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

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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 first, the possibility of finding 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 defined 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 finishing his medical education and writing the thesis that still
defines 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 field hospital for its fighters.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 fighters 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 defined 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
identified 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 identifies 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 final c­ hapters
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 find the ongoing elaboration of a
school of thought, that is, a collection of more or less divergent thinkers
testing constituted methods against new problems. Debates about names
are, however, not without their dangers. In particular, insisting on an epis-
temological focus in Canguilhem can obscure his work as a philosopher
concerned with the entire range of possible human experiences, activities,
and values.
Jean-François Braunstein addressed this danger with an ­ argument
reformulating a trope from Pierre Macherey, who identified a
‘Canguilhem after Canguilhem,’ a philosopher who reformulated his
thinking in the face of Foucault’s critique (Macherey 1998). Braunstein
offered, instead, the idea of a ‘Canguilhem before Canguilhem.’ On
the basis of the many short articles and reviews Canguilhem wrote in
the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as a co-authored book in 1939, he
argued that Canguilhem had already begun to develop a distinctive phi-
losophy through his early association with Alain, pen name for Émile
Chartier, followed by a turn to Bergson (Braunstein 2000). Xavier Roth
has expanded this approach and shown the extent to which Canguilhem
was educated in French Neo-Kantian philosophy and the profundity
of the transformation that happened as he began his medical studies
 Preface    xi

and renounced pacifism in the second half of the 1930s (Roth 2013).
Guillaume Le Blanc has given an important reading of Canguilhem’s
interest in anthropology and its connections to his biological philosophy,
with a focus on his later positions (Le Blanc 2010). And the ongoing
publication of Canguilhem’s Oeuvres complètes, begun in 2011, prom-
ises to provoke continued interest. Thanks to all of this work, there is a
growing awareness that Canguilhem’s personal history, that is to say, the
history he lived and participated in from his birth in 1904 to his death
in 1995, was that of a philosopher who endeavored to form and test his
thinking through his commitments and actions in the world around him.
In anglophone philosophy, however, it has been found important
to claim that Canguilhem was more of a historian than a philosopher
(Gutting 2005, 10). Perhaps such conclusions can be drawn because
Canguilhem’s reserve continues to do its work, encouraging its pur-
suit by those outside academic philosophy. The anthropologist Paul
Rabinow, also known for his work around Foucault, has been one of
these (Rabinow 1994). But recent translations and new work involving
Canguilhem, undertaken by anthropologists, historians, philosophers,
and others suggest that now is the time for a philosophical reconsidera-
tion.6 The diversity of interest in his writings should remind us that this is
a philosopher who believed that philosophy becomes valuable in encoun-
ters with the events, practices, and situations foreign to itself. It is up to
those who call themselves philosophers, therefore, to begin reading his
writings, endeavoring to situate them in relation to what is outside phi-
losophy and any suppositions about the autonomy of thought itself or its
history. Such endeavors, wherever they begin, can only aid in the revitali-
zation of what it means to do philosophy now.
The book before you takes the risk of trying to read Canguilhem as a
philosopher of error both to show his importance in the recent history of
philosophy and to suggest his continuing relevance. If others have argued
that he is a philosopher of error, they have generally done so from the per-
spective of his later writings. This is likely because Foucault himself sug-
gested that Canguilhem was a philosopher of error on their basis.7 This
book, however, shows that this was the problem with which he grappled
from the start. I have written it primarily by reading his published writings

6See, for example, Canguilhem ([1952] 2008) and Geroulanos (2017).

7For more on Foucault’s debt to Canguilhem’s later work, see Talcott (2014).
xii    Preface

and unpublished lecture notes on error and attempting to situate these

in relation to the concerns and events to which they responded. This led
me also to approach Canguilhem through the authors that he read, com-
mented on, borrowed from, and resisted, Alain, Bergson, and Bachelard
above all. And finally, it led me to focus on Foucault, though not with-
out mentioning or discussing others who also followed Canguilhem by
resisting him. There is a good case to be made, we will see, that without
Canguilhem there would be no Foucault as we know him. And though
further studies are needed, this book suggests that postwar French philos-
ophy in general would be quite different without Canguilhem.
Canguilhem positioned his writings as contributions to a philosoph-
ical anthropology, though we will see that this led him to argue for the
dehumanization of various institutions and disciplines, including psychol-
ogy, in the same way that surgeons dehumanize the flesh in order to bet-
ter operate upon it. In this, he helped to open a space for Foucault’s
efforts to rouse his contemporaries from their anthropological sleep. If
Canguilhem, like so many of his contemporaries, speaks the language of
man [l’homme] and uses the masculine pronoun when referring to peo-
ple as both a species and as individuals, he encourages perhaps other
conceptions of subjectivity than those of the European colonist. When
I quote or paraphrase him, using either man or human being, I do
not disguise his language. I aim, however, at greater ambiguity in my
choice of nouns and pronouns. And if the reader finds it questionable
whether Canguilhem’s positions successfully escape difficulties facing
people today, this should be read not as a sign to condemn his work,
but rather as a reminder of the difficulty of any philosophical effort and
an invitation to put his to the test of new problems in order consider
the functional variation it might admit and the aid that might thereby
be conferred on contemporary efforts. Though I began by recalling that
Canguilhem was a hero of the Resistance, this is no assertion of perfec-
tion. I insist, instead, on his importance in a certain history, one that
informs much present work in and outside of philosophy.
My primary aim has not been to discern whether Canguilhem gives
the correct reading of the authors he discusses. His range of references is
so wide and rich that, had I engaged in such a task, the reading this book
gives would not have been possible, nor would it have been faithful to
his conception of philosophical work. My aim has been, rather, to cap-
ture something of the endeavor that he undertook and the challenges he
faced therein from the late 1920s through the mid-1960s.
 Preface    xiii

The following chapters can be read separately, though they are

designed to be read from beginning to end. There are occasional over-
laps between materials covered, though with differences in emphasis, and
these should provide continuity rather than needless repetition. Because
of its historical scope, this book addresses later writings usually deployed
to argue that Canguilhem is a philosopher of error only in the last chap-
ter. I am setting the stage, then, for a second volume that considers the
latter part of Canguilhem’s career, both his ongoing discussion with
Foucault and others, and his responses to the new, molecular biology
and its implications. This later volume will also include some writings
from the period covered here, but which make sense to treat in relation
to his later career. It is my hope that the current book will contribute to
an understanding of the philosophical value of the history of philosophy
and give rise to further interest in Canguilhem’s work and its importance
for thinkers, writers, scientists, physicians, and other practitioners. I hope
too that people will take up and test his methods, as they find them, in
an effort to make sense of their own problems and concerns.

Philadelphia, USA Samuel Talcott

July 2018

References
Bing, F., J.-F. Braunstein, and E. Roudinesco, eds. 1998. Actualité de Georges
Canguilhem: Le Normal et le pathologique. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut
Synthélabo.
Braunstein, Jean-François. 2000. “Canguilhem avant Canguilhem.” Revue d’his-
toire des sciences, Tome 53/1, janvier-mars, 9–26.
Canguilhem, Georges. (1943) 1989. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated
by C. R. Fawcett. Brooklyn: Zone Books; (1943) 1966. Le normal et le
pathologique. Paris: PUF.
———. (1952) 2008. Knowledge of Life. Translated by Geroulanos and Ginsburg.
New York: Fordham University Press; (1952) 1965. Connaissance de la vie.
2nd ed. Paris: Vrin.
———. 1977. Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie. Paris:
Vrin; English translation: 1988. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the
Life Sciences. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Cambridge: MIT Press.
———. (1992) 1995. “Introduction to Penser la folie: essais sur Michel
Foucault”. Translated by A. Hobart. Critical Inquiry 21: 297–289.
xiv    Preface

———. 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem.

Edited by François Delaporte. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Brooklyn: Zone
Books.
———. 2004. Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès. Paris: Éditions Allia.
———. 2015. Oeuvres complètes, Tome 4, Edited by C. Limoges. Paris: Vrin.
Foucault, Michel. 1989. “Introduction by Michel Foucault.” In Canguilhem
(1943) 1989, 7–24.
Geroulanos, Stefanos. 2017. Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History
of the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gutting, Gary, ed. 2005. Continental Philosophy of Science. Malden: Blackwell.
Homer. 2018. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton.
Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2010. Canguilhem et la vie humaine. Paris: PUF.
Lecourt, Dominique. 1975. Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem,
and Foucault. Translated by B. Brewster. London: NLB.
———. 2008. Georges Canguilhem. Paris: PUF.
Lévy, Gilles, and Francis Cordet. 1974. À nous, Auvergne! Paris: Presses de la Cité.
Limoges, Camille. 2015. “Introduction. Philosophie Biologique, Histoire des
Sciences, et Interventions Philosophique: Georges Canguilhem 1940–1965.”
In Canguilhem 2015, 7–48.
Macherey, Pierre. 1998. In a Materialist Way. Translated by T. Stolze. London:
Verso.
Rabinow, Paul. 1994. “Introduction: A Vital Rationalist.” In Canguilhem 1994,
11–22.
Roth, Xavier. 2013. Georges Canguilhem et l’unité de l’expérience: juger et agir
(1926–1939). Paris: Vrin.
Talcott, Samuel. 2014. “Errant Life, Molecular Biology, and the
Conceptualization of Biopower: Georges Canguilhem, François Jacob, and
Michel Foucault.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 36(2): 254–279.
 Acknowledgements

It is customary for writers of scholarly works, after acknowledging what

they have learned from others, to take responsibility for their own errors.
Such a procedure aims to repay a debt in the most conscientious of ways
and without damage to those who provided the credit, as it were, that
financed the project. But is it not possible to receive bad advice and
accept it? Is it not possible that an author receives such advice and by
learning to reject it furthers their own work? That such questions are sys-
tematically ignored in acknowledgements shows that we are dealing with
a literary form dominated by custom. What is important here is to give
recognition and be thankful.
But are we really expressing thanks when we take credit for the errors
in our work? It might seem so insofar as we relieve others of responsibil-
ity for a work to which they did not directly contribute. But the implicit
or explicit treatment of acknowledgement as the repayment of a debt,
credit extended that is now being returned, might suggest otherwise.
In such recognition, accounts are settled as much or more than thanks
given. Of course, this is why writers often add that they are incapable of
repaying the debt, thereby suggesting, in all modesty, that they are truly
thankful for what they have been given by others.
Perhaps, however, there is a certain greed in the desire to locate all
errors within one’s own efforts. This figures error, moreover, as a mis-
take in need of correction. But can one even claim to be the origin of all
the mistakes that one might make? If I read a doubtful assertion some-
where and then repeat this, is it solely my mistake? In claiming that it

xv
xvi    Acknowledgements

is, I assert my responsibility for it. And there is truth to this concerning
a work like a book—after all, it is one or more individuals who under-
took the project and without whom it would be not exist. A book has
a creator or creators: the one(s) who wrote it. And in writing it as they
did, they are responsible for it. Still, is it not rather grandiose to proclaim
responsibility for all that goes astray in what one has written?
Following Canguilhem, I suggest that there are other meanings of
error than the mistake. He locates a different, more original sense in
the trial and error exhibited by the living as they confront, more or less
blindly, the contingencies and challenges of their own milieux. Here,
error is not so much mistake as it is going off course and ending up in
the wrong place, lost. And for those of the living that live through their
use of tools, and the thought that this makes possible, this leads life to
take the form of adventure. The uncertainty and seeming impossibility of
getting back on course certainly does not prohibit feeling that one must
find a way back. And there is a good reason to think that the very effort
to do so, even if destined for failure, can also lead to invention.
Writing this book has often left me feeling lost and has certainly taken
much long labor. The preparation for it has gone on, intermittently but
consistently, longer still. And so I find that I have many to thank, not
foremost for the information that I learned from them or the mistakes to
which they subjected to me, but for the adventures, intellectual and other-
wise, which they have lived with me, on behalf of me, near me, or against
me, for however brief or long a duration while I worked towards this
book. Each will know—or be able to imagine—how their own endeavors
have intersected with mine here. Thanks, then, in alphabetical order, to:
Amy Allen, Alain Beaulieu, Jeremy Bell, Peg Birmingham, Jim Bradshaw,
Pascale-Anne Brault, Jean-François Braunstein, Jeff Brown, Martin
Carrion, Leah Comeau, Ruth Crispin, Jim Cummings, Michael Dockray,
Michael Eng, Anne Marie Flanagan, Christine Flanagan, Tim Freeman,
Terrence Geary, Avery Goldman, Josh Hayes, Peter Hoffer, Warren Hope,
Lee Howell, Nazim Karaca, Laurie Kirzsner, Colin Koopman, Gerard
Kuperus, Kimberly Lamm, Chris Lauer, Len Lawlor, Caitlin Leach,
Rick Lee, Thomas Lindbloom, Lee Linthicum, Richard Lynch, Mary
Beth Mader, Ed McGushin, Marjolein Oele, Dorothea Olkowski, David
Macauley, Frédérique Marty, Sam McAuliffe, Holly Moore, Iván Moya
Diez, Robert Mugerauer, Kevin Murphy, Michael Naas, David Peña-
Guzmán, Vikki Pike, Eileen Rizo-Patron, John Roberts, Cliff Robinson,
 Acknowledgements    xvii

Kim Robson, Roy Robson, Katya Roelse, Charles Scott, Janae Sholtz,
Elizabeth Sikes, Peter Steeves, Dianna Taylor, Kevin Thompson, David
Traxel, John Tresch, Matteo Vagelli, Pär Widén, Jason Wirth, Sokthan
Yeng, and Perry Zurn. I am particularly thankful to Darrell Moore, wher-
ever he may be, for starting me off on this course. And I am saddened that
Bob Boughner was not able to see this book finished and read my thanks
for his conversation.
Material support from University of the Sciences has also been help-
ful, and I am grateful for this to both Suzanne Murphy, former Dean
of Misher College of Arts and Sciences, and Phyllis Blumberg, Director
of the Teaching and Learning Center. I also thank the National
Endowment for the Humanities for support in attending the 2017
summer institute on City/Nature at the University of Washington, as
well as the institute’s organizers—Richard Watts, Thaisa Way, and Ken
Yocom—and the participants in discussions that helped with the writing
of Chapter 2.
Thanks also to Amy Invernizzi and Phil Getz at Palgrave Macmillan
for their patience with my preparation of the manuscript, which took far
longer than anticipated.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as “Georges Canguilhem
and the Philosophical Problem of Error,” in Dialogue: Canadian
Philosophical Review, Volume 52, Issue 4, December 2013. Thanks to
Cambridge University Press for allowing its republication here.
My gratitude also goes to Charles Meyers and staff of the J.W.
England library, as well as Nathalie Queyroux at the Centre d’Archives
en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences for their invaluable help,
the former in procuring obscure French books in West Philadelphia, the
latter in opening Canguilhem’s archives on the Rue d’Ulm to me while
she was still busy organizing them.
I cannot fully express my gratitude to my parents, Katherine Talcott
and Russell Talcott, without whom none of this would have been pos-
sible, for the adventures we have had, their examples, and all sorts of
support. My many thanks go also to Cynthia Ponder and Alma Talcott
for their examples, good humor, and encouragement. And, finally, I am
especially thankful to Erin Ramsden whose patient discussion and smart
questions have helped me better understand my work on a few, lit-
tle-known French philosophers.
 Note on Texts, Translations,
and References

I make much use of Canguilhem’s medical thesis, published in 1943

as Essai sur quelques problèmes concernants le normal et le pathologique
(Clermont-Ferrand: Imprimerie “La Montagne”), or Essay on Some
Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological. This was repub-
lished without the original preface and with a few modifications as
Section One of his 1966 Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: PUF). It
is widely available in the later edition via Carolyn Fawcett’s translation
of The Normal and the Pathological (Brooklyn: Zone Books). With the
exception of the last chapter, my book focuses on the 1943 text and its
English translation, abbreviating this as Essay.
In general, I have quoted from available translations, though I have
sometimes modified these or, more frequently, indicated the French
for greater clarity. I have always consulted Canguilhem’s French and all
translations are mine unless I refer to an existing English translation. I
make limited use of archival materials from his two courses on error. And
I have often had recourse to the writings to which Canguilhem refers in
order to better understand his claims.
Regarding references, I put translations first in the reference list where
possible, since I cite these in quotations. Bibliographical information
for the original French, in these cases, can be found in the same entry,
after the translation. Since this book endeavors to reconstruct a history, I
include original dates of publications in citations and references.
Given the plethora of short writings, lectures, etc., in numerous, differ-
ent sources and their collection in his Complete Works [Oeuvres complètes],

xix
xx    Note on Texts, Translations, and References

page references for Canguilhem’s writings are, wherever possible, from the
currently published volumes. For the sake of clarity, however, I give writings
available in these Works their own reference entries, according to original
publication details and refer to the original date of publication when citing
them. Chapter reference lists include, therefore, bibliographical informa-
tion for both the original source of publication and Canguilhem’s Oeuvres
complètes. Since the volumes containing his well-known books have not yet
been published, page references to these follow the pagination of the most
widely available published editions.
 Contents

1 Power, Ruse, and Resistance in Societies of Control:

Canguilhem on Algeria, the Republic, and Education 1
A Political Education During the Downfall of the Republic 3
The Algeria Writings: War, the New Janissaries, and Other
Dangers 15
Education: Experience, Adventure, Silence 30
References 35

2 The Births of Political Resistance and Biological

Philosophy Out of the Spirit of Medicine: Error
in the Early Years 39
Philosophy of Life, Philosophy of War 40
Medicine, Philosophy, and Error 42
Alain, the Fiction of Gods and Spirit, and the Problem of Error 48
Fascism and Marxism in the Countryside: The CVIA
and Peasants 60
Concluding Remarks 70
References 73

3 Technical Alterations in the Problem of Error: From

the True and the False to the Normal and the Pathological 77
Notes from the Lycée de Valenciennes 79
On Descartes and Technique 80
The Treatise on Logic and Morals 82

xxi
xxii    Contents

The Course on “Error” 91

The Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal
and the Pathological 95
Concluding Remarks 100
References 102

4 Error and the Problem of Creation 105

The Young Canguilhem on Vitalism and Creation 107
Canguilhem’s Two Commentaries on Creative Evolution 113
Bergson, Alain, and the Problem of Creation 123
Alain: The Powers of the False and Creative Labor 130
References 138

5 Knowledge of Life True to Life: Medicine,

Experimentation, and Milieu 141
Medicine and Experimentation in the Essay on Some
Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological 143
The Place of Experimentation in Knowledge of Life 156
Canguilhem’s Reflexive Method and the Concept of Milieu 166
References 178

6 Becoming Rationalist: Biological Philosophy, History

of the Reflex Concept, and the Uses of Water 179
Biological Philosophy and Gaston Bachelard: Becoming
Rationalist 181
The Reflex: History of a Concept and Its Philosophical Value 191
On Psychology and Psychiatry 201
Bachelard, Canguilhem and the Uses of Water in the History
of Madness 208
References 215

7 Experimentation and the Crisis of Medicine 219

Dagognet’s Biological Philosophy and Clinical Anthropology 220
Canguilhem, Leriche, and the Dehumanization of Medicine 230
“To Care Is to Undertake an Experiment”: Industrial Societies
and the Crisis of Medicine 237
Foucault, Canguilhem, and the History of Modern Medical
Experience 250
References 257
 Contents    xxiii

8 Put to the Test: Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy

and a New Concept of Error 259
Science and the Problem of Error in 1955–1956 260
Histories of Scientific Concepts of Life, Biological Philosophy
of Error 264
Ruse and Truth, Death and Life in Artistic Creation 269
The Monstrous in Life, Imagination, and Science 275
Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy Put to the Test 280
References 289

Index 291