“Is The Normal and the Pathological Vitalist?”

Résumé En

Canguilhem’s celebrated work The Normal and the Pathological seems light-years removed from any species of ‘vitalism’, at first glance, and indeed to our knowledge the scholarship has never sought to connect this work to his article “Aspects of vitalism.” Of course, part of the problem hinges on the definition of vitalism: is it an anti- or at least non-naturalistic doctrine of mysterious vital forces which are presented as ontologically specific, like Hans Driesch’s entelechies, or a type of scientific claim regarding the unique nature of biological entities, perhaps an outdated scientific claim? In fact, Canguilhem in the latter article distinguishes between a properly philosophical kind of vitalism and a more scientific kind, with the idea that the former is not directly refutable on an empirical basis in the way the latter is. Is Canguilhem’s conceptual matrix in The Normal and the Pathological a species of philosophical vitalism? We suggest a different distinction, between what one of us has called the “attitudinal vitalism” articulated in “Aspects of vitalism” influenced by Kurt Goldstein), and the “property vitalism” found in The Normal and the Pathological. Attitudinal vitalism deliberately steers clear of factual (and in that sense, refutable) scientific claims about life, vital forces and such, whereas property vitalism seeks to build on what Canguilhem calls the “originality of vital facts,” starting from some statements of Bichat on the instability and irregularity of vital phenomena. Decisively, property vitalism does not appear to be founded on an ontologically grounded and specific claim about vitality. In The Normal and the Pathological, in the interest of drawing an objective boundary (although we are not fully committed to this objectivity) between what is living and what is not, Canguilhem recognizes a genuine originality to vital phenomena, deeper down than the attitudes of living beings: life is that type of phenomena where instead of laws of nature, there are “organizations of properties” (Knowledge of life). But what sort of claim is the insistence on the originality of vital facts? Just because it is not naïve ontological vitalism does not mean it is vitalism without any ontology.