Abstract
It is well known that authors such as Emile Chartier, i.e. Alain, Henri Bergson and Kurt Goldstein impacted importantly on the work of Georges Canguilhem. This paper argues, however, that it is the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche which gave Canguilhem’s work its most distinctive traits. Themes such as the relationship between health and disease, the influence of language on perception and knowledge, or the conception of philosophy as a philosophy of values, are obviously Nietzschean. The paper shows that in Nietzsche as well as in Canguilhem these themes rely on and refer to the research direction of “General Physiology,” which since the 1860s investigated the relation of the organism to its environment with regard to phenomena such as assimilation, nutrition, and orientation. At the same time, the paper shows that Canguilhem’s reliance on Nietzsche remains intact even as General Physiology is being eclipsed by the emergence of Genetics and Molecular Biology, and as the life sciences as a whole reconfigure themselves with respect to the concept of information.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own (H. Sch.).
- 2.
See also Brusotti (2021), who presents and discusses an unpublished essay, written by Canguilhem in 1947/48, that deals with Nietzsche’s maxim „Become who you are!“
- 3.
Canguilhem cites another passage from Valéry’s “Introduction” in the reflex book and other Valéry texts elsewhere in his work (e.g., Canguilhem, 2008, 140). In contrast, he hardly refers to considerations in the philosophy of science concerning the relationship between concept and analogy as, for example, spelled out in Metzger (1926).
- 4.
“Two kinds of causes that are often confused. [...] The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed-up energy waiting to be used somehow, for something; the second kind, by contrast, is something quite insignificant, mostly a small accident in accordance with which this quantum ‘discharges’ itself in one particular way: the match versus the powder keg.”
- 5.
For Canguilhem, the Mayer reception of Nietzsche has not been a secret, as he included a fragment from Nietzsche’s manuscripts, in which Mayer is quoted, in an edited volume anthology in the early 1950s. See Canguilhem, 1952, 58–59. In the precise form used by Canguilhem, this fragment can be found in Würzbach, 1940, 179–182. The part concerning Mayer, however, is omitted in Canguilhem’s selection. For this particular fragment, see Nietzsche, 1980c, 451, for the other parts, see Nietzsche, 1980b, 89; 300.
- 6.
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Schmidgen, H. (2023). Knowledge, Life, and Error. Nietzschean Themes in the Work of Georges Canguilhem. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_8
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