individualism: "If only individuals exist, then there is no species of disease, only sick individuals. Nominalists... shared one common purpose -- to show that universals are merely a way of using singular things and not in the nature of things themselves. Nominalists look upon shared properties of individual things as an authentic equivalent to universals.... For the nominalist, diverse things must exhibit some minimal degree of similarity before one can construct the concept of that similar property which is supposed to take the place of universal essences." (307-8)
"In what sense is an organism organized? This was not a question that lent itself to easy solution in terms of mechanical models. Preformationism, the theory that the growth of the adult organism from the original seed is simply a matter of enlargement of structures already contained in miniature in the seed... referred the whole issue of organization back to Creation. The rise of embryology as a basic science in the 19th century made it possible to reformulate the question.... Bernard was possessed by one idea: that the organized living thing is the temporary manifestation of an idee directrice, a guiding idea." (312)
"Bernard seems to have sensed that biological heredity consists in the the transmission of something we now think of as coded information." (314) Modern biology "has dropped the vocabulary and concepts of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry, all more or less directly based on geometrical models, in favor of the vocabulary of linguistics and communications theory." (316)
"The germ theory of contagious diseases has certainly owed much of its success to the fact that it embodies an ontological representation of sickness.... By contrast, Greek medicine offered a conception of disease which was not ontological, but dynamic, no localizationist, but totalizing." (322)
"Every conception of pathology must be based on the prior knowledge of the corresponding normal state, but conversely the scientific study of pathological cases becomes an indispensible phase in the overall search for the laws of the normal state." (329) "A pathological symptom, considered by itself, expresses the hyperactivity of a function whose product is exactly identical with the product of the same function in so-called normal conditions.... The pathological can be distinguished as suchm that is, as an alternative of the normal state, only at the level of organic totality." (335)
"Knowledge is better than ignorance when action is required."
Quotes Victor Prus (1821): "It is through the changes which the disease of an organ and sometimes the complete suspension of its activity transmit to its functions that we learn the organ's use and importance." (341)
"Because life is activity of information and assimilation, it is the root of all technical activity." (343)
"Any normality limited to maintaining itself, hostile to any variation in the themes that express it, and incapable of adapting to new situations is a normality devoid of normative intent." (352) "A mutant individual, as the point of departure for a new species, is both pathological, because it is a divergence, and normal, because it maintains itself and reproduces." (353) "The pathological is not the absence of biological norm; it is another norm, but one that is, comparatively speaking, pushed aside by life." (354)
KEY POINT: "An environment is normal when it allows species to multiply and diversify within it." This represents the core value with the Canguilhem's analytic system: a bias in favor of complexity, and the circumstances that enable the elaboration of complexity, which is to say resilience.
"Health becomes perceptible on in relation to diseases... Health is a margin of tolerance for the inconstancies of the environment." (355)
"Artists, whose function is to dream for mankind beyond what is known, to scorn the real, to make the need for change imperative, found a treasure trove in the thought of children." (359)
"Try as one will, a plurality of norms is comprehensible only as a hierarchy. Norms can coexist on a footing of equality only if drained of their normative intent.... A norm cannot be normative without being militant, that is, intolerant. In intolerance, in aggressive normativity, there is of course hatred, but in tolerance there is contempt." (364)
"Rationalist and positivist norms: reason is superior to mysticism; noncontradiction is superior to participation; science is superior to myth; industry is superior to magic; faith in progress is superior to the progress of faith." (367)
"Modernity is not normal in the sense of having achieved a definitive superior state; it is normative, however, because it strives constantly to outdo itself." (368)
"Science is a contemplative possession of reality through exclusion of all illusion, error and ignorance, whereas Wisdom is the use of principles of appreciation provided by science for the purpose of brining human life into a state of practical and affective perfection, that is, happiness." (379)
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