The Origins of Georges Canguilhem's 'Vitalism:' Against the Anthropology of Irritation

Canguilhem’s work in epistemology and in the history of the life sciences rests on a double deontological dogma: a ‘vitalism of norms’ and, as a consequence of this, a ‘normative vitalism’. According to Canguilhem, life consists in the plastic power, proper to all organisms, of creating qualitatively new norms; if life is essentially a potentiality, then this means that the living being is not simply a machine, an assembly of pieces reacting to the environment, but is what modifies and creates it. If the organism is not a mechanism, then it also means that pathology cannot be described as a deficit or a disorder of a supposed normal state, but it is just a qualitatively different norm proper to the living being confronted with an obstacle. This simple stance also entails an anthropology: both Canguilhem’s theory of knowledge and social theory are vitalist insofar as they are deeply rooted in this minimal definition of life. Both technology and society are conceived as external organs (prostheses) created by the human animal and science and morals, value judgments and judgments of fact are a reflection on the reason for the failure of those organs. On a deontological level (methodological and ethico-political), it follows, finally that, from the perspective of life, ‘vitalism’ as a doctrine is the most ‘vital’ stance one can adopt both epistemologically and politically. While not systematically formulated, these ideas are sketched for the first time in The Normal and the Pathological and in a series of essays written at the beginning of the 1940s (and later published in The Knowledge of Life in 1955). Therefore, if we look at Canguilhem’s intellectual trajectory before World War II, and, even more, before 1935, the moment at which Canguilhem begins his medical studies, it seems that Canguilhem was far from being a ‘vitalist’, even in this peculiar sense, and far from presenting his work as a historical epistemology of the life sciences. On the contrary, he was a harsh critic of vitalism and finalism and a strong defender of “transformism” in its strictly mechanistic, Lamarckian version. Faithful to Alain’s theory of knowledge and to Auguste Comte’s sociology, he strictly distinguished human mind (l’esprit) – conceived as the only source of judgments and volition – from the human body, conceived as a machine. Why such a change? This essay aims to describe Canguilhem’s first 10 years of activity, the implicit theoretical framework of his intellectual work, the relation between his anthropology and the doctrines of Alain, Comte and especially Broussais’s theory of irritation. Finally, it aims at explaining the social and political reasons at the base of his later vitalist philosophy of life and his implicit rejection of Kantianism and Comtism.