Canguilhem summary

Casey Wicker 8/30/11

Mr. Canguilhem begins the “Knowledge of Life” firstly with the argument that the reading holds, saying, “A physician’s thought and activity are incomprehensible without the concepts of the normal and the pathological” (Canguilhem, 121). It is with this statement that Mr. Canguilhem bases the reading. He then brings p several questions that deal with “what if” statements. These include “Is ‘anomaly’ the same as ‘abnormality’?” and “Is ‘pathological’ the same concept as ‘abnormal’?” (Canguilhem, 121). He ends the introductory with the statement very similar to his thesis, this reading, “human life can have a biological meaning, a social meaning, and an existential meaning” (Canguilhem, 212)

The next several pages of Canguilhem’s argument consist of statement and references from Bichat and Claude Bernard. Conguilhem questions the ambiguity of the word “normal” and how it “sometimes designates a fact that can be described through statistical sampling…yet sometimes designates an ideal, appositive principle of evaluation” (Conguilhem, 122). Conguilhem decides too look at the cause of this ambiguity “in order to understand its renewed vitality” (Conguilhem, 122). It is here that he brings in Bichat and the way he “locates the distinctive characteristic or organisms in the instability of vital forces” (Conguilhem, 122). To refute this claim of the instability of vital forces Conguilhem brings in a Claude Bernard. Bernard talks about the “legality of vital phenomena, their consistency as being inflexible, under defined conditions, as that of physical phenomena” (Conguilhem, 123). These two opposing ideas remind Conguilhem of the objection that Aristotle had to Plato, but Conguilhem concludes the opposing ideas by saying that Bernard has a greater factual argument and that his biology “includes a fully Platonic conception of laws, coupled with a deep sense of individuality” (Conguilhem, 124).

Conguilhem then proceeds to inquire whether “by considering life as an order of properties we might not come closer to understanding certain difficulties that cannot be solved from within the other perspective” (Conguilhem, 125) With this thought in mind he concludes that abnormality or irregularity are part of our very existence. And that “if individuals of the same species remain distinct and not interchangeable, because they are both completely alike and differ solo numero” (Conguilhem, 125).

Conguilhem concludes that, although anthropology looks at norms, that the human biology and medicine are, and always have been, necessary. However, he does note that anthropology does not cause morality and thus the concept of normal always remains a normative concept of “properly philosophical scope” (Conguilhem, 133).

Works Cited

Conguilhem, Georges. “Normal and Pathological.” Knowledge of Life. Trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. 212-133a