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The life of concepts:

Georges Canguilhem and the history of science

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Abstract

Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the “French style” of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem’s study of the reflex concept with respect to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem’s philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences.

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Notes

  1. Unless otherwise stated all translations from the French and the German are my own.

  2. Excerpts from FR were published in English in Delaporte (Delaporte 2000, pp. 179–187 and 193–194). In addition, one may note that Canguilhem also published a short article on the reflex concept in the nineteenth century in 1964 (Canguilhem 2002a).

  3. See Macherey (1964), Lecourt (1972), and Fichant (1973).

  4. For recent attempts to contextualize the French tradition of history of science, see Bitbol and Gayon (2006), Brenner and Gayon (2009), Chimisso (2008, 2013).

  5. For a nuanced confirmation of this argument, see Braunstein (1998).

  6. As already noted, similar conceptions of life can be found in Max Verworn, Jabob von Uexküll, Frederik Buytendijk, and Kurt Goldstein, to quote only a few general biologists. As a point of reference in this connection, see, for example, Verworn (1895).

  7. A similar conception of concepts can be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. On this issue see Schmidgen (in press).

  8. This notion of vitalism is spelled out in more detail in Canguilhem (2008c).

  9. On the early history of this institute, see Bonah (2000).

  10. I would like to warmly thank the Strasbourg physiologist Bernard Canguilhem for having shown this library to me.

  11. On Walter’s tortoises, see Hayward (2001); and, more generally, Pickering (2009).

  12. On Canguilhem and Goldstein, see Gayon (1998), Debru (2004) and Métraux (2005). On p.344 Métraux has published one of the letters by Canguilhem to Goldstein, written on 28 May 1954, at the occasion of the publication of La connaissance de la vie.

  13. It should be noted that Kayser (1947), at the end of his second lecture, credits Canguilhem for his help in conducting the historical research that was required for preparing his presentation.

  14. For reasons of genealogical completeness one may add that von Weizsäcker’s chef d’oeuvre, Der Gestaltkreis (1940), was published in a French translation established by Michel Foucault and Daniel Rocher in 1958.

  15. On p.41 of FR Canguilhem presents the following quotation from Lebesgue (1905, p. 169 ): “Un objet est défini ou donné quand on a prononcé un nombre fini des mots s’appliquant à cet objet et à celui-là seulement.” The same quotation can be found in Cavaillès (1938, p. 15).

  16. For the experimental background of this mode of thought, see (Johns and Schmidgen 2002, pp. 640–645).

  17. It seems to be this thought that Foucault has rephrased with regard to Canguilhem’s contributions to the history of concepts: “Through the elucidation of the knowledge of life and from the concepts which articulate this knowledge, Canguilhem gets to the question of the concept in life” (Foucault 1980, p. 60). I follow here a different, at times more pertinent translation of Foucault’s “Introduction” to The Normal and the Pathological than the one which was published with Canguilhem (1989).

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Acknowledgments

The present paper is a condensed, revised and updated version of my introduction to the German translation of Canguilhem’s book on the formation of the reflex concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Schmidgen H., 2008, “Fehlformen des Wissens”. In Georges Canguilhem, Die Herausbildung des Reflexbegriffs im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, München: Fink, VII–LVIII). An early version of this paper was discussed in the colloquium of Department III (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) at the Max Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. I am thankful for the criticism and comments that I received in this forum. I would also like to thank Karl Hall (Central European University, Budapest) and Travis Gaug (Regensburg University) for their corrections of my English.

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    Henning Schmidgen

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Schmidgen, H. The life of concepts:. HPLS 36, 232–253 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-014-0030-1

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