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Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error Samuel Talcott Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error Samuel Talcott Department of Humanities University of the Sciences Philadelphia, PA, USA ISBN 978-3-030-00778-2 ISBN 978-3-030-00779-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00779-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover illustration: Jean-François de Le Motte, Vanité et Trompe l’Oeil, n.d., ca. 1650–1700, 118.7 90.8 cm, Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon × This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Katherine, Russell, Cynthia, Alma, and Erin PREFACE Tell me about a complicated man Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost… —The Odyssey1 If, as Georges Canguilhem said, it is human to make mistakes and only an evil spirit could willfully persist in error, what are we to make of some- one who persists in asserting the inescapability of the problem of error?2 This book introduces the reader to Canguilhem through his commit- ment to this philosophical problem from his early writings to the height of his career, approximately 1927–1966. Via close textual analysis and interpretation, I argue that he is persistently concerned with this prob- lem, even when things appear otherwise. As a philosophical problem, this is no passing question, but a pressing need and the means by which he confronts traditional philosophical questions and concrete worries. It concerns, at frst, the possibility of fnding a place in life for the error, the mistaken belief that, when recognized, we wish we had known ear- lier so that we did not suffer from it. And yet, the experience of error is essential to who we are, even when, perhaps especially when we want to be right. This book suggests that Canguilhem’s commitment to the 1See Homer (2018, 105). 2See Canguilhem (1977, 9). vii viii PREFACE problem led him to develop a philosophy that endures, that is, a phi- losophy capable of altering and reformulating itself in the face of great upheaval, both intellectual and political. Born in 1904, he grew up in a world defned by the event and ongo- ing possibility of massive violence and political catastrophe. Still in his thirties, he lived through the German invasion and occupation of France. Canguilhem is remembered today as a hero of the Resistance, though this is not to say a hero of violence. He would recall his friend, philoso- pher and resistant, Jean Cavaillès, eventually executed by the Nazis, for the daring lucidity with which he undertook armed attacks against the German forces in France. And he admired the way Cavaillès’ commit- ment to the universal, found in his study of mathematics, provided the resolve he needed to undertake such combat against the belligerent, vio- lent, and invading forces of particularism. But Canguilhem was reserved about his own activity. Active, however, he was. In addition to his Resistance activities, here- placed Cavaillès as philosophy teacher at the University of Strasbourg, relocated to Clermont-Ferrand after the German occupation of Alsace, while fnishing his medical education and writing the thesis that still defnes his reputation, an Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), later expanded under the title The Normal and the Pathological (1966). Towards the end of his life, when asked about his involvement in the Resistance, he recalled putting his medi- cal skills to use in organizing a feld hospital for its fghters.3 We know, among other things, that he was elected in 1944 by the different resist- ance groups in the Auvergne, often considered the heart of the move- ment, to direct its political branch in the region.4 And we know that he was nearly killed in an ambush after volunteering on a mission to rescue wounded fghters trapped behind enemy lines.5 If he did not advertise his own experiences and activity later, this was not because of a discretion that he maintained about these experi- ences and memories alone. Those who knew him later as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne or director of 3See the interview with François Bing and Jean-François Braunstein in Bing, Braunstein and Roudinesco (1998, 122). 4See Lévy and Cordet (1974, 240) and Limoges (2015, 15). 5See Lévy and Cordet (1974, 329–330) and Limoges’ editorial note in Canguilhem (2015, 197). PReface ix the Institute for the History of Sciences and Techniques testify to his personal reserve [réserve], a word that connotes discretion, but also resistance to agreement. Professing, late in life, continued allegiance to his earlier historical studies of biological concepts, he announced that his reader would have to decide whether he maintained his own way of working in the face of new thinking because of some réserve, or from laziness, or perhaps incapacity (Canguilhem 1977, 10). Curiosity about his thought, he suggests, is no idle matter, but a risk that demands effort and leads to a choice. Among his francophone readers, it is gen- erally agreed that it was out of discretion, and a tendency towards resist- ance, that he pursued his work quietly in the history of science, avoiding the grand debates and scandalized disagreements that defned postwar French intellectual life. Shortly after Canguilhem’s profession of conceptualism, in an essay that introduced many anglophones to his work, Michel Foucault gave this very interpretation and attempted to correct for the relative ano- nymity to which this had condemned him (Foucault 1989). According to Foucault, Canguilhem’s distinctive interests and concerns can be identifed in the work of philosophers, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, Marxists, and many more in the postwar period. Although he was not directly Canguilhem’s student, the latter agreed to function as direc- tor of Foucault’s thesis after reading it, later saying that he discovered a philosopher in his History of Madness (Canguilhem [1992] 1995, 289). Dominique Lecourt, who was one of his students, notes that Canguilhem would not have appreciated Foucault’s “hyperbolic praise,” and suggests that he treats Canguilhem as a deus ex machina for French thought in the 1960s (Lecourt 2008, 5–6). This is perhaps, however, to stretch Foucault’s claims insofar as he identifes two traditions of phil- osophical thought in France, placing Canguilhem in “a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept” and opposing this to “a phi- losophy of experience, of sense and of subject” (Foucault 1989, 8). This book will tend to support Foucault’s distinction, while undoing any claims about mutual exclusivity. Canguilhem, we will see, had much to say regarding experience, sense, and the subject. Lecourt also hesitates before Foucault’s claim that Canguilhem was a philosopher of error (Foucault 1989, 23; Lecourt 2008, 5–6). This is, I think, because he believes that it diminishes Canguilhem as a philosopher, whose work does not reduce knowledge to the errors of life, but offers essential lessons about the dangers confronting contemporary societies by x PREFACE insisting on the need to think truth and life together. The fnal chapters of this book will suggest greater continuity between Canguilhem and Foucault, perhaps, than Lecourt is willing to admit. But both Foucault and Lecourt, although for different reasons, agree on his philosophical importance and suggest his continuing relevance: Foucault in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lecourt over a decade after Canguilhem’s death in 1995. And at the Sorbonne today traces of his activity remain visible in the Cavaillès Room, for example, commemorated in 1974 with a lec- ture by Canguilhem on the occasion (Canguilhem 2004, 37–48). More importantly, his writings remain active in the continuing elaboration of historical epistemology there. A name popularized by Lecourt in describing Gaston Bachelard’s work, it has since been applied to Canguilhem and many others, becoming an area of international interest (Lecourt 1975). Lecourt himself, how- ever, named Canguilhem’s approach epistemological history. Foucaultian archeology and genealogy are sometimes treated as endeavors in histori- cal epistemology, even if Foucault called his own work historical ontology. As we will see, though Canguilhem conceived of philosophizing as a per- sonal and singular activity, he also insisted on the importance of collec- tive effort, and could only be pleased to fnd the ongoing elaboration of a school of thought, that is, a collection of more or less divergent thinkers testing constituted methods against new problems.
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