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GEORGES CANGUILHEM, A Vital Rationalist:
selected
writings from Georges Canguilhem, edited by Francois Delaporte, trans.
by
Arthur Goldhammer.
New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Pp.481. ISBN 0-942299-72-8. 24.25. $36.25.
Canguilhem has, across the century,
carefully spied out
how, in the history of science, "obsessional constraints" take hold
of "the curious yet docile mind" (p.72): yet he never argues that
acknowledgement of such obstacles to understanding entails the
levelling of all
knowledge-claims, the restoration of myth in the face of modernity
(pp.367-9).
This selection, covering his philosophy of biology and medicine, is
graced by
another gorgeous Zone Books production and Paul Rabinow's brief,
substantial
introduction, but Canguilhem himself doesn't seem to have had a hand in
its
compilation. Goldhammer's translation finds easily both a crisp
historian's
style, for work on baroque physiology or Comte, and surprising literary
power
for psychoanalytic speculation by Canguilhem as cultural critic. Some,
caught
up by recent interest in Canguilhem, might wish for full translations
of his
work on the reflex concept and of Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie
des
sciences, enormously influential in France. Here, instead, selections
from
these books are amalgamated with chunks of those already translated,
The Normal
and the Pathological [NP] and Ideology and Rationality. But this format
allows
the juxtaposition of material from the books with translations of
scattered
papers from a 50-year span. Those pained at the omission of notable
untranslated writings, like early 1960s essays on Bachelard and Darwin,
can
trace them, thanks to Camille Limoges' 70-page critical bibliography,
an
outstanding resource on twentieth century French intellectual life.
Delaporte divides the material into five
parts. They
cover methodology, epistemology of biomedical sciences, the history of
concepts
(cell, reflex, biological object), textual interpretations (Descartes,
Comte,
Bernard), and positive problems about life and normality. It is,
admittedly,
hard to produce what Rabinow calls "a kind of coherent 'book'" from
Canguilhem's overlapping, distributed output of essays: but some
editorial
strategies are frustrating. Although a survey essay 'Vie' of 1973, from
the French
Encyclopaedia Universalis, is translated in sequence with only brief
omissions,
Delaporte has fragmented and levelled other texts oddly to fit his
conceptual
categories. This creative editing lacks a sense of development in
Canguilhem's
methods or interpretations. Extracts are undated, and it is difficult
and
time-consuming to calibrate passages across bibliography and source
list.
Chapters include material from different periods of Canguilhem's
career, with
entries for encyclopaedias and general history of science texts beside
papers
of quite different status written for specialist collections.
While the collection falls short of an
easy access
introduction, much of value here extends the texts already available in
English. Essays on the epistemology of medicine written after NP are
well
represented. Canguilhem develops his historicized distinction between
active
interventionist medicine, aligned for him with mechanism, and a
watchful
patience which he applauds, since "a dynamic body deserves an expectant
medicine" (p.129). Pursuing the thought from NP that all human
physiology
is applied physiology, Canguilhem argues that there is no loss of
epistemological status in the conversion of theory into therapy
(p.153).
Canguilhem also aligns information theory further with his stress on
the
contextual nature of adaptive body-environment relations or
"discussions". Happy, like cognitive scientists, to apply the concept
of information at subintentional levels of explanation, he views
organisms as
temporary pockets of biological stability, where improbable
organization
permits brief resistance to inevitable thermal equilibrium. Though
noise might
be productive (p.88), Canguilhem defends the integrity of "an organic
order firm in its orientation if precarious in its incarnations".
Without further context, it is hard to
judge how
Canguilhem's views, such as his battery of arguments against mechanism
in the
life sciences, might have shifted in response to other historians of
science,
or to wider cultural changes. He construes mechanism narrowly, as
incompatible
with information theory, incompatible with a notion of biological
function, and
as applicable primarily to geometric and quantitative approaches to the
discontinuous motions of neuromuscular systems. It's less plausible now
to
think (as Canguilhem did in 1937, comparing Aristotle on slaves) that
the
Cartesian beast-machine doctrine was linked, in intention or
consequence, to a
programme for justifying vivisection: and more plausible now, in a
cyborg age
which requires what Canguilhem called an "organology" to explain
machines, to find active matter within historical mechanisms.
The relation of mechanism &
authoritarianism in
Canguilhem poses sharper problems, and this is one area in which
Limoges' hope
for links between Canguilhem's oeuvre and the traces of his career
(p.386) is
realized. Canguilhem's early topics included pacifism, Pirandello,
colonialism,
and suicide as well as Leibniz, Kant, and Bergson: the full dedication
to
medical studies which gave his mature philosophy such power occurred
only when,
in 1940 Toulouse, he refused to teach according to the Vichy regime's
orders.
Canguilhem's active engagement in the Auvergne Resistance was not long
over
when he pointed out interrelations, in cell theory, between
totalitarian
politics, with individuals sacrificed to higher organic society, and
the
vitalistic biology of German Romantic nature philosophers, in which
organisms
are continuous wholes conceptually prior to their components. It's not
that
alternative "French" pictures of discontinuous organic molecules were
any less ideological, being interdependent in turn with Enlightenment
politics
of atomic individuals in contractual association. The overdetermination
of
theoretical concepts is no bar to their efficacy or epistemological
dignity.
But the historian of science, not a scientist but a maker of
judgements, in
this context had clear values to apply. The emphasis here later
shifted, for
"the analytic method in conjunction with the discontinuous imagination"
(p.167) came more strongly under fire through Canguilhem's attention to
a
biological specificity which he thought mechanists miss, since life and
death
are not problems for physics and chemistry. But the role of national
differences in the history of physiology continued to exercise him,
conflict
between French and German schools cropping up in various domains, from
bacteriology to energy utilization in industrialized bodies.
Canguilhem remained confident that
psychoanalysis of
knowledge is compatible with scientific realism, where the latter opens
space
for the normative criticism and judgements of hierarchy essential to
philosophy
(p.384). This reminds us that Foucault's celebrated alignment of
himself with
Canguilhem, against phenomenologists and existentialists, as
investigators of
knowledge, rationality, and concepts rather than of meaning,
experience, and
the subject, should not encourage neglect of their differences. As
Foucault
noted, Canguilhem's polemical realism required the retention of a
true/false
dichotomy as a judgemental, rather than simply descriptive or
conversational,
tool. Canguilhem often uses evidence from present sciences, refusing to
collapse them into mere vehicles of normalization. Indeed, the category
of the
normal is not, for Canguilhem, necessarily linked to surveillance, that
of the
pathological not wholly disciplinary. Like Foucault, he stresses the
priority
of infraction over regularity, infringement over law, for there are no
(normative) norms without something to regulate. But since, for
Canguilhem, we
cannot step back from current norms, we must inevitably be militant,
intolerant, in their expression or defence (p.364). This need not be
the
individual's complicity in an imposed regulatory apparatus, for
biological
(unlike social) norms are intrinsically resistant. There is no diatribe
against
the subject in Canguilhem, as in many influenced by him: indeed he
insists on
the phenomenological, qualitative nature of the health/disease
opposition,
tempted occasionally to posit something like "no disease without
awareness". But Rabinow's suggestion (p.18) of an idiosyncratic
"not-so-latent existentialism" underestimates the extent to which
Canguilhem bypasses consciousness: awareness is corporeal, the wisdom
of the
body testing the adaptability of the internal environment to an
inconstant
external environment of "leaks, holes, escapes and unexpected
resistances" (p.356). Pathology as negativity does involve error, the
risk
of catastrophe being inevitable in maintaining normativity: but
Canguilhem sees
no existentialist responsibility here, only (as NP has it) traces of
anguish.
Thinking of subjectivity in Canguilhem
reveals the
difficulty of extending his deeply biological view of norms to the
cognitive
domain. Leriche's picture of health as "life lived in the silence of
the
organs" doesn't easily apply to psychology, an area Canguilhem has
rarely
approached directly, beyond the deconstructive history of his 1958
paper 'What
is Psychology?' (not included here despite the claim to the contrary on
p.411).
There are hints, about psychology and politics, in three manuscripts on
norms
and normativity from which Delaporte includes selections (undated and
arranged
out of Canguilhem's order). After reworking themes from NP, they
examine the problematic
equation of earlier with inferior mentalities which followed Piaget and
Levy-Bruhl. But while historicizing over-optimistic rationalism,
Canguilhem
defends the possibility of comparing and evaluating mentalities. We
should see
"the modern mentality" not as definitively superior, but as normative
in its ideals of openness to testing in new conditions. The disastrous,
conservative impulse to revert, impossibly, to a wholesale tolerance of
childhood fantasy and puerile myth (p.362) in over-reaction to
positivism
ignores the painful awareness of the desire/reality gulf for which
adults and
moderns have struggled. Resolution of reason's crises lies only in
future
invention and adaptation, not in deceptively reviving past norms as if
on equal
footing: "try as one will, a plurality of norms is comprehensible only
as
a hierarchy" (p.364). The tension here runs deep between democratic
faith
in a rational fallibilism, and Nietzschean joy in the risky aggression
of
expansionist normativity.
Last updated 31 August 2004.