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Error and the Problem of Creation

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Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error

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Abstract

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 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Allendy (1929, 14).

  2. 2.

    We will consider his later studies of milieu in Chapter Five, but at this point he defines it as material, that is, physical and chemical, conditions of existence.

  3. 3.

    If Canguilhem adopts here a social determinism with regard to biological theories, it is not because he believed that thought should be determined by material conditions of life. As he would remark a few years later, the idea of a militant materialism may be a contradiction, but it is a beautiful one, see Chapter Two.

  4. 4.

    On the historical relation between Darwinism and Lamarckism in France, see Grimoult (2001).

  5. 5.

    Octave Hamelin is also recommended here for his rejection of final causes as absurd in the study of nature.

  6. 6.

    On Cuénot, Vialleton, and Bergson, see Grimoult (2001, 209–213).

  7. 7.

    Braunstein and Schwartz include a helpful note about this course in Canguilhem (1938, 500). The quotations from Canguilhem in the following paragraph are my translations of quotations from Canguilhem included in this note.

  8. 8.

    See Chapter Two.

  9. 9.

    An essential part of the French educational system, those who pass are qualified to teach in the national education system.

  10. 10.

    It would also be worth comparing his discussion of convergence with Dupréel (1939). Canguilhem continues to use the term later in writing, for example, about François Jacob and Foucault (Talcott 2014).

  11. 11.

    Canguilhem is essentially quoting Bergson ([1911] 1998, 226) and Bergson ([1907] 2013, 227).

  12. 12.

    Though Canguilhem is highly critical of Platonism, he follows Alain in suggesting that Plato was not necessarily Platonist.

  13. 13.

    Both, of course, were active before Sartre, Chartier’s student, who Canguilhem pictures as one inheritor of his ideas alongside others. Deleuze’s interest in Bergson and the image should also be considered in relation to Reflections.

  14. 14.

    Deleuze should surely be read as relating to these points. They also resonate with Leonard Lawlor’s work on the resistance that life affords through its very blindness, its powerlessness. See Lawlor (2006).

  15. 15.

    Canguilhem suggests that Alain’s theory is original, even if it converges with Hegel’s, since he developed it before reading the latter.

  16. 16.

    I return to this in Chapter Eight below.

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  1. Department of Humanities, University of the Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Samuel Talcott

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Talcott, S. (2019). Error and the Problem of Creation. In: Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00779-9_4

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