Gauk Roger Can Guil Hem

7/31/2019 Gauk Roger Can Guil Hem

1/13

Gaukroger, Canguilhem. November19, 1999 Page 1

Canguilhem and the Autonomy of Biology

Stephen Gaukroger

Canguilhem, in the final chapter ofIdologie et rationalit dans

lhistoire des sciences de la vie,1

raises questions about the nature

of the biological. This is a question of particular importance for

Canguilhem because he follows Bachelard2

in holding that the

subject matter of a science is something created within that

science, as opposed to being something empirically given outside

the science which that science then investigates. Part of what is

involved here is the notion that science is formed through a break

with common sense, so that scientific thinking about biologicalphenomena will inevitably be discontinuous with common sense

thinking, which Bachelard, for example, believed had distinctive

characteristics which prevented it from going beyond traditional

forms of thought: above all, he argued that common sense thinking

pursued unconstrained and inappropriate use of metaphor and

analogy in thinking through new problems. But another part of

what is involved, on this view, is that a good deal of what a

science has to achieve is tied up with its giving an account of what

exactly its subject matter is; where this is less a case of

discovering its subject matter as creating that subject matter. Ive

got some sympathy with some aspects of this project, but I also

think that the idea that sciences have distinctive subject matters

ignores the complex range of problems that make up the domain

of investigation of a science, and invites a form of essentialism

wholly alien to other aspects of the Bachelardian project. I want to

look tonight at a case where I think these problems are manifest:

Canguilhems account of the move way from mechanism to a formof vitalism in 19th century biology. Now the paper is in a state of

gestation, and is based on an earlier paper which looks at

mechanistic accounts of sentience, so there are some unresolved

shifts between the biological and the sentient, but I dont think

any of the major points hang on this. Also, Im less concerned in

the paper with the details of Canguilhems account than with

trying to establish what the correct account is; and, somewhat

more disconcertingly, I dont really get up to the 19th century.


2/13


The reason for this, however, is that I think that Canguilhem fails

to pinpoint the nature of the problems bequeathed to the

nineteenth century by early modern physiology, and I want to

argue that attention to these problems illuminates whats at issue

in the 19th century.

Canguilhems concern is with what marks out the domain of

biology as an autonomous scientific discipline, and he takes this as

something that obliges one to capture the idea of the living in a

way that clearly marks it out from the non-living. Although

nineteenth-century thinkers were not the first to try to capture

the difference between the living and the non-living, they werethe first to make this part ofand to some extent constitutive ofa

particular project. Not only did the term biology only come into

existence in 1800, and into general currency in 1802, but there is

a sense in which the discipline itself is a nineteenth-century one.

Treviranus defines biology in terms of the different forms and

phenomena of life and Lamarck defines it in terms of all that

pertains to living bodies, whereas in the eighteenth century, the

disciplines that had looked at animals and plants would also

routinely have included minerals, these being contrasted with the

products of human artifice.3

The eighteenth-century project was

not biology, but natural history (which continued well into the

nineteenth century), and natural history carved things up very

differently from biology.

I want to compare two stages in the carving up of natural

phenomena, that of Aristotle, that of Cartesian mechanist

physiology, and to compare these with the nineteenth-century

defence of vitalism. In particular, I want to look at these in the

context of traditional natural-philosophical questions about the

existence of goal-directed processes. This is, I believe, one

important path into the question of what distinguishes the living

from the non-living, and I want to argue that it is wrong to think,

as Canguilhem does, that seventeenth-century reductionism,

which largely focuses on eliminating goal-directedness, is

necessarily a denial of this distinction. Moreover, by taking the


3/13


path of teleology versus mechanism, rather than that of vitalism

versus mechanism, I think we gain some extra insight into why it

was that vitalism suddenly seemed so attractive in nineteenth-

century biological thought, when mechanism had made such great

strides since the seventeenth century, and seemed to beincreasing its explanatory power rapidly with the growth of

animal and plant physiology in the course of the nineteenth

century.

Aristotle

When we consider the difference between living and non-living in

Aristotle, we find a number of very fundamental differences

between Aristotle and us. In the first place, what lies at the basisof Aristotles classification of natural phenomena is not a

distinction between the living and the non-living but a distinction

between those things that have an intrinsic principle of change,

and those things that have an extrinsic principle of change.

Acorns, and stones raised above the ground, both come in the first

category; the former has within itself the power to change its

state, into an oak tree, the latter has the power to change its

position, to fall to the ground. In neither case is anything external

required. Aristotle thinks that we explain and understand things

by understanding their natures. To give the nature of something is

to give the ultimate characterization of it. If we ask why a stone

falls, the answer is simply: that it falls because its a stonethat is

how heavy things behavejust as, if we are asked why a

particular tree puts out broad flat leaves in spring and keeps them

through the summer, we may reply that it does that because its a

beech. In other words, we dont feel it is necessary to look outside

the thing to account for its behaviour. And wherever we feel thatwe can explain a things behaviour, partly at least, without looking

outside the thing, we think that its behaviour, and the feature that

it acquires or retains, is natural. It is natural for stones to fall, it is

the nature of beeches to have broad flat leaves. The fundamental

distinction is between natural objects and processes, and artifacts

and constrained processes (raising bodies above the ground,

making furniture out of trees).4


4/13


The second difference is that whereas we might be tempted

to explain biological phenomena in physical (e.g. biochemical)

terms, but never physical process in biological terms, Aristotle

uses a biological model to enable him to think through all natural

processes. Natural objects have within themselves the source oftheir own making, artifacts do not: the paradigm case that is

invoked to understand this is the process of organic growth, and

the crucial distinction he wants to capture is that between growth

and manufacture. The category of natural things and processes, as

opposed to artifacts and artificial or externally induced processes,

is what physics or natural philosophy is concerned with. This

category of things not only includes living things, but the general

model that Aristotle uses is biological in its orientation. That is to

say, what we would regard as physical processes properthe

movement of inanimate objects, for exampleis ultimately

conceived on a biological model. The placing of considerations of

motion firmly within the central metaphysical doctrines of form

and substance makes the account that Aristotle gives quite

different from that we find in the work of natural philosophers

from the seventeenth century onwards. His account of substance is

dominated by biological examples and metaphors. The substantial

form of a thing is supposed to provide it with an identity for

example, and Aristotles examples are always of animals. Even

though the doctrine is supposed to apply to all physical things, he

never gives us examples of inanimate things, and it is hard to see

how it is to be extended to these. Biological models and examples

saturate his account. The inorganic tends to be modelled on the

organic.5

The division of the subject matter of natural philosophy into

natural processes and artificial or constrained processes, and the

use of a biological model to think through natural processes

generally, are separate questions. What marks out natural

processes is the fact that they occur as a result of something

internal to the body, something that follows from the nature of the

body, as opposed to something imposed from outside. It has

nothing to do with biological versus non-biological processes: there

are artificial biological processesgrafting, for examplejust as

there are artifical non-biological ones, and there are natural non-


5/13


biological processesbodies falling to the earthjust as there are

natural biological ones. The fact that biology helps Aristotle model

natural processes does not mean that he treats these processes as

biological (as the Stoics were inclined to do, for example, in their

occasionally animistic construal of natural processes), for he doesnot.

What we must not do is to run the two questionsthe nature

of natural processes and biological modellingtogether. If we do

run them together, then we will perhaps be led to think of the

Aristotelian project in terms of associating biology and internally

generated behaviour. This might then seem to provide a contrast

with non-biological, externally generated behaviour, as a separate

category. And since the difference between the biological and the

non-biological is extensionally equivalent to that between the

living and the non-living, it will inevitably appear that we have

here a distinction between the two in terms of internally and

externally generated behaviour.

This is how Canguilhem interprets things, so that we get a

shift from Aristotle, in which there is a sharp distinction between

the living and the non-living, to Cartesian mechanism, in which

this distinction is obliterated, to nineteenth-century vitalism, in

which the distinction is revived in the form of vitalism, that is, in

the form of the doctrine that what distinguishes the living from

the non-living is some vital principle inherent in living things

which confers on them the power to generate their behaviour

internally, in contrast to non-living things, whose behaviour is

generated externally.

Descartes

As Canguilhem notes, Descartes contradicted Aristotles

propositions point by point, but it is not at all clear that Aristotles

doctrine, once properly understood, provides any foundation for

the distinction between the living and the non-living, nor that

Descartes doctrine, once properly understood, undermines any

foundation for this distinction.


6/13


In discussing Descartes doctrine of animal machines, it is

important that we distinguish between a reductionist account and

an eliminativist account of animal faculties. What is original about

Descartes project is not that it construes the faculties in corporeal

terms, for they had traditionally been so construed (in the medicaltradition, by Scholastic Aristotelians, and by Paduan Aristotelians),

but to show that construing them in corporeal terms did not

contradict the central tenet of mechanism that matter was inert.

But is Descartes point is not that bodies actually are machines (an

eliminativist view) but rather that the structure and behaviour of

bodies are to be explained in the same way that we explain the

structure and behaviour of machines (a reductionist view). On the

question of cognitive faculties in animals, for example, he accepts

that animals have cognitive states, and attempts to set out how

these cognitive states might be generated from the interactions of

corpuscles of inert matter: his aim is not to deny cognitive states

to animals. His aim is to show how (a form of) genuine cognition

occurs in animals and that this can be captured in mechanistic

terms, not that cognition does not occur at all, that instead ofa

cognitive process we have a merely mechanical one.6

Canguilhem

actually takes Descartes as an (unsuccessful) eliminativist,7

but

this is a misunderstanding of Cartesian mechanism, and it has

consequences for the question of how we carve up natural

phenomena, for on an eliminativist reading, Descartes is simply

denying any distinction between animals and inorganic entities,

whereas in fact he is keeping to the distinction but denying that it

can be made in the any of the traditional ways.

These traditional ways can be divided into three kinds of

approach. These attempt to provide an account of physiology that

aims to explain various functional differences between organs

either, first, in terms of qualitatively different kinds of matter, or,

second, in terms of some non-material principle guiding those

functions, or, third, in goal-directed terms which cannot be

captured mechanistically. In the first case, what was usually

invoked was the traditional doctrine of the four elementsearth,

air, fire, and waterbut Descartes had, inLe Monde, already

questioned both the basis for this doctrine and whether the

accounts it produced could have any explanatory value, whether


7/13


8/13


mechanist physiology. Descartes response in the case of

embryology is instructive here.8

Unlike his account of perceptual

cognition, his treatment of the development of the foetus is

eliminativist, that is, it effectively eliminates any element of goal-

directedness in foetal development.

There are a number of similarities between Descartes

account of the formation of the Earth and his description of the

formation of the foetus in theDescription du corps humain. Both

had traditionally been construed as intrinsically goal-directed

processes, and it is important to appreciate here that Descartes

concern is not with goal-directedness as such, but with intrinsic

goal-directedness. He does not deny that God guides the

development of the embryo any more than he denies that God

guides the formation of the Earth. But such extrinsic goal-

directedness simply does not fall within the domain of natural

philosophy for Descartes. It would do so only if the goal-

directedness were somehow internalised by the body so guided,

but this would be to allow processes in the body that were

incompatible with the inertness of matter. At one level, Descartes

is not denying that there is a question as to why matter behaves

in such a way that the foetus develops into an adult of a particularspecies. What he is saying is that the explanation for that is not

something internal to the development of the foetus but external

to it: God made it so. What Descartes is concerned with in his

natural philosophy are internal or intrinsic causes, and these are

missing in the case of foetal development.

What Descartes denies, then, is intrinsic goal-directedness.

Such intrinsic or internally-generated goal-directedness is a

feature of Aristotelian natural philosophy, where it was thought tobe characteristic of any natural process. There, organic processes,

such as a seed developing into a tree, and inorganic processes,

such as the fall of a body to the earth, are put down to some

intrinsic goal-directedness. Mechanism dismantles the conceptual

apparatus whereby processes are construed as being goal-

directed, because it removes the doctrine of forms, which is crucial

to the notion of something striving to realise its nature state. It

does this not just in the cases where goal-directedness seems an


9/13


artificial way to construe what happens once Aristotelianism has

been abandoned, however, but also in cases where this remains a

natural way of construing what occurs, such as in the development

of the foetus.

Most biological processes can thought of goal-directed terms:

nutrition, respiration, excretion, sleep, etc. But then many purely

physical processes can be thought of in goal-directed terms, and

Aristotle had thought that the explanation of the fall of heavy

bodies to the ground had to display the goal-directedness of this

process: bodies fall to the ground because this is their natural

place, and when they are unconstrained, it is in the nature of

heavy bodies behave in this way. This raises the problem of

where we draw the line. We may concede that a process can

described in terms of a goal without conceding that goal-

directedness plays any genuine part in explaining the process.

Unless we think that telology plays a part in any natural organic

process, we will not be inclined to think that increase in weight in

adolescents or adults, for example, requires explanation in terms

of ends or goals. On the other hand, we may be inclined to think

that the development of the foetus does require an explanation in

terms of ends or goals: it develops in this way because it isdeveloping into a horse, or a person, or a bird. In the middle of

these two is a grey area. We can think of Descartes strategy as

pushing foetal development into the grey area, in which case the

question of the right kind of explanation will no longer be judged

by a priori considerations about whether goals are relevant, but

by how effective whatever concrete explanation one comes up

with is in accounting for the detail.

More schematically, although Descartes does not lay out hisplan for dealing with this question explicitly, it seems clear that a

threefold strategy must lie behind any thoroughgoing mechanist

approach to embryology. First, ordinary growth is accounted for in

a way that makes no references to goals. Secondly, the process of

formation and maturation of the foetus is treated simply a species

of growth: it involves a significantly greater increase in complexity

and internal differentiation of parts than the process of growth

from childhood to adulthood, of course, but this in itself does not


10/13


make it qualitatively different. Third, the mechanist must show

how the development from a low degree of complexity and

internal differentiation to a high degree of complexity and

differentiation is something that can be handled in mechanistic

terms.

What this strategy allows one to do is to provide a general

account of growth, in terms of how raw material is introduced into

the organism from outside and transformed into the kinds of

highly differentiated material making up bones, blood, muscle, etc.

Then, having done this, one shows how the kind of account

developed in this way can be extended to the case where the

organs are not being built up but are actually being formed anew.

When the body is considered, no longer as the body of an

animal or an homme machine, but as part of what Descartes will

refer to as the substantial union of mind and body, intrinsic goals

re-enter the picture, because of the presence of a conscious

intelligence, and that, on Descartes account, is their proper place.

There is much to be said for this view, not least that if one

accepts final causes, it is far from clear that one can stop at one

division between the living and the non-living, for there seems to

be an equally clear division between animals and plants, between

sentient and non-sentient, between consious and non-conscious, as

medieval natural philosophers realised. And how are such

differences to be captured: a different kind of matter? Surely not.

Different levels of soul as one ascends the tree of physical

entities? Isnt this just to label the problem while giving the

impression one has solved it?

For Descartes, sentience requires extrinsic goals, and these

are not the business of natural philosophy because they are

Divine. Intrinsic goals are appropriate to entities that are

conscious and exercise free will, because they require formulation.

The problems with this otherwise attractive picture begin when

you get rid of God, for now you have no recourse to extrinsic goals.

By the end of the 18th century, explanation in natural philosophy

relied less and less upon God, and with the appearance of

evolutionary theory in the middle of the 19th century, appeal to


11/13


God was replaced with appeal to natural evolutionary processes:

but were these extrinsic or intrinsic? It wasnt clear: it seemed to

be a bit of both. Moreover, the dividing line between intrinsic and

extrinsic became blurred: are goals inherent in the species rather

than in the individual intrinsic or extrinsic?

Conclusion

Canguilhem sees the question in terms of a revival of vitalism in

biology in the 19th century. I have suggested that there is no such

revival: Aristotelian thought was not vitalist, and there was

nothing to be revived. Vitalism was largely new. It arose, I

suggest, as a response to a problem about goal-directed processes,

not as a response to a problem about the nature of life. Basically,what happened was this. Mechanism,as far as the biological

sciences were concernedcould survive only so long as extrinsic

goals were conceived of as falling outside the domain of natural

philosophy. Mechanism never removed goals from activities such

as animal sentience, it simply moved them from the intrinsic to

the extrinsic level, where they were relatively harmless only so

long as there was something at the extrinsic level whose goals

they were. Once God disappeared from the picture, either literally

or because natural philosophers became increasingly unwilling to

invoke God to explain basic, natural biological processes, they

became highly problematic. As I see it, there were three ways in

which one could go: either (i) one has to say that biological activity

such as sentience is not goal-directed either intrinsically or

extrinsically; or (ii) say it is directed by extrinsic goals and

reformulate just what extrinsic goals amount to, something that

seemed to involve an inevitable blurring of the extrinsic/intrinsic

distinction, or (iii) say that biological functions such as sentienceare regulated intrinsically, the most direct and obvious construal

of which is in terms of vitalism.

(i) seemed implausible, and I think it is implausible. This left

the choice between (ii) and (iii). Now (iii) is, I think, pretty clearly

the fallback position. If theres an onus of argument, its on

proponents of (ii), who are telling us that we have to do something


12/13


pretty radical, but they are not sure just what it is. Thats why

vitalism became so attractive.


13/13


Canguilhem, Georges (1977). Idologie et rationalit dans

lhistoire des sciences de la vie, Paris: Vrin.

Charlton, W. (1970). Aristotles Physics I, II, Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Coleman, William (1971). Biology in the Nineteenth Century, New

York: Wiley.

Descartes, Ren (1677). Tractatus de Homine et de Formatione

Ftus, Quorum prior Notis perpetuis Ludovici de la Forge,

Amsterdam: Elservir.

Descartes (1998). The World and Other Writings, trans. S.Gaukroger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaukroger, Stephen (1976). Bachelard and the Problem of

Epistemological Analysis, Studies in History and Philosophy of

Science, vol. 7: 189-244.

Gaukroger, Stephen (1995). Descartes, An Intellectual Biography,

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

1Canguilhem (1977)

2See Gaukroger (1976)

3There is a good introduction to these questions in Coleman (1971), to

which I owe these examples.4

There is a good account of these issues in Charlton (1970).5

This is notto say that he conceives of inorganic things as being

organic. The Stoics, who had a holist view of the universe as a giant

organism held something like this view, but Aristotle did not. He has

a biological model: he does not advocate a biological reduction.6

See Gaukroger (1995) 269-90, for details.

7

8Descartes (1677), 191-239; Descartes (1998), 186-205. Check refs.

Documents

Gauk Roger Can Guil Hem