Georges Canguilhem

Works

• 1943The Normal and the Pathological

  His medical thesis, expanded in 1966: disease is not a mere quantitative deviation from the normal, as Comte and Claude Bernard held, but a different, more restricted norm of life; health is the capacity to set new norms.

• 1952Knowledge of Life

  Essays on experimentation in biology, cell theory, vitalism, machine and organism, and the living being and its milieu: biology has to start from the living being as a centre of values, not from the machine.

Position

Canguilhem’s starting question was medical: is disease merely a quantitative variation of the normal state, as Broussais, Comte and Claude Bernard had taught? In The Normal and the Pathological he answered no. For a living being, “normal” is not a statistical average but a norm it institutes itself. Health, in his phrase, is “une marge de tolérance des infidélités du milieu”, a margin of tolerance for the inconstancies of the environment: the capacity to fall ill and recover, and to set new norms in new situations. Disease is also a norm of life, but a narrower one that can no longer adapt. Medicine therefore rests on the experience of the sick person before it rests on physiology. In the essays of Knowledge of Life he defended the autonomy of biology against mechanism without returning to a metaphysical vitalism, traced the history of the concept of milieu and argued that machines should be understood as extensions of organisms rather than organisms as machines. As a historian of science he followed Bachelard in writing the history of concepts rather than of great men or discoveries, and introduced the notion of a “scientific ideology” that precedes a science; his study of the reflex argued that the concept was formed by Thomas Willis rather than by Descartes. His lecture “What Is Psychology?” (1956) attacked psychology as a technique of adjustment without a clear object. Through his students François Dagognet and Dominique Lecourt, through Foucault and through readers such as Althusser and Bourdieu, his history of norms and concepts shaped much of French philosophy after 1960.

Life & context

Georges Canguilhem was born on 4 June 1904 in Castelnaudary in the Aude. At the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris he was taught by Alain, whose pacifism he shared in his early years, and in 1924 he entered the École normale supérieure, in the same year as Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan and Daniel Lagache. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1927 and taught at lycées in Charleville, Douai, Valenciennes, Béziers and Toulouse, where from 1936 he also studied medicine. In 1940 he refused to teach under the Vichy regime. In 1941 he took over Jean Cavaillès’s post at the University of Strasbourg, which had withdrawn to Clermont-Ferrand, and joined the Resistance movement Libération-Sud; under the name “Lafont” he served as a doctor in the fighting at Mont Mouchet in 1944. His medical thesis on the normal and the pathological appeared in 1943. After the war he taught at Strasbourg again, was inspector general of philosophy from 1948, and in 1955 received his doctorate in philosophy with a study of the formation of the concept of reflex. In the same year he succeeded Bachelard at the Sorbonne and as director of the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques, which he led until 1971. He was the rapporteur for Michel Foucault’s thesis Folie et déraison (1961), and Pierre Bourdieu registered with him a thesis project on the temporal structures of affective life that he never completed. Canguilhem died on 11 September 1995.

Further main works

• The Formation of the Concept of Reflex in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955)
• What Is Psychology? (lecture 1956, published 1958)
• Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Sciences (Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, 1968)
• Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences (1977)