Canguilhem and the Logic of Life

Arantza Etxeberria and Charles T. Wolfe

[L]a vie déconcerte la logique.

(Canguilhem 1977a, 1)
[T]o do biology, even with the aid of intelligence, we sometimes
need to feel like beasts ourselves.
(Canguilhem 2008a, xx)

Abstract We examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning

the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of
life stems from the idea of a living individual endowed with creative subjectivity
and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic.” In contrast, we examine two
naturalistic perspectives in the 1970s exploring the logic of life (Jacob) and the logic
of the living individual (Maturana and Varela). Canguilhem can be considered to be
a precursor of the second view, but there are divergences; for example, unlike them,
he does not dismiss vitalism, often referring to it in his work, and even at times
describing himself as a vitalist. The reason may lie in their different views of
science.

Keywords Canguilhem · Vitalism · Biology · Logic of life · Autopoetic/

heteropoetic · Analysis/synthesis · Living individual

A. Etxeberria
IAS Research for Life, Mind, and Society, Department of Philosophy,
University of the Basque Country, UPV-EHU, Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
C. T. Wolfe (*)
Département de Philosophie & ERRAPHIS, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès,
Toulouse, France

© The Author(s) 2023 131

C. Donohue, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century
Life Sciences and Philosophy, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life
Sciences 29, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12604-8_8
132 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

1 Introduction

In Canguilhem’s philosophy, life disconcerts logic because of its intrinsically self-­

produced or “autopoetic”1 nature, in contrast with mechanical devices. This is
‘logic’ in the sense of the method of scientific discovery, even that which Claude
Bernard theorized for experimenting with organisms in vivo,2 but also, ‘logic’
understood as a concept or scheme of the internal organization and functional inte-
gration that underlies the living state. Knowledge of life, the method, is challenging
for biology. Experimental biology tends to consider living beings as machines, and
the knowledge operation required for that leaves part of life aside; it cannot grasp
life in full. In fact, although Canguilhem as a historian and philosopher of science
has a high regard for biology,3 he finds that something goes missing when scientific
knowledge aims to understand life by means of an analysis of wholes in(to) parts,
even if this may be the only way to proceed. The analysis/synthesis dichotomy is
important in Canguilhem’s view on life and vitality, as well as for his understanding
of medicine, and of the pathological more generally. Life is not analyzable, he con-
tends, i.e., life defies scientific methods because of its inherent plasticity and vari-
ability, which are evident in its interactive or relational capacity. The latter is
particularly emphasized in his conceptualization of the milieu as forming a constitu-
tive relation with the organism,4 notably close to, and inspired by, von Uexküll’s
idea of Umwelt.
Canguilhem’s understanding of life sets a high value on its capacity to establish
its own multiple norms according to its relationship with the milieu, and change
them within a range of potentialities to establish a new physiological order when
required.5 This entanglement of organism and milieu in a normative relation is the
main distinctive feature of Canguilhem’s vitalism. Not that he posits the matter of
life as an ontological or metaphysical entity different from that of physicochemical
systems. Canguilhem denies that vitalism is a metaphysics, and then adds immedi-
ately afterwards that it is “the recognition of the originality of the fact of life [le fait

1
As we discuss below, Canguilhem writes “autopoetic”, rather than “autopoietic”.
2
Bernard 1865, Coleman 1985.
3
Canguilhem’s relation to science itself and the knowledge of science has been questioned; for
example, Gabel 2015 mentions Jacob’s comment in the Web Stories Video, that Canguilhem told
him that he would not have written much of what he did, had he read Jacob earlier. Although Jacob
seems to have understood Canguilhem’s remark at face value, we could always think he was just
being polite and appreciative of the work of the scientist.
4
In “The Living and its Milieu,” he writes that “the relationship between the organism and the
environment is the same as that between the parts and the whole of an organism” (Canguilhem
2008a, 111).
5
“Man is only truly healthy when he is capable of multiple norms, when he is more than normal.
The measure of health is a certain capacity to overcome organic crises in order to establish a new
physiological order, different from the initial order” (“Le normal et le pathologique,” in Canguilhem
1965, 167). See also Canguilhem 1972, 77, 155.
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 133

vital].”6 What is this originality, then? It is not an ontological specificity (like a

Drieschian entelechy), yet it is a feature which resists any ‘logic of life’. Although
he warns that there are intellectual dangers inherent in positing that living beings are
like an empire within an empire (imperium in imperio, Canguilhem 1965, 95), he
asserts that Life itself determines livings beings to act in interpretive, purposive,
normative, vital ways. Life “disconcerts logic” (Canguilhem 1977a, 1). He does not
reject biology’s kind of knowledge as science either, but contends that being alive is
the same as being synthetic, as opposed to analytic; and synthetic, like autopoetic,
means that it is a system in a state of continuous creativity.
In this essay we examine Canguilhem’s ideas concerning the knowledge of life
and its consequences for science and vitalism. First, his concept of life, which stems
from the idea of the living individual as endowed with creative subjectivity and
norms; we will consider it as a Kantian view in that it shares Kant’s challenge to a
science of living beings (Sect. 2). Second, why life disconcerts logic. In order to
explicate this, we examine two different perspectives. One is the evolutionary and
genetically based logic of life of works such as Jacob’s (1973) (Sect. 3). The other
is the organizational dynamic logic of the individual of the autopoietic school
(Maturana and Varela 1973). Although Canguilhem seems to have preceded and
influenced the latter, there are divergences. For example, unlike them, he does not
dismiss vitalism (Sect. 4). Third, we explore his claim for vitalism connected with
views about the role of analysis in the scientific knowledge of life and his character-
ization of life as synthesis (Sect. 5).

2 Canguilhem and the Life of an Organism

Since the second half of the nineteenth century there have been two distinctive
styles in the study of biology. One of them, physiology, focuses on the living organ-
ism, and takes as its main topic the arrangement of parts or organs into an organized
whole. The other style, that of evolutionary biology, is concerned with differential
changes of traits in populations and lineages through – mainly – genealogical pro-
cesses. The main exponents of each of these styles or traditions were, respectively,
Claude Bernard (1865) and Charles Darwin (1859).7
A main philosophical topic of physiology is biological individuality, its delimita-
tion and its cohesion: how a living individual maintains its integrity and organiza-
tion through the causal interactions of its parts and the regulation of those interactions
(Bernard 1878–1879; Pradeu 2016). This was the approach pursued experimentally
by Claude Bernard’s physiology, as it aimed to reach scientific status; some consid-
ered him as the Newton of medicine (see note 5 below). Physiology thus understood

6
Canguilhem, “Le normal et le pathologique,” in Canguilhem 1965, 156.
7
As several authors have noted, Claude Bernard’s physiological tradition had little interest in evo-
lutionary or developmental biology, which it did not view as proper sciences (see Normandin 2007).
134 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

parted ways with the more observational approach of natural history and intended
to be scientific. Canguilhem’s philosophy of life operates within this physiological
framework permeated by the antagonism between mechanist and vitalist views con-
cerning the special status of living beings and the challenge thus posed for the sci-
entific knowledge of life.
This subject matter is reminiscent of Kant‘s view of organized beings and scien-
tific knowledge. Kant promoted the view of living beings as purposeful and self-­
organized in his 1790 Critique of Judgment (§ 65, AA 5, 374). There he established
the grounds for understanding organized beings whose components are mutually
dependent on each other and on the whole they generate. Being self-organized, they
are very different from artifacts such as a watch, organised according to a designer’s
plan. But this understanding set a limit for science. Difficulties appear in the project
of reconciling this with the conceptual framework Kant developed for natural sci-
ences in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), founded in natural laws without
purposiveness, in external causes, and in mechanical principles (Nuño de la Rosa
and Etxeberria 2010). Kant did not think there can be a naturalist scientific explana-
tion for living beings, such as there is one for physical systems. His declaration that
there will not be a “Newton of the blade of grass”8 is well known: “Indeed, so cer-
tain is it, that we may confidently assert that it is absurd for human beings even to
entertain any thought of so doing or to hope that maybe another Newton may some
day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from
natural laws that no design has ordered” (Kant 1790/1987 § 75, AA 5, 400).9
Kant’s view of the organism as a self-organized system constitutes a challenge
for the scientific analytic method. There have been attempts to reconcile teleology
and mechanism, such as Lenoir (1982)’s who understood the Kantian tradition as a
way to integrate self-organization and teleology within scientific biology. But those
naturalizing efforts or scientific explanations of material self-organizing appear to
be reductionistic (Moss and Newman 2016). In sum, the Kantian challenge is basi-
cally the problem of whether our knowledge of life or of living systems can be natu-
ralized. Kant seems to hold that it cannot (and some praise him for this, while others

8
Since then, there was a long controversy about who could be the scientific figure that would con-
tradict Kant. According to Cassirer, for biologists like Haeckel, Darwin was the “Newton of the
blade of grass,” yet Roux rejected this (Cassirer 1950, 163). Others have mentioned Claude
Bernard (Prochiantz 1990), and still others thoroughly agree with Kant (Nuño de la Rosa and
Etxeberria 2010). We return to this topic in Sect. 4.
9
This statement of Kant’s is often quoted approvingly, a rare exception being Zammito 2006, who
notes that Kant is neatly placing himself in the rearguard of scientific thought of his time concern-
ing living entities. Our point here is simply to note the existence of this influential position accord-
ing to which ‘Life’ is not reducible to a certain set of empirical (measurable, quantifiable) features.
In that sense Canguilhem can be said to be a Kantian (see Brilman 2018 for an interesting develop-
ment of this connection).
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 135

reproach him for just the same claim).10 Canguilhem’s approach to this, in some
respects similar to Kant’s (Brilman 2018), asks how we can know about living
beings with the kind of knowledge developed to investigate inanimate beings and
the production of technical devices.
Canguilhem’s view of living systems as actively self-produced or autopoetic
establishes the difference with respect to technological objects. He referred to living
beings as “autopoétique” or “autopoetic” in “L’expérimentation dans la biologie
animale,” an essay on the experimental tradition started by Claude Bernard, origi-
nally delivered as a talk in 1951 and included in La connaissance de la vie. There he
distinguishes the “heteropoetic” character of human technical activity in its interac-
tion with the environment: “Man first experiences and experiments with biological
activity in his relations of technical adaptation to the milieu. Such technique is het-
eropoetic, adjusted to the outside, and it takes from the outside its means, or the
means to its means” (Canguilhem 2008a, 9). However, he contends that when in
interaction with other living beings, experimenters become aware of the “autopoetic
character of organic activity.” The realization of this has been an achievement:
“Only after a long series of obstacles surmounted and errors acknowledged did man
come to suspect and recognize the autopoetic character of organic activity and to
rectify progressively, in contact with biological phenomena, the guiding concepts of
experimentation.” Human action producing technology “presupposes a minimal
logic – for the representation of the external real, which human technique modifies,
determines the discursive, reasoned facet of the artisan’s activity, and all the more
so the engineer’s.” This does not work in the case of living entities because humans
cannot produce them from the exterior, therefore “we must abandon this logic of
human action if we are to understand living functions” (Canguilhem 2008a, 9).
Canguilhem’s attention is focused on the kind of knowledge of or attitude
towards living entities, in epistemological terms. The “autopoetic” character of liv-
ing beings, in contrast with artefacts, refers to the kind of object of knowledge.
Later Maturana and Varela (1973, 1980) will use a similar term (autopoiesis) to
characterise the constitutive organization of living beings. This topic appears also in
the analysis/synthesis opposition: Canguilhem insists that knowledge of living sys-
tems proceeds by analysis; to know living individuals, science or biology has to
analyze them, while ontologically they are synthetic, as they dynamically produce
themselves in an active and creative way. “The physiology of regulation (or homeo-
stasis, as it has been called since Walter Bradford Cannon), together with cytologic
morphology, enabled Bernard to treat the organism as a whole and to develop an
analytic science of organic functions without brushing aside the fact that a living

10
Respectively, Chen 2019 and Zammito 2006 and 2018. The extent to which Kant ‘refuses’ natu-
ralization or perhaps just the integration of the life sciences in a mechanistic scientific project (on
Kant’s ‘Newtonian’ understanding of science), given that naturalization itself is a debated and
non-transparent category, is somewhat controversial: for a different view from ours see Duchesneau
2018 (thanks to G. Bolduc for pointing this out), and the review of this book by one of us
(Wolfe 2020).
136 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

thing is, in the true sense of the word, a synthesis” (“Le tout et la partie dans la pen-
sée biologique,” translated in Canguilhem 1994, 298).
To argue that living bodies are special, Canguilhem takes over Kurt Goldstein’s
chief holistic or organismic idea presented in his influential work The Organism
(1934) – it is the organism as a totality, not a cluster of functions or organs, which
acts and reacts as a unified approach to its environment and its challenges
(Canguilhem 1972, 49) – and strips it of some of its more overtly metaphysical trap-
pings. In Canguilhem’s unique way of engaging with ‘organisms’ and the question
of their uniqueness we find one of the curious features of Goldstein’s account: the
way in which he wavers or moves back and forth between a cautious, epistemologi-
cal position (reminiscent of the Kantian regulative ideal in the third Critique) in
which organisms are real and special because of the way we cognitively constitute
them, and a bold, ontological position in which organisms are real because of basic,
intrinsic features which are just there. However, this convenient distinction between
the epistemological (projective, externally constitutive) vision of biological entities
and the ontological vision (strong vitalist, ‘rational metaphysics’ as Kant might
have said) is somewhat muddied when Canguilhem introduces a further vitalist
twist, in “Aspects du vitalisme”: that it might be an objective (‘ontological’) feature
of living beings that they are interpretive beings, and especially that they need to
regard other entities as being, like themselves, organismic, purposive, vital. We
interpret Canguilhem as alluding to this need of being interactively immersed with
other organisms to know what they are, when he writes in La connaissance de la vie
that “We suspect that, to do mathematics, it would suffice that we be angels. But to
do biology, even with the aid of intelligence, we sometimes need to feel like beasts
ourselves” (Canguilhem 2008a, Introduction xx). There may also be an existential-
ist parfum in Canguilhem’s reflections, as when he describes this interpretive stance
as essentially a kind of fundamental existential attitude – not a ‘fact’ but a way of
life, indeed a contemplative way of life. In any case, what is distinctive of his posi-
tion, especially when we consider the core arguments of The Normal and the
Pathological, is the presupposition that normativity is a power or capacity proper to
living beings:
We, on the other hand, think that the fact that a living man reacts to a lesion, infection,
functional anarchy by means of a disease, expresses the fundamental fact that life is not
indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and thereby even an
unconscious position of value; in short, life is in fact a normative activity. Normative, in
philosophy, means every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm,
but this mode of judgment is essentially subordinate to that which establishes norms.
Normative, in the fullest sense of the word, is that which establishes norms. And it is in this
sense that we plan to talk about biological normativity. (Canguilhem 1972, 126–127)

We find here an insistence that there is something unique about living entities that
makes them creators of a certain world which they inhabit. Upon closer examina-
tion, this idea seems to contain some Nietzschean overtones (Foucault also pointed
to this aspect in his mentor’s work: Foucault 1991, 21), namely, the idea that val-
ues, norms and other higher-level constructs are in fact products of our vital
instincts, so that life integrates rationality to itself through its normative activity. In
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 137

a lecture in the problem of regulations in the organism and society, Canguilhem

also insists that
An organism is an entirely exceptional mode of being, because there is no real difference,
properly speaking, between its existence and the rule or norm of its existence. From the
time an organism exists, is alive, that organism is ‘possible’, i.e., it fulfils the ideal of an
organism; the norm or rule of its being [existence] is given by its existence itself (Canguilhem
2002, 106–107).

Organisms have agency. Yet Canguilhem does not appeal to a disembodied, founda-
tional subjectivity, as we might find in more anti-naturalistic trends in phenomenol-
ogy; there is no pure ego contemplating the reality of the flesh like a sailor in a ship,
for him. As regards the relevance of experience, it would seem that – despite their
shared affinity for Goldstein – it is more than unlikely that Canguilhem would go as
far as Merleau-Ponty, as we see when he reflects on the limitations of a conceptual-
ization of the living body as “inaccessible to others, accessible only to its titular
holder” (Canguilhem 2008b, 476).
Canguilhem’s position on organic uniqueness and what he somewhat cryptically
calls ‘experience’ is subtly yet significantly different:
the classical vitalist grants that living beings belong to a physical environment, yet asserts
that they are an exception to physical laws. This is the inexcusable philosophical mistake,
in my view. There can be no kingdom within a kingdom [empire dans un empire], or else
there is no kingdom at all. There can only be one philosophy of empire, that which rejects
division and imperialism. . . . One cannot defend the originality of biological phenomena
and by extension, of biology, by delimiting a zone of indeterminacy, dissidence or heresy
within an overall physicochemical environment of motion and inertia. If we are to affirm the
originality of the biological, it must be as a reign over the totality of experience, not over
little islands of experience. Ultimately, classical vitalism is (paradoxically) too modest, in
its reluctance to universalize its conception of experience.11

‘Classical’ vitalism as described here is what one of us has termed substantival

vitalism elsewhere (Wolfe 2011, 2015a). That is, a form of vitalism claiming that
living beings are ontologically special, different from the rest of the physical world,
and perhaps even unexplainably so. And Canguilhem’s diagnosis of an “inexcusable
philosophical mistake” is clear enough (whether we explicate this in Spinozist
terms – no kingdom within a kingdom – or in physicalist terms – no gaps in the law-
like physical world; neither of these are to be confused with a more ‘Gaian’ sense
of ‘one world’ in which life is coeval with this world). But what should we make,
then, of his defence of the “originality of the biology,” i.e. the autonomy of biology,
as a “reign over the totality of experience”? What looks at first glance like meta-
physical holism might instead be an ‘attitudinal’ conception, that is, a point of view
on experience.

11
Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme,” in Canguilhem 1965, 95, emphasis ours. To our knowledge,
this unusually ‘phenomenological’-sounding appeal to ‘lived experience’ rather than ‘life’ has not
been pointed out in Canguilhem, with the exception perhaps of Paul Rabinow’s comments on
Canguilhem’s “not-so-latent existentialism,” in his introduction to the Canguilhem anthology A
Vital Rationalist (Rabinow 1994, 18).
138 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

Canguilhem was aware and acceptant of the biology of his times, and paid atten-
tion both to the physiological perspective and to the evolutionary|molecular biology
perspective. Yet he does not appear to be keen to develop what we could call a logic
of life or the living; why? Taking into account Canguilhem’s views on living indi-
viduals, we can now consider the reason why life disconcerts logic according to
him. For this, we examine some views on the nature of life and organisms in the
biology of the 1970s, such as François Jacob’s and Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela’s, each proposing a particular proposal for a logic in biology.
Canguilhem’s ideas contrast with those of biologists of the time: we will specifi-
cally take into account Jacob’s evolutionary perspective in La logique du vivant and
Maturana and Varela’s organizational perspective in Autopoiesis and cognition.
Both books were originally written in the early 1970s (in languages different from
English) and elaborate very different research programs to explore living
organization.

3 The Logic of “Life at Large”

As mentioned earlier, two major traditions of biological thought emerged in the

nineteenth century, which articulate and convey distinctively different intuitions
concerning life. The evolutionary approach conceives of life as a whole and unique
phenomenon, whereas the physiological approach is concerned with the organiza-
tion of particular living individuals underlying the living state.
In the early 1970s, the two styles of biology generated different and opposed
views on whether the organization of living organisms or the phenomena of repro-
duction and evolution of living entities was primary in biology. A previous clash
between the two styles can be also found earlier in the twentieth century, when
scientists and philosophers of the Theoretical Biology Club (such as Needham,
Woodger, and Waddington, among others) developed a distinctive organicist frame-
work in contrast to the then-emerging framework of molecular biology and the
Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology (Etxeberria and Umerez 2006;
Peterson 2017).
François Jacob’s La logique du vivant was a very important book in the 1970s in
which the author, already a Nobel Prize winner and a widely recognized molecular
biologist, made a remarkable attempt at reconstructing the history and philosophy
of biology around the notion of biological organization. His “logic of life” stands
for the then-prevailing genetic and evolutionary consensus that the most important
feature of life is reproduction (and evolution), visible in the recent findings in
molecular biology. Jacob attempted to reconcile the received tradition of continental
European biological thought with views stemming from contemporary ideas on
genetics and evolution. It is full of enthusiasm towards the notion of biological
information and the logic of genetics of the 1960s and 1970s, which he understands
to be the corollary of biological struggles to understand biological organization,
through a model of life sympathetic to informational formalisms for genetic action.
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 139

This he shares with Canguilhem to a certain point, as is visible in the latter’s 1966
additions to Le normal et le pathologique, displaying a real openness to genetics as
a “nouvelle connaissance de la vie.” (see Morange 2000; Loison 2018).
For Jacob, the special features of life appear in the evolutionary genetic frame-
work, linked not to the properties of living beings such as studied by classical phi-
losophy (e.g. Thomism) but to the new image made possible by the evolutionary
science of the time. It enhances a collective view of life connected as a genealogical
succession, rather than mechanistically explainable at the level of the individual liv-
ing being:
An organism is merely a transition, a stage between what was and what will be. . . . (Jacob
1973, 2). Everything in a living being is centred on reproduction (ibid, 4).
Let us imagine an uninhabited world. We can conceive the establishment of systems
possessing certain properties of life, such as the ability to react to certain stimuli, to assimi-
late, to breathe, or even to grow - but not to reproduce. Can they be called living systems?
Each represents the fruit of 1ong and laborious elaboration. Each birth is a unique event,
without a morrow. Each occasion is an eternal recommencement. Always at the mercy of
some local cataclysm, such organizations can have only an ephemeral existence. Moreover,
their structure is rigidly fixed at the outset, incapable of change. If, on the contrary, there
emerges a system capable of reproduction, even if only badly, slowly, and at great cost, that
is a living system without any doubt. (ibid, 4–5)

Jacob distinguishes explicitly the two views of biology. According to his preferred
perspective, evolutionary accounts consider the genealogical connection among liv-
ing beings in the sense that living beings are not systems that arise and disappear
due to their physicochemical properties, or at least not only because of them. As
many of their capacities have been inherited from their ancestors, these systems, or
part of them, have been informed by others:
Much of the controversy and misunderstanding, particularly with regard to the finality of
living beings, is caused by a confusion between these two attitudes. Each tries to establish
a system of order in the living world. For one, it is the order which links beings to one
another, sets up relationships and defines speciations. For the other, it is the order between
the structures by which functions are determined, activities coordinated and the organism
integrated. One considers living beings as the elements of a vast system embracing the
whole earth. The other considers the system formed by each living being. One seeks to
establish order between organisms; the other within each organism. The two kinds of order
meet at the level of heredity, which constitutes the order of biological order, so to speak
(Jacob 1973, 7–8).

Darwinian evolution implies two main ideas: that of the common ancestor, which
entails that there is a genealogical connection among forms of life, often repre-
sented as the tree of life, and secondly, a claim about the causes of evolutionary
processes, such as natural selection (thus understood as explanatory of key features
of living beings). The received view of the Modern Synthesis reinterpreted both
aspects, and by the 1970s many proposed genes as the main ontology, but critics of
this view affirm, and Jacob was among them, that evolution by natural selection
does not contribute to our knowledge of living organization if it is not by studying
development and regulation. After the 2000s, new approaches in systemic and syn-
thetic biology made clear the need to take into account organismic approaches both
140 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

for molecular and evolutionary biology. Jacob made a great effort to integrate the
new biology based on genetics and molecular biology with the organizational tradi-
tion (Jacob 1977). In fact, Jacob and Monod’s distinction between structural and
regulative genes has been identified by some as a source for the field of evo-devo
(Morange 2017, 278). Jacob identifies the genetic program, and the determinism it
embodies, as the fundamental element of the emerging new theory of the living.
However, he also admits the importance of different levels of integration in the
domain of life, called integrons, each of them being characterized by some indepen-
dence with respect to lower ones.
Current systemic approaches search for a complementarity of the two perspec-
tives. On the one hand, the study of evolution needs to include the mechanical causal
processes taking place in development – in addition to population dynamics at vari-
ous levels and contingent events – and processes responsible for organizations and
entities that emerge in interactions, such as symbionts, ecosystems, etc. The
extended evolutionary synthesis attempts to advance a perspective that would be
encompassing and inclusive (Pigliucci and Müller 2010). On the other hand,
research on the nature of living organization cannot rely only on formal, mathemati-
cal aspects; organizations need to be studied in the material domain, including his-
torical evolutionary events. Jacob emphasizes how biology is an exploration of a
logic of life beyond any logic of the living organism. From this perspective, biologi-
cal knowledge is not concerned with individuality, finality or causal mechanisms; it
is a science of living forms that appear and are transmitted in a contingent way.
In his review of François Jacob’s evolutionary perspective, Canguilhem (1971)
addresses the view of life taking place at the level of cells and the logic of reproduc-
tion, as disclosed by the genetics of the time. He there confronts the view that “in
order to understand what we are as living beings, we must look to the chromosome,
the gene, the DNA molecule. The biochemical study of the bacteria is the beginning
of self-knowledge of oneself as a living being” (Canguilhem 1971, 23). This view
seems to oblige one to reject finalism, and the centrality of individuality (see
Brilman 2018 for a reading of Canguilhem that emphasizes how, in contrast, his
philosophy of norms is or can accommodate a philosophy of individuality). In addi-
tion, Canguilhem treats the new playground of biological science, namely the infor-
mational perspective, as a new logic for understanding life and getting rid of vitalism
in order to achieve full continuity of the vital and the inanimate. Canguilhem’s
review of Jacob’s book praises his effort but does not give in, to the contrary.
Gabel quotes Jacob saying that only in the fifties did Canguilhem begin to take
account of contemporary biological research, and contends that after that he gave up
his vitalism. “Though he did not renounce his old positions –in fact he seems to
have felt his philosophy to be consistent with the discoveries of genetics and molec-
ular biology- he in fact moved away from both humanism and vitalism” (Gabel
2015, 82). We disagree, as in his review Canguilhem remains sceptical about the
informational logic of life. Indeed, as Morange has maintained, molecular biology
does bear out the continued relevance of some of Canguilhem’s ideas (even if
Canguilhem did not analyse developments in biology adequately). Also, philosophi-
cal positions may be modulated, but are not dictated by scientific facts, and this is
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 141

evident in Canguilhem’s case, as when he writes: “The execution of a program that

is identified with its realization is a blunt fact, without cause or responsibility. The
logic of life does not refer to any logician” (Canguilhem 1971, 23). In that sense,
blind evolution is a change without history, as “evolution through natural selection
is only history in its incidents, errors and rare events” (24). And at the end of the
review, Canguilhem reflects on Jacob’s much-quoted pronouncement that biologi-
cal research no longer “‘inquires into Life” (“On n’interroge plus la vie aujourd’hui
dans les laboratoires”), i.e., that the concept of Life (and by extension any ontologi-
cally foundational clauses attached to work in the life sciences) no longer serves any
purpose in such work.12 With a curious kind of pathos that is however not
‘Romantically anti-scientific’, he observes that living beings “think they live” a life
“outside of laboratories,” not realizing (Canguilhem literally writes “not knowing”)
that in laboratories, “Life has lost its life with its secret.”13

4 The Logic of the Living Individual

Very soon after the 1970s, and especially at the turn of the century, both in the phi-
losophy of biology and in most biological disciplines there was a significant move-
ment in search of systemic and organizational principles, as is made evident by
current advances in systems biology, synthetic biology and the extended evolution-
ary synthesis. Historically there are (at least) two organizational traditions: the
physiological one starting with Claude Bernard, to which autopoiesis (and most of
the work on biological autonomy) belongs, and the developmental one which has
led to structuralism and Evo-Devo (Etxeberria and Bich 2017; Etxeberria 2004).
Both have connections to Kant‘s view of organisms in his Critique of Judgment in
their ways of arguing holistically and/or mereologically, although they have kept
quite apart during the twentieth century.
To Jacob’s plea for a logic of life, Varela and Maturana respond with a new vin-
dication of the centrality of the living individual as a foundation of biology, this time
looking for a “logic” of the living individual. Maturana and Varela’s notion of auto-
poiesis can be considered to be an answer to Jacob’s picture that especially rejects
the informational perspective in biology, a view shared by the Developmental
Systems Theory in philosophy of biology, especially after Susan Oyama (1985).

12
Jacob 1970, 320 (all translations are ours unless otherwise indicated). At the conceptual level,
this corresponds to Edouard Machery’s deliberately deflationary suggestion (Machery 2012) that
we should give up seeking to provide definitions of life, as these are either folk concepts, or unre-
solvable with other competing definitions: namely, evolutionists, theoretical biologists, self-orga-
nization theorists, molecular biochemists and artificial life researchers cannot agree on a
definition.
13
Canguilhem 1971, 25. He adds that “it is outside laboratories that love, birth and death continue
to present living beings – the children of order and chance – the immemorial figures of these ques-
tions that life science no longer asks of life.
142 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

Their narrative on the logic of the living individual, clearly influenced by Jacob’s
book, deliberately disputes many of his positions about the logic of life and the
centrality of reproduction and evolution. In contrast, for the positive part, it often
draws Canguilhem’s views to contrast Jacob’s informational stance. But their main
claim goes far beyond Canguilhem’s position and points to developments in biology
that Canguilhem did not foresee, in particular in work in cybernetics and artificial
systems that aimed to explore living phenomena through synthetic and systemic
models and simulations. (see however Canguilhem’s remarks on cybernetics in his
essay on the emergence of the concept of biological regulation, in Canguilhem
1977b, 82). It is within this research field that Maturana and Varela’s contributions
flourished.
The autopoietic approach to the living belongs to the above-mentioned physio-
logical systemic tradition focused on the problem of the relational unity of the liv-
ing, additionally associated with Kant’s understanding of organisms, Claude
Bernard’s concept of milieu intérieur, and the organicist tradition that considers life
as organization – a tradition including Hans Jonas and Jean Piaget among others.14
Other clear associations are with the cybernetic movement, especially with second-­
order cybernetics (on this relation see Bich and Etxeberria 2013).
The notion of autopoiesis was proposed by Maturana and Varela15 (Varela 1979;
Maturana and Varela 1973, 1980) to refer to the biological self-organization of indi-
vidual living beings, in contrast with other properties of life that the biology of their
time considered as primary (genes as DNA or informational properties). The basic
idea of autopoiesis is self-production, as a relational dynamic of components that
generates or brings forth a membrane or boundary, which constitutes the individual
living being’s identity as separated from the surroundings (Varela 1981). The auto-
poietic approach to life criticises evolutionary and molecular biology, and focuses
in contrast on, autonomy and identity, aiming to naturalize them as marks of life,
prior to reproduction or evolution. The autopoietic theorists claim that living orga-
nization has primacy with respect to the other phenomena associated with life
(Etxeberria 2004). The status of individual identity, constituted by the system itself,
and not by anything external (heteropoietic), is a central idea of this approach. As
we noted, some of the distinctions they stress, for example that between autopoiesis
and heteropoiesis, already appear in Canguilhem’s La connaissance de la vie. The
relations of the autopoietic unity and its surroundings cannot be understood in terms
of input/output fixed interactions. Instead, non-specific perturbations are coupled
with plastic behaviors of the system within the range of internal coherence.
In their initial writings, the authors embrace mechanism and criticize vitalism, in
the name of their logic of self-production. This is important because, according to

14
Canguilhem sits somewhat unsteadily here, given that he is less of a “naïve (ontological) organi-
cist” than the rest.
15
Both Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana have separately claimed to have coined the term,
referring to different sources for the invention. Here we suggest that they probably conceived the
notion based on those passages of Canguilhem’s La connaissance de la vie in which he describes
living systems as autopoetic.
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 143

them, vitalism focuses on entities bearing properties, in contrast with the relational
approach they defend in which properties appear as a result of relations among
components (see Bich and Arnellos 2012, 79). Maturana writes that
in a vitalistic explanation, the observer explicitly or implicitly assumes that the properties
of the system, or the characteristics of the phenomenon to be explained, are to be found
among the properties or among the characteristics of at least one of the components or
processes that constitute the system or phenomenon. In a mechanistic explanation the rela-
tions between components are necessary; in a vitalistic explanation they are superfluous
(Maturana 1978, 30).

For interactionist or ecological perspectives living beings cannot be fully accounted

for in terms of intrinsic properties, but need to take into account relational proper-
ties arising from interactions between living constituents.16
One difference between Canguilhem’s usage of the term ‘autopoetic’ and
Maturana and Varela’s account of autopoiesis may be that the latter intend to explore
ways in which the autopoiesis of living systems can be explored in artificial models.
This is not exactly like Canguilhem, who thinks that the autopoetic character of liv-
ing beings is equivalent to their not being susceptible to be grasped by knowledge.
Canguilhem starts his book La connaissance de la vie with the sentence: “Connaître
c’est analyser” (“To know is to analyse”) only to remind us quickly of the difficul-
ties of grasping a true knowledge of what it means to be alive through analysis.
Although Maturana and Varela also recognise the difficulty of knowing life,
“regarded as rationality’s blind spot” (Brilman 2018, 40), they rely more confidently
on the possibility of exploring the autopoietic organization through the construction
of networks and other artificial systems that will allow for the exploration of impor-
tant aspects of self-production. Today not everyone would accept that biology as a
science proceeds merely by analysis. On the contrary, many fields including syn-
thetic biology and, earlier, Artificial Life, have attempted to build synthetic models,
systems or simulations by integrating knowledge from different sources and explor-
ing their emergent and creative properties. As a result, the concept of scientific
knowledge associated with many fields is far from the idea that the aim of models is
to represent reality. Rheinberger (2015) has reflected on the nature of the different
epistemological objects produced by science to explain life, and ‘organizational’
theories in the philosophy of biology (see Moreno and Mossio 2015; Bechtel 2007)
have contributed to understand their epistemological and ontological properties.
Many of those systems can in some ways be creative or autopoetic as well, at
least in that the complexity of their organization and their operation is opaque to

16
We do not discuss Canguilhem’s relation to ecology here for want of space but in his rather little-
known essay “Qu’est-ce que l’écologie?” (1974) he expresses a rather cautious, at times deflation-
ary attitude towards what one might term the more Romantic and/or political determinations of
ecology, without thereby dismissing it out of hand. It is tempting, however, to see his reflections on
organism and environment as lending themselves to an almost ‘Gaian’ type of understanding,
according to which nothing that we know on Earth as natural can be understood as such without
the intervention of life: biological phenomena permeate and intervene in the physics and chemistry
of all the natural world, so that biology is fundamental.
144 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

rationality. Then to ask ‘are organisms unique in the physical world? If so, why?’ as
an orienting question does not only affect issues of an ontological kind (what is
life), or an epistemological kind (how can we know life?), but also highlights the
presence of a specifically relational dimension.
In considering these matters, Hacking (1998, 202) highlights the relational char-
acter of Canguilhem’s anti-Cartesian thinking about machines: “He takes all tools
and machines to be extensions of the body, and part of life itself” (Hacking 1998,
202). In this sense, Canguilhem’s approach stresses that there may be an aspect of
life which cannot be grasped only by considering the system’s properties (as when
we question whether machines and living beings are or not similar). On the con-
trary, what is considered is a certain relation to the milieu (Gayon 1998; Etxeberria
2020). Something that is still opaque to logic.

5 Canguilhem’s Claim for Vitalism

A main feature of vitalism in scientific research is to consider that living beings are
in some sense different from inorganic or inert beings; this does not always have
further ontological and methodological implications. Canguilhem’s work appears to
be among those defending that view, although he is critical of … uncritical ontologi-
cal vitalism. At the same time, Canguilhem appears more cautious than Jacob or
other prominent figures who try to dissolve the problem of what life is into an evo-
lutionary logic. This deflationary view underlies usual attempts to replace the defi-
nition of life with a list of living properties, such as those appearing in many biology
textbooks. In contrast Canguilhem is suspicious of the rejection of vitalism in this
way because many of the features that are associated with life, in contrast with those
of inanimate systems do surreptitiously appear in normative concepts such as evo-
lutionary advantage (1971, 24).
Canguilhem often refers to vitalism in his work, going as far as describing him-
self – playfully, yet not just playfully, given the circumstances – as a vitalist.17 He
acknowledges that vitalism is a position that is difficult to maintain. As Dominique
Lecourt comments, “Canguilhem, a hero of the Resistance, clearly expresses the
difficulty of presenting himself as a ‘vitalist’ in 1946-1947” (Lecourt 2011, 13) and
he thus quotes this passage from “Aspects of Vitalism”:
Today, above all, the usage of vitalist biology by Nazi ideology, the mystification that con-
sisted in using theories of Ganzheit to advocate against individualist, atomist, and mecha-
nist liberalism and in favor of totalitarian forces and social forms, and the rather easy
conversion of vitalist biologists to Nazism have served to confirm the accusation formulated

17
For example in the Foreword to his book on the development of the notion of reflex: “Il nous
importe peu d’être ou tenu pour vitaliste…” and when he presents the book itself as a “defense of
vitalist biology” (Canguilhem 1977a, Avant-Propos, 1). Some years earlier, he had devoted one
article exclusively to the topic, “Aspects du vitalisme” (originally a series of lectures given at the
Collège Philosophique in Paris in 1946–1947), in Canguilhem 1965.
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 145

by positivist philosophers like Philipp Frank, as well as by Marxists (Marcel Prenant) that
it is a “reactionary biology” (Canguilhem 1965, 97, 2008a, 72)

At the same time, Canguilhem was comfortable identifying himself with the
equally problematic figure of Nietzsche, and his reference to Marxist criticisms of
vitalism should not be taken to mean outright agreement. In the same essay,
Canguilhem asserts from the outset that when the philosopher inquiries into bio-
logical life, she has little to expect or gain from “a biology fascinated by the pres-
tige of the physicochemical sciences, reduced to the role of a satellite of these
sciences” (Canguilhem 1965, 83, 2008a, 59). What this entails for vitalism is that
it has a specifically philosophical place, whether it is scientifically ‘validated’ or
‘refuted’, and apart from its status as a scientific ‘construction’. In this sense, as
Canguilhem suggests, vitalism is not like geocentrism or phlogiston: it is not refut-
able in quite the same way.18
To summarize these two dimensions of Canguilhem’s thought, one could say that
on the one hand his vitalism is heuristic, a claim that living phenomena need to be
approached in a certain way in order to be understood; but on the other hand, it pos-
sesses a more ontological, Aristotelian dimension. Consider the example Canguilhem
had given in “Aspects du vitalisme”: vitalism is not like (the theory of) phlogiston
or geocentrism. Now, faced with this ‘fact’ that vitalism is not like phlogiston, there
are two possible responses: it’s not like phlogiston because it’s true and thus one’s
ontology needs to include it or it’s not like phlogiston because it has this heuristic
value, or explanatory power.
For Canguilhem vitalism is a way to understand Life in a certain way in order not
to miss its essential spontaneity; historically, thinkers known as vitalists have had
what he calls “this vitalist confidence in the spontaneity of life.”19 In other words,
the philosopher in this position is almost inexorably led to a vitalist positionnement.
The type of questions she will have for biological science entails that the latter not
be conceived of in reductionist terms, although Canguilhem doesn’t explicitly say if
a purely physicochemical perspective on biological entities is flawed ontologically,
or just methodologically. Nevertheless, this is a loaded, rather a prioristic concep-
tion of biological science, actually quite reminiscent of the holism of Goldstein,
who Canguilhem openly credits as a major influence.20

18
Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme,” in Canguilhem 1965, 84; Canguilhem 2008a, 60. The
Medawars note that it is hard to devise an experiment to ‘refute’ vitalism (Medawar and
Medawar 1983).
19
“Aspects du vitalisme,” in Canguilhem 1965, 89.
20
On Canguilhem and Goldstein, Gayon 1998, 309–310, and Métraux 2005 make some useful
observations (Métraux also reproduces a letter from Canguilhem to Goldstein); see also Wolfe
2015b. Gayon notes several further references to Goldstein in Canguilhem: Canguilhem 1965,
11–13, 24, 146; Canguilhem 2002, 347; Canguilhem 1977b, 138. Canguilhem (along with
Merleau-Ponty) played a key role in the introduction of Goldstein into France, through the transla-
tion of the Organism book (Goldstein 1934/1939), which Canguilhem initiated (the co-translator,
Jean Kuntz was his student) and also by translating Goldstein’s article on the “problème épisté-
mologique de la biologie” together with his wife Simone.
146 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

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. As this is not an analysis of vitalism in general but of certain issues in the
thought of Canguilhem, it may be worth rapidly clarifying this terminology. It
seems that, in addition to a kind of ‘de facto’ vitalism of some life scientists who
insist on the specificity of the systems they study, including in relation to the objects
of other sciences such as chemistry and physics, there is a non-ontological vitalism,
articulated in thinkers like Claude Bernard and at times in Xavier Bichat (Wolfe
2019), distinct from an ontological vitalism in that the latter will consider the differ-
ence between living and non-living beings, organisms and mechanisms, ‘whole-­
person’ analyses in medicine and molecular analyses, etc., as having ontological
significance and/or as being ontologically grounded.
This sense of privacy, of inaccessible interiority, is a crucial feature of many
defences of what organisms are and how they are different from machines, but as we
mentioned earlier, one should rather think in relational terms. This raises the issue
of the relation between Canguilhem and phenomenology.21 That is, while main-
stream biologists thought the problem with vitalism was its appeal to immaterial
vital forces, or ‘entelechies’ that could not themselves be located anywhere in the
spatiotemporal world, there may be a different, more philosophical problem with
vitalism, in that it can become an appeal to a kind of foundationalist subjectivity, a
Self, a Centre, whether this is equated with life itself (as in the old Aristotelian motif
that ‘the soul is life’) or is seen as a precondition thereof. Interesting – and idiosyn-
cratically – Canguilhem’s way of renewing vitalism is neither that of the “classical”
vitalist, in his terms (which matches the standard critical portrayal of the vitalist),
nor that of the subjectivist.
Kurt Goldstein and Canguilhem were, we suggest, onto something when they
insisted that rather than say what is unique about the biological, we look to the
observer: to be an organism is to have a point of view on organisms; one which
produces intelligibility, which reveals organisms as meaning-producing beings.
Goldstein stressed a kind of ‘standpoint’ dimension in ‘the organism’ (in fact, typi-
cally the human patient), namely, the idea that we necessarily have ‘points of view’
on our environment and that such points of view enter into the basic definition of
what it is to be such an organism. Canguilhem gave further inflection to this idea by
speaking of how vitalism is not a mere scientific theory (true or false, refutable,
experimental, etc.) but, crucially, something existential, what he calls an exigence:
Vitalism expresses a permanent requirement or demand [exigence] of life in living beings,
the self-identity of life which is immanent in living beings. This explains why mechanistic
biologists and rationalist philosophers criticize vitalism for being nebulous and vague. It is
normal, if vitalism is primarily a ‘demand’, that it is difficult to formulate it in a series of
determinations (“Aspects du vitalisme,” in Canguilhem 1965, 86).

21
For a nice discussion which makes Canguilhem a phenomenologist see Gérard 2010; for an
equally convincing reading which seeks to draw Canguilhem away from phenomenology, see
Sholl 2012.
Canguilhem and the Logic of Life 147

An exigence is not a vital ‘fact’ in a static sense but rather something processual and
indeed agential. Other prominent recent figures like Varela also underline the
uniqueness of the biological by rejecting that life can be characterized by providing
some empirical criteria and vindicate the need for a concept of life that takes into
account the self-producing activities of living systems. Yet he explicitly rejects
vitalism and embraces naturalism. In this respect Weber and Varela differ from
Kant, who believed that living organization cannot be explained scientifically: “Our
immodest conclusion is that Kant, although foreseeing the impossibility of a purely
mechanical, Newtonian account of life, nonetheless was wrong in denying the pos-
sibility of a coherent explanation of the organism. But this ‘Newton of the
Grassblade’ was surely not Darwin.” Instead, they maintain that it is the “conver-
gence of philosophical and biological thinking” which offered “an objective account
of biological individuality that joins in circle with the constitution of a subject”
(Weber and Varela, 2002, 120–121). Thus, they think that the times are ripe for a
naturalistic understanding of the living individual as autopoietic.

6 Conclusions

In this paper we have shown some of the problems Canguilhem faced in challenging
the existence of a logic of life that can be known by science, in contrast to Jacob and
Maturana and Varela, who are more confident than him, but with very different
arguments. Some of Canguilhem’s difficulties derive from embodiment, relations of
the living with the milieu and with other living organisms, and his apparent sympa-
thy for certain phenomenological approaches to the nature of life and living bodies,
notably their ‘existential’ and ‘attitudinal’ dimensions (even though this definitely
does not make him a phenomenologist), although he doesn’t go all the way and lit-
erally appeal to the “truth of my body”, as Merleau-Ponty did (Canguilhem 2008b,
475); his residual existentialism (with occasional overtones of anthropocentrism)
may hold some lessons for present-day thinking about life.
Perhaps the difference between vitalism and organicism, given the Kantian dif-
ficulties for a science of the living,22 lies in the difference between a complete skep-
ticism (towards some vitalist positions, although most of them are caricatures) and
the hope that science can advance, however partially or perspectivally, in under-
standing at least some aspects of biological organization. Although it is clear that
most vitalists were in agreement with this position, criticisms (like for example
those of logical empiricists like Frank, although closer reading reveals important

22
Aside from some of the difficulties mentioned earlier, the specific ‘conceptual difficulty’ lies in
the way some non-reductionist programs like Varela’s strongly invoke the Kantian pedigree, while
somehow overlooking the fact that a core element of the Kantian concept of organism is that it
cannot be the object of a causal-naturalist science.
148 A. Etxeberria and C. T. Wolfe

nuances)23 have built a straw-man of vitalism as a position that wholly rejects scien-
tific understanding of life and embraces mysticism instead.
Canguilhem is not a vitalist according to this excessively partial picture, yet he
also does not believe that life has a logic that can be grasped in fixed norms or regu-
lations. And this not only because the norms are internal or internally produced and
managed (like in autopoiesis), but also and more importantly because they are vari-
able and their very organization may be contingent in some respects. We suggest
that the recognition that some scientific models may have properties of the kind
Canguilhem attributes to living beings – that is to say, they are also emergent, cre-
ative, and synthetic, and oblige scientists to interact with their products instead of
just analysing or representing them – may be a landmark separating different views
of science. Organicism tends to value these models as naturalistic, whereas vitalism
as understood by and in Canguilhem, takes a step back, and stresses their rela-
tional nature.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was published online in Transversal:

International Journal for the Historiography of Science, 4, special issue on Canguilhem (2018):
47–63. The authors wish to thank the editor of the journal for permission to reprint a revised ver-
sion, Marina Brilman and Sebastjan Vörös for their helpful reading of earlier drafts of this paper,
and Ghyslain Bolduc for his comments on the penultimate version.
AE acknowledges funding from Grants IT 1228-19 from the Basque Government) and
PID2019-104576GB-I00 from the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain. CW was funded by
the FWO (Flemish Research Council) and then by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research
and Innovation Programme (GA n. 725883 ERC-EarlyModernCosmology).

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