Abstract
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.
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- 1.
Alain ([1934] 1988, 58–59).
- 2.
A difficulty facing Canguilhem’s anglophone translators, and readers, is that the French expérience can refer to both experience and experimentation. The French also have the word expérimentation, but the locution faire une expérience often is used to refer to performing an experiment. I frequently note the French in order to draw attention to what would otherwise seem different words.
- 3.
For recent explorations of medical error in the French context, see Sureau et al. (2006).
- 4.
See Allendy (1929, Chapter 1).
- 5.
Empiricism here refers more to the medical than the philosophical tradition.
- 6.
Foucault, for example, later thanked him for inventing an “eidetic epistemology” (Eribon 1989, 127).
- 7.
- 8.
See Canguilhem (1964, 1055) and the editor’s note here. It is important to recall that for him no organism simply submits to its milieu, even when this is imposed upon it.
- 9.
Von Uexküll’s world [Welt] would thus not be the same as Canguilhem’s world [monde], as we see in the final pages of “The Living and its Milieu.” To test Canguilhem’s gloss on his terminology, one would consult the original German since von Uexküll ([1934] 2010) systematically translates Umwelt as environment, whereas Canguilhem equates it with milieu.
- 10.
We will see a similar point made by Dagognet in Chapter Seven.
- 11.
The English edition translates this clause to say that the individual “cannot itself be referred to without losing its original meaning.” Though questionable on grammatical grounds, this fits with Canguilhem’s belief that life deploys ruses in order to survive and flourish. It also suggests that knowledge of life would be impossible. But Canguilhem believes, I argue, that artfully designed experiments succeed, at least partially, in capturing the original significance of biological functions.
References
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Talcott, S. (2019). Knowledge of Life True to Life: Medicine, Experimentation, and Milieu. In: Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00779-9_5
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