Canguilhem and the Greeks: Vitalism Between History and Philosophy

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the role of ancient Greek medicine and philosophy in Georges Canguilhem’s analysis of vitalism at the intersection of history and philosophy in his essay “Aspects of Vitalism” in light of larger questions about the historicity of “life” as a concept in the history and philosophy of science and contemporary biopolitical theory. Vitalism, for Canguilhem, is not a proper object of the history of science. But nor is it a philosophy that exists outside of historical time. I show how Canguilhem embeds vitalism both historically and trans-historically by threading each of its three “aspects” in the essay through ancient Greece. Canguilhem distinguishes his own understanding of both life and vitalism from that of the “classical” vitalists of the eighteenth century by refusing to read ancient Greece as romantically naïve or pre-technological and instead locating a dialectic between vitalism and mechanism already in antiquity. I argue for a critical re-reading of Canguilhem’s own conjunction of vitalism and Hellenism that resists its figuration of ancient Greece as the place where the human qua species first comes to take itself as an object of knowledge. I instead propose reading ancient Greek medical and philosophical texts that are read and reread in debates about the nature of human life and the life of Nature over millennia as part of a milieu that shapes how contemporary thinkers theorize life in the interest of human flourishing.

The Greeks haunt life as an object of historical and philosophical inquiry. The field named biology—a science (logos) of bios, one of the Greek concepts of life—has been around for a little more than two centuries. But the prefix bio– has been proliferating in continental philosophy, critical theory, and political theory since the turn of the millennium under the auspices of biopolitics. Biopolitics is not synonymous with a history or philosophy of biology, even less so with the cluster of philosophical positions on “life” associated with vitalism. Yet the intensification of theoretical concern with life as an object of political, economic, and social control over the past few decades has produced a series of dominant narratives about the history of “life” as a concept deployed with material effects within networks of power. Within these narratives, both historiographical and philosophical, the Greeks tend to be positioned in one of two ways.

The first strategy consigns the Greeks to obsolescence in the face of modernity’s appropriation of life as an object of scientific and medical knowledge and state management. Michel Foucault famously declared in 1966 in The Order of Things that life as an object of knowledge does not exist prior to the nineteenth century; only, rather, “living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.”¹ Historians of the life sciences have pointed to the emergence of biology as an autonomous academic discipline around 1800 as a critical turning point in the modern conceptualization of life. Even more important to the periodization of “life” for biopolitical theory is Foucault’s claim in the final section of the first volume of the History of Sexuality that a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached “when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies.” “For millennia,” Foucault continues, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”² Foucault himself marked the form of power emergent on the threshold of modernity with the neologism “biopower,” a term that is now largely superseded by biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus, on this version of a Foucauldian line, essentially modern. And biopolitics, in turn, defines modernity.

The historicity of “life” in relationship to the Greeks in Foucault is complicated by his late work on bios.³ But it is not Foucault’s Greeks who have been primarily responsible for keeping Greek “life” alive in biopolitical theory for the past two decades. Far more consequential has been Giorgio Agamben’s ubiquitous claim that ancient Greek life is divided at its core into bios and zōē. On Agamben’s analysis, bios defines life in the robust sense of the life lived by the proper political subject, whereas it falls to zōē to designate what he calls “natural life” or “bare life.” Far from lying outside of politics, zōē marks a state of exception within the political, where life is wholly vulnerable to the power of the sovereign. Agamben thus uses bios and zōē not only to articulate the foundational structure of Western politics but to establish politics itself “as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized.”⁴ Agamben has his own understanding of a biopolitical modernity in the Nazi camps. Yet he invests a semantic split in Greek “life” with far-reaching structural–conceptual implications for metaphysics and politics in “the West.” In so doing, he enacts another familiar way of conjugating “the Greeks” with life. They are there at the origins of the West and at the foundation of Man.

Here, then, are the choices on offer for the relationship of “the Greeks” and life. Either Greek life is obsolescent; or it survives, ghostly but powerful. Either modernity should be read in terms of autogenesis, or we should tell an ancient origin story. From one perspective, I find the choice easy enough: the ancient Greeks matter to how we historicize “life.” More specifically, I think that the history of the concepts of life, nature, and the body elaborated in ancient Greek texts produces, over the course of multiple readings in multiple reception communities not limited to Western Europe, philosophically interesting puzzles that we are still grappling with.

Yet from another perspective, this choice commits us all too easily to an origin story that brings with it problems bound up in the entwined histories of modern vitalism, Philhellenism, and European theories of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Donna V. Jones has shown how constitutive racialism is of philosophies of life in this period; Alexander Weheliye has critiqued the dominant theories of biopolitics for misconstruing “how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human.”⁵ In conjunction with these critiques, I suggest we should also think about the ways in which vitalism meets Philhellenism, in particular, not only in explicit arguments for a racial biopolitics committed to purity and health, but also on the terrain of universal humanism.⁶ It is in line with this commitment that I reject Agamben’s account of bios and zōē not only on philological grounds, but also philosophical ones.⁷ But it cannot just be a question of correcting an error. For doing so would leave intact the move Agamben makes—namely, the plotting of “bare life” as zōē at the primal scene of Aristotle’s Politics as a performance of linguistic and hermeneutic expertise that claims for itself the petrifying authority of “the classical.” For Agamben’s philological practice traffics in a species of revealed truth that secures the totalizing reification of “the Western tradition.” If we are to think more critically with both “the Greeks” and the concepts of “life” in which they are entangled, we—historians and philosophers alike—need something better than ancestral, mystified Greeks and self-generated moderns. I hope this essay makes a small contribution to this larger critical project and the question of how to imagine the relationship of ancient Greek texts addressed to the question of “life” and contemporary problems in vitalism and biopolitics.

The challenge is that history at a scale that encompasses Greek antiquity while also trying to answer to the present is always at once philosophical and mythical. The mythic aspect of “the Greeks” is one reason why they do not go away. It is not the only reason, though. For the history of (what in standard academic terms is called) science, medicine, and philosophy unfolds for millennia along axes of reading and rereading ancient Greek texts. These texts are recursively embedded in radically diasporic multitudes of thought that cannot be neatly described as Western or European but span the globe. This multiplicity is another reason why the Greeks do not go away.

The challenge that I have just outlined is especially acute when the question concerns life as an object of philosophical and scientific knowledge within historical time. One of the most challenging and exciting twentieth-century engagements with this question is the vitalism of the historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem. For Canguilhem, the blurred zone of passage between history and philosophy is vitalism. In this chapter, I aim to show that this passage is facilitated by “the Greeks” in Canguilhem’s work in ways that have been neither fully articulated nor critically examined. I pursue this claim through a close reading of the role of the Greeks in his influential and difficult paper “Aspects of Vitalism,” first presented as one of three lectures at the Collège philosophique in Paris in 1946–1947 and then published in 1952 in Canguilhem’s second book, The Knowledge of Life.⁸

Although the role the Greeks play for Canguilhem across his writings is more complex than what I can show for “Aspects of Vitalism,” the essay is important insofar as it is the only one that Canguilhem devoted specifically to vitalism.⁹ Moreover, the essay’s complicated staging of the Greeks at the intersection of philosophy, history, and myth sheds considerable light on why antiquity matters deeply to Canguilhem’s larger vitalist project. Pressing Canguilhem’s use of the Greeks in “Aspects of Vitalism” thus brings to the surface difficult but persistent questions about the science of life as a privileged expression of human nature versus a set of circumscribed practices of knowledge associated with “the West”; the origins of these practices; the work of racism, colonialism, and fascism in the stories that have been told about these origins; life as a “natural” object of systematic conceptualization in science and philosophy; and, finally, the temporality of biopolitics and the historical status of “life” as an object of control figured as technē. In closing, I suggest that by critically interrogating the way in which the Greeks mediate between history and philosophy for Canguilhem in light of his approach to history as an expression of life, we can get clearer about what is at stake in the stories we choose to tell about life as an object of philosophy across historical time and work to craft them more critically and constructively.

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Born in France in 1904, Canguilhem was educated as a philosopher, a historian of science, and a physician. In 1955 he took over from Gaston Bachelard as Director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et Techniques at the Sorbonne, which he led for over 15 years in addition to supervising the examinations and training for philosophy. For both institutional and intellectual reasons, Canguilhem exercised a formative impact on a number of postwar French philosophers, including Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, and Gilles Deleuze. But his relationship with Foucault was especially important.

In his definitive essay on Canguilhem’s legacy, Foucault identified the marking of discontinuities as critical to Canguilhem’s method in the history of science.¹⁰ Canguilhem’s views on method were themselves shaped by Bachelard’s historical epistemology, which understood science as proceeding along a path pitted with “epistemological obstacles” to be surmounted.¹¹ These obstacles decisively fragment time’s continuum, creating a history of science. In his fidelity to Bachelard’s method Canguilhem was unsparing of his criticism of those historians of science who would seek out precursors—that is, those figures who ostensibly begin projects that are only finished at a later moment in history, at which point genuine progress is achieved. The precursor, Canguilhem argues in his essay “The Object of the History of Sciences” (2005), is a “false object” of the history of science that endangers its status as historical.¹² In making a historical figure a precursor, the historian cuts him off from the very conditions (social, cultural, intellectual, material) that determine his horizon of possibility, thus recasting time as empty space that can be traversed first one way, then another.¹³ The ancient Greeks—Aristarchus, Hippocrates—function in the essay as paradigmatic cases of what Canguilhem calls, after J. T. Clark, “the precursor virus.” We smile, he says, at those who invoke them to explain Copernicus or Harvey. We know better.

In insisting on the irreversibility of history, Canguilhem echoes the most important tenet of his best-known work, The Normal and the Pathological. All organisms, he argues there, follow a path of irreversible development that is coextensive with life itself. Health is always a dynamic state, changing in relationship to disease and individuated by the organism’s unique, contingent passage through time and by its relationship to what Canguilhem calls its “milieu.”¹⁴ The relationship between the life of the organism and science as it unfolds historically is not merely one of analogy for Canguilhem.¹⁵ For the discontinuities within the sciences express what Canguilhem sees as a fundamental axiom about life: life has a creative relationship to error, which is itself a product of the organism’s ongoing interactions with its environment. The endless but irreversible “auto-correction” process of the sciences, the history in science, must be read, then, through Canguilhem’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge and life.¹⁶ On this understanding, knowledge is not opposed to life. It is, rather, a fundamental aspect of life’s situatedness in its milieu. The transhistorical collective of scientists performs a continuous testing of life as an object of knowledge in a process that, because of the very nature of life as it is enacted by living subjects, is necessarily marked by discontinuities, ruptures, and shifts of knowledge. The “knowledge of life”—this is the title of the book in which “Aspects of Vitalism” appears—is at once knowledge that is made by life (and so belongs to it as the knowing subject) and knowledge of life insofar as life is understood as an object of knowledge.¹⁷

Canguilhem’s approach to the history of the life sciences is therefore shaped by his understanding of the relationship between knowledge and life. But here we arrive at a paradox. On the one hand, Canguilhem insists on discontinuity within the history of science. It is because time is fragmented that the history of science is a history of discontinuity. On the other hand, by understanding the knowledge of life as not only the knowledge that life science gains of life but also the knowledge that belongs to life, we seem to have moved beyond the boundaries of history (though not of time), precisely because discontinuity is now read through a theory of life itself. In light of the problem, it is tempting to differentiate formally between the orientation of the philosopher and the work of the historian as two separable modes of inquiry. But the situation of Canguilhem’s method is more complex, difficult, and, in many ways, irresolvable.¹⁸ Canguilhem himself insisted he was doing both together in a practice he called “epistemological history.”¹⁹ History and philosophy are stubbornly implicated in one another in Canguilhem’s work. Their knotting can be seen most clearly at the dense core of Canguilhem’s philosophical commitment, on which his claims about knowledge and life are founded—namely his vitalism.

Canguilhem makes it clear at the start of “Aspects of Vitalism” that vitalism attracts him as a philosophical position. He argues there that vitalism differs from other objects that a historian of science might take up, such as phlogiston or geocentrism. For unlike those erstwhile scientific objects and theories, vitalism can never be overcome. Rather, vitalism is “a certain orientation of biological thought,” one that, “whatever the limited historical resonance of the name given to it, will be seen to have a significance greater than just that of a stage in biology’s development.”²⁰ It is “a permanent exigency of life within the living” and not a method; an ethics, not a theory.²¹ Its timeless counterpart is mechanism. If vitalism resists all attempts to disprove it, it’s because it’s not something that can be disproven.

Yet Canguilhem still inscribes vitalism within history, in two important ways. First, vitalism is a label that has been claimed by or applied to particular thinkers in the history of the life sciences and medicine: the seventeenth-century Belgian “chemical” physician Jan Baptist van Helmont, for example, or the nineteenth-century “father” of histology Xavier Bichat, or the twentieth-century theorist of the organism as a whole, Kurt Goldstein. It is true that the meaning of vitalism in this context is constrained by its “limited historical resonance.” But the very recurrence of vitalism as a historical phenomenon still points to something crucial about its larger meaning. Second, vitalism occupies a privileged moment within history because it is the product of a historical process through which life becomes an object of knowledge. “A philosophy that asks science for clarifications of concepts,” Canguilhem writes, “cannot remain uninterested in the construction of this very science.”²² The founding of a science of life, in Canguilhem’s view, transforms the nature of what humans qua organisms generate in their interaction with their world. It is only within this new realm of activity that vitalism itself makes sense.

It is at this point in the argument that Canguilhem turns to the ancient Greeks. They surface as the critical point of passage at which Man’s natural tendency, qua living being, to produce knowledge of life produces life as a formal, “scientific” object of knowledge. Aristotle occupies a crucial place here, but so does Hippocrates. The importance of the Greeks does not mean that Canguilhem neglects the boundary of modernity—far from it. To the extent that the boundary is operative, it separates a history of the philosophy of the living from a history of biology proper (in “Knowledge of Life,” the Greeks appear in the section labeled “philosophy,” not “history,” which comprises only the essay on cell theory).²³ Yet because vitalism recurs within the history of the life sciences across a field of discontinuities, it points to the entanglement of the philosophy of life within the timebound “construction” of the life sciences. This entanglement points to the transhistorical persistence of the Greeks, blurring any strict boundary between antiquity and modernity.

The final sentence of “Aspects of Vitalism” reads, “In the end, to do justice to vitalism is simply to give life back to it.”²⁴ Canguilhem implies that the work of the historian who thinks vitalism in time is instrumental to making this gift. But what kind of historical time do the Greeks, in fact, occupy? What does it actually mean to historicize—an act we usually associate with contingency and denaturalization—an orientation towards life that Canguilhem describes as “the expression of the confidence the living being has in life, of the self-identity of life within the living human being conscious of living?” In the essay itself, Canguilhem isolates out three aspects of vitalism: first, the vitality of vitalism; second, its fecundity; and third, its honesty. Each of these aspects offers not only a different facet of vitalism; each also offers a different perspective on antiquity, which recurs throughout the essay in a discontinuous yet insistent fashion, thereby performing, as it were, its own vitality. I turn now to examine each of these three aspects in detail.

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Canguilhem begins his inquiry by suspending the question of whether vitalism is true from a scientific perspective. Instead he asserts that it is true “historically.” The fact that it keeps making comebacks is its “vitality,” the first aspect of vitalism Canguilhem discusses. But precisely because it eludes any one historical period, vitalism’s vitality is a problem for the philosopher rather than for the historian. Nevertheless, even if we are within the remit of philosophy, we are not talking about an expanse of time coextensive with life itself. Rather, we are talking about the beginnings of a history, the history of biological theory, which “reveals itself to be a thinking that throughout its history has been divided and oscillating.”²⁵ These oscillations move between not only what Canguilhem calls Discontinuity and Continuity (on the problem of the succession of forms) but also Preformation and Epigenesis (on the problem of development), and Atomicity and Totality (on the problem of individuality). Each of these oscillations, Canguilhem proposes, expresses a dialectical process that life produces in thought once it has emerged as an object of a science of life. What this means is that the “life” at stake in vitalism is always already defined by a science of life. And as Canguilhem makes immediately clear in this essay, this science of life is given as Greek. It’s the “Hippocratic” expression of trust in vis medicatrix naturae, the idea, that is, that nature possesses its own healing power, or Platonist-Aristotelian-Galenic views on universal sympathy.

Yet from another perspective, the life expressed in (Greek) vitalism precedes it. For vitalism turns out to express a more basic, “instinctual” distrust of the power of technology (technique) over life. In other words, it translates something internal to life itself, described by Canguilhem as “the expression of the confidence the living being has in life, of the self-identity of life within the living human being conscious of living”; he goes on to describe this, as we have seen, as “a permanent exigency of life in the living (une exigence permanente de la vie dans le vivant), the self-identity of life immanent to the living.”²⁶ Life, in other words, always expresses a need, a demand (connotations of the French word exigence). But it is also confident in its fundamentally agonistic relationship to its milieu. This agonism with the external world will eventually take shape as vitalism’s counterpart, mechanism. But before mechanism, the living human being has an attitude towards life that Canguilhem glosses as the “cunning of reason.” The phrase calls Hegel to mind. But Canguilhem is also playing with the sense of “stratagem” present in the Greek word for “machine,” mēchanē, as we will see further. Suffice to say here that mechanism “as a scientific method and as a philosophy” is already implicit in the human use of tools.²⁷

The human tout court is constituted here by a fundamental push and pull. Canguilhem emphasizes the point by turning to the Czech biologist and historian of science Emanuel Rádl for his claims about the two ways in which the human being considers nature. Either “Man” sees himself as its (or her, in keeping with the unmarked but gendered Man and the feminization of Nature) child, feeling a sentiment of belonging and subordination to Nature; or Nature is held before him as a “foreign, indefinable object.”²⁸ Part of the vitality of vitalism is therefore secured by a polarized definition of the human being in relationship to Nature: kinship and sympathy (this is the position of the vitalist) or by a sense of distance and mastery (mechanism). The polarity of human nature produces the permanent oscillation of biological theory. This means that vitalism’s “vitality” ultimately points to the irrepressibility of life’s faith in itself. Nevertheless, this faith comes to be mediated in human beings by historically situated forms of vitalism. And as we have seen, the first of these forms is Greek. Life latches onto history in the guise of vitalism through Greek names: first Hippocrates, then Plato, Aristotle, and Galen.

In truth, the nature of historical emergence as it takes shape in the essay is more complicated than the account I have just offered for reasons that challenge any simple linearity in the history of vitalism. Although Hippocrates is the first to be named in the essay, Canguilhem introduces him in the context of a vitalist tradition already defined by the eighteenth-century Montpellier physician Paul-Joseph Barthez. The guiding principle of this tradition is the “Hippocratic” principle of vis medicatrix naturae. For Canguilhem, the principle represents “the biology of physicians skeptical of the constraining power of remedies” and distrustful “of the power of technique over life.” By introducing Hippocrates via an eighteenth-century “spirit of Hippocratism,” Canguilhem initially frames it as a reaction to mechanism and, more specifically, Cartesianism.

Yet the appeal to a vis medicatrix naturae can be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus and, more specifically, to a passage from Epidemics VI on “untaught nature” that was taken up by Galen as foundational for the philosophy of nature in the texts that he ascribed to Hippocrates: “The body’s nature,” the passage runs, “is the physician in disease. Nature finds the way for itself, not from thought.”²⁹ This Hippocratic vitalism thus “gets behind” Cartesian mechanism to claim historical priority. But what kind of priority should we accord ancient vitalism, if it is, by definition, already a translation of something else, namely, life’s faith in itself? What mechanism motivates this translation, so far removed from the Cartesian moment?

The difficulties inherent in such a question will become clearer when Canguilhem turns to the second aspect of vitalism. But they are already evident in his invocation of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, names given as examples of the attitude towards Nature that Rádl had defined in terms of sympathy and in opposition to an attitude that views Nature as a “foreign, indefinable object” to be mastered. Rádl’s theory is a philosophical anthropology: there are two timeless options. But Canguilhem frames the sympathetic attitude of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen as already vitalist, already inside a science of life. What this means is that their vitalism has to have been shaped by the prior emergence of the machine or technique as an obstacle to life.

It is worth emphasizing that, for Canguilhem, all life is agonistic vis-à-vis its milieu and creative in its strategies for survival. The use of technology is “a universal biological phenomenon,” as he writes in “Machine and Organism.”³⁰ Fundamentally, technology is not opposed to life. Rather, it is an extension of life into the milieu. For human beings, tools and machines are the expression of this extension of life.³¹ At the same time, it is in humans’ use of tools that we find the seeds of mechan-ism. Here I suggest that Canguilhem’s double translation of the Greek word mēchanē as “machine” and “cunning” shows its own cunning. In a basic sense, the mēchanē is always double-sided. On the one hand, as “machine” or “tool,” it’s an extension of (human) life into the milieu. On the other hand, as “cunning,” it represents a disposition towards its object, that is, Nature—namely, as a foreign, hostile object to be hunted, captured, and controlled, precisely because Nature is seen as the source of obstacles to (a) life.

This double-sided quality of the mēchanē is doubled again in Canguilhem’s choice of the Greek lexeme, which he allies with the figure of Ulysses. With mēchanē, we also capture a relationship that is at once “permanent” and historical. It is in the use of tools among humans that we find the seeds of mechanism. But the Greek of the lexeme, together with the appeal to Ulysses, also signals the historical potential of the dialectic between Man and Nature held within the Greek term mēchanē. And this is crucial, because it is only within a historical process by which Nature is objectified as an object of control that vitalism can express the opposing sentiment—namely, that Man is one with Nature. So the mēchanē expresses not just the doublet “machine/cunning,” but the beginnings of a historical process through which the use of machines produces an attitude of mastery vis-à-vis Nature—a trust in tools and forms of epistemic capture, and a corresponding definition of the world they act on as inert and passive—that will eventually transmute into mechanism and trigger, in turn, the formation of vitalism.³² In short, the mēchanē enables the transition from the universal nature of Man into the history of science on the quasi-mythic terrain of ancient Greece. Canguilhem does not explicitly locate the Greeks within a historical process here. Rather, the mēchanē and Ulysses hover in the space of mythic time, on the cusp of the transformation of life into vitalism. They stand behind vitalism proper. When we turn to the second aspect of vitalism, however, we do find the Greeks being invoked in historical terms through Canguilhem’s critique of modern vitalism’s “return to antiquity.” I turn now to consider how Canguilhem’s imagination of the Greeks as historical actors produces his own “unclassical” vitalism.

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Canguilhem calls the second aspect of vitalism its “fecundity.” What Canguilhem wants to address with “fecundity” is whether vitalism is productive within the history of biology, or whether it is an obstacle to progress that has to be discarded for biology to make real discoveries. After all, vitalism could be vital and still sterile. It could persist not because it is rooted in some truth about life but because it is an especially tenacious and pernicious illusion. At the start of the essay, Canguilhem had set aside questions of truth. He now shifts back into the mode of historical epistemology to reframe the question of vitalism’s vitality in terms of Bachelard’s “epistemological frontier.” Is this vitality, he asks, only a symptom of mechanism’s historically contingent limits? If that were true, then vitalism merely marks the (ever-shrinking) territory that mechanism has yet to conquer. To argue otherwise would only be to refuse mechanism “the time it needs to complete its project.”³³ Canguilhem’s position here looks even harder to defend today, with the advances in biotechnology casting life as “no more ontologically interesting than stardust,” as Jones writes.³⁴ But as Jones goes on to argue, vitalism is tenacious. It is unlikely that Canguilhem would have ceded its ground even today.

Canguilhem takes different tacks in responding to the charge that vitalism is a scientific dead-end. He first lists the contributions of vitalists to the history of biology. But he quickly runs into the problem that whatever the import of these contributions to biology, the concepts produced to explain them (e.g., vital principle, entelechy, hormé) seem to indicate neither progress nor discovery. Rather, in their (re)generation of Greek concepts, they seem to signal regression: “vitalism’s fecundity appears at first glance to be all the more contestable in that…it always presents itself as a return to antiquity,” whether one considers the return to Aristotle against Descartes in van Helmont or in the Montpellier vitalists, or the return of Renaissance humanists to the Plato of the Timaeus over an Aristotle who had become “overly rationalized” in medieval scholasticism.³⁵ The return to the Greeks only seems to confirm vitalism’s sterility. Canguilhem thus, like an organism in the face of an obstacle, changes course. His new strategy pivots on a split in vitalism. On one side is what Canguilhem calls “classical vitalism,” by which he is referring primarily to the vitalists of the eighteenth century who become conflated with “Hippocrates.” On the other is his own vitalism. He elucidates this split by differentiating two ways of “returning” to the Greeks.

The return to antiquity, Canguilhem argues, need not be about revalorizing concepts that are worn out. Rather it is about going back to the sources, fueled by “a nostalgia for intuitions ontologically more original and closer to their object.”³⁶ What are these intuitions? Not vitalism itself, at least as it is defined according to the “Hippocratic” spirit of the Montpellier vitalists. Rather, these intuitions pertain to a dialectic within the science of life as it is played out in historical time already in antiquity. Here Canguilhem proposes mechanism as a philosophical position historically realized in fifth-century Greece: Aristotle’s vitalism responds to Democritus’ mechanism; Plato’s finalism responds to Anaxagoras’ mechanism.³⁷ Canguilhem is spelling out what was only hinted at earlier. Insofar as the first named vitalists are Greek, they are responding to the emergence of historical mechanists like Democritus and Anaxagoras in a space that was already opened up by a mythic mēchanē in the discussion of vitalism’s first aspect.

Canguilhem’s decision to name Greek mechanists at this point turns out to be critical for his own definition of vitalism. For he is subtly but surely taking his distance at this point from what he calls “the vitalist’s eye,” a product of eighteenth-century Hippocratism.³⁸ The vitalist’s eye offers only a naïve vision of the past as pre-technological and pre-logical, “a vision of life anterior to tools and language, that is, to instruments created by man to extend and consolidate life.”³⁹ Canguilhem aims to see both the history of (ancient) vitalism and life itself differently.

We can now better understand Canguilhem’s earlier conflation of “Hippocrates” with vis medicatrix naturae. He is not interested in going back to the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus as a site for the very dialectic that interests him. His lack of concern makes little sense from a historical or even philosophical perspective. After all, the theorization of medicine as a technē is a guiding thread of the writings in the “Hippocratic” Corpus, and medicine, in turn, was the paradigmatic technē, especially vis-à-vis- the mastery of (human) nature, in the fifth and fourth centuries bce.⁴⁰ Indeed, the principle of vis medicatrix naturae appears late in the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, perhaps as a response to the dominance of “technical” intervention in the earlier writings of the Corpus, much as Canguilhem’s account here would predict. In other words, an argument can easily be made, appropriating Canguilhem’s notion of a dialectic within biological theory, that the principle of “untaught nature” is itself a response to certain strains of technological optimism, conditioned by the valorization of technē as the source of medicine’s power and authority, in fifth- and fourth-century bce medical writing. But if Canguilhem is unconcerned with whether Hippocratic “vitalism” might itself already be embedded in the dialectic that he identifies elsewhere, it is because he is using the name of Hippocrates to label the “emic” expression of classical vitalism. He does this even as he recognizes that this expression is properly an effect of the reception of “Hippocrates” from Galen to the revival of Hippocratism in the Montpellier vitalists.

In other words, Canguilhem uses Hippocrates strategically to name the eighteenth-century vitalist’s refusal to cede any ground to mechanism. It is because the so-called “Hippocratic spirit” believes nature has no need of technique—in later writings, Canguilhem treats “Hippocratic” medicine as non-interventionist, even “contemplative”—that it can produce the naïve vision of pre-technological Man.⁴¹ In negotiating the apparent obsolescence of vitalism, Canguilhem thus appropriates Hippocrates to designate both the refusal to acknowledge the entanglement of life and technique and a false origin for later vitalists. These vitalists mistakenly use Hippocrates to prove the possibility of medicine before or without technique, rather than recognizing that vitalism and mechanism go hand in hand already in classical antiquity.

The wrong kind of vitalist “return to antiquity” is therefore implicated in the “classical”—that is, eighteenth-century—vitalist’s misunderstanding of the relationship between life and technique. Canguilhem accordingly needs to correct both aspects of the classical vitalist’s error. When he looks to the relationship between Democritus and Aristotle for philosophical clarity on the problem of vitalism, he is looking to a different antiquity. This antiquity is viewed not from within the classical eighteenth-century vitalist perspective, which posits Hippocrates as a purer, pre-technological figure. Rather, Canguilhem is adopting the perspective of a different vitalism, what we could call an “unclassical” vitalism, a vitalism that is nevertheless still oriented towards classical Greek antiquity. Let us see what this looks like for Canguilhem.

Canguilhem’s own vitalism takes shape in his last defense of vitalism’s fecundity, This defense requires the outright rejection of classical eighteenth-century vitalism. Discussing Bichat, he identifies classical vitalism’s “philosophically inexcusable fault” as its designation of an “empire within an empire” (that is, Spinoza’s imperium in imperio) in order to secure the specificity of the biological against the laws of physics.⁴² Far from erring in its ambitions, classical vitalism is too modest, Canguilhem declares. His argument builds on his philosophy of the organism and is developed at greater length in the lectures that followed “Aspects,” “Machine and Organism” and “The Living and Its Milieu.” His strategy throughout these lectures is to nest mechanism within vitalism. “To live,” he writes in “The Living and Its Milieu,” “is to radiate: it is to organize the milieu from and around a center of reference, which cannot itself be referred to without losing its original meaning.”⁴³ The very behavior of “man as technician and scientist” therefore demands an explanation that privileges life.⁴⁴ In this way Canguilhem claims a priority for life vis-à-vis reason or mechanism that is at once logical and historical. In place of the classical vitalist’s naïve vision of pre-technological Man, he offers a vision of Man whose use of tools and concepts is as rooted in life as is the vitalist resistance to technique.

Nevertheless, vitalism itself is a specific translation of the permanent exigency of life, enmeshed in the analogous mechanist “translation” of a more fundamental mēchanē. As such, it falls back into history, and history returns us to Greek origins. Canguilhem attributes an even more powerful historical priority to the ancients, with the promise of originality and purity such priority entails, in his explication of the third and last aspect of vitalism: its honesty.

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Canguilhem’s defense of the “honesty” of vitalism shows him grappling with a charge against vitalism that is more damning than that of obsolescence or error—namely, the charge that it is politically reactionary, counterrevolutionary, or something even more toxic: complicit in the horrors of the Holocaust through the Nazi appropriation of vitalist biology for a racist biopolitics.⁴⁵ These charges were not abstract to Canguilhem, who fought in the French Resistance. It is worth remembering, too, that the lectures date to 1946–1947. But he refuses to accept the charges against vitalism on the grounds that politics borrows from biology what it has already lent it. The blame for Nazi biology, he insists, lies with the moral and philosophical failures of Nazi biologists.

If you are going to be persuaded of vitalism’s innocence, these arguments would seem sufficient. But Canguilhem goes a step further, seeking to exculpate vitalism due to the innocence of its origins: “If we look for vitalism’s meaning in its origins and for its purity at its sources, we will not be tempted to reproach Hippocrates or the Renaissance humanist for the dishonesty of their vitalism.”⁴⁶ Why does Canguilhem feel compelled to make this move? We could read it as a final encounter between the historian’s understanding of vitalism and the philosopher’s. For Canguilhem goes on to acknowledge that it is in part true to see behind the twentieth-century resurgence of vitalism the workings of political economy and, more specifically, bourgeois society’s crisis of confidence in capitalism—a reading of vitalism’s attraction that could no doubt be developed with even greater force in the early twenty-first century. But Canguilhem is generally impatient with externalist explanation. So he sets aside historical materialism to return to the space in Greek antiquity where history transmutes into an expression of life itself—and, indeed, an expression of life’s resistance to technique: “the rebirths of vitalism translate, perhaps in discontinuous fashion, life’s permanent distrust of the mechanization of life.”⁴⁷

Yet the nostalgic longing for the “purity” of vitalism’s sources is itself implicated in a different kind of history in which the Greeks represent an innocent origin. History in the mode of nostalgic mythmaking feels decidedly impure in light of another -ism that became complicit in the formation of Nazi ideology—namely, German Philhellenism in its attachment to a lost Greek homeland.⁴⁸ Does politics borrow from Philhellenism what it has already lent to it? Do these transactions take place across a sharp border? Has the love of the Greeks ever been innocent? Surely, as Nietzsche at his most critical would insist, the answer must be “no.”⁴⁹ If we need a critical vitalism, can we pursue this end without also thinking critically about the Greeks? So what can we say about Canguilhem’s Greeks? What can we do with them?

By this point, I hope to have demonstrated how thoroughly the Greeks permeate Canguilhem’s reading of vitalism as at once historical and philosophical in “Aspects of Vitalism.” They occupy consequential roles in each of the three aspects of vitalism: vitality, fecundity, honesty. I have tried to show how, on Canguilhem’s account, the Greeks produce the first historical articulation of vitalism. Hippocratism is thus the form in which life asserts itself, and keeps asserting itself, within the repeatedly renegotiated terms of life science. So as long as we remain within a science of life, vitalism as recursion has to be read vis-à-vis a Hippocratic origin if its vitality is to be fully appreciated. But the “Hippocratic” vitalism of the eighteenth century also failed to comprehend the dialectic between vitalism and mechanism out of which it was created. This ancient dialectic, Canguilhem argues, can and must therefore be read in terms of his own vitalism, which repairs vitalism’s ancient history in order to repair its philosophy. Within Canguilhem’s terms, the oscillation between vitalism and mechanism in biological theory is part of a much longer, continuous, and indeed non-human story of life’s exercise of technique. But it is also the result of a critical rupture in the relationship of (human) life to knowledge. Canguilhem’s own theory encompasses the philosophical position that life by its very nature distrusts mechanization, even as it uses tools to evade obstacles. It also encompasses the historical position that once Greek vitalism emerges it becomes the template for life’s knowing, conscious rebellion against science that is retraced in vitalism’s later rebirths. In the third part of the essay, this template is revisited as vitalism’s innocent origin.

Greece thus mediates between history and philosophy in “Aspects of Vitalism.” It enables Canguilhem to fold his philosophical argument about the relation of (human) life and knowledge into history as the expression of a recurrent but still timebound phenomenon: vitalism. It is therefore impossible to grapple with the entwinement of history and philosophy in Canguilhem without also thinking about how he approaches the history of philosophy in ancient Greece. At the same time, Canguilhem is not exactly doing the history of philosophy or biology in “Aspects of Vitalism.” If he invokes the agonism between Democritus and Aristotle, it is not with the aim of analyzing or even documenting a philosophical debate. Rather, he surgically deploys that dynamism as a historical fact against the naïve vitalist’s view of history and in the service of his own theory of life and its history. Canguilhem can do this because he takes for granted the place of classical Greece as the spatio-temporal zone where life consequentially crosses into history as the object of both mechanistic control and vitalist care.

By attending to the function of the Greeks in “Aspects,” we can see that the essay is, at a fundamental level, addressed to the question of what it means to historicize a permanent exigency of life. It is worth recalling the warped temporality created by Canguilhem’s introduction of Hippocrates via the Montpellier vitalists. The blurring between “Hippocrates” and “the Hippocratic spirit” implies that Canguilhem is well aware that his ancients are mediated by post-Cartesian vitalism as it flourished in France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even as he reads the Latin vis medicatrix naturae as the Greek of “Hippocrates.” He is committed to the view that organismic time is irreversible. But still, the Greeks cannot be contained within this modern reception. If they’re imbricated in Canguilhem’s “history of the present,” to borrow a term of Foucault’s, it is precisely because they exceed modernity.⁵⁰ What exceeds the eighteenth-century reception is something like the “life” that fuels Canguilhem’s own vitalism. Philosophy and history are mixed up because the Greeks are inside and outside of history.

I will try to be more precise. We could take up ancient Greek vitalism and its reception from a historicist perspective. The history of the life sciences has been shaped by various “returns” to “the Greeks,” and especially Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen. Problems concerning the mastery of the nature of living things and the care of human life and bodies are knit into this history, recursively and dialectically articulated through textual transmission and scenes of experimentation situated in institutions and communities like translation movements patronized by elites and/or the state, medical faculties in universities, and commercial laboratories. The proper work of historicism here would seem to be to stress contingency, the sense that the history of life might have been otherwise, in defiance of Whig history and the teleology of progress. It would be to emphasize, too, the very density and messiness of a thickening around Greek texts, which decenter the proprietary claims on the Greeks qua ancestors exercised by the figure of vitalist return.

But Canguilhem’s transhistorical account of vitalism does something different, cutting through the complexity of thick history. The essay appears, we can recall, in the “philosophy” section of Knowledge of Life, not the history section. Why “Aspects” belongs in the section on philosophy presumably has something to do with what it means to be working as a historian of life within a milieu. Insofar as Canguilhem locates himself within the tradition of philosophical biology, he knows as a historian that the making of that tradition informs his organization of the world and his understanding of his own experience, as much as experimental work in biology informs his thinking.⁵¹ But this tradition does not just offer life as an object of knowledge. It offers a choice of orientation: mechanism or vitalism. Not just as a philosopher, but as someone who is, simply, alive, Canguilhem sees himself as obligated to decide between these options, even as he creatively reinterprets what that decision entails—that is, even as he “chooses” vitalism but affirms a version of vitalism that differs in fundamental ways from classical vitalism. It is this space of choice or orientation towards, I suggest, that Canguilhem is trying to hold open when he describes vitalism as an ethics. Ethics in this sense expresses his position that being alive always entails the organization of the world in terms of values. The force of vitalism may then be derived from the idea that however contingent or provincial or distant its historical emergence was, in the world shaped by its emergence or, more precisely, by an embedded dialectic of vitalism and mechanism, vitalism is choiceworthy.

Is it possible to read Canguilhem’s return to the Greeks in the same spirit? Canguilhem himself, as I have argued, assumes the conjunction of vitalism and the backwards-glance towards the Greeks. His intervention in classical vitalism is not to sever the relationship with the Greeks. Rather, in remaking it through a reading of the mechanism/vitalism dialectic in antiquity, he implies that to be a vitalist is to always go back to the Greeks. That return is part of what secures the vitality of vitalism itself as over and above modernity (and especially as pre-Cartesian). There is a real sense here that mechanism is aligned with the myth of the autogenesis of modernity. For insofar as mechanism expresses a faith in the autogenesis of biological science and technology, it denies the relationship of the history of life science to a philosophy of life (vitalism), as well as the relationship of a philosophy of life to life itself. But the choice that I outlined at the start of my paper is precisely about whether the Greeks are a necessary part of this history, the history of life as an object of knowledge. That question implies others. Are the Greeks irrelevant to what we call modernity or, say, biopolitics? Are they irrelevant to any work of orienting towards life, away from the biopolitical, however it is understood?

In this chapter, I have tried to open up some space to pause and assess Canguilhem’s complex conflation of Hellenism and vitalism. One problem with the conflation is that it reenforces the figuration of the Greeks as the origin of science and philosophy. The problem is familiar. But I would point specifically to how the origin-function of the Greeks in Canguilhem enacts the idea that, prior to the birth of philosophy in Greece, Man only had “technique,” understood as the most primitive form of mēchanē; the idea that Greece is where Man first thinks himself.⁵² Another problem arises from the very elision of Hellenism in modern genealogies of the biopolitical that draw a sharp line between obsolescent views on life and a science of life. What these genealogies have too often overlooked is the Greeks’ persistent role in figuring the life that escapes modernity, the fuller life that is at once lost and able to be regained.⁵³ We need to think more critically about the surplus of life that modern thinkers have invested in “the Greeks,” who are regularly taken together with “the savage,” “the primitive,” and other highly racialized non-Western Others to figure a vitality lost to those who identify as European.⁵⁴ Canguilhem’s desire for a purer vitalism at the origins of Greek antiquity thus cannot be disentangled from a deeply raced and sexed paradigm of Man aligned with “the Greeks”. Here the choice is not between ancients and moderns but between what kinds of longue durée stories we tell.

In grappling with this choice, perhaps we could think about Canguilhem’s strategy to capture mechanism with vitalism. Remember that, on Canguilhem’s revised vitalism, mechanism is only the hypertrophy of a technique that begins as an extension of life. Life and technique are inseparable. By analogy with this claim, could the choice between ancients and moderns be equally illusory? That to the extent the ancient Greeks set at least some of the terms within which “we moderns” make choices about life, or politics, they are always already determining the way we orient towards life, or towards our mechanisms, our technologies? These orientations, the argument would go, unfold within the terms of a life that precedes them, and so shapes the very nature of the choices, even when those choices are to affirm modernity, just as life conditions even the choice of mechanism.

The analogy has conceptual force. It also has problems. By framing the claim of the Greeks on the moderns in these terms, I think we can also see more clearly the challenges and limits of Canguilhem’s organicism at the level of historiographical method; that is, problems that go beyond his “naïve” or romantic return to the Greeks as pure. Here it is a question of what the organicism of vitalism itself does for the unity of biological theory or a philosophy of life. For in extending vitalism back to the Greeks, Canguilhem suggests that each manifestation belongs to the same life. Admittedly, the life that Canguilhem has in mind has been freed, we could say, from the unity of classic holism, where the parts are always parts of a larger whole governed by a structure that secures oneness despite multiplicity. Instead of an organism governed by the teleological normativity of Aristotle’s biology, Canguilhem seeks an organism individuated in time and creatively remade through its encounters with a milieu. Nevertheless, even if we read the history of a philosophy of life through Canguilhem’s revised model of life itself, we have still imposed the unity of a life on that history, suggesting a coherence, boundedness, and inner determination that reifies and indeed naturalizes the “Western” tradition in biological terms.

Instead, what if we were to work through the organicism of Canguilhem’s history of a philosophy of life by thinking of the ancient Greeks not as an origin point from which a life has unfolded, but as themselves part of the milieu? At a minimum this would resist the recurrence of the Greeks in a philosophy of life science as an index of life itself. It would resist, too, the very definition of the Greeks as the site where Man takes life as an object of systemic knowledge and practice. Instead, it would attend to the very materiality of ancient Greek texts about life, and nature, and body, and soul—and their readings and re-readings—as part of the world inhabited by later thinkers struggling to define the flourishing of human life is as well as the nature of the cosmos. It would take seriously the choice-making of thinkers situated in a milieu, a collective of thinkers, whose boundaries are, at present, uncertain.

In other words, whether we read the Greeks as part of the vitalist project becomes a decision informed by what we think will contribute to our flourishing at a particular historical moment. Part of the challenge here is navigating between reading the Greeks as inextricable from this milieu, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, framing a “return to the Greeks” as a choice on the order of choosing vitalism. Another way to say this is that Hellenism is woven together with vitalism to an extent that we cannot choose to undo their historical entwinement. But getting clearer about how they work together might help us make choices about how to engage with vitalism, the Greeks, and the problems, historical and philosophical, posed by “life” within communities that are not reified by nation nor by race nor by the phantasm of Europe but are, rather, dynamic and heterogeneous and heteroglossic. It is within a milieu where lives are lived together under circumstances at once radically contingent and deeply informed by entrenched structures of inequity, exploitation, and violence that we make decisions about which pasts to read with, and on what terms.⁵⁵ In the end, Canguilhem’s philosophico-historical perspective on vitalism asks us to think about the impossibility of neutrality within a landscape that is not of our own making but is, nevertheless, remade, however incrementally, by our choices of which pasts to value, and how, and why.⁵⁶ This perspective can help us see how the Greeks in “Aspects of Vitalism” function as at once historically consequential texts, myths, and objects of elective affinity. By diagnosing the different facets of classicism’s continuity in the essay, we may gain a better sense of how reading the history and philosophy of vitalism through the Greeks is always an ethico-political choice made in a particular milieu, at a particular moment.