S.

Talcott, Canguilhem and the Problem of Error

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Table of Contents
Front Matter

Chapter 1: Power, Ruse, and Resistance in Societies of Control: Canguilhem on Algeria, the
Republic, and Education
A Political Education during the Downfall of the Republic
The Algeria Writings: War, the New Janissaries, and other Dangers
Education: Experience, Adventure, Silence

Chapter 2: The Birth of Political Resistance and Biological Philosophy out of the Spirit of
Medicine: Error in the Early Years
Philosophy of Life, Philosophy of War
Medicine, Philosophy, and Error
Alain, The Fiction of Gods and Spirit, and The Problem of Error
Fascism and Marxism in the Countryside: the CVIA and Peasants
Concluding Remarks

Chapter 3: Technical Alterations in the Problem of Error: From the True and the False to the
Normal and the Pathological
Notes from the Lycée de Valenciennes
On Descartes and Technique
The Treatise on Logic and Morals
The Course on “Error”
The Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological
Concluding Remarks

Chapter 4: Error and the Problem of Creation

The Young Canguilhem on Vitalism and Creation
Canguilhem’s Two Commentaries on Creative Evolution
Bergson, Alain, and the Problem of Creation
Alain: The Powers of the False and Creative Labor
 S. Talcott, Canguilhem and the Problem of Error

Chapter 5: Knowledge of Life True to Life: Medicine, Experimentation, and Milieu

Medicine and Experimentation in the Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the
Pathological
The Place of Experimentation in Knowledge of Life
Canguilhem’s Reflexive Method and the Concept of Milieu

Chapter 6: Becoming Rationalist: Biological Philosophy, History of the Reflex Concept, and the
Uses of Water
Biological Philosophy and Gaston Bachelard: Becoming Rationalist
The Reflex: History of a Concept and its Philosophical Value
On Psychology and Psychiatry
Bachelard, Canguilhem and the Uses of Water in the History of Madness

Chapter 7: Experimentation and the Crisis of Medicine

Dagognet’s Biological Philosophy and Clinical Anthropology
Canguilhem, Leriche, and the Dehumanization of Medicine
“To Care is to Undertake an Experiment”: Industrial Societies and The Crisis of
Medicine
Foucault, Canguilhem, and the History of Modern Medical Experience

Chapter 8: Put to the Test: Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy and a New Concept of Error
Science and the Problem of Error in 1955-1956
Histories of Scientific Concepts of Life, Biological Philosophy of Error
Ruse and Truth, Death and Life in Artistic Creation
The Monstrous in Life, Imagination, and Science
Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy Put to the Test

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 S. Talcott, Canguilhem and the Problem of Error

Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 1: Power, Ruse, and Resistance in Societies of Control: Canguilhem on
Algeria, the Republic, and Education

This chapter shows that after Canguilhem became the premier French historian and philosopher
of science in 1955, he remained a political philosopher deeply concerned with his historical
moment. His systematization of Alain’s political thought during the Algerian war testifies to this
and suggests the importance of both for later French political thought. I focus, however, on
Canguilhem’s uses of Alain in his analyses of this colonial and civil war and other dangers of the
postwar period. Central here is his reflection on the importance of rusing, whether in pursuit of
justice or attempts to manipulate public belief. Against such manipulations, he defended the
importance of education, exemplified through his essay on the role of experience and adventure,
that is to say, error, in life.

Chapter 2: The Birth of Political Resistance and Biological Philosophy out of the
Spirit of Medicine: Error in the Early Years

This chapter considers the transformations the young Canguilhem experienced in the 1930s,
while providing insight into the continuity of commitments that drove these changes. Beginning
from his vehement attacks on vitalist philosophy, I argue that his reading of Alain’s The Gods
together with the school of human geography led him to an enduring appreciation of such
philosophy, no longer as a false, bellicose doctrine, but a belief attuned to life in particular
human and natural worlds. This fits with his early medical conception of philosophy and unique
form of Marxism. These different interests, I show, culminated initially in his pamphlet on
Fascism and Peasants. From the start, I argue, the problem of error frames Canguilhem’s work,
even as its significance for him changes over time.

Chapter 3: Technical Alterations in the Problem of Error: From the True and the
False to the Normal and the Pathological

Drawing on Canguilhem’s early writings, manuscript notes, famous medical thesis, and his co-
authored Treatise on Logic and Morals, this chapter considers his classic formulations of the problem
of error and argues that he partially transforms these through his encounter with human suffering
and sickness. In both his genealogy of a thesis in positivist medicine and his own account of
sickness and health, error as mistake is replaced by an interest in the role confusion and suffering
play in sustaining creative endeavors in medical technique and sciences. While Canguilhem
might thus appear to turn away from error, I argue that he remains committed to its elemental
form: the trial and errors of life, be these exemplified by organisms or the history of science.

Chapter 4: Error and the Problem of Creation

This chapter begins by considering Canguilhem’s early critique of vitalist confusions before
turning to his 1943 commentaries on Bergson’s Creative Evolution. And in his 1952 homage to
Alain, I show, he found that both philosophers began an effort to understand creation without
falling into the trap of Platonism. Ultimately, I show why Canguilhem thought Alain’s approach

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to the problem of error is superior to Bergson’s, but that neither theorizes creation without
succumbing to Platonism. Through a close reading, I elucidate Canguilhem’s account of
Bergson’s importance for a philosophy of values and his failure to conceive of science or error as
anything other than falsification of life. For Alain, however, it is his scientific conception of the
living body that leads to trouble.

Chapter 5: Knowledge of Life True to Life: Medicine, Experimentation, and Milieu

This chapter begins exploring error in medical practice, as Canguilhem grappled with it in his
Essay and Knowledge of Life. A close reading of his efforts to distinguish experimental from medical
activity leads to some methodological observations about his relation to positivism and
phenomenology in the former book and an exemplification of his methods in the latter and its
study of the milieu concept. I argue that this study leads him to more expansive claims about the
fruitfulness of biological experimentation for knowledge of life even as he cautions against
treating medicine as experimentation and proposes consent as a criterion by which to test the
legitimacy of semi-experimental, semi-medical endeavors. Finally, I show how this informs his
distinctive understanding of subjectivity.

Chapter 6: Becoming Rationalist: Biological Philosophy, History of the Reflex

Concept, and the Uses of Water

This chapter puts Canguilhem into discussion with Bachelard and Foucault through the former’s
poetics of water and the latter’s discussion of water’s use in psychiatry. I read Canguilhem’s
history of the reflex concept as a critical extension of Bachelard’s efforts at “becoming rationalist”
and culmination of his own biological philosophy. Canguilhem, I argue, treats the concept as an
historical a priori in seeking to extend a convergence between the sciences and workers’
resistance to psychological techniques of control. And this fits with his critique of psychology and
defense of Pinel’s therapies for madness. On this basis, I argue that Foucault’s History of Madness
resists Bachelard and Canguilhem by reflexively criticizing their writings to show the historical
contingency of categories of work, alienation, and Man.

Chapter 7: Experimentation and the Crisis of Medicine

This chapter returns to questions about experimentation, first presenting François Dagognet’s
investigation of medical empiricism and appeal to a clinical anthropology as an attempted
extension of Canguilhem’s work. I find Canguilhem’s response in his return to René Leriche.
Whereas Dagognet implies that medicine’s empiricism arises from its impotence before nature
and conceals clinical knowledge of man, Canguilhem questions humanist medicine by insisting
that therapeutics today works by wounding and medicine has become anti-natural. His
“Therapeutics, Experimentation, and Responsibility,” I show, considers further consequences in
describing the medical crisis afflicting industrial societies. Medicine, he finds, has become
perhaps the pre-eminent political problem for modern societies, providing no anthropology. I
conclude by considering Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic as a critical extension from Canguilhem’s
essay.

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Chapter 8: Put to the Test: Canguilhem’s Biological Philosophy and a New

Concept of Error

This chapter draws together preceding conclusions to show the central significance of error for
Canguilhem’s biological philosophy. Examining an unpublished 1955-1956 lecture course
clarifies how it addressed error as a philosophical and social-political problem by studying the
history of biological sciences. Because this philosophy depends on his understanding of technical
and artistic creation, I exemplify this before examining imagination’s role in human life as a vital
response to monstrous alteration that makes both artistic and scientific activity possible. Yet in
banishing monsters as imaginary, positivist science becomes monstrous itself. There is no
escaping such alterations. I conclude, therefore, by considering his biological philosophy’s spirit
and ability to endure the alteration that threatened it when Canguilhem finally recognized error
as a scientific concept.

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