and the care of human life and bodies are knit into this history, recursively and dialectically articulated through textual transmission and scenes of experimentation situated in institutions and communities like translation movements patronized by elites and/or the state, medical faculties in universities, and commercial laboratories. The proper work of historicism here would seem to be to stress contingency, the sense that the history of life might have been otherwise, in defiance of Whig history and the teleology of progress. It would be to emphasize, too, the very density and messiness of a thickening around Greek texts, which decenter the proprietary claims on the Greeks qua ancestors exercised by the figure of vitalist return.

But Canguilhem's transhistorical account of vitalism does something different, cutting through the complexity of thick history. The essay appears, we can recall, in the "philosophy" section of *Knowledge of Life*, not the history section. Why "Aspects" belongs in the section on philosophy presumably has something to do with what it means to be working as a historian of life within a milieu. Insofar as Canguilhem locates himself within the tradition of philosophical biology, he knows as a historian that the making of that tradition informs his organization of the world and his understanding of his own experience, as much as experimental work in biology informs his thinking.<fnref n="51" /> But this tradition does not just offer life as an object of knowledge. It offers a choice of orientation: mechanism or vitalism. Not just as a philosopher, but as someone who is, simply, alive, Canguilhem sees himself as obligated to decide between these options, even as he creatively reinterprets what that decision entails—that is, even as he “chooses” vitalism but affirms a version of vitalism that differs in fundamental ways from classical vitalism. It is this space of choice or *orientation towards*, I suggest, that Canguilhem is trying to hold open when he describes vitalism as an ethics. Ethics in this sense expresses his position that being alive always entails the organization of the world in terms of values. The force of vitalism may then be derived from the idea that however contingent or provincial or distant its historical emergence was, in the world shaped by its emergence or, more precisely, by an embedded dialectic of vitalism and mechanism, vitalism is choiceworthy.

Is it possible to read Canguilhem's return to the Greeks in the same spirit? Canguilhem himself, as I have argued, assumes the conjunction of vitalism and the backwards-glance towards the Greeks. His intervention in classical vitalism is not to sever the relationship with the Greeks. Rather, in remaking it through a reading of the mechanism/vitalism dialectic in antiquity, he implies that to be a vitalist is to always go back to the Greeks. That return is part of what secures the vitality of vitalism itself as over and above modernity (and especially as pre-Cartesian). There is a real sense here that mechanism is aligned with the myth of the autogenesis of modernity. For insofar as mechanism expresses a faith in the auto-genesis of biological science and technology, it denies the relationship of the

<footnote n="51">⁵¹Thus it is true his views of life as dynamic and productive of its own norms is informed by Darwin or genetics and ongoing work by biologists (Sholl 2012: 122; Etxeberria and Wolfe 2018), but it is also informed by his stance as a historian, by which he reads this scientific information as operating within a regime of truth that is historicized at different levels.</footnote>
history of life science to a philosophy of life (vitalism), as well as the relationship
of a philosophy of life to life itself. But the choice that I outlined at the start of my
paper is precisely about whether the Greeks are a necessary part of this history, the
history of life as an object of knowledge. That question implies others. Are the
Greeks irrelevant to what we call modernity or, say, biopolitics? Are they irrele-
vant to any work of orienting *towards* life, away from the biopolitical, however it
is understood?

In this chapter, I have tried to open up some space to pause and assess
Canguilhem's complex conflation of Hellenism and vitalism. One problem with the
conflation is that it reenforces the figuration of the Greeks as the origin of science
and philosophy. The problem is familiar. But I would point specifically to how the
origin-function of the Greeks in Canguilhem enacts the idea that, prior to the birth
of philosophy in Greece, Man only had "technique," understood as the most primi-
tive form of mēchanē; the idea that Greece is where Man first thinks himself.<fnref n="52" />
Another problem arises from the very elision of Hellenism in modern genealogies
of the biopolitical that draw a sharp line between obsolescent views on life and a
science of life. What these genealogies have too often overlooked is the Greeks'
persistent role in figuring the life that escapes modernity, the fuller life that is at
once lost and able to be regained.<fnref n="53" /> We need to think more critically about the sur-
plus of life that modern thinkers have invested in "the Greeks," who are regularly
taken together with "the savage," "the primitive," and other highly racialized non-
Western Others to figure a vitality lost to those who identify as European.<fnref n="54" />
Canguilhem's desire for a purer vitalism at the origins of Greek antiquity thus can-
not be disentangled from a deeply raced and sexed paradigm of Man aligned with
"the Greeks". Here the choice is not between ancients and moderns but between
what kinds of *longue durée* stories we tell.

In grappling with this choice, perhaps we could think about Canguilhem's strat-
egy to capture mechanism with vitalism. Remember that, on Canguilhem's revised
vitalism, mechanism is only the hypertrophy of a technique that begins as an exten-
sion of life. Life and technique are inseparable. By analogy with this claim, could

<footnote n="52">⁵² For the opposition of technique and science as a means of differentiating pre-Greek and Greece science, see Rochberg 1992: 550–51, citing a passage from William Wightman’s 1951 *Growth of Scientific Ideas*: “Greek thought differed from all that had gone before in respect both of *generality* and *rigour*. In general thinking, which opens up possibilities undreamed of by the severely ‘practical man,’ we pass from *percepts*—things to which we can point, like triangular fields—to *concepts*, creations of the process known as *abstraction*…Science is, among other things, the generalization of perceptual experience by means of adequate concepts.” See further Rochberg 2016: 38–58. Cf. the way this position persists at Sholl 2012: 119: “With the rise of scientific knowledge, thought is not that which merges with life or appears as a continuation of vital process, as is technique. Rather, thought objectifies life, turning it into something to be studied.”</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ See Holmes 2019. Esposito 2008, for example, ignores the role of Philhellenism in Nietzsche’s vitalism (78–109) and Nazi biology. A critical awareness of the function of the Greeks would complicate his appropriation of Canguilhem’s vitalism at Esposito 2008: 189–91.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ See Payne 2018 on the Greeks in this role. See also Jones 2010, esp. 102–28 on vitalism, “the primitive mind,” and racial memory in Bergson.</footnote>
the choice between ancients and moderns be equally illusory? That to the extent the ancient Greeks set at least some of the terms within which “we moderns” make choices about life, or politics, they are always already determining the way we orient towards life, or towards our mechanisms, our technologies? These orientations, the argument would go, unfold within the terms of a life that precedes them, and so shapes the very nature of the choices, even when those choices are to affirm modernity, just as life conditions even the choice of mechanism.

The analogy has conceptual force. It also has problems. By framing the claim of the Greeks on the moderns in these terms, I think we can also see more clearly the challenges and limits of Canguilhem's organicism at the level of historiographical method; that is, problems that go beyond his “naïve” or romantic return to the Greeks as pure. Here it is a question of what the organicism of vitalism itself does for the unity of biological theory or a philosophy of life. For in extending vitalism back to the Greeks, Canguilhem suggests that each manifestation belongs to the same life. Admittedly, the life that Canguilhem has in mind has been freed, we could say, from the unity of classic holism, where the parts are always parts of a larger whole governed by a structure that secures oneness despite multiplicity. Instead of an organism governed by the teleological normativity of Aristotle's biology, Canguilhem seeks an organism individuated in time and creatively remade through its encounters with a milieu. Nevertheless, even if we read the history of a philosophy of life through Canguilhem's revised model of life itself, we have still imposed the unity of a life on that history, suggesting a coherence, boundedness, and inner determination that reifies and indeed naturalizes the “Western” tradition in biological terms.

Instead, what if we were to work through the organicism of Canguilhem's history of a philosophy of life by thinking of the ancient Greeks not as an origin point from which a life has unfolded, but as themselves part of the milieu? At a minimum this would resist the recurrence of the Greeks in a philosophy of life science as an index of life itself. It would resist, too, the very definition of the Greeks as the site where Man takes life as an object of systemic knowledge and practice. Instead, it would attend to the very materiality of ancient Greek texts about life, and nature, and body, and soul—and their readings and re-readings—as part of the world inhabited by later thinkers struggling to define the flourishing of human life is as well as the nature of the cosmos. It would take seriously the choice-making of thinkers situated in a milieu, a collective of thinkers, whose boundaries are, at present, uncertain.

In other words, whether we read the Greeks as part of the vitalist project becomes a decision informed by what we think will contribute to our flourishing at a particular historical moment. Part of the challenge here is navigating between reading the Greeks as inextricable from this milieu, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, framing a “return to the Greeks” as a choice on the order of choosing vitalism. Another way to say this is that Hellenism is woven together with vitalism to an extent that we cannot choose to undo their historical entwinement. But getting clearer about how they work together might help us make choices about how to engage with vitalism, the Greeks, and the problems, historical and philosophical, posed by “life” within communities that are not reified by nation nor by race nor by
the phantasm of Europe but are, rather, dynamic and heterogeneous and heteroglos-
sic. It is within a milieu where lives are lived together under circumstances at once
radically contingent and deeply informed by entrenched structures of inequity,
exploitation, and violence that we make decisions about which pasts to read with,
and on what terms.<fnref n="55" /> In the end, Canguilhem’s philosophico-historical perspective
on vitalism asks us to think about the impossibility of neutrality within a landscape
that is not of our own making but is, nevertheless, remade, however incrementally,
by our choices of which pasts to value, and how, and why.<fnref n="56" /> This perspective can
help us see how the Greeks in “Aspects of Vitalism” function as at once historically
consequential texts, myths, and objects of elective affinity. By diagnosing the differ-
ent facets of classicism’s continuity in the essay, we may gain a better sense of how
reading the history and philosophy of vitalism through the Greeks is always an
ethico-political choice made in a particular milieu, at a particular moment.

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# Canguilhem and the Logic of Life

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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: arantza.etxeberria@ehu.eus

C. T. Wolfe (✉)

Département de Philosophie & ERRAPHIS, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès,
Toulouse, France
# 1 Introduction

In Canguilhem's philosophy, life disconcerts logic because of its intrinsically self-produced or “autopoetic”<fnref n="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,<fnref n="2" /> but also, ‘logic’ understood as a concept or scheme of the internal organization and functional integration 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,<fnref n="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 contends, i.e., life defies scientific methods because of its inherent plasticity and variability, which are evident in its interactive or relational capacity. The latter is particularly emphasized in his conceptualization of the milieu as forming a constitutive relation with the organism,<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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 immediately afterwards that it is “the recognition of the originality of the fact of life [le fait

<footnote n="1">¹As we discuss below, Canguilhem writes “autopoetic”, rather than “autopoietic”.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²Bernard 1865, Coleman 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Canguilhem'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.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴In “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).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">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.</footnote>
vital].”<fnref n="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 characterization 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 organism, 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 processes. The main exponents of each of these styles or traditions were, respectively, Claude Bernard (1865) and Charles Darwin (1859).<fnref n="7" />

A main philosophical topic of physiology is biological individuality, its delimitation and its cohesion: how a living individual maintains its integrity and organization 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 considered him as the Newton of medicine (see note 5 below). Physiology thus understood

<footnote n="6">⁶Canguilhem, “Le normal et le pathologique,” in Canguilhem 1965, 156.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷As several authors have noted, Claude Bernard's physiological tradition had little interest in evolutionary or developmental biology, which it did not view as proper sciences (see Normandin 2007).</footnote>
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 concerning the special status of living beings and the challenge thus posed for the scientific knowledge of life.

This subject matter is reminiscent of Kant's view of organized beings and scientific 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 sciences 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 explanation 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”<fnref n="8" /> is well known: “Indeed, so certain 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).<fnref n="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 basically the problem of whether our knowledge of life or of living systems can be naturalized. Kant seems to hold that it cannot (and some praise him for this, while others

<footnote n="8">⁸Since then, there was a long controversy about who could be the scientific figure that would contradict 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.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹This 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 concerning living entities. Our point here is simply to note the existence of this influential position according 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 development of this connection).</footnote>
reproach him for just the same claim).<fnref n="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, originally 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 interaction with the environment: “Man first experiences and experiments with biological activity in his relations of technical adaptation to the milieu. Such technique is heteropoetic, 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 living 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 systems 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 homeostasis, 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

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Respectively, Chen 2019 and Zammito 2006 and 2018. The extent to which Kant ‘refuses’ naturalization 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).</footnote>
thing is, in the true sense of the word, a synthesis” (“Le tout et la partie dans la pensée 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
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, foundational subjectivity, as we might find in more anti-naturalistic trends in phenomenology; 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 conceptualization 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.<fnref n="11" />

'Classical' vitalism as described here is what one of us has termed substantial 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.

<footnote n="11">¹¹Canguilhem, “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).</footnote>
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.
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 framework, linked not to the properties of living beings such as studied by classical philosophy (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 living 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 assimilate, to breathe, or even to grow - but not to reproduce. Can they be called living systems? Each represents the fruit of long 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 living 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 represented 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 synthetic biology made clear the need to take into account organismic approaches both
for molecular and evolutionary biology. Jacob made a great effort to integrate the new biology based on genetics and molecular biology with the organizational tradition (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 independence with respect to lower ones.

Current systemic approaches search for a complementarity of the two perspectives. 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 various 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, mathematical aspects; organizations need to be studied in the material domain, including historical evolutionary events. Jacob emphasizes how biology is an exploration of a logic of life beyond any logic of the living organism. From this perspective, biological 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 reproduction, 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 addition, Canguilhem treats the new playground of biological science, namely the informational 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 molecular 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, philosophical positions may be modulated, but are not dictated by scientific facts, and this is
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 biological 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 ontologically foundational clauses attached to work in the life sciences) no longer serves any purpose in such work.<fnref n="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."<fnref n="13" />

## 4 The Logic of the Living Individual

Very soon after the 1970s, and especially at the turn of the century, both in the philosophy of biology and in most biological disciplines there was a significant movement in search of systemic and organizational principles, as is made evident by current advances in systems biology, synthetic biology and the extended evolutionary 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 vindication 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 autopoiesis 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).

<footnote n="12">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 unresolvable with other competing definitions: namely, evolutionists, theoretical biologists, self-organization theorists, molecular biochemists and artificial life researchers cannot agree on a definition.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">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 questions that life science no longer asks of life.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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 Varela<sup>15</sup> (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1973, 1980) to refer to the biological self-organization of individual 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 autopoietic 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 organization 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

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Canguilhem sits somewhat unsteadily here, given that he is less of a “naïve (ontological) organi-
cist” than the rest.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">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.</footnote>
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 relations 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* properties arising from interactions between living constituents.<fnref n="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 living 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 difficulties 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 important aspects of self-production. Today not everyone would accept that biology as a science proceeds merely by analysis. On the contrary, many fields including synthetic biology and, earlier, Artificial Life, have attempted to build synthetic models, systems or simulations by integrating knowledge from different sources and exploring 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

<footnote n="16">¹⁶We 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 deflationary 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.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="17">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.</footnote>
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 biological life, she has little to expect or gain from “a biology fascinated by the presense 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 refutable in quite the same way*.<fnref n="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 possesses 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.”<fnref n="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 conception of biological science, actually quite reminiscent of the holism of Goldstein, who Canguilhem openly credits as a major influence.<fnref n="20" />

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Canguilhem, “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).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹“Aspects du vitalisme,” in Canguilhem 1965, 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰On 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 translation 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 épistémologique de la biologie” together with his wife Simone.</footnote>
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 difference 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.<fnref n="21" /> That is, while mainstream 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 idiosyncratically – 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, typically 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).

<footnote n="21">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.</footnote>
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 possibility of a coherent explanation of the organism. But this 'Newton of the Grassblade' was surely not Darwin." Instead, they maintain that it is the "convergence 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 sympathy 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 literally 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 difficulties for a science of the living,<fnref n="22" /> lies in the difference between a complete skepticism (towards some vitalist positions, although most of them are caricatures) and the hope that science can advance, however partially or perspectivally, in understanding 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

<footnote n="22">²²Aside 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.</footnote>
nuances)<fnref n="23" /> have built a straw-man of vitalism as a position that wholly rejects scientific 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 regulations. 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 variable 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, creative, 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 relational 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 version, 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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# Is There Not a Truth of Vitalism? Vital Normativity in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty

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Sebastjan Vörös

**Abstract** The paper investigates the phenomenon of vitalism through the lens of vital normativity as expounded by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem. I argue that the two authors independently developed complementary critiques of the mechanical-behaviourist conception of life sciences, which culminated in a surprisingly similar notion of life construed as a normative (polarized) activity, i.e., an activity that is not indifferent to its own conditions of possibility. Such an alternative conception of life has far-reaching consequences for the epistemology of life sciences, for it requires it to reconsider not only its object of inquiry - the nature of (the relationship between) an organism and its environment -, but also, since scientists themselves are living beings, the nature of its epistemic practices. What I call the truth of (a specific variety of) vitalism is thus reflected not only in how life is cognized, but also in how life cognizes (itself). This last point is of particular philosophical importance, as it paves the way towards a more dynamic conception of reflection (tentatively called ouroboric thought), which takes seriously that we, as cognizers of life, at the same time live the lives of cognizers.

## 1 Historical Blindspot: Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized

In a sense, this paper is a reflection on a missed opportunity; an opportunity for a productive dialogue between two French thinkers who, working at the same time and in the same intellectual milieu, addressed similar issues and drew surprisingly similar conclusions, but who never, at least to my knowledge, engaged with each other's work directly. The two thinkers in question are Georges Canguilhem and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the topic they both grappled with - from two different,

<footnote>S. Vörös (✉)
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
e-mail: sebastjan.voros@ff.uni-lj.si</footnote>
yet complementary perspectives - is vital normativity and its implications for philosophy and science.<fnref n="1" />

This surprising oversight has not gone completely unnoticed and has been acknowledged briefly by at least one of the two protagonists of our story. Thus, in his preface to the second edition of the *Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological* (published in 1950), Canguilhem points out that, during the inception of the *Essay* (first published in 1943), he could have profited by drawing on Merleau-Ponty's *The Structure of Behavior* (first published in 1942). However, as it was brought to his attention when the manuscript had already been in print, he could give it but a passing nod of recognition. Yet to his mind, such an omission is not necessarily something to be regretted since, as he puts it, he would much prefer “a convergence whose fortuitous character better emphasizes the value of intellectual necessity to an acquiescence, even fully sincere, in the view of others” (NP, 29–30).

In what follows, I will try to unearth and explore this ‘fortuitous convergence’, especially as it pertains to the topic of vital normativity and its relation to vitalism. I will draw mostly on the two texts mentioned above, although I will occasionally turn to some later works, particularly Canguilhem’s *Knowledge of Life* (first published in 1952) and Merleau-Ponty’s *Phenomenology of Perception* (first published in 1945). My approach will not be exegetical, but thematic: by drawing on both authors I will put forward a case for vital normativity which, as I will try to show, lends credence to a general impetus behind vitalist approaches. In so doing, I will, for the most part, skim over many an undoubtedly important difference between the two authors, leaving a more thorough comparative study to those better versed in such undertakings.

## 2 Dialectical Blindspot: An Immodestly Vitalist Proposal

Before I proceed to the main topic, however, there is one obvious hurdle I need to tackle. This hurdle is related to the fact that, while Canguilhem had been quite vocal in his defense of (some version of) vitalism,<fnref n="2" /> Merleau-Ponty never seems to have ventured down the vitalist path; in fact, he was often openly dismissive of vitalism.<fnref n="3" /> Doesn’t this, in and of itself, undermine the project I have set out to achieve?

<footnote n="1">¹Despite the thematic convergence of their investigative agendas, there is currently a surprising lack of comparative studies on the topic; a notable exception is Peña-Guzmán (2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²For a more in-depth analysis of Canguilhem's vitalism see Wolfe and Wong 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³For instance: “We are upholding no species of vitalism whatsoever here. We do not mean that the analysis of the living body encounters a limit in irreducible vital forces.” (SB, 151) And even more radically: “These remarks cannot serve to justify a vitalism, however - even the refined vitalism of Bergson. The relation of the vital élan to that which it produces is not conceivable, it is magical.” (SB, 158)</footnote>
Let us approach this from a somewhat skewed angle. Underneath the thematic polyphony of Merleau-Ponty's work one finds a common methodological thread. The latter is best illustrated by his tendency to flesh out his own views against the backdrop of the antagonistic approaches he is trying to supersede: realism vs. transcendentalism, empiricism vs. intellectualism, naturalism vs. vitalism, etc. Now, while on the surface level this may seem like a fairly trivial strategy - after all, hasn't such a contrastive approach become the gold standard of contemporary academic debate? - Merleau-Ponty supplements it with a unique dialectical twist.<fnref n="4" /> For, instead of simply refuting the two views under scrutiny, he is bent on showing that, while ultimately *erroneous*, they are nevertheless *motivated* errors, “rest[ing] on an authentic phenomenon which philosophy has the function of making explicit” (SB, 216). In other words, while rejecting some aspects of each antagonistic pair, he retains others, and he does so by reintegrating them, in a broadly Hegelian fashion, into a more comprehensive whole, in light of which their meaning undergoes a substantial change. Thus, one finds explicit references to a “truth of dualism” (SB, 209), “truth of sociologism” (SB, 211), “truth of naturalism and realism” (SB, 224), even “truth of solipsism” (PP, 419), as well as claims to the effect that intellectualism/transcendentalism is “less false than abstract” (PP, 143), etc.

However, there is a glaring omission in Merleau-Ponty's strategy, for, although featuring in several of his dialectical arguments, he never raises the question of the *truth of vitalism*. This is all the more striking if we consider that not only is its antagonistic pair, naturalism, afforded ample treatment - the penultimate section of *The Structure of Behavior* even carries the title "Is There Not a Truth of Naturalism?" (SB, 201-221) - but also that, as mentioned, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the truth of sociologism *despite the fact* that sociologism plays a marginal role in his treatise. Is vitalism, that dreaded Urfiend of modern biological science, so flawed in his eyes as to exceed even the rehabilitative scope of the dialectical approach?

The way in which Merleau-Ponty normally speaks of vitalism, namely as a view propounding the existence of an ephemeral supplement, variously called “life force”, “élan vital”, “entelechy”, etc., to the mechanistic processes found in living organisms, lends credence to such interpretation. Thus, by Merleau-Ponty's lights, both naturalism and vitalism subscribe to the “realist postulate” (SB, 46), i.e., they both view the organism as a bundle of interrelated causal mechanisms, with naturalism “juxtaposing separated mechanisms” and vitalism “subordinating them to an entelechy” (SB, 3). However, in his view, both of these conceptions are mistaken, since the proper object of biology is neither (pace naturalism) “the superposition of elementary reflexes” nor (pace vitalism) “the intervention of ‘vital’ force”, but rather “an indecomposable structure of behavior” (SB, 46; more on this presently).

What Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of vitalism, then, seems to be the run-of-the-mill *substantive* variety (Wolfe 2011) which, in Canguilhem's words, accepts “the insertion of the living organism into a physical milieu to whose laws it constitutes exception” (AV, 69) and tries to underscore the originality of life “by

<footnote n="4">⁴For Merleau-Ponty's use of "dialectics" see Pollard 2016.</footnote>
demarcating within the physico-chemical territory [...] enclaves of indetermination, zones of dissidence, or foyers of heresy” (ibid.). Canguilhem agrees with Merleau-Ponty that such ‘vitalism of two empires’ - the empire of physio-chemical processes and the empire of vital-biological forces - leads to philosophical blind alleys, for “there cannot be an empire within an empire without there being no longer any empire” (ibid.). Yet, as Canguilhem is quick to add, the classical substantivist vitalism errs not in pushing its agenda too far - by, say, reverting to supernatural forces - but in *not going far enough*:

> If one is to assert the originality of the biological, this must be in terms of the originality of one realm over the whole of experience, and not over islets of experiences. In the end, classical vitalism sins, paradoxically, only in its excessive modesty, in its reluctance to universalize its conception of experience. (ibid.; cf. SB, 158)

There is, then, an *immodest* variety of vitalism, of which Canguilhem explicitly speaks and to which Merleau-Ponty merely alludes, a vitalism that is both less and more radical than its substantive cousin. It is *less* radical in that it does not posit epistemic and ontological cracks in the edifice of scientific knowledge; however, it is *more* radical in that, if taken seriously, it forces us to “‘comprehend’ matter within life, and the sciences of matter - which is science itself - within the activity of the living” (AV, 70). That is, vitalism, in this broader sense, is not a scientific theory, but a persistent demand to inquire into the *existential underpinnings* of scientific inquiry; it has to do not so much with centers of indetermination within the scientific framework as with decentering scientific determinations against the backdrop of vital normativity. And, as I will argue, it is precisely in this epistemic and existential immodesty that, as a germinating seed, the truth of vitalism lies.

## 3 Mechanical Blindspot: Vital Normativity

I begin with a brief exposition of Merleau-Ponty's and Canguilhem's critiques of the mechanistic-behaviourist account of life. The two approaches, although waging war against a common foe, tackle the issue from different perspectives, with Merleau-Ponty focusing primarily on the notion of behaviour and Canguilhem dealing with the notion of (un)health and (ab)normality. However, their critiques prove mutually enriching and lead to a strikingly similar understanding of life.

Merleau-Ponty starts his exploration of behaviour with a critical assessment of behaviourism, the prevalent school of thought in the biological and psychological sciences of the time (SB, 4–5). According to the behaviourist, the objective conception of animal and human comportment must be shorn of intentionality, meaning and normativity, and construed solely in terms of mechanical action,

> in which the cause and the effect are decomposable into real elements which have a one-to-one correspondence. In elementary actions, the dependence is uni-directional [...] and, even when one speaks of reciprocal action between two terms, it can be reduced to a series of uni-directional determinations. (SB, 160-161)
For the behaviourist, every behavioural act consists of a sequence of causally inter-
related mechanical actions which take place in discrete physio-anatomical parts: an
outside stimulus impinges on a specific sense organ (affector); this triggers a spe-
cific neural pathway (reflex arc); finally, the stimulated pathway brings about the
activation of a specific motor unit (effector). Thus, all behaviour is ultimately a
summative (re-)action caused by an outside stimulus and mechanically mediated by
the activity of independent reflex arcs: "The 'normal' activity of an organism is only
the functioning of this apparatus constructed by nature; there are no genuine norms;
there are only effects" (SB, 9).

However, drawing on the findings of numerous non-reductionist (holist) scien-
tists of the time - primarily Goldstein,<fnref n="5" /> but also Buytendijk, von Weizsäcker,
Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka -, Merleau-Ponty argues that behaviourism is both
empirically unsubstantiated and conceptually moot. To begin with, it accords poorly
with actual observations.<fnref n="6" /> In words of Noah Brender:

The ‘elementary reflex’ which was supposed to be the basic unit of behaviour [...] turned
out to be largely mythical. [...] Instead, the effect of a given stimulus was found to vary
according to the presence or absence of other stimuli, the history of the organism, and the
activity it was engaged in. (Brender 2013, 251-2)

However, when confronted with such empirical discrepancies, the behaviourist, instead of eschewing his initial (mechanistic) presuppositions, tries to make observational data fit theoretical predictions. It does this by introducing auxiliary, and fundamentally unobservable, processes (inhibition, shunting, etc.), “which are almost in contradiction with it, just as the Ptolemaic system revealed its inadequacy by the large number of *ad hoc* suppositions which became necessary in order to make it accord with the facts” (SB, 16).

An alternative approach, adhering more closely to observational data, portrays
behaviour not as something that can be decomposed into a succession of reflexes but
as something pertaining to *the organism as a whole*. Even more importantly, behav-
iour, on this view, cannot be understood by studying processes that are passively
triggered in a living being by external influences, but becomes intelligible only in
light of *an active engagement of the organism with its environment*. For example,
consider a predator observing its prey: “When the eye and the ear follow an animal
in flight, it is impossible to say ‘which started first’ in the exchange of the stimuli.”
(ibid., 13) One could, of course, say that “the movements of the organism are always

<footnote n="5">⁵It could be claimed that, since both Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty were influenced by Goldstein's organismic biology, we shouldn't be surprised to find their work cohere in so many respects. However, this is but partly, perhaps only trivially, true; for while it is undoubtedly the case that both drew heavily on Goldstein, it is also the case that each of them not only focused on different aspects of Goldstein's work, but also expanded and modified them in substantial ways that merit further exploration. While there are some high-quality studies on the impact of Goldstein on each of the two authors individually - see, e.g., Smyth 2017 for Merleau-Ponty and Wolfe 2015 for Canguilhem -, a comprehensive comparative analysis of the two "Goldsteinians" remains yet to be written.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶For a comprehensive overview see Sheredos 2017, 194–7.</footnote>
conditioned by external influences”, i.e., that behaviour is the *effect* of stimulations; but one could just as rightfully say that these stimulations have “been made possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to the external influences”, i.e., that behaviour is the *cause* of all stimulations (ibid.).

The organism is not akin to a keyboard that reacts, in a predetermined way, to a set of external factors; instead, it actively participates, “by its proper manner of offering itself to actions from the outside”, in the process of *selecting, and structuring of*, the stimuli to which it will be sensitive (SB, 13). This is why the organism does not respond to discrete physicochemical stimuli, as behaviourists would have it, but rather to their frequency, intensity, temporal sequence, etc., i.e., to the complexes of stimuli organized as *structured wholes* (SB, 8). Thus, by shaping and elaborating the stimuli, the organism carves out of the physical domain a unique *virtual domain* - a ‘milieu’ or an ‘Umwelt’ as a domain of structures that are *significant for it*: “One could say that the [milieu] emerges from the world through the being and the actualization of the organism [...] an organism can exist only if it succeeds in finding in the world an adequate [milieu] - in shaping a [milieu]” (SB, 13; quoting Goldstein, cf. O, 85).<fnref n="7" />

This last point is what, in Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, distinguishes vital systems from all physical systems, even those that, as suggested by Gestalt theorists, act as organized wholes or as what in modern parlance would be called *complex dynamic systems*. For instance, Merleau-Ponty mentions the formation of a spherical soap bubble (SB, 131, 146) as an example of a physical process that is best described not in terms of causal interactions between discrete particles, but in terms of *dynamic field phenomena* adhering to the *law of minimum energy displacement and maximum level of stability* (SB, 36, 146). Thus, in the soap bubble,

> the external forces exerted on the surface of the bubble tend to compress it into a point; the pressure of the enclosed air on the other hand demands as large a volume as possible. The spherical structure which is realized represents the only possible solution to this problem of minimum and maximum. (SB, 146)

When exposed to external influences, dynamic physical systems (re)act as *integrated wholes*: they undergo concerted transformations of their co-determining 'parts' which collectively tend towards a mechanical-energetic equilibrium.

Now, the comportment of living beings can be said to resemble that of dynamic physical systems in that it also tends towards an equilibrium: every outside disturbance triggers imbalances in the organism’s sensory parts, which are then compensated by changes in the motor parts, only to trigger further alterations in the sensory parts, and so on (SB, 36–7). However, Merleau-Ponty argues that, unlike physical systems, in which the equilibrium is obtained with regards to *real* (i.e.,

<footnote n="7">⁷In fact, as both Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty emphasize, organisms respond to discrete physico-chemical stimuli only in pathological and laboratory conditions, i.e., in conditions that are *abnormal* for the living being. In such cases, the organism can be “momentarily reduced to the conditions of the physical [cause-effect] system” (SB, 150); however, this is not a mode of being that is *proper to the organism* (more on this below).</footnote>
physico-chemical) conditions, vital systems obtain the equilibrium “with respect to *virtual* conditions which the system itself brings into existence” (SB, 145; my emphasis). Put differently, the equilibrium that the vital system tends towards is not the mechanical-energetic equilibrium, but rather the “vital equilibrium” (SB, 147), which depends on the *organisation, history and activities of the organism*: “[T]he [vital] structure, instead of procuring release from the forces with which it is penetrated through the pressure of external conditions, executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself” (SB, 145–6). Thus, whereas actions exercised by the physical system always have “the effect of *reducing a state of tension*, that is to say, of *advancing the system toward rest*” (SB, 145; my emphasis), living beings tend not towards rest, i.e., towards the simplest energetic state with regards to their physico-chemical surrounding, but rather towards the maintenance of a *level of tension that is characteristic for them*. This level of tension is simplest not with regards to physico-chemical factors but *with regards to the organism’s characteristic engagements with its milieu* (SB, 146–7).

According to Merleau-Ponty, then, the comportment of living beings needs to be situated into the virtual domain of significance, which they construct by submitting the external stimuli to their “descriptive norms” (SB, 28; my emphasis). Hence, unlike physical systems, whose ‘behaviour’ can be encapsulated in mathematically expressible laws, “organic structures are understood only by a norm, by a certain type of transitive action which characterizes the individual” (SB, 148; my emphasis). However, although integral to his argument, Merleau-Ponty never elucidates what he means by “norm”; luckily, Canguilhem’s Goldstein-inspired explorations into the nature of health/disease and normal/pathological provide a much-needed supplement to this interpretative hiatus.

As already mentioned, Canguilhem approaches a similar topic from a different angle, focusing primarily on the question of whether life sciences (medicine in particular) can be couched exclusively in objectivist terms. Now, what exactly would objective science of health and normality amount to? For one thing, it would construe health and normality as *descriptive (statistical) facts* represented by “a canonical collection of functional constants” (NP, 122): body temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, etc. Analogously, disease and abnormality would be conceived as deviations from the established statistical averages (NP, 151): they would denote *quantitative privations*, i.e., divergences from physiological constants, instead of qualitative alterations, i.e., changes in the manner of being (NP, 42). Consequently, scientific medicine would require that pathology (science of disease/abnormality) be grounded in physiology (science of health/normality), with the latter studying normal (i.e., statistically average) and the former studying abnormal (i.e., statistically divergent) physiological processes.

According to Canguilhem, the ideal of objective medicine harkens back to the grand philosophical narrative, developed by the protagonists of what has been later termed scientific revolution, whose ultimate goal was the all-encompassing mechanization of nature (NP, 128). However, any approach that tries to account for vital behaviour in mechanical terms faces a serious challenge, for it needs to explain why
physical systems are indifferent to their movements, while this is decidedly *not* the case with living systems:

> In establishing the science of movement on the principle of inertia, modern mechanics in effect made the distinction between natural and violent movements absurd, as inertia is precisely an indifference with respect to directions and variations in movement. Life is far removed from such an indifference to the conditions which are made for it; life is polarity. The simplest biological nutritive system of assimilation and excretion expresses a polarity. (ibid.)

This last point is crucial. Whenever we try to develop a strictly descriptive science of health and normality, we implicitly presuppose that certain states are deemed (un)desirable by, and thus normative for, the living being (NP, 222). Put differently, the reason why, say, a given physiological state is considered pathological is not because it statistically diverges from certain physiological averages, but because the living being itself shows us, by means of its behaviour, that these statistical divergences are *significant for it*. So, instead of being descriptive facts, health/disease and normality/pathology turn out to be *normative concepts*: “[M]edicine exists as the art of life because the human being himself [or, as he later adds, living beings in general] call[s] certain dreaded states or behaviors pathological (hence requiring avoidance or correction) relative to the dynamic polarity of life” (NP, 126).

By characterizing life as *dynamic polarity*, Canguilhem points to what he feels is “the fundamental fact that life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible” (NP, 127): the organism's engagement with its surrounding is never neutral but involves “preference and exclusion”, “propulsion and repulsion” (NP, 136). Because interactions with matter *matter* to the organism - they are literally a matter of life and death - *living* is a fundamentally *normative activity* (NP, 123, 126, 228). Canguilhem is adamant that the term ‘normative activity’ doesn’t stand solely for the human faculty of producing normative judgements, i.e., judgements that evaluate facts in light of norms, but rather refers to something much more fundamental, namely “that which establishes norms” (NP, 127). The organism’s engagements with its surrounding take place against the backdrop of “a permanent and essential vital need”, the *vital need for self-maintenance/perseverance*, as expressed in “reactions of hedonic value or self-healing or self-restoring behaviour” (NP, 127).

From the point of view of mechanical science, anchored in statistical and descriptive analysis, there can be no difference between anomaly and abnormality (NP, 155): why are some statistical divergences (anomalies) considered normal, while others (pathologies) are considered ab-normal? According to Canguilhem, this question can be adequately addressed only if we admit of a *new point of view*:

> That point of view is that of vital *normativity*. [...] It is because the anomaly has become pathological that it stimulates scientific study. The scientist, from his objective point of view, wants to see the anomaly as a mere statistical divergence, ignoring that the biologist's scientific interest was stimulated by the normative divergence. (NP, 136)

Objective science, like Minerva's owl, is always too late: it embarks on its investiga-
tive journey with the falling of the dusk, when the vital norms have already been
established. Hence, although statistical constants investigated by the physiologist
have epistemic merit, they do so only if set against the backdrop of the organism's engagements with its milieu: "Taken separately, the living being and his [milieu] are not normal: it is their relationship that makes them such." (NP, 143). For it is only *when life has already asserted itself*, i.e., when the organism has established a suitable milieu for itself, that it is possible to undertake the study of physiological constants which are the *expression*, and *not the bearer*, of vital normativity (NP, 165, 171, 175).

We can see, then, that Merleau-Ponty and Canguilhem, although traversing different paths, arrive at a similar conclusion: in order to properly understand vital phenomena - behaviour and health, respectively - the notion of vital normativity requires that we consider the *whole mode of life of the organism*<fnref n="8" /> as expressed in-and-through the *history of its engagements with its milieu*. In the words of Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers: "[L]iving beings are not, and cannot, be indifferent to the conditions of their life, both the internal conditions of the organism [...] and the external conditions by the natural and social milieu in which they interact" (2008, ix-x). Just as it is inadequate to think of organismal behaviour as a mechanical process governed from the outside, so it is inadequate to think of organismal well-being (health) as being determinable solely from the inside; instead, the organism and its milieu constitute two aspects of an integrated whole.

## 4 Knowing Life: The Vital In-Between

Understanding life as normative (polarized) activity has far-reaching consequences for the knowledge of life, construed both as the “knowledge we have of life when we take it as an object” (*objective* dimension) and as the “knowledge that life itself produces” (*transcendental* dimension) (ibid., ix). The truth of immodest vitalism, as we will see shortly, is thus reflected not only in *how life is cognized* but also in *how life cognizes itself*. In this segment, we will focus on life as the object of knowledge, leaving the question of life as the transcendental condition of knowledge for the next section.

The critique outlined above has underscored a profound ambiguity surrounding the notions of ‘organism’ and ‘milieu’, an ambiguity which has to be dispelled if life sciences are to acquire a more solid epistemological footing. Let us look at each of the two notions in turn, starting with ‘organism’. In the mechanical-objectivist picture, the term ‘organism’ stands for “a segment of matter”, “a sum of physical and chemical actions” (SB, 151). However, this conception is problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, since all organismal processes are couched in physico-chemical terms, the normal/pathological distinction becomes meaningless (ibid.). For

<footnote n="8">⁸Note that this is exactly how Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty, again following Goldstein, understand the term 'behaviour'. See for instance: "We have spoken on several occasions of the *modes of life*, preferring this expression in certain cases to the term *behavior* in order to emphasize better the fact that life is dynamic polarity." (NP, 205; my emphasis)</footnote>
instance, the build-up of waste in the organism, which, if not prevented, leads to deterioration and ultimately death, still proceeds in accordance with physico-chemical laws (NP, 128–9). Physico-chemical regularities are oblivious to biological realities, as vividly expressed by Canguilhem’s music analogy: “[T]he states of an organism are like those found in music: the laws of acoustics are not broken in cacophony - this does not mean that all combinations of sounds are agreeable” (NP, 56).

Secondly, and relatedly, the mechanical point of view threatens to eliminate the very object it sets out to elucidate. In Merleau-Ponty’s words:

> A total molecular analysis would dissolve the structure of the functions of the organism into the undivided mass of banal physical and chemical reactions. [...] In order to make a living organism reappear, starting from these reactions, one must trace lines of cleavage in them, choose points of view from which certain ensembles receive a common signification and appear, for example, as phenomena of ‘assimilation’ or as components of a ‘function of reproduction’; one must choose points of view from which certain sequences of events, until then submerged in a continuous becoming, are distinguished for the observer as ‘phases’ - growth, adulthood - of organic development. (SB, 152)

Or as phrased more colourfully by Canguilhem:

> The laws of physics and chemistry do not vary according to health or disease. But to fail to admit that from a biological point of view, life differentiates between its states means condenning oneself to be even unable to distinguish food from excrement. Certainly a living being’s excrement can be food for another living being but not for him. What distinguishes food from excrement is not a physicochemical reality but a biological value. (NP, 220)

All partitive analysis implicitly presupposes another understanding of the organism, one that doesn’t conceive of it as a bundle of anatomico-physiological apparatuses, but as a “general attitude towards the world” (SB, 148) and a “center of actions which radiate over a ‘milieu’” (SB, 157). The organism, on this reading, is not a thing, but a *center of normative (polarized) activity* (NP, 131), and as such, engenders a *form of (rudimentary) intentionality*, a directedness-towards-the-milieu. This intentionality, however, is not of the order of intellection, but of affect and action; it is not related to notion, but to (e)motion.

Now, concerning the concept of ‘milieu’, it can be said that the ‘world’ inhabited by the organism is not the “system of mechanical, physical and chemical constants, made of invariants” (NP, 197); instead, it is its *Umwelt* - “a being-for-the-animal,” i.e., “a certain milieu characteristic of species” (SB, 125). In words of Canguilhem:

> The living creature does not live among laws but among creatures and events which vary these laws. What holds up the bird is the branch and not the laws of elasticity. If we reduce the branch to the laws of elasticity, we must no longer speak of a bird, but of colloidal solutions. (NP, 197-8)

The milieu, then, is “a world of qualified objects” (NP, 198), a domain of what Merleau-Ponty calls *sens*. The word is particularly fitting, for it designates both ‘meaning’ and ‘direction’ (cf. PP, 229). Thus, while structures in the milieu have *significance* for the organism, this is not an intellectual-conceptual but a *motor-affective* significance: they excite and orient the organism’s interest, they function as solicitations and constraints, as demands and prohibitions. A given significative
structure is thus neither (*pace* mechanistic) “physicochemical reality” devoid of value (NP, 220) nor (*pace* intellectualist) “logical signification” (PP, 7) with an “encyclopedic value” (NP, 98), but a biological reality imbued with “affective”, “expressive” and “vital value” (NP, 136; PP, 7).

With these new conceptions of ‘organism’ and ‘milieu’ in place, the *relation* between them needs to be recast as well. According to Merleau-Ponty, causal explanations - even of the bidirectional type - are ill-suited for the task at hand, for they fail to account for the *relations of significance* that are characteristic for the organism-milieu interactions. For instance, a cat which, in the first trial, is taught to pull the string attached to a piece of food with its paw, is able to pull it in the second trial with its teeth with no additional training (SB, 96). The two movements, while *physiologically different*, i.e., involving different neuromuscular pathways, share the *same significance*, i.e., involve performances that have the same meaning for the organism. In other words, behaviour does not conjoin effective reactions and individual stimuli, but expresses a dialectic (internal, meaningful) relationship between an *aptitude* and a *typical situation*, “which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure” (SB, 161).

Reverting once again to the comparison of the physical and the living systems, we can now better appreciate the fact that, in the latter but not in the former, the aptitude and the situation, the organism and the milieu, *constitute a new integrated whole*:

> In a physical form, dialectical relations between 'parts' stand out against a background (the environment) which is not part of the [...] form. In vital forms, both the organism and its milieu are 'parts' of one form. We perceive organisms as bound up with and engaged in their milieu as a place of relevance. (Sheredos 2017, 212)

The appropriate understanding of a given organism is predicated on our being acquainted with its vital norms as expressed in-and-through its interactions with the virtual milieu it lives in. This *qualitative (normative) aspect* of biological phenomena is ineradicable: “Quantity is quality denied, but not quality suppressed” (NP, 110). Thus, when a given state is described as ‘biological’ or ‘physiological’ by a scientist, it is, at least implicitly, evaluated as *positively qualified* by the organism in question (NP, 110–1). Quantitative inquiries are of course both useful and valid - both Merleau-Ponty (SB, 132) and Canguilhem (NP, 122) are adamant about that -, but they are so within the parameters implicitly set by the life form under scrutiny and intelligible to the life form performing the scrutiny.

## 5 Living Knowledge: From Technognosis to Metanormativity

Conceiving of life as polarised activity - as a dialectical *in-between* of the organism and its milieu - has another, and even more radical, corollary, for it casts fresh light on the fact that life appears in life sciences not only as an object (objective
dimension) but, being an enterprise undertaken by scientists who themselves are living beings, also as a subject (transcendental dimension). Here, we touch upon an issue that has caused quite a stir in (at least French and German) philosophy, namely the issue of a (seeming) conflict between knowledge and life. This issue is usually depicted as allowing for (again, seemingly) only two resolutions: either *eradicating life through knowledge* and reverting to “a crystalline (i.e., transparent and inert) intellectualism,” or *deriding knowledge through life* and plunging into “a foggy (at once active and muddled) mysticism” (TL, xvii). However, construing life as normative activity enables us to carve a *middle ground* between the two extremes, for it shifts our attention from the (seeming-but-non-existent) conflict between life and knowledge to the (difficult-but-tractable) tension between human being and its milieu (ibid.).

## 5.1 *In the Beginning Was the Deed: On Technognosis*

Can life be eradicated through knowledge? Let us start with an almost trivial observation that a scientist, being a living being himself, is, like all other living beings, actively involved in establishing and/or maintaining a dynamic equilibrium with his environment. As such, all his activities, scientific or otherwise, need to be situated against, and understood from, this general background. For instance, a physiologist examining the physiological constants and classifying them as (ab)normal,

> does more - not less - than the strict work of science. He no longer considers life merely as a reality identical to itself but as polarized movement. Without knowing it, the physiologist no longer considers life with an indifferent eye, with the eye of a physicist studying matter; he considers life in his capacity as a living being through whom life, in a certain sense, also passes. (NP, 222)

This has at least two significant implications. Firstly, and crucially, it follows that *life grounds, and calls forth, knowledge*. Thus, it is “life’s setbacks” (ibid.) - the *disequilibria* between the human being and his environment - that pave the way to cognition in general and scientific inquiry in particular. Canguilhem, for instance, underlines the epistemic import of *disease* for (life) sciences:

> Disease is the source of the speculative attention which life attaches to life by means of man. If health is life in the silence of the organs, then, strictly speaking, there is no science of health. Health is organic innocence. It must be lost, like all innocence, so that knowledge may be possible. Physiology is like all science, which, as Aristotle says, proceeds from wonder. But the truly *vital wonder* is the anguish caused by disease. (NP, 100-1; my emphasis)

This notion can be generalized. It is when the vital in-between is disrupted, that reflective inquiry, begotten from vital wonder, comes to the fore. Thus, if considered from the genealogical perspective, objective knowledge cannot be value-free; instead, it is *poli-valent (meta-normative)* in the sense that it allows transitions between different normative frameworks (more on this below).
The second implication is that the relation between technology and science becomes much more nuanced than the standard view would have it. Usually, technology is construed as a practical application of science: we need to know in order to be able to act (NP, 99, 104–5). However, such a view errs in at least two respects. To begin with, it ignores the constitutive role of technology in the epistemic enterprise. Technology is not simply “a docile servant carrying out intangible orders,” but rather an “advisor and animator”: it confronts us with concrete problems and urges us to tackle them without paying heed to the theoretical solutions which will eventually spring forth out of these encounters (NP, 101; cf. 105).

Secondly, by putting the cart (science) before the horse (technology), the classical approach severs life from knowledge, transposing it, in theory if not in practice, into the crystalline realm of intellectualism, in which disembodied gaze hovers over the mechanical world. However, it is possible to bridge this noetic chasm if technology is considered not as a product of science, but as a complexification and elaboration of

> vital impulses at whose service it tries to place systematic knowledge. [...] All human technique, including that of life, is set within life, that is, within an activity of information and assimilation of material. It is not because human technique is normative that vital technique is judged such by comparison. Because life is activity of information and assimilation it is the root of all technical activity. (ibid.)

If knowledge is to be situated into the framework of life and action, more emphasis needs to be given to its *implicit, practical, and technical aspects*. That is to say, the ideal of *episteme* needs to be set in close(r) relation to the facticity of “praktognosia” (PP, 162), the *logos* furnished by the behavioural complexes of our biological bodies and their numerous culturo-technological extensions (habits, tools, institutions, etc.). If we overlook this constitutive relevance of *technognosis*, we are likely to misapprehend the domain of mind and thought.

## 5.2 Minded Life: On Hypervirtuality and Metanormativity

However, does this mean that science can be simply reduced to vital polarity, that mind is ultimately nothing but an extension of life? And if so, haven't we been impaled on the other horn of dichotomy, namely that of 'foggy mysticism'? It is true that Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty both argue that (human) knowledge has to be understood against the backdrop of (vital) normativity, which makes it, first and foremost, a *new mode of behaviour*, “a new equilibrium with the world, a new form of organization of [human] life” (LT, xvii). However, this does not preclude a *qualitative* difference between life and mind:

> An organism's behavior can be in continuity with previous behaviors and still be another behavior. The progressiveness of an advent does not exclude the originality of an event. (NP, 87)?
To get a better handle on this delicate issue, let us look at Merleau-Ponty's account of the relation between what he calls the "vital order" (life) and the "human order" (mind). His contention is that, on the superficial level, the human order may look simply as a variation of the vital order: just as, say, animals live in their unique organic milieus, so human beings live in their admittedly more diversified, but structurally similar, culturo-social milieus:

> If life is the manifestation of an 'interior' in the 'exterior,' [human] consciousness is nothing at first but the projection onto the world of a new 'milieu' - irreducible to the preceding ones, it is true - and humanity nothing but a new species of animal. (SB, 162)

However, and crucially:

> [T]his lived consciousness does not exhaust the human dialectic. What defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature - economic, social or cultural - beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others. (SB, 175)

Thus, the difference between the two orders lies not so much in the greater complexity of human *Umwelten* but rather in the distinctly human ability to *transcend and modify* these selfsame *Umwelten*. According to Merleau-Ponty, what is characteristic of human behaviour and seems to be lacking in the comportment of non-human animals, is a certain *multiplicity and mobility of perspective*, which he expounds in his commentaries on Wolfgang Köhler's famous experiments on chimpanzees.<fnref n="9" />

In one set of experiments, chimpanzees, when confronted with a puzzle, had grave difficulties in alternating their viewpoint. For instance, having learned how to use a rod to obtain a piece of fruit, a chimpanzee left alone with a dried bush was unable to use its branches for the same purpose: "The tree branch as a stimulus is not even the equivalent of a rod, and the spatial and mechanical properties which permit it to assume this function are not immediately accessible to animal behavior" (SB, 113–4). Similarly, the animal did not use a branch as a tool - even if it had learned to do so in the preceding trials - as long as another monkey was sitting on it: "It leans against it; thus it cannot be said that it has not seen it; but it remains for him a means of support or rest; it cannot become an instrument" (SB, 114).

What are we to make of this? In Merleau-Ponty's view, the rod is not given to the chimpanzee in the same way as it is to the human observer, that is, as a *discrete thing* that can be seen from different perspectives and manipulated in different ways; instead, it is "invested with a 'functional value' which depends on the effective composition of the field" (SB, 116–7). More specifically, the situation in which the animal finds itself is given to it as a structured whole, in which the significance of each aspect is co-specified with the significance of all other aspects. Hence, if one segment of the situation changes, so do all the others. This is why, for the chimp, the branch-as-seat and the branch-as-instrument are not two aspects of the same thing, but literally *two different things* (SB, 145). Further, the motor-affective significance of the situation is predicated on the motor-affective aptitudes of the animal; it "is not

<footnote n="9">⁹For reasons of space, I provide but a brief overview of these experiments; for a more thorough and interpretatively brilliant account see Moss Brender 2017.</footnote>
an object of knowledge for the chimp [...] Rather, the chimp lives its situation as an immediate call to action, an imperative or compulsion that cannot be denied” (Moss Brender 2017, 145).

In human beings, on the other hand, this motor-affective dynamism undergoes an important transformation, brought about by what Merleau-Ponty calls “multiplicity of perspective” (SB, 122). In words of Moss Brender:

> Like the chimpanzee, we experience our situation as Gestalt, an organized and oriented whole. But unlike the chimp, we are able to reorganize or reorient this whole, to 'Gestalt-shift' more or less at will between different possible configurations of the situation. (Moss Brender 2017, 146).

There is, then, a certain *distance* or *remove* from the motor-affective significance of a situation, which allows us to resist its imminent demands, to vary our perspective, and finally, to thematize it (more on this below).

The second example is even more telling. In one experiment, Köhler placed a piece of fruit behind a grill and taught the chimpanzee to use a stick to pull it within its reach. In another trial, he placed a three-sided frame around the fruit, whose open side was facing away from the animal. So, to get to the fruit, the chimp had to first push the fruit away from itself, then move it around the frame, and finally pull it towards itself. However, Köhler observed that the chimp had great difficulty in completing the task and was stubbornly trying to pull the fruit towards itself. This may strike us as odd for, while the chimp had enormous difficulties in moving the fruit along the required path, it is clear that it could have easily retraced the same route with its own body if the conditions allowed it to do so (SB, 117).

What to us look like two identical paths - from A to B and from B to A - are apparently not identical for the chimpanzee. Again, what are we to make of this? Merleau-Ponty's contention is that space for the chimp is not *geometric* but *corpo-real*, i.e., space that has a "null-point", namely the chimp's own body (SB, 117). For this reason, the chimpanzee "does not experience itself as an object moving through a fixed landscape; rather, it is the landscape that shifts around the animal in response to animal's movements" (Moss Brender 2017, 148). In other words, movement for the chimp does not mean a *change of position* (a change *in space*) but rather a *change of situation* (a change *of space*).

To get a better understanding as to how this differs from human perception, let us consider what it actually takes to successfully solve the puzzle in question. To begin with, it requires that one dissociates oneself from one's embodied perspective and "take(s) up the object's point of view" (ibid., 149). Further, it requires that one sees oneself - one's own body - as yet another object, which stands in multiple relations with other objects. And finally, it requires the ability to translate a motor sequence that would be carried from the *object's* point of view into a visual sequence that would be seen from *our current* point of view, i.e., to "transcribe a kinetic melody into a visual [sequence] [...] establishing relations of reciprocal correspondence and mutual expression between them" (SB, 118). In short, the solution to the problem requires "mobility of perspective" (Moss Brender 2017, 149), which allows one to not only alternate perspectives from the same point of view (i.e., multiplicity of
perspective) but to also *alternate the point of view itself* and imagine the action-to-
be-taken “*from a perspective outside of the movement itself*” (ibid., 151; emphasis
in the original). Note that this is not to say that human beings no longer have a
center, but that, in our case, the center is *mobile*, and that we are able “to take up a
virtual point of view without actually moving our body to that location” (ibid., 149).

What is of particular importance is that these two abilities - the multiplicity and
mobility of perspective - allow for what Merleau-Ponty calls *symbolic behaviour*,
i.e., a mode of behaviour in which behaviour itself becomes "the proper theme of
activity" (SB, 103). The task of performing a detour in the example above requires
that we "trace by our very gesture the symbol of the movement which we would
have to make if we were in its place" (SB, 118). Put differently, to execute a detour
requires establishing correspondences between various patterns of behaviour exe-
cuted from various centers: the (actual) gesture I perform with my hand when I
move the fruit along the relevant path *expresses the same significance* as the (vir-
tual) movement of my body traversing the selfsame path. Symbolic behaviour thus
stands for the ability to take up a *common significance* of various - *actual* or *virtual* -
behavioural structures, and express it in (other) gestures, pictures, or words; these
then stand as *symbols* or "structure(s) of structures," i.e., as structures expressing
structural correspondences between various sensorimotor patterns (cf. Moss
Brender 2017, 152).

The capacity of establishing “relations between relations” (SB, 118) is at the core of what we call *reason(ing)*. But note, firstly, that while not identical with vital behaviour, reason(oning) still is, essentially, a *form of behaviour*, a *new mode of being*; and secondly, that once constituted, it is *not* simply a contingent addition to former modes of behaviour, but rather a *novel structuration*, a transformation of the vital organisation *in its entirety*:

Mind is not a specific difference which would be added to vital or psychological being in order to constitute a man. Man is not a rational animal. The appearance of reason and mind does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed instincts in man. [...] But if the alleged instincts of man do not exist apart from the mental dialectic, correlatively, this dialectic is not conceivable outside of the concrete situations in which it is embodied. (SB, 181)

Non-human living beings are embedded in their virtual domains of significance, but
these domains are fixed by each organism's organization - the "a priori of the spe-
cies" (SB, 122) - and are (almost) always given from a single perspective: "The
animal *lives* in the meaning of its immediate situation without *perceiving* this mean-
ing as such." (Moss Brender 2017, 146; emphasis in the original) In the case of the
human mind, this vital dynamism is sublimated into a new structure: significance is
not only *enacted* but also *thematized*. More specifically, human bodily attitudes are
open to regular modification, whereby motor-affective significances in the human
milieu also become modified. This is why, instead of "aptitudes," Merleau-Ponty
uses the Hegelian term "work," which denotes "the ensemble of activities by which
man transforms physical and living nature" (SB, 162). Work opens up not only the
possibility that something can have more than one meaning, but also a realization
that this shift in meaning corresponds to the alteration of the (bodily) attitude taken
by someone: “It is only at the level of symbolic conduct [...] that, instead of seeking to insinuate his stubborn norms, the subject of behavior ‘de-realizes himself’ and becomes a genuine alter ego.” (SB, 126).

Let us now, by way of summary, underline three main points that emerge out of these reflections. Firstly, a non-human living being is capable of *experiencing* in the sense of establishing meaningful relationships between physico-chemical stimuli and shaping them into structured wholes, its *Um-welt*; a human being, on the other hand, is capable of *reasoning* in the sense of establishing “relation(s) between relations” (SB, 118), and thus recognizing, beyond its current milieu, a *Welt* (SB, 176), “universe” (SB, 176) or “world of things” (SB, 175) - a virtual framework of contingencies underpinning all possible body-situation alterations. Secondly, life is intrinsically *normative*, i.e., it is a polarized (non-neutral) activity whose dynamic equilibrium pertains not to physico-chemical conditions but “to *virtual* conditions which the system itself brings into existence” (SB, 145; our emphasis); mind, on the other hand, can be said to be intrinsically *metanormative*, i.e., it is a polarized (non-neutral) activity that can thematize and, to a certain degree, modify its virtual conditions of possibility. Finally, while non-human beings live in a domain of virtuality, human beings can be said to live in a *domain of hypervirtuality*: they live among meaningful structures of the second order, among *symbols* and *things*. Human beings can create, destroy, and re-create different virtual domains - the worlds of myth, art, science, etc.; put differently, they can enact multifarious virtual habitats, the outermost horizon of which - the virtual domain in which perspectives, constitutive of other virtual domains, coalesce - is what is called the ‘objective world’.

We can now better understand what was said at the beginning of this section, namely that the position defended by Merleau-Ponty and Canguilhem transforms the question of life vs. knowledge into that of organism vs. milieu:

> Thought is nothing but a disentangling of man from the world that permits us to retreat from, to interrogate, and to doubt (to think is to weigh, etc.) in the face of obstacles that arise. [...] It is not true that knowledge destroys life. Rather, knowledge undoes the experience of life, seeking to analyze its failures so as to abstract from it both a rationale for prudence (sapience, science, etc.) and, eventually, laws for success, in order to help man remake what life has made without him, in him, or outside of him. (TL, xvii)

The relation of mind to life is the same as that of life to matter: it is a *novel structuration*, where the dialectical pair ‘aptitude-situation’ (normativity-virtuality) is restructured into the dialectical pair ‘work-world’ (metanormativity-hypervirtuality). What is crucial, however, is that, in this view, the originality of life (*a propos* matter) and mind (*a propos* life) is not one of *addition* but one of *transformation*, one of “a [wholesale] retaking and a ‘new’ structuration” of the preceding structural dynamics (SB, 184). Mind, for instance, is neither a non-material add-on to, nor a mere quantitative complexification of, life; instead, it is a new dynamic equilibrium, a qualitatively novel integrated whole. According to Merleau-Ponty, when it comes to such structural shifts (from ‘matter’ to ‘life’ and ‘life’ to ‘mind’), “[i]t is not a question of two *de facto* orders external to each other, but of two types of relations, the second of which integrates the first” (SB, 181). This sits well with Canguilhem’s
claim that *quantitative continuity* doesn't preclude *qualitative discontinuity*: "The progressiveness of an advent does not exclude the originality of an event" (NP, 87).

It is not so much that, in living beings, physical phenomena are supplanted with
novel vital phenomena, but rather that, after achieving a certain level of complexity,
the behavioural pattern characteristic of physical things undergoes a wholesale
transformation, whereby all constitutive processes acquire a new significance. And
this, as we saw earlier, includes both continuity and discontinuity: the higher order
"eliminates the preceding one as an isolated moment", yet it also "uses and subli-
mates it", "conserves and integrates it". There is, in short, a "double aspect" to the
said relation, for it "both liberate[s] the higher from the lower and found[s] the for-
mer on the latter" (SB, 207, 208).

6 Conclusion: Life's Fecundity and Ouroboric Thought

Let us now return to the question of vitalism. We have seen that both Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty agree that vitalism, when cast in the scientific mould, is false, even blatantly so; yet it is still a motivated error, one that “rest[s] on an authentic phenomenon” (SB, 216). There is more to vitalism than meets the scientific eye, which is why, as Canguilhem points out, it cannot be placed on the same footing or be refuted in the same way as, say, phlogiston or geocentrism (AV, 60–1). But what is this *more* that separates vitalism from the aberrant theories of old? What is the authentic phenomenon which vitalism so immodestly expresses?

The answer I have tried to sketch points in the direction of vital normativity. The latter, as we have seen, manifests itself in (at least) two aspects that are central to vitalism. The first aspect is the appreciation for *the generative and spontaneous dimension of life*, for the unexpected leaps, shifts, and transformations that characterize organic dynamism:

> It is certain that, for vitalists, the fundamental biological phenomenon [...] is the phenom-
> enon of generation. A vitalist [...] is a man who is led to meditate on the problems of life
> more by the contemplation of an egg than by handling of a winch or iron bellows. (AV, 64)

The normativity of life manifests itself as *life's fecundity* (AV, 66–7), as life's capacity of both establishing *and transcending* new norms and thereby new life-forms, in relation to which (objective) knowledge always alights too late:

> Life is the formation of forms; knowledge is the analysis of in-formed matter. It is normal
> that an analysis could never explain a formation and that one loses sight of the originality
> of forms when one sees them only as results whose causes or components are to be deter-
> mined. Because they are totalities whose sense resides in their tendency to realize them-
> selves as such in the course of their confrontation with their milieu, living forms can be
> grasped in a vision, never by a division. (TL, xix)

The second, and in my opinion more important aspect, is best approached through
Canguilhem's claim that vitalism "is first and foremost a demand [...] need to
keep the question of the sense of the relation between life and science open" (TL:
ix; my emphasis). There is, as we have seen, an ineradicable recursivity in all reflection on life: it is the impetus of vital normativity that calls forth knowledge, which, through its techniques and practices, recursively alters the dynamics of vital normativity. This idea, if taken seriously, has important implications on how we understand our epistemic practices and urges us to make conceptual space for a more dynamic type of reflection, which I would like to call *ouroboric thought*. We find references to ouroboric thought, under different labels, in both thinkers. Canguilhem speaks of *reasonable rationalism*, a rationalism that is able to “incorporate the conditions of its practice” by recognizing “the originality of life,” and therefore acknowledge that “the thought of the living” ultimately takes “from living the idea of the living” (TL, xx). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty speaks of *radical reflection* (PP, 61–3) or *hyper-reflection* (VI, 38, 46), i.e., reflection that “knows itself as as reflection-on-an-unreflective experience” (PP, 72), and that “elucidate[s] the unreflective view which it supersedes and show[s] the possibility of this latter, in order to comprehend itself as a beginning” (PP, 73).

The crucial point is the same: Since we, as cognizers of life, at the same time live the lives of cognizers, our reflection, like the mythical snake of Ouroboros, must encompass not only its own embeddedness in the prereflective dynamism of life, but also how, in and through its operations, it modifies that selfsame dynamism in which it is embedded, thus altering both its conditions of possibility and its subsequent operations - and so on, indefinitely. It is here, I think, that the truth of immodest vitalism lies. Put simply, it is the *truth of vital wonder* (NP, 101), the truth of an existential blindspot of all our epistemic endeavours; it is the recognition that “one must know how to cede a place to the irrational, even and especially when one wants to defend rationalism” (MO, 95), that one must make room for “the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance” (PP, 115). Hence its epistemic immodesty, hence its existential impudence.

# Bibliography

## *Abbreviations*

TL Canguilhem, Georges. 2008. Thought and the Living. In *Knowledge of Life*, xvii–xx. New York: Fordham University Press.

AV Canguilhem, Georges. 2008. *Aspects of Vitalism*, 59–74. New York: Fordham University Press.

MO Canguilhem, Georges. 2008. *Machine and Organism*, 75–97. New York: Fordham University Press.

NP Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. *The Normal and the Pathological*. New York: Zone Books.

O Goldstein, Kurt. 2000. *The Organism*. New York: Zone Books.

SB Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. *The Structure of Behavior*. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

PP Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. *Phenomenology of Perception*. London/New York: Routledge Classics.
## Secondary Sources

Marrati, Paola, and Todd Meyers. 2008. Foreword: Life as Such. In *Knowledge of Life*, ed. Georges Canguilhem, vii–xii. New York: Fordham University Press.

Moss Brender, Noah. 2017. On the Nature of Space: Getting from Motricity to Reflection and Back. In *Perception and Its Development in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology*, ed. Kirsten Jacobson and Russon John. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

———. 2013. Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking: Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic Systems Theory. *Symposium* 17 (2): 246–270.

Peña-Guzmán, David M. 2013. Pathic Normativity: Merleau-Ponty and Canguilhem's Theory of Norms. *Chiasmi International* 15: 361–384.

Pollard, Christopher. 2016. Merleau-Ponty's Conception of Dialectics in Phenomenology of Perception. *Critical Horizons* 17 (3-5): 358–375.

Sheredos, Benjamin. 2017. Merleau-Ponty's Immanent Critique of Gestalt Theory. *Human Studies* 40: 191–217.

Smyth, Bryan. 2017. The Primacy Question in Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology. *Continental Philosophy Review* 50: 127–149.

Wolfe, Charles T. 2011. From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes. *Eidos* 14: 212–235.

———. 2015. Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of Biophilosophy. In *Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy*, ed. Meacham Darian, 197–212. Dordrecht: Springer.

Wolfe, Charles T., and Andy Wong. 2014. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of Biophilosophy. In *The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics*, ed. G. Bianco, M. de Beistegui, and M. Gracieuse, 63–75. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

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<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>
# A ‘Fourth Wave’ of Vitalism in the Mid-20th Century?

<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>

Check for
updates

Erik L. Peterson

**Abstract** In his 1966 John Danz lectures, Francis H. C. Crick decried vitalism in the life sciences. Why did he do this three decades after most historians and philosophers of science regarded vitalism as dead? This essay argues that, by advocating the reduction of biology to physics and chemistry Crick was: (a) attempting to imbue the life sciences with greater prestige, (b) paving the way for bioengineering and the reduction of consciousness to molecules, and (c) trying to root out religious sentiment in the life sciences. In service of these goals, Crick deployed vitalism as a straw man enemy. His wave of so-called vitalists in the middle of the twentieth century in fact raised legitimate questions regarding the relationship of organisms to their DNA molecules that Crick was ill-equipped to answer. Moreover, most were not vitalists at all but advocates for what I term *bioexceptionalism*—an argument for the methodological utility of keeping biological pursuits within their own domains, distinct from physics and chemistry, regardless of the ontological status of living things. Nevertheless, Crick’s status as a “cross-worlds influencer” entrenched a philosophically-enervated reductionism in the life sciences for decades.

## 1 Introduction

Francis H. C. Crick (1916–2004) rose to the podium in the Roosevelt Senior High School auditorium in northern Seattle, Washington, USA, on the night of 24 February, 1966, to pose a simple question: “Is Vitalism Dead?” The entire event was odd. The location was odd: why at a high school and not at a university or scientific institute? The question was odd: historians and philosophers of science believed the mechanism-vitalism debate concluded three decades earlier, with the deaths of the major proponents of vitalism’s third wave, Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson (Allen 2005; Beckner 1959). Why was Crick raising the dead? And Crick’s answer to the

E. L. Peterson (✉)

Department of History, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

e-mail: elpeterson@ua.edu
question was odd: vitalism thrived, he insisted. Three decades after the debate sup-
posedly ended, a Nobel laureate took to a high school stage to inveigh against a
wave of support for vitalism he sensed floating like some airborne virus through the
sciences, infecting even the nonspecialist public.

Immediately after the lectures, University of Washington Press asked Crick to expand them into a book. The talks were already a mutation of a lecture Crick delivered to the Cambridge Humanists Society earlier, so it wasn't difficult for him to repackage them as *Of Molecules & Men* (publishers believed a title hinting of John Steinbeck would sell more copies in America). In the book, Crick claimed that prominent scientists still called on a phantasmal *élan vital* that eluded mechanistic explanations woven into biology. Nevertheless, vitalism's days were numbered, he assured his audience. Molecular biology—Crick's own research, in other words—was just then in the process of finally winding down that old debate. He issued a warning (again, quite odd considering the commonly held history of vitalism): “And so, to those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” (Crick 1966: 99).

The purpose of this essay is to peel back the layers of Crick's lecture and subsequent book in order to discover what lay underneath this strange event. Who were the 1950s and 1960s vitalists against whom Crick made these pronouncements? How could vitalists exist in the professional life sciences at all, given that the term “vitalism” was more or less professionally hazardous by the 1960s (Peterson & Hall 2020)? Why did Crick, by then an internationally known pioneer of molecular biology, deliver his speeches in an American high school? What does this event have to tell us about the status of the life sciences mid-century? And, more to the point, what function did Crick's appellation “vitalism” play in that era, and what significance does it hold in our own?

Though it seems simple on its face, the story here consists of a complex tangle of
arguments between Crick and his peers. It was a strange situation wherein physi-
cists and chemists argued for what I term *bioexceptionalism*, while Crick argued for
the reverse. By bioexceptionalism, I mean only an argument about the *methodologi-
cal utility of preserving biological pursuits within their own domains, distinct from
physics and chemistry*. Whether there are ontological reasons to hold biology as
ultimately reducible to physics or not, there are disciplinary reasons to *act as if* life
is special. Put a different way, this attitude—holding in abeyance ontological ques-
tions in favor of an anti-reductionist methodological stance—is what I’m deeming
bioexceptionalism. It is no means clear that what motivated the advocates for bioex-
ceptionalism in the mid-twentieth century was an ontic commitment to a vital force,
entity, or fluid—something *essentially* unique about the living.

Why do Crick's moves here regarding vitalism matter? First, because of his stat-
ure as a Nobel laureate and champion of the Young Turks sweeping through molec-
ular biology, they were rhetorically persuasive. Crick's aspersions deflected the
critiques of his own reductionism and muted those who advocated for bioexception-
alism. Secondly, by insinuating these individuals were the “cranks” he mocked,
Crick indirectly turned the lens of historians and philosophers of science away from
investigating these figures and their influences on the life sciences. Thirdly, the existence of Crick's feared 'fourth wave of vitalism' in the mid-twentieth century a half-century after the third wave suggests the reductionistic solutions offered by earlier physiologists (e.g., Jacques Loeb) and geneticists (e.g., H. J. Muller) did not settle the issue earlier. Why, then, should we believe Crick's solutions settled them mid-century?

Perhaps the most significant reason to focus on Crick's *Of Molecules and Men* and the purported 'fourth wave of vitalism' is for the window it opens into longer-term trends within academic disciplines. These events reveal in miniature a growing split within the life sciences and between the sciences and academic disciplines not considered sciences. The "two cultures" divide lamented by C. P. Snow in the 1950s accelerated in the next decade. And Crick, in particular, saw in this trend cause for celebration, not regret. The future would replace biological explanations with exclusively physicochemical ones—meaning also that biological functions, including cognition, would be replaced by engineered, synthetic cells and computers. That was, Crick thought, the goal of the sciences and the conclusion (in both senses) of other knowledge traditions, such as what is traditionally known as the arts, literature, humanistic pursuits more generally, and, of course, religion. The vitalist "cranks," then, stood not only in the way of science but also his vision of a technologically mediated destiny—humanity without the humanities or the arts, and absent much of the social and even the life sciences.

## 2 Of Molecules and Crick

"It is notoriously difficult to define the word 'living'," began Crick in *Of Molecules and Men* (Crick 1966: 3). Viruses, especially, create a conundrum. They can certainly reproduce—as we in the SARS-CoV-2 era have become only too aware—which should mean they're living. But they're not especially multifaceted, not organism-like. What classifies viruses living things has to do with the fact that structurally, viruses are both sufficiently complex and sufficiently ordered at a chemical level. From Crick's perspective, ordered complexity at the tiniest level acted as the single marker between the living and non-living (Crick 1966: 5). Viruses demonstrate ordered complexity; rocks do not. Paradoxically, Crick also deployed viruses as a reminder that the gap between living and non-living was itself insignificant—crossable, for all intents and purposes. Natural selection excepted, there appeared no principle or law or operation unique to the domain of living things. The ordinary concepts of chemistry and physics could explain viruses and, by extension, all life (Crick 1966: 10). No vital forces necessary.

For Crick, this view comported with the ultimate goal of the field of biology under the new, confident leadership of molecular biologists, like himself: "to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry" (Crick 1966: 10, emphasis in original). And if this was the quest, Crick saw his role in it as two-fold: (1) to reorient the practice of the life sciences around this notion that all living things can be explained
through physics and chemistry without reference to uniquely-biological forces, entities, or processes; (2) to undertake this reorientation because, to date, no interesting biological phenomena had yet appeared to discredit that view. The history of science would validate his role in the quest. Ultimately, Crick asserted, this would open up the world of bioengineering.

Yet some enemies remained to vanquish, if he hoped to complete his quest. These enemies belonged to a tribe of vitalists. For Crick, that meant they adhered to a particular creed:

> [T]here is some special force directing the growth or the behavior of living systems which cannot be understood by our ordinary notions of physics and chemistry. ...there must be something else in a biological system which cannot be included under the heading of physics or chemistry. There must be some sort of force, or some directing spirit—this is the sort of idea that appeals to nonscientists. Scientists on the other hand often prefer to think that there will be extra laws in biological systems which are not included in physics and chemistry (Crick 1966: 16–17).

These beliefs would not stand, according to Crick. History showed all earlier barriers to explaining biological systems in terms of chemical ones had been broken through. And thankfully, the one feature of the living world that didn’t seem amenable to strictly chemical explanations, namely evolution via natural selection, now seemed at least partially reducible to chemistry. Mutations, Crick reminded his audience, were rare-but-consistently-occurring chemical events. Over the eons, very many of these rare-but-consistently-occurring events enabled a set of organisms to fit new environmental conditions. Like one of a nearly infinite set of chemical keys placed at random into a lock, there was always a chance the door could be opened. This had happened so often, in fact, that we could explain all of the living world merely through this process of chemical trial and error. The first gigantic mistake vitalists made, Crick insisted, was to make the living realm seem more complicated than this.

At present, there were but three areas still holding out against physics and chemistry gobbling up the life sciences for good: (a) the borderline between living and non-living; (b) the origins of life; and (c) “consciousness” (Crick 1966: 17). Crick’s work on DNA, RNA—and the Central Dogma linking them in proper order—meant that molecular biology was close to solving (a). He spent much of the second section of his three-part John Danz Lecture, in fact, simply explaining to his audience the coded DNA to protein sequence. This level of understanding, he predicted, would allow bioengineers to assemble living organisms molecule by molecule by the turn of the twenty-first century at the latest. Simply completing this feat—engineering a living cell from non-living parts—would demonstrate two important facts. First, that there was no life/non-life boundary. Secondly, that the conditions of abio-genesis at the origins of life (hold out (b)) were not only plausible but uncomplicated. Consciousness presented a more intimidating problem, Crick admitted. Here he roamed far outside his expertise. Nevertheless, he confidently proclaimed consciousness also just a molecular problem to be solved by computing and, indeed,
centered much of the rest of his scientific career around proving this point.<fnref n="1" /> True, Crick conceded, the logical conclusion of these concepts would eventually render humans obsolete. On the way into the twilight, however, humans would get some great entertainment. We would be able to watch two computerized beings interact. How amusing, thought Crick, to pair an android programed for seduction with one programed to be a psychiatrist! “Explosively funny situations” such as these would more than make up for the sudden redundancy of humans and the concomitant realization that most of what humans valued about themselves turned out not to be important after all (Crick 1966: 83).

## 3 Decoding Crick's Depiction of Vitalism

University of Edinburgh developmental biologist C. H. Waddington took it upon himself to review *Of Molecules and Men* for *Nature*. That Waddington of all people would write the most prominent review makes sense: Crick had been a long acquaintance of Waddington's. More than that, Waddington pushed to write the review when he saw Crick veering beyond scientific claims, dabbling in the sorts of philosophy of biology that Waddington made a professional pursuit. “No Vitalism for Crick,” Waddington's piece, came off less harshly than most of the reviews of *Of Molecules and Men*. Manhattan Project physicist Eugene Wigner, for instance, praised Crick for his lucid description of the DNA to RNA process but found the rest of the text dismissible at best (Wigner 2001). Waddington, by contrast, put Crick's claims into serious conversation with the longer-term discussion of the history of vitalism. Was there a wave of vitalism in the 1960s? Waddington thought Crick's formulation too sloppy to tell.

For him to attack vitalism, charged Waddington, Crick would have to be clearer on the implications of his definition of physics and the relationship of that physics to biology. Crick supposed physics was relatively solid. Waddington noted the strange behavior of particles and energies at the quantum level—something not predicted or even predictable in the physics of the nineteenth century, for instance— and doubted Crick's supposition. “If biologists should find it necessary to postulate an entity as odd as a quark, would that be vitalistic or not?” queried Waddington. If there was vitalism, Crick conflated two different varieties of it, Waddington warned. “Objective vitalists” claimed that there is something mysterious about living things, such that their behavior could not be fully explicated by any purely physical system. Waddington doubted if many of these sorts of vitalists existed in science anymore. “Subjective vitalists,” however, focused on the gap between any description of consciousness or awareness or mind and the *experience* of it. Descriptions of neurons and their interconnections existed in a “different logical realm” from the

<footnote n="1">¹Even years later, after Crick admitted the existence of life itself seemed miraculous, he doggedly held to the notion that consciousness must be biochemistry (Nagel 2012: 124).</footnote>
subjective human experience; that much was “irrefutable,” thought Waddington. Crick merely set up a straw argument when equating this realization of subjectivity with older notions of the soul quickening the human fetus.

"The only differences between us are matters of emphasis," Crick insisted to Waddington in private correspondence.<fnref n="2" /> Though, he also admitted that his lack of philosophical training in or appreciation for philosophy meant that he had "never really thought about [these issues] in detail"—apparently even whilst delivering lectures and writing books about them. A month had transpired since Waddington's "very friendly review" appeared in *Nature*, and Crick had decided to sit down and more carefully consider his own claims. Vitalists, Crick decided, could really be divided into three camps. The "obvious sort" believed in souls irreducible to physics and chemistry. Crick really disliked this group, but belatedly admitted they were different than those who he attacked in the book. It was the second group, the "bio- tonic laws" group, that troubled Crick the most. Physicist Walter Elsasser fit into this category, though Crick admitted that he hadn't really read the recent works by Elsasser that Waddington referenced in his review. Waddington's treatment of Elsasser certainly made Elsasser's position into something stronger than Crick's strawman version of him, Crick admitted. The third group of vitalists, according to Crick, centered around Max Delbruck—a discovery that Crick had just made and that astonished him. Imagine, Delbruck a vitalist! These sorts of vitalists, if they deserved that appellation at all, thought biological investigations would reveal new laws in physics and chemistry. Crick seriously doubted those sorts of claims, too. Did he have evidence for it? Not really. But he doubted it, nonetheless. What would Waddington say to that?

The real problem with *Of Molecules and Men*, responded Waddington, had to do with the way Crick and others formulated the vitalism/mechanism dichotomy.<fnref n="3" /> As formulated, the question being asked was: *Starting with a foundation of modern physics and chemistry, would we be able to account for biology?* Those who said ‘yes’ were said to be mechanists; those who said ‘no’ were dubbed vitalists. But that was the wrong formulation of the problem, according to Waddington. Instead, one should start by asking whether, beginning with whole systems in biology, we would find anything that physics and chemistry might not eventually accommodate—rec- ognizing that physics and chemistry were evolving disciplines, just like biology. There were two features of biology that physics and chemistry could not deal with at present, Waddington suspected. The first, as Crick also noted, was natural selec- tion. But the second, not of much interest to Crick nor, Waddington suspected, to other molecular biologists, was the process of development. This is the field of inquiry once situated in the old field of morphology. To Waddington—who specialized in paleontology and embryology alongside of philosophy before mov- ing into genetics—development was still the most vexing problem. Concepts like

<footnote n="2">²Crick to Waddington, 9 November 1967, box 102, folder PP/CRI/I/2/6/5, Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Waddington to Crick, 27 December 1967, box 102, folder PP/CRI/I/2/6/5, Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.</footnote>
natural selection and development remained far removed from what bare-bones
physics and chemistry presently had the power to explain, asserted Waddington. Of
course, that didn't mean that physics and chemistry would *never* accommodate
these foundational features of biology, just that they could not now. This was pre-
cisely Elsasser's point, Waddington reminded Crick. Years later, Waddington would
clarify the problem with Crick's reductionism:

The real snag of reductionism, it seems to me, arises if you suppose that we really know all there is to be known about the physical entities and laws. ... I was taught that molecules were made up of little groups of atoms which stick together with valency bonds, like little hooks sticking out of them .... This left absolutely no possibility of the very large scale protein molecules with their tertiary structure and allosteric behavior.... That concept didn't occur forty years ago ... it's been added on since. You must, I think, always realise that we don't know all about the basic physical entities ... (Waddington 1972: 30).

Crick didn't bother to answer Waddington's challenge. Perhaps by then, he'd moved on to discussions of astrobiology, among other things. Waddington invited him to contribute to the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) meetings held in Lake Como, Italy, and Crick attended—he loved the Italian vistas. But reports from those philosophically robust meetings show Crick didn't contribute much to the discussions (Waddington 1970). We can discern his feelings, however, from his behavior immediately after. Among the more influential ideas to emerge from that year's IUBS theoretical biology meeting was Lewis Wolpert's "tricolor flag" model of embryonic development across gradients. Crick went after this model in 1970, attempting to discredit it (Crick 1970).<fnref n="4" /> Despite much talking about big concepts, Crick never felt quite comfortable really diving into analytical philosophy of biology. Perhaps he felt, given his list of enemies to vanquish, he never needed to.

## 4 Identifying Crick's Vitalist Enemy

Crick dismissed as “the obvious sort” of vitalist folks like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard was an astute, geologically trained Jesuit priest who was on the 1929 team that discovered “Peking Man” (*H. erectus pekinensis*). But he had also been influenced by the work of vitalist Henri Bergson (Aczel 2007). Teilhard regarded evolution as fully teleological, a slow unfolding toward an Omega Point with humans as a key component of the creation shaping God’s progressive vision: “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire” (Teilhard de Chardin 2002: 87). Teilhard’s vitalism wasn’t so much an additive force or an *entelechy* as an overall condition of existence. “A directing spirit,” as Crick dubbed it (1966:16).

<footnote n="4">⁴In this article, Crick picked up on the explanation already on offer by Turing (1952).</footnote>
On the one hand, “obvious” vitalism like Teilhard’s was not worth taking seri-
ously. On the other, Crick suspected more than a whiff of Christianity—however
heterodox Teilhard’s faith appeared to a religious insider—wafted through all ver-
sions of “obvious” vitalism. And it was railing against Christianity that both ener-
gized Crick and made it difficult for him to find common ground with religious
thinkers or institutions. As he wrote to the editor of Cambridge University’s *Varsity*
magazine, “In the past, religion answered these [enduring] questions, often in con-
siderable detail. Now we know that almost all these answers are highly likely to be
nonsense....”<fnref n="5" /> The biology of Darwin and Mendel had already scrubbed this sort of
thinking out of real science, Crick asserted.

But what about the other two kinds of vitalism? As a representative of the third type of vitalist, Crick could only identify Max Delbruck. As Delbruck was an insider, a founding figure of molecular biology, in fact, and as Delbruck claimed he found no in principle barrier between physics and biology, Crick turned away from attacking him.

The most bothersome version of vitalism, from Crick's point of view, was the
second type—the “biotonic laws” version. Waddington affirmed that Walter Elsasser
acted as a reasonable figurehead for this group, though he didn't dismiss this group
as Crick did. On the surface, Crick's complaint was that Elsasser didn't understand
biology. Underneath the bravado, however, Crick must have seen that Elsasser rep-
resented something very disconcerting. If Crick's major goal was to reduce biology
to chemistry and physics, what did it mean when a physicist denied that physics had
the power to accommodate the reduction?

Walter Elsasser (1904–1991) migrated from particle physics to geophysics to biology over the course of his career, achieving notoriety in the first two fields as a faculty member of prestigious universities from coast to coast in the United States. But aside from determining the physics at work in the earth’s generation of a magnetic field, he felt his most important achievements were in theoretical biology. Elsasser dedicated the last four decades of his life attempting to hammer out the very relationship between physics and biology that Crick proclaimed to be his own ultimate quest. And, though, Elsasser definitely believed he was *not* advocating for vitalism, his concept of biotonic laws definitely rubbed practicing biologists the wrong way.

Biotonic laws, as advocated by Elsasser, was merely the idea that governing
principles in biology are more expansive than the existing laws known to physics.
He began promoting this concept in *The Physical Foundation of Biology: An Analytical Study*, the work that raised Crick's hackles (Elsasser 1958). The concept
highlighted two bones of contention. The first one was obvious: Elsasser did not
regard the 'ordered heterogeneity' of organisms as reducible to any physical process
currently understood. The number of biochemicals arranged by cells was already
large, and the ways in which they could be arranged to make a biological object like

<footnote n="5">⁵Crick to P. Medlicott, editor of *Varsity*, 3 October 1966, includes typescript draft (with handwritten additions) of Crick, “Why I am a humanist.” Box 85, PPCRI/H/4/4, Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.</footnote>
a cell was incomprehensible—a number larger than the number of stars. For example, something like $10^{80}$ particles are thought to exist in the observable universe. Around one thousand genes regulate the production of penicillin in *Aspergillus*, however. Imagining only two states of those genes—normal or mutated—the number of possible genetic combinations leaps to roughly $10^{300}$—a clear indication of the possible heterogeneity of living things at the biochemical level (Rubin 1998: xiv). The question now becomes how this *possible* heterogeneity can be organized in precise ways to produce biological products that perform a range of *specific* functions when in the context of an organism. This is what R. D. Hotchkiss called the problem of ordered heterogeneity; Elsasser (1998: 39) adopted that terminology.

Crick admitted this, too, with his term “ordered complexity”—what viruses have that rocks do not. Elsasser ran afoul of Crick because of what Elsasser thought that ordered heterogeneity meant. The fact that this heterogeneity at the chemical level could be ordered precisely at the cellular level, and then that ordered heterogeneity passed on from generation to generation almost unaltered did not represent a principle that could be easily excavated from those already discovered in physics or chemistry. (In his elucidation of this point, Elsasser repeated the postulates of Niels Bohr (1933), for instance, who advocated complementarity in biology as well as in the wave-particle duality of light.) What’s more, the inability of biology to cleanly reduce to physics was not merely due to our lack of present knowledge, but a problem of human intellect for as far out as Elsasser could envision. Life, for all intents and purposes, is just too complex to understand in the causal chain from proton to organism. This point, Elsasser claimed, was *not* calling forth vitalism because he invoked no supernatural intervention, no *élan vital*, and no *entelechy*—just really large numbers. Numbers too large, in fact, for any human to elucidate; even a computer-assisted one. Bringing biology down to the lowest physical level was epistemically ridiculous. Crick’s reductionist quest to fit biology to physics, in other words, was not going to work.

More than that, it was unproductive. Elsasser’s second bone of contention with Crick’s reductionism was over what to do in the face of such immense complexity. He maintained that level of complexity meant that the life sciences would continue to draw on a methodology separate from that of physics and chemistry. Life wasn’t limited to the study of molecules. Biology needed to acknowledge the order at the cellular level and above. This kind of holism reflected the only appropriate methodology in the life sciences. In effect, Elsasser argued for the permanent autonomy of biology from the physical and chemical sciences. Not because life was special in the old vitalistic sense, but because humans didn’t have the capability of tracing all of the causal chains from the quantum realm, though the atomic, molecular, and to the organismic level. In this face of this great unknowing, biologists and those interested in living things should continue to employ traditional techniques already developed in the discipline without fear that they will one day be collapsed to the methodologies of chemistry and physics by molecular biologists like Crick. To put my terminology in Elsasser’s mouth, the attitude of biologists should be one of *bioexceptionalism*. Why? Because when referencing only their basic physical and chemical structure, organisms are “highly indeterminate,” while at the organismic
level, living beings are highly constrained. Elsasser thought that gap could only be bridged by understanding “some sort of *morphological criteria*” not yet known (Elsasser 1998: 52).

From Crick's ill-defined perspective, this was just as much vitalism as Teilhard de Chardin's version. It might be hard to see exactly why this should be, since Elsasser offered this challenge from physics, not from Teilhard's religious motivation. Why did Crick conflate Elsasser's laws with religious considerations?

To an extent, it was simply an accident of timing. Crick's promotion of humanism and reduction of religious claims to “nonsense” in the Cambridge *Varsity* occurred at the same time that he attacked vitalism in the John Danz lectures that became *Of Molecules and Men*. As Waddington forced him to confess privately, despite his ire, Crick lacked familiarity with the decades of historical and philosophical examination of the claims of vitalism and had not carefully thought through his own claims before publishing.

Yet, it's worth mentioning that Elsasser's philosophy-rich rejection of reductionism rendered it strange (if not suspect) to Crick and the growing cadre of molecular biologists *just because it felt philosophical*, independent of its philosophical content. Apparently, many biologists wanted to avoid even the appearance of being too into philosophy. “Most working biologists…do not like to *think* and look with a very fishy eye on anything which savors of philosophy,” wrote the editor of the *Quarterly Review of Biology*, Raymond Pearl, when pressed to publish pieces in theoretical biology (quoted in Peterson 2016: 74). It’s at least conceivable, in other words, that merely the philosophical *feel* of Elsasser’s work made it seem foreign and something to be avoided. The reductionism promoted by Crick in *Of Molecules and Men*, that organismic behavior could be reduced to molecules of DNA, seemed more conducive to the typical way of doing science by mid-century. As Waddington himself later explained: “[R]eductionism is a recipe for action…if you are confronted with a complex situation, for instance a living system, your best bet to get some sort of pay-off or other is to look for the physical or chemical factors which can influence the phenomenon in question.” Of course, it made for “lousy philosophy.” But when what is called for is making a “quick (scientific) buck by discovering some useful practical information,” it inhibited the slow, complex search for multiple levels and a plurality of inputs (Waddington 1977: 23–25).

Perhaps by “vitalist,” then, Crick meant that biotonic law “vitalism” stood in the way of his belief in reducing biology to physics and chemistry that facilitated the ultimate goal of bioengineering life (and presumably artificial intelligence) that such a reduction promised. Elsasser’s biotonic laws placed a limit to Crick’s reductionist quest and the progressive bioengineered utopia that was supposed to derive from it. One common objection to religious explanations of national phenomena is that they are “science stoppers”—religious advocates address scientific mysteries with a “because God made the world that way,” and that’s it; there’s nothing more to say. Even if this wasn’t what biotonic laws were intended to do, Crick sensed that they were still anti-progressive, just like religious objections were anti-progressive. “Vitalists” were anyone who thought Crick was wrong about the ease of reduction
or who disagreed with the goal of engineering life. It didn't much matter from what quarter their objections had their origin.

## 5 Demystifying Mid-Century Vitalism

If we accept Crick's definition that “vitalists” were anyone who thought he was wrong about the ease of reduction or who disagreed with the goal of engineering life, then *indeed there was a fourth wave of vitalism in the middle of the twentieth century*. But I do not think we should accept Crick's definition. For one, it's not even his own.

Despite the fact that he claimed not to appreciate science fiction,<fnref n="6" /> Crick's attack on “vitalism” parroted a line of attack by popular science fiction author Isaac Asimov. “Modern science has all but wiped out the borderline between life and non-life,” proclaimed Asimov six years earlier in his very widely read *Intelligent Man's Guide to Science*. “[I]t is to biochemistry ('life chemistry') that biologists today are looking for basic answers to the secrets of reproduction, heredity, evolution, birth, growth, disease, aging, and death.” As a biochemist himself, Crick seems to have taken this sentiment on board. “Once we get down to the nucleic-acid molecules, we are as close to the basis of life as we can get,” Asimov continued. “Here, surely, is the prime substance of life itself. ... All the substances of living matter...depend in the last analysis on DNA” (Asimov 1960: 389). Biochemists and biophysicists, Asimov promised, would in the very near future offer all relevant information about DNA and, it followed from Asimov's perspective, all of secrets of life.

Just as Waddington challenged Crick's philosophy of biology in the late-1960s, physiologist Barry Commoner confronted Asimov's in the early-1960s. It is Commoner's position against Asimov that we can identify as the beginning of a wave of dissent against reductionism and the bioengineering impulse that flowed from reductionism, which both Asimov and Crick shared.

Commoner had professional standing (as did Waddington). As chair of a Committee on Molecular Biology and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Commoner ranked neither as a disciplinary outsider nor as a member of the fusty “old guard” defending his legacy. And from that position, Commoner encouraged biologists—even those who agreed with the “increasingly important place in *all* areas of biological research” now occupied by biochemistry and biophysics—to view statements like Asimov’s not as a corrective against vitalism but as direct attacks on their fields (Commoner 1961: 1746, emphasis in original).

<footnote n="6">⁶The “necromancy of science,” Crick called science fiction. Crick to P. Medlicott, 3 October 1966, includes typescript draft (with handwritten additions) of Crick, “Why I am a humanist.” Box 85, PPCRI/H/4/4, Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.</footnote>
Since biology is the science of life, any successful obliteration of the distinction between living things and other forms of matter ends forever the usefulness of biology as a separate science. If the foregoing [statement of Asimov's] is even remotely correct, biology is not only under attack; it has been annihilated (Commoner 1961: 1746).

And, in fact it did appear to Commoner and others that the discipline of biology had dramatically lurched toward annihilation in the years since the Second World War. Instead of becoming botanists, embryologists, or even geneticists, new ambitious students migrated to biochemistry and biophysics. Instead of plants or even *Drosophila*, students learned on model organisms such as bacteria and viruses. The very meaning of “organism” had changed as a result. That trend, feared Commoner (1961: 1747), signaled darker days ahead.

Earlier generations of biologists had also noted how these sorts of philosophical divisions around the theory of life could end up altering the practice of biology as discipline. T. H. Huxley, for instance, long ago noted distinctions between experimental and taxonomic biologists, and the drift in interest and expertise toward the former (Desmond 1997: 628–30). But this time was different, Commoner believed. Organismal biologists felt real apprehension. Headwinds of interest and attitude and, perhaps most importantly, grant money was blowing biology away from the study of systems and organisms and toward a complex but not very exciting molecule—DNA (Schaffner 1969).

The “crisis in biology” was larger than this, however; its root cause, philosophical. Reductionists like Crick presumed “the unique capabilities of living things” had their ultimate explanation in “separable chemical reactions.” The competing anti-reductionist view found those unique capabilities to be “a property of the whole cell” and, beyond that, the whole organism (Commoner 1966: 44). Recent research in physics and chemistry led to the conclusion that cellular organization could not be explained with reference only to chemical and physical constituents. In other words, life was not reducible to non-life; the cell represented the least complex system that counted as living (Commoner 1961: 1747).<fnref n="7" />

That root philosophical cause not only lured practitioners toward studying molecules, Commoner asserted that it also compromised the future welfare of humankind. For too long, physicists and chemists had limited solutions to larger human problems to merely technical fixes. For instance, when applying their scientific knowledge to social problems like food procurement, many scientists exhibited an “increasing tendency to ignore the facts of life” and defaulted to the use of “insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, nematocides, pesticides, and other assorted agents” while ignoring other causes and consequences. By promoting the view of that there was no barrier between living and non-living, these scientists created, with naïvely clear consciences, materials that fatally restricted the “adaptive latitude of the ecological environment, which is so vital to the success of plant, beast, and man” (Commoner 1961: 1748). What’s more, by altering the present adaptive landscape,

<footnote n="7">⁷For this point of his argument, Commoner relied upon the testimony of physicists like Niels Bohr and Cyril Hinshelwood, and, of course, Walter Elsasser.</footnote>
chemists and physicists also impacted the future in unpredictable ways. Overconfidence in the physico-chemical sciences led to “blindness,” then pollution by an underregulated chemical-industrial complex. If this happened in a large-scale way, like it had in the nuclear-military-industrial complex, Commoner feared not simply for his occupation or his discipline, but for the viability of many kinds of life on Earth, including human. Only “sickness and death” would follow (Commoner 1966: 46). He longed for a more perspicacious alliance between physics, chemistry, and biology in which, organismic biologists would take the reins rather than bio-chemists like Crick, focused merely on “mating strands of DNA” (Commoner 1961: 1746).

This is the crucial point. For Commoner, the debate over reductionism—so often regarded as an abstraction wrangled over only by professional philosophers of science—took on grave ethical weight.

Other powerful voices joined Commoner's. Several emphasized the philosophical shortcomings of reductionism. Physical chemist Michael Polanyi's might have been the loudest; his protégé Marjorie Grene's the sharpest. They both argued that biology requires a different conceptual scheme.

> For whether an organism operates more as a machine or more by a process of equipotential integration, our knowledge of its achievements must rely on a comprehensive appreciation of it which cannot be specified in terms of more impersonal facts, and the logical gap between our comprehension and the specification of our comprehension goes on deepening as we ascend the evolutionary ladder. ... [W]hat we observe about the capacities of living beings must be consonant with our reliance on the same kind of capacities for observing it. Biology is life reflecting upon itself... (Polanyi 1962: 347).

Biological processes, according to Polanyi, were those able to maintain stable and open systems. This claim wasn't new or interesting, of course. Others had compared living thing to flames in slow motion, Polanyi admitted—consuming material, leaving chemically altered by-products, moving, spreading. What differentiates living things from flames, from Polyani's perspective, is the ability to capture material perturbations large and small and use them to perpetuate themselves in formations more suited to the environment. They develop in new configurations, in other words, and then they pass on those newly developed configurations. These were the new rules of the biological level that emerged from the purely physicochemical. A sensitive level rose out of the purely biological, as well. Evolution had to explain these emergent levels, which rendered the theory of evolution into a biotonic law (Polanyi 1962: 344–64).

Marjorie Grene emphasized that the divisions between biology on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other aren't denials of the continuity of nature—though it isn't clear that “emergence” does violate that continuity in the first place, as Crick might believe. Causes and explanations just look different in biology than they do in physics or chemistry. In the physical sciences, phenomena follow logically from theory. Given the kinetic theory of gas, for instance, we know that if pressure is thus-and-so and temperature is thus-and-so, then volume is logically predictable. Molecular biologists might say that they're doing something similar when predicting phenotypic changes after genotypic manipulation—what happens