E NCYCLOPAEDIA OF

P HILOSOPHY OF
E DUCATION

Georges Canguilhem

James Marshall
University of Auckland

Georges Canguilhem was born on 4 June, 1904, at Castelnaudary near Toulouse, in

South Western France. He died on 11 September 1995 at the age of 91.
Success at Castelnaudary Lycée (where he was a boarder), and the award of a schol-
arship to study at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris, enabled him to gain entrance

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to the École Normale Supérieure in 1924. In his cohort were Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond

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Aron, and Paul Nizan. Later there were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Cavaillès. He
was influenced by his teacher Alain (Emile Chartier) at Henri IV, by Cavaillès whom he
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succeeded at the University of Strasbourg in 1941, and by Gaston Bachelard, whom he
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succeeded as Professor of History and Philosophy of Sciences at the Sorbonne, and as Di-
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rector of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences and Techniques, in 1955. In addition to his
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qualifications in philosophy he gained a Doctorate in Medicine at the University of Stras-

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bourg in 1943. His doctoral thesis was to be republished several times, and translated
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into English as The Normal and the Pathological in 1978 (with an introduction by Michel
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Foucault). He also occupied the important administrative post of Inspecteur Général de
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Philosophie between 1948 and 1955, having initially refused it at the time of the Libera-
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tion. In this post he was responsible for the teaching of philosophy in lycées. His writing
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was austere and he was noted as an exacting if not intimidating examiner. Nor was he
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the typical French intellectual, pronouncing on almost anything and prepared to occupy a
radical political platform. If he was on the left he was not on the radical or revolutionary
left. For full bibliographical details and accompanying biographic comments see Camille
Limoges (1994). For a fuller historic account in English of Canguilhem’s life see David
Macey (1998).
His friend Jean Cavaillès, who was to be assassinated by the Nazis in January 1944,
had encouraged him into the resistance (if encouragement were needed – given his ‘rebel-
lious’ stances at ENS and his early opposition to events in Germany). After the Gestapo
raid on the Faculté des Lettres at the University of Strasbourg (by then in Clermont-
Ferrand) in 1943, and in which two professors were killed, and many students and profes-
sors deported to Germany (but which he managed to evade), he was forced underground
where he took a major part as a doctor in the Auvergne Maquis (code name ‘Lafont’).
He was awarded the Military Cross and the Médaille de la Résistance in 1944. Later, in

M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B. Žarnić, A. Gibbons (eds.)

Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education
http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA
1976, he was to publish a study of his former student, colleague and co-member of the
resistance Jean Cavaillès: Vie et Mort de Jean Cavaillès.
Unlike Bachelard, who took physics and chemistry as historical examples of scientific
rationality, he took as his major sources, biology and medicine. It could be said that
in selecting biology and medicine, and in rejecting great scientific events such as the
Copernican Revolution, that he forged a change of course in French History of Science.
Biology and medicine were not as rigorous as physics and chemistry and are inextricably
intertwined with non-discursive practices. Foucault is to extend this displacement further
to the human sciences.
If Canguilhelm was an historian of science rather than a philosopher of science then
he was also an historian who was extremely sensitive to philosophical issues. According
to Dominique Lecourt (1975: 165f.): ”There is probably no better definition of the his-
tory of the sciences as it is conceived and practised by Georges Canguilhem himself. . . it
seems completely justified to make him Bachelard’s heir”. But his history is also episte-
mological. For Canguilhem , ”the history of science is the history of an object – discourse
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– that is a history and has a history, whereas science is the science of an object that is not
a history, that has no history”( Canguilhem in Delaporte, 1994: 26). Thus (ibid.): E D
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C L discourse, is
. . . the object of the history of science has nothing in common with the object
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of science. The scientific object, constituted by methodological
secondary to, although not derived from, the C
E N non-natural, cultural objects.
initial natural object. . . The his-
tory of science applies itself to these /secondary,
. h r objects’. But it is also concerned with
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It is a discursive project about scientific
s project”, a progress which may ”meet with ac-
cidents, be delayed w f
”the progress of the discursive
.
or diverted by obstacles, or be interrupted by crises, that

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is moments of judgement and truth
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p of the history of science are then very different from the objects of science.
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Thetobjects
For Canguilhem science arrests time, construing its objects as non-temporal, and as not
having a history. The full reality of the scientific object is in principle available to the
scientist in the present. It is of course true that these objects exist in time and change
through time. However the objects of history of science are regarded themselves as part
of an historical development which has not yet finished. The objects of history of science
are incomplete. Whereas the objects of geology can be treated as complete, as ”givens”
open to analysis, the objects of history of science cannot, as their value and meaning are
determined first by an epistemological and normative judgement and, second, are always
in principle open to re-evaluation as to their value and meaning in accordance with the
progress of science.
Canguilhem’s epistemological concern then is with the history of concepts. The
philosopher’s aim is to identify ”the order of conceptual progress that is visible only
after the fact and of which the present notion of scientific truth is the provisional point
of culmination” (Canguilhem, 1988: 9). But this history of concepts is not the history

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of ideas. Nor is it a history of terms, or of phenomena, or even of theories. Perhaps the
elimination of these possibilities can make clearer his view of the history of science.
If there were such a thing as a history of terms then it might concern itself with explor-
ing the use of a term from its historical antecedents to more modern usages. For example,
the term ‘atom’ in current use in modern science was also employed by the pre-Socratics.
However whilst the same term or word was used by both pre-Socratics and contemporary
scientists, the referents of these terms have almost nothing in common. Such a history
was not Canguilhem’s.
Nor is the history of concepts to be identified with a history of phenomena. For ex-
ample someone might produce a history of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in, say,
New Zealand. What would be crucial here for Canguilhem is not what is observed - the
phenomena - but the interpretation of those phenomena. It is not enough then for some-
one to observe and describe phenomena no matter how new, or unexpected (perhaps as
the result of a Baconian experiment), for that person to have a scientific concept, or to be

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doing science, or to be writing the history of science. One cannot explain in observational
terms (thus for Canguilhem Priestly did not have a concept of oxygen whereas Lavoisiier
did – Gutting 1989). ED
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But Canguilhem also insists upon the separation of concepts from any theories which
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may ”use” those concepts. Concepts are not imbedded in theories, and they do not derive
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their meaning from associated theories. Instead concepts permit one to identify data in a
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scientifically meaningful and useful manner: theories explain the data and/or phenomena

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identified prior to explanation by concepts. Concepts permit scientific questions to be
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formulated and theory(ies) provide(s) scientific answers to those questions. Concepts are
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also claimed to be ”theoretically polyvalent” (Canguilhem, 1988: 6). By this is meant
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that one and the same concept can occur in different theories. Thus Canguilhem was able

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to write the history of the reflex arc, a concept which occurs in several quite different
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theories. This is not to deny that a concept may become reformulated and transformed
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between theories, but if the concept retains an underlying fundamental scientific content,
it is still the same concept.
Canguilhem believes that there is a close relationship between concepts and phenom-
ena. If he is rejecting the distinction sometimes claimed between (neutral) facts and the-
ories, he is not doing so in any simplistic fashion which claims that there are no observed
facts apart from their theoretical interpretations. His position is more complex as he
makes distinctions between terms, concepts and theories. Concepts which are theoreti-
cally polyvalent identify phenomena, not necessarily or merely theories. Instead theories
explain those phenomena identified prior to explanation by concepts.
Clearly Canguilhem does not view the history of science as itself possessing scientific
status. Such a view of the history of science would see it in positivistic manner as present-
ing already constituted objects from the past of science to be scrutinised by the historian
of science, just like any other data in a laboratory. What is wrong with this approach is
Canguilhem’s insistence that history of science is normative. Here he would seem to be
following Bachelard in believing that the historian’s judgements of the past are informed

3
by the present. This involves a form of epistemological analysis which furnishes to the
historian the principles for informed judgement of the past. Clearly there are normative
notions associated with the evaluation of science’s achievements and progress.
On the Normal and the Pathological is the work for which Canguilhem is best known.
Not only was it important in the area of medicine but it was important for other areas
of the human sciences. As Foucault said in the Introduction to the English version this
work was important ”for those very people who were separated from, or challenged, the
establishment”. It was the work of Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem on ”a philos-
ophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept” which was important in the crises of
the Universities and the status and role of knowledge in the 1960s, rather than ”a philos-
ophy of experience, of sense, and of subject”, ie, of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, according
to Foucault (Canguilhem, 1978: ix-x.). If that is the case however, for Canguilhem, the
events of 1968 were not easy or comfortable, as he had given his life to the academy and
may have been seen as a mandarin (Bourdieu, 1998: 191).

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This work was essentially his medical doctoral thesis. He attacked the notion that the
concepts of the normal and the pathological, so essential to the thought and activity of
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medicine, could be interpreted in a straightforward positivistic and statistical manner. He
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attacked the fundamental notion that normal was a statistical mean, because that amounted
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to conceiving and treating a living system as if it were structured and therefore governed
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in a law like manner. If that were the case it would have been in some pre-established
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harmony with the environment. Instead, Canguilhem argues, the human organism is a

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living vital organism which is by no means in any pre-established harmony with its envi-
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ronment, for ”The laws of Galilean or Cartesian mechanics cannot by themselves explain
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the origin of coordinated organ systems, and such coordinated systems are precisely what
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one means by ‘life’. In other words, mechanism is a theory that tells us how machines

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(living or not) work once they are built, but it tells us nothing about how to build them”
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(Canguilhem in Delaporte, 1994: 78).
htt Thus for Canguilhem the normal begins instead with the living organism and an order
of specific properties, arguing that medical practice must be based upon the diversity of
life which in turn provides the paths for its own conceptualisation and for the restoration
of its normal state. ”To say that ‘no doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with
a new arrangement of eyes or limbs’, is to recognise that an organism’s norm of life is
furnished by the organism itself, contained in its existence” (Canguilhem, 1978: 159).
Therefore we must proceed from life to understanding and not from understanding to life,
and thus define life as a meaning inscribed in matter. Lecourt (1975: 184) translates this
position into the form of an equation: < life = code = information = concept of life =
concept >.
Essentially for Canguihem then normality means the ability to adapt to changing cir-
cumstances, to environments which are both various and variant. It thus involves activity
and flexibility so that the living being lives in shifting relationships with a continuously
changing environment. Medical dictionaries define the normal as ”that which conforms
to the rule, regular”. Canguilhem extends this brief definition as follows: ”(1) normal is

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that which is such that it ought to be; (2) normal, in the most usual sense of the word, is
that which is met in the majority of cases of a determined kind, or that which constitutes
either the average or standard of a measurable characteristic” (Canguilhem, 1978: 69).
For Canguilhem and his views on life and concept, there can be no such sense of a patho-
logical normal for living organisms and hence there can be no purely objective pathology
(Rabinow, in Delaporte, 1994: 16).
Canguilhem’s thesis on life is known as vitalism. Gordon (1998: 185) states the thesis
thus:

• life is an irreducible concept and one which is necessary to science;

• its content is given through experience as living beings as well as our observation
of living beings;

• our conceptual activity in general is a continuation and extension of our existence

as living beings.
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Also, for Canguilhem (1952: 143), machines are seen as an extensionE ofD
ganisms: ”Un outil, une machine ce sont des organs, et des organsP A living or-

L O sont des outils ou

extensions of the body (Hacking, 1998: 207). His work Y C

des machines”. His point is not that tools and machines are organisms but that they are
here, directed as much against
Cartesian dualism, has obvious implications forN C
the philosophy of technology.
r /
In education there are at least three broadE parameters along which a Canguilhem in-
spired research programme might t
s h
. First there is the importance for the human
proceed.
.
sciences, including education,f fof Canguihem’s approach to epistemology, especially his
emphasis that this must w
w be an historical epistemology. If this is being traced in the general
/wsciences in Anglo-American thought (see eg, Economy and Society, 27
/
area of the social
:
tp be of concern here is the specific nature of rationality in education, especially
[2&3], 1998)
Whattwould
h
it is almost non-existent in education (though see Marshall, 1996: 47-53).

those aspects of educational theory and research which laid claim to scientific status, and
the role which critical historical thought might play in relation to ‘the’ vital form of life
displayed in a living organism. Second there is a need for a deeper exploration of the
notion of ‘normal’ in educational thought and theory. Canguilhem’s notion of the norm
as not being statistical but, instead, to be associated with normativity, that is the ability of
a living organism to adapt with activity and flexibility to changing circumstances would
be more than helpful here. Finally his views on vitalism, normativity and the notion that
tools and machines are extensions of living organisms have interesting possibilities for
problematising the educational thrust towards technology.
For ‘extensions’ of the ideas of Canguihem to the human sciences see entries for
Michel Foucault, particularly ‘Foucault on Science’. See also entries for ‘Bachelard,
Canguilhem and Foucault on Science’, and ‘Norms in Education’.

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References
Balibar, Étienne et al. (1993) Georges Canguilhem: philosophe, historien des sciences,
Paris: Albin Michel.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) ‘Georges Canguilhem: an obituary notice’, Economy and
Society, 27(2&3), 190-192.
Canguilhem, Georges (1952) ‘Machine et Organisme’, Connaisance de la Vie, Paris:
Hachette.
Canguilhem, Georges (1976) Vie et Mort de Jean Cavaillès, Ambialet: Pierre Laleure.
Canguihem, Georges (1978) On the Normal and the Pathological, Dordrecht: Reidal,
1978. Originally published as Le Normal et le Pathologique, Paris: Presse Universitaires
de France, 1966.
Canguilhem, Georges (1988) Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sci-
ences, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT1 Press.

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Delaporte, François (1994) A Vital Rationalist: selected writings from Georges Can-
guilhem, New York: Zone Books. Introduction by Paul Rabinow, pp.11-22.
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Gordon, Colin (1998) ‘Canguilhem: life, health and death’, Economy and Society,
27(2&3), 182-189.
OPA
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Gutting, Gary (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cam-
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bridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hacking, Ian (1998) ‘Canguilhem amid the Cyborgs’, Economy and Society, 27(2&3),
202-216.
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t
Lecourt, Dominique (1975) Marxist Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Fou-
fs
w.f
cault, London: New Left Books. Part I published as The Historical Epistemology of
Gaston Bachelard, Paris: Vrin, 1969, and Part II as For a Critique of Epistemology, Paris:

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Librairie François Maspero, 1972.
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Limoges, Camille (1994), ‘Critical Bibliography’, in (ed.) François Delaporte (1994),
p
htt
A Vital Rationalist: selected writings from Georges Canguilhem, New York: Zone Books,
pp.385-454.
Macey, David (1998) ‘The Honour of Georges Canguilhem’, Economy and Society,
27(2&3), 171-181.
Marshall, James D. (1996) Michel Foucault: personal autonomy and education, Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education

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1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology