Décalages

Volume 2 | Issue 2 Article 3

2018

"Being in the True?" Science and Truth in the

Philosophy of Georges Canguilhem
Etienne Balibar

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Recommended Citation
Balibar, Etienne (2016) ""Being in the True?" Science and Truth in the Philosophy of Georges Canguilhem," Décalages: Vol. 2: Iss. 2.
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"Being in the True?" Science and Truth in the Philosophy of Georges
Canguilhem
Cover Page Footnote
Presentation given at the colloquium Georges Canguilhem, Philosophe, historian des sciences, Collège
International de philosophie, Paris, from October 6-8 1990, Actes du Colloque, Albin Michel, Paris 1993.
Reprinted in E.B., Lieux et noms de la vérité, Editions de l’Aube, 1994.

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 Balibar: "Being in the True?"

In 1964-1965, an educational program devoted to the theme “Philosophy and

Science” appeared on television.1 In one broadcast, Georges Canguilhem was
interviewed by Alain Badiou, leading to the following exchange:

Question: Must we continue radically to oppose scientific knowledge to common

knowledge?
Answer: Yes, and increasingly so. There is no scientific knowledge without, on one
hand, highly-developed mathematical theories, and without, on the other, the use of
increasingly complex instruments. I would even venture to say that there is no such
thing as common knowledge.
Question: Do you mean by that that the expression “scientific knowledge” is a
pleonasm?
Answer: You have understood me perfectly. That is what I mean. Knowledge that is
not scientific is not knowledge. I maintain that “true knowledge” is a pleonasm, as are
“scientific knowledge” and “science and truth,” and that they all express the same
thing. This does not mean that for the human mind there is no goal or value outside
of truth, but it does mean that you cannot call knowledge what is not knowledge, and
cannot apply this term to a way of living that has nothing to do with truth, that is, with
rigor.

These incisive formulations— let us not forget, originally spoken rather than
written —have always made me uncomfortable. We can attribute two meanings or
uses to them, just as we do every time we confront a tautological equation (a
“pleonasm” as Canguilhem says) in philosophy whose terms connote, whether we like
it or not, the transcendental or the absolute: Deus sive Natura, Scientia sive Veritas. Must
we understand Canguilhem’s formulations as proposing a critical, even positivist,
restriction of the empire of truth to the domains delimited by scientific activity and
objectivity? Or instead as a hyperbolic extension of science, or the sciences, to the
totality of the field of truth, even if this field is in motion —not bordered once and
for all by some constitutive limit, but open, according to its own ongoing history? It
goes without saying that, depending on the orientation adopted, the meaning of this
specification or precaution (“this does not mean that for the human mind, there is no
goal or value outside of truth”) would be very different. In the one case, it might refer
to the place occupied by philosophy alongside science (if not above it), whereas, in the
other, it would instead signal what, in any event, escapes it and prevents it from
establishing itself as the Court of Final Appeal of our existence.
Thus, our perplexity increases through the two elements that figure in the same
context. Canguilhem has vigorously denied to philosophy—or should it be renamed
epistemology?—the capacity to “determine the extent of the concept of science” and,
in consequence, to “define the comprehensiveness” of philosophy, except through a

1
Text of the program published in the Revue de l’Enseignement philosophique, 15th year, n° 2, December
1964—January 1965, pp. 10-17.

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simple reference to the field of human culture, in which science is distinguished from
other activities (in particular from industrial activities) on the basis of its theoretical
finality. But this does not prevent Canguilhem from proposing an epistemological,
and thus philosophical, thesis on truth: “There is truth either in the formal sense or in
the sense of the coherence of the interpretation of phenomena. There is no other.”
To which he added, that "the difficulty here is that the formal serves the experimental
at a given moment in order itself to advance, and that the experimental more often
advances through the formal than by the experimental itself." In other words,
Canguilhem has outlined a general epistemology, a rather rare thing for him (I will
return to this), but has done so practically, in the form of a denial.
Might it be said that I have subjected formulations that the author would
probably not have included in his oeuvre, however he defined it, to abusive
treatment? Perhaps. In this case, we may consider the discussion a pretext for the
elaboration of a question whose real answers we will seek in the texts themselves. The
fact remains that, several years after the televised interview, Canguilhem laid claim to
these same words, even as he further specified them. This time it was in the course of
a discussion that took place on February 27th, 1968 at the Sorbonne as part of the
conference series, “Les Structures et les Hommes,” organized by the review Raison
présente and the Union rationaliste.2 There, Canguilhem remarked that

One day, it seems that I scandalized all the philosophy students who watched a
particular television program. The students, as well as many of their professors,
because I said this: there is only scientific truth, there is no such thing as philosophical
truth. I am ready to take responsibility here for what I said elsewhere. But to say that
there is only scientific truth, or that there is only objectivity in scientific knowledge
does not mean that philosophy is without object (…). There is no philosophical object
in the sense that there is a scientific object that science constitutes theoretically and
experimentally … but finally I do not mean that there is no object of philosophy.

No philosophical object, but one or more objects of philosophy? Let us hazard the
following paraphrase: no constituted philosophical object, in the sense that there are
constituted scientific objects, but one or more objects, that is, questions, for
philosophy: and Canguilhem cited as an example the question of the political uses of
neurophysiology.
The context of this new intervention brings with it an interesting specification:
for any science, unlike the non-sciences or the pseudo-sciences that are immediately
distinguishable by their historicity or their repetitiveness, its specific history is
constitutive of true scientificity. More precisely, what makes it constitutive are the
successive historical forms within which conditions of objectivity, inseparably

2
Text published in Structuralisme et marxisme, U.G.E. 10/18, Paris 1970, pp. 205-265.

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 Balibar: "Being in the True?"

theoretical and experimental, conceptual and instrumental, are organized within

progressive systems, indefinitely substitutable in an order of increasing objectivity.
From this point on, the preceding reference to two types, or modes of scientific
truth—the only truth there is—may be reinterpreted. It is less a matter of outlining a
classification of the sciences according to knowledge [connaissance] than of
designating this identity of objectivity and of historicity as the same field of truth, the content
of which, in every region of knowledge [savoir], at every moment, is a defined and
coherent combination of formalism and instrumentation. This thesis is clearly
Bachelardian in inspiration, although it does not appear explicitly anywhere in
Bachelard’s work; based on it, we may now turn to Canguilhem’s oeuvre properly
speaking. Can we say that, for Canguilhem, at least at some point in his reflection,
science and truth became identified, insofar as they are both concerned with a more
essential identity, that of objectivity and historicity?
It is here, however, that a complication awaits us. Earlier, I hazarded the phrase
“general epistemology”—and we might just as easily say philosophy, or philosophy of
knowledge. But, we know full well that it is neither by chance nor from a lack of time
or opportunity that such an “epistemology” is precisely what Canguilhem always
refused to develop as a separate discourse. There is clearly, for him, an intrinsic
connection between the fact of postulating, or, indeed of simply suggesting, this
essential equation, and the fact of going to the things themselves, while setting aside
any general or generic discourse that would have had “science” as its object, beyond
the theoretical minimum required to take up the problems of history and of
philosophy through a critique of their traditional presentation. It is easy to see how, for
Canguilhem, such a meta-scientific discourse would have exactly the same
characteristics as the discourse of “scientific method” or “experimental method,”
whose essential connection to positivist philosophy produced a normative
interpretation of the fait accompli and a denial of the historicity of knowledge [savoir].3
At the same time, it was a matter of proving that the real alternative for Canguilhem is
not the choice between the renunciation of philosophy and the construction of a
methodology, of a meta-language—contrary to what positivism suggests.
Unfortunately for us, this also means that Canguilhem’s philosophical utterances (about
knowledge, life, history, or technique), and they are not rare, are always interwoven in a
highly specified critical and historical context, and consequently lose their significance
as soon as we try to separate them from this context.

3
Notably the texts on Claude Bernard assembled in the Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, 1st
ed., Vrin, Paris 1968, pp. 127—71, as well as the educational television program on “La recherche
expérimentale” (avec C. Mazières), transcribed in the Revue de l’Enseignement philosophique, 18th year, n°
2, December 1967—January 1968, p. 58ff.

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There are, however, some exceptions to this situation, the conditions of

possibility of which arise from polemical conjunctures or by commemorations. I am
thinking primarily of the texts written for the purpose of presenting and analyzing the
work and thought of Gaston Bachelard.4. But here we encounter yet another
difficulty. Canguilhem persistently adhered to the thesis, which he attributes to
Bachelard, according to which a critical history of the sciences, a non-naturalist history
of the sciences, does not endow itself with the ability to construct a fictional record of
the facts of knowledge, but situates itself either in the perspective of an evaluation, or
analysis of the problems that the scientist seeks to resolve, or the perspective of the
search for truth that is by definition an axiological procedure—and a history of the
sciences of this type must necessarily be founded on an epistemology. An epistemology, like
Bachelard’s, which would be a non-positivist philosophy of theoretical
discontinuities,and intellectual innovations. Taking these texts literally, at the limit we
would have done nothing more than substitute a reflection on Bachelard for a
reflection on Canguilhem. But this is not at all what we want to do because we are
convinced, in re-reading Canguilhem’s historical and epistemological work, that, while
clearly not anti-Bachelardian, it is profoundly original even in its use of concepts
borrowed from Bachelard. There remains, however, another category of texts: those
in which Canguilhem was led for his own purposes to think the category of the “true”
by means of a reflection on and a discussion of the history of the sciences. I will thus focus
on the three of these texts that I regard as crucial.
The first is exactly contemporary with the remarks to which I referred a
moment ago: the lecture, “Galilée, la signification de l’oeuvre et la leçon de l’homme,”
delivered in 1964 and re-published in the Etudes d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences. In
this simple, but extraordinarily concentrated, text whose assumptions are borrowed
from Koyré, Santillana and Clavelin, Canguilhem reconstitutes the epistemological
dilemma that underlies the ethical problem posed by Galileo’s refusal to accept the
theoretical and as well as political compromise proposed by the Church (the doctrine
of the astronomical “Equivalence of Hypotheses”). Galileo’s work developed
simultaneously in two principal directions: first, laying down the foundations of a
revolutionary dynamics on the basis of the articulation of the first invariant in physics
to be expressed mathematically (which renders this thesis incompatible with the
ancient perception of nature: movement is a state of things that conserves itself
indefinitely), and second, providing a body of evidence to support the Copernican
thesis, some observational (with the scientific use of lenses transformed into the
telescope), others physical and thereby demonstrative. I quote Canguilhem:

4
The principal texts are collected in a section of the Etudes d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, 1st
edition, Vrin, Paris 1968, pp. 173—207.

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 Balibar: "Being in the True?"

Galileo rejected Osiander’s interpretation of Copernicus, which accommodated the

Aristotelian philosophers and the Catholic theologians. Faithful to Copernicus, he set
himself the goal of establishing that Heliocentrism is true in the sense of a physical
truth. But his peculiar genius lies in having perceived that the new theory of
movement, Galilean dynamics, furnished a model of physical truths still to be
advanced, truths that would define Copernican astronomy as a radical and complete
refutation of Aristotelian physics and philosophy. It was in his pursuit of this mission
that Galileo compelled the Church to condemn Copernicus by condemning him.

But Canguilhem continues:

We concede to those who have pointed out that the physical arguments made by
Galileo … did not have the evidentiary value that he attributed to them, and in
particular that Galileo did not manage to produce the evidence demanded by Tycho
Brahé in support of terrestrial movement (…). None of Galileo’s experiments …
succeeded in confirming the predictions of calculus, none succeeded in convincing
even scientists as non-Aristotelian as he was (…). On the other hand, the physical
evidence that should have established calculus, the measure of the parallaxes of the
fixed stars … was only partially furnished by Bradley in 1728 and was not complete
until the 19th century.
And yet, we will say, along with Alexandre Koyré, that it is Galileo who is in
the true.
Being in the true does not mean always saying the true.5

Being in the true: a remarkable and remarked upon formula. Does it imply, to
return to our initial question, that being “in the true” is to be “in science?” And, once
again, according to what orientation is this formula to be understood? But first, how
do we interpret this “in” that suggests, at least metaphorically, a space, a domain, or
perhaps borders? In “The Order of Discourse,” Michel Foucault in 1970 proposed an
interpretation, citing and taking inspiration from Canguilhem:

Within its own limits, each discipline recognizes true and false propositions; but it
pushes back a whole teratology of knowledge beyond its margins. The exterior of a
science is both more and less populated than is often believed: there is of course
immediate experience, the imaginary themes which endlessly carry and renew
immemorial beliefs; but perhaps there are no errors in the strict sense, for error can
only arise and be decided inside a definite practice; on the other hand, there are
monsters on the prowl whose form changes with the history of knowledge. In short,
a proposition must fulfill complex and heavy requirements to be able to belong to the
grouping of a discipline; before it can be called true or false, it must be ‘in the true’, As
Canguilhem would say.

5
G. Canguilhem, Etudes d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, pp. 44-46. The passage from Koyré that
inspired Canguilhem is found in the Etudes galiléennes, vol. 2, Hermann 1939 (reprinted 1966), p. 155.

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In order to maintain the sense of the discussion, it is necessary to cite yet the
following page:

People have often wondered how the botanists or biologists of the nineteenth century
managed not to see that what Mendel was saying was true. But it was because Mendel
was speaking of objects, applying methods, and placing himself on a theoretical
horizon which were alien to the biology of his time. Naudin, before him, had of course
proposed the thesis that hereditary traits are discrete; yet, no matter how new or
strange this principle was, it was able to fit into the discourse of biology, at least as an
enigma. What Mendel did was to constitute the hereditary trait as an absolutely new
biological object, thanks to a kind of filtering which had never been used before; he
detached the trait from the species, and from the sex which transmits it; the field in
which he observed it being the infinitely open series of the generations, where it
appears and disappears according to statistical regularities. This was a new object
which called for new conceptual instruments and new theoretical foundations…

And Foucault’s conclusion:

Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not ‘within the true’ of the biological discourse of
his time: it was not according to such rules that biological objects and concepts were
formed. It needed a complete change of scale, the deployment of a whole new range
of objects in biology for Mendel to enter into the true and for his propositions to
appear (in large measure) correct. Mendel was a true monster, which meant that
science could not speak of him; whereas about thirty years earlier, at the height of the
nineteenth century, Scheiden, for example, who denied plant sexuality, but in
accordance with the rules of biological discourse, was merely formulating a disciplined
error.
It is always possible that one might speak the truth in the space of a
wild exteriority, but one is ‘in the true’ only by obeying the rules of a discursive
‘policing’ which one has to reactivate in each of one’s discourses.
The discipline is a principle of control over the production of
discourse. The discipline fixes limits for discourse by the action of an identity which
takes the form of a permanent re-actuation of the rules.6 [cited from “The Order of
Discourse” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, translated by Ian McLeod]

Although this analysis without a doubt merits its own discussion, this is not my
object. But it seems clear to me that it attempts precisely to reverse the sense of
Canguilhem’s phrasing. In effect, what Canguilhem said is not that Galileo already
found himself—unlike his adversaries—within the limits of a constituted discipline,
6
Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970,
Gallimard, Paris, pp. 35-38. This analysis of the “Mendel case” may be compared to those that
Canguilhem himself proposes in “Sur l’histoire des sciences de la vie depuis Darwin” (1971),
collected in the anthology Ideologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie, Vrin, Paris 1977, as well
as in J. Piquemal, “Aspects de la pensée de Mendel” (1965), reprinted in J. Piquemal, Essais et leçons
d’histoire de la médecine et de la biologie, P.U.F. 1993.

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 Balibar: "Being in the True?"

that he submitted himself to the norms and to the “discursive policing” of certain
rules authorizing the validation of statements, and therefore a certain mode of
division between the true and the false—in short, what he said and meant is not that
the truth of Galileo is relative to certain theoretical and institutional conditions,
retrospectively discovered as necessary, but on contrary that Galileo anticipated ahead
of time and in the absence of rules, a regime of the universality of a truth that will be
sanctioned after the fact. A regime absolutely incompatible with the systematic error
of Ptolemaïcism, of Aristotelianism, and their union, under the seal of Catholic
theology. It is in this real anticipation—totally distinct, however, from the fiction of
the “precursor”—wherein, for Galileo, the fact of being “in the true” resides.
And if we reflect on this difficulty, beginning with Canguilhem’s previous work,
from Le normal et le pathologique to La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles and the essay on the history of cellular theory in La connaissance de la vie, we
clearly see that any other interpretation would have led to one or another variant of
the concept of “normal science,” against which Canguilhem constantly argued (even
before it was identified as such) by portraying science as an adventure of intelligence
at the heart of life itself which, borne by that part of life that is human,, must
distinguish itself from life in order to allow the resolution of problems that life poses
to the living: what we might call theory, not the equivalent of a normality, but of a
normativity. But we see that above all the epistemological “frame” produced by
Canguilhem’s description is not synchronic nor is it spatially metaphorisable: it is only
conceivable as a temporal modality, and the problem it represents is entirely contained
in the question of knowing what content must be assigned to this “gap” between what
Galileo is certain of—the objective or real truth of Copernicanism—and what he is
capable of demonstrating.
What does Canguilhem tell us in this regard? Two things that are distinct, even
if they are connected. First, that Galileo was aware of being able to bring to a conclusion
a proof founded on “the power of calculus that permitted the formulation of the first
law of mathematical physics,” that is, the constitution of a complete mathematical
physics “of universal dimensions.” And this is what we know will effectively be
produced, but, and I am still citing Canguilhem, in his activity, Galileo “assumed for
himself, in his human existence, the infinite task of measuring and coordinating
experiments that require the time of humanity as the infinite subject of knowledge.”
In other words, he imagined it, and imagined himself as the subject of science. In other
words, he imagined it, and imagined himself as the subject of science. But herein lies
the second aspect: Galileo imagined this infinite task as finite: in other words, at the
same time that he is “in the true” he is also in error, notably because he maintained a
“circularist” representation of the cosmos (which is one of the reasons why he did not
pay attention to what Kepler proposed to him, without which he could not know the
concepts that completed his own and furnished an essential part of the required
“proof”).

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In sum, and this is without a doubt Canguilhem’s most profound thesis, “being
in the true” is being in disequilibrium in relation to the time of the true: it is not being
the contemporary of the true or being present to the true (to the “presence” of the
true), but being ahead of and, simultaneously, behind it. And in consequence, being
in the true is also to be in the non-true: between the two formulations with which
Canguilhem describes Galileo’s situation (“not always saying the true,” “to be in the
true”), we discover not a restrictive relation or a contingent juxtaposition, but a strict
implication. In order to “be in the true,” far from remaining within the limits of a
domain that would be, even virtually, the empire of the true (with its “police”), or one
of the regions of the empire of the true (one of the established scientific disciplines),
one must also, in an unstable and polemical —presumptuous, as Canguilhem will say
elsewhere—way, be able to remain in the non-true or in error. A certain type of error.
Passing over to the other side of our equation (science = truth), would we then say
that being “in science” is also being in non-science, in a determinate ideology?
Why use this terminology, which until now has played no role in our discussion
and seems to have been imported from a foreign philosophy? It is suggested by a
reading of a second text, by means of which I would like to continue the discussion.
The text in question is the 1969 article, “Qu’est-ce qu’une idéologie scientifique?,” collected
in the volume Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie, whose title refers to
the article.7 It is theoretically the center of the volume, around which its diverse
illustrations and elaborations are arranged. And it represents in particular the end
point of a long series of indications dispersed throughout the work, all of which
converge around the idea that there cannot be a history of truth that is only the history
of truth, nor a history of science that is only the history of science.8
These two formulations are not completely equivalent. The first designates an
internal contradiction: “Those who seek to write the history of truth alone, will
produce an illusory history. M. Suchodolski is correct on this point, the history of the
truth alone is a contradictory notion.” The only means by which history can be made
a non-contradictory project is thus to bring contradiction itself into history [“…faire entrer
la contradiction dans l’histoire…”], and even into truth; “error" and “truth” in this sense
are not juxtaposed, but, as Canguilhem says a little earlier, using Bachelardian terms of
“lapsed history” and “sanctioned history,” are “at once separated and interlaced.” Our
second formulation—the history of science cannot only be the history of science—
designates an exterior condition, and even a double exterior condition:” on the one
7
Op. cit., pp. 33-45.
8
In Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, Plon, 1961, p. 456). Canguilhem was able to
find this astonishing formula taken from “a contemporary of Claude Bernard:” “The history of
madness is the response of the history of reason” (Michea, Démonomanie article from the
Dictionnaire de Jaccoud). The Pascalian and Nietzschean project of a “history of truth” was only
appropriated by Foucault, retrospectively and prospectively, much later (cf. La volonté de savoir, 1976;
L’usage des plaisirs, 1984).

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hand, practices, experiments and institutions, among which science itself figures as a
practice, an experiment and an institution; and, on the other, an “unconscious need
for direct access to the totality,” an extraordinary formula in which, if we allow this
terminology, we will recognize the subject of the desire of knowledge—that is not the
universal and impersonal subject of science, but is, however, never separable from it.
At the point that these diverse determinations, internal and external, meet, what
Canguilhem calls “scientific ideologies,” emerge, marking the conclusion of a
meticulous differentiation of Marx, Althusser, Foucault. Of these scientific ideologies,
irreducible to political ideologies of class, distinct from the false science of anti-
science (religion), and equally distinct from the ideologies of scientists (or scholars),
he gives several examples: Atomism, Heredity, and Evolutionism.9 [Is not vitalism, or
at least the aspect of vitalism (Organicism) with which Canguilhem was occupied in
the early part of his oeuvre, in this sense, equally a “scientific ideology?” And how is it
possible not to try to think pre-Copernican astronomical and cosmological geocentrism in
these terms?] He shows that they occupy a necessary, although paradoxical, place not
outside but in “the space of knowledge.” Further, in the guise of a conclusion, he
states three theses on scientific ideologies, destined simultaneously to illuminate their
constitution and their function:

a) The scientific ideologies are explanatory systems whose object is hyperbolic relative
to the borrowed norm of scientificity that is applied to it.
b) There always is a scientific ideology before the emergence of a science in the field
where the science will be established; there is always a science before an ideology in
the lateral field at which this ideology obliquely aims.
c) Scientific ideology should not be confused with false sciences, magic or religion. It
is, like them, moved by an unconscious need for direct access to the totality, but it is
a belief that watches from the sidelines of an already established science whose prestige
it recognizes and whose style it imitates.10

Thus, scientific ideologies are “presumptuous” (hyperbolic) extensions of a

model of scientificity: they transpose a norm of truth beyond conditions of the
application of the concepts that support this model, and that allow this norm to exist
(thus, in the examples analyzed here, the concepts of “natural selection,” of
“correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis,” etc.). Through this
extension, objectivity is lost, and one moves in a certain sense from the virtuality of
truth to the virtuality of error.
It is nonetheless presented as the decisive moment in the history of truth, and
thereby in the history of scientific knowledge [connaissance]. In effect, without this
9
This last example is fully developed in the collective work of G. Canguilhem, G. Lapassade, J.
Piquemal, J. Ullmann, Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, Thalès 1960, reprinted Paris, P.U.F.,
1985.
10
Ibid. p. 44

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extension there would never be migrations or exportations of concepts from one

domain, or even one discipline, to another, for Canguilhem, the general form, or at
least the presupposition, of any progress in explanation. This coincides with the
fundamental idea according to which the typical unities of knowledge [savoir] are not
“theories” but “concepts.” Or, to put it another way, the idea according to which the
strategic element in theories around which the “possibilities of truth” are in play, the
element that also enters into a process, in practice infinite, of circulation,
“naturalization” and “transformation, is the concept. Not only is the epistemology of
Canguilhem, after those of Bachelard and Cavaillès, an epistemology of the concept
par excellence (and not an epistemology of “theories”), but Canguilhem is one of the
very rare contemporary philosophers who works on the question: “What is a
concept?” or who seeks to construct a concept of the “concept.”11
It is in their circulation (that is, translation, transposition, generalization) that
the application or “labor” of concepts takes place, which in turn makes it possible to
test them and to establish their truth. However, we can equally assume—taking up
some of Canguilhem’s earlier suggestions12—that “presumptuous” extension is also a
correlative of the dogmatization of concepts in their original domain. That is, of the—
provisional—erasure of the equivocations, the possibilities of divergent interpretation
that they entail: on this point, we might think of the striking example of post-
Newtonian mechanical philosophy in which the causal thought of the Principia and of
the Opticks retreats into the univocity of a “determinist” doctrine of “central forces.”
In order hyperbolically to “extend” the use or application of a concept beyond an
established epistemological border (and any extension of this kind is first supported
by an analogy, whether formal, imaginary or pragmatic), it is in effect necessary to
choose among its theoretical virtualities. It is thus necessary to re-transform the
“concept-problem” into a “concept-solution.”13 The contradiction is immediate.
But Canguilhem goes even further: he suggests that scientific ideologies not
only follow conceptual creation, or the “fact of truth,” but that they always precede
scientific creation, that is, epistemological ruptures or breaks. It is not with just any
11
See, among others, “Le vivant et son milieu,” in La Connaissance de la Vie, 2nd editions, Paris, Vrin
1965, pp. 129 and on, as well as the conference “Du concept scientifique à la réflexion
philosophique,” Cahiers de philosophie, published by the Group d’étude de philosophie de l’Université
de Paris, UNEF-FGEL, n° 1, January 1967. This question was the subject, in its time, of
commentaries by P. Macherey commentaries (“La philosophie de la science de G. Canguilhem,” La
Pensée, n° 113, January—February 1964) and D. Lecourt (“L’histoire épistémologique de Georges
Canguilhem,” in Pour une critique de l’épistémologie, F. Maspero, Paris 1972).
12
Cf. ‘La théorie cellulaire,” in La Connaissance de la Vie, op. cit., pp. 43 and on; “Le vivant et son
milieu,” ibid., pp. 129 and on. And naturally Du développement à l’évolution…, op. cit.
13
Thus Canguilhem seeks to find this “philosophical pluralism” in the past itself, by virtue of the
virtual polyvalence of concepts that Bachelard considered necessary to an analysis of the present,
that is, the activity of modern science: the reason perhaps being that, for him, any reason which
explores and works is always already “dialectical.”

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error, web of errors, or even theory with which a science must break in order to
establish itself: it must break with an ideology that is already itself the result of the
ideologization of a science. I would add: it breaks with an ideology that is already the
ideologization of a scientific concept, or, as Spinoza said, of “a true idea.” Thus
Darwin and Mendel broke with concepts of milieu or heredity that rested on, at least
in part, an ideological extension of mechanistic science. Galileo broke with a dynamics
whose concepts (above all that of “natural place”) accompanied the ideologization of
the first geometrization of the universe.
This is an apparently strange, perhaps even contradictory, idea, in that it
suggests that scientificity as such has no beginning, but that there is always already a
dialectic of scientificity and ideologization, or better yet, of the ideologization and de-
ideologization of the concept, that is constitutive of knowledge [connaissance]. But we
can also interpret it by saying that Canguilhem’s propositions (profoundly Spinozist in
this regard) do not permit a thinking of the absolute beginning of scientificity, but only
its infinite process, its re-commencement or its development. Is this the weak point of
his propositions or precisely their strength? With Canguilhem epistemology truly takes
leave of the problem of “origins,” whether the origins of science or the origins of
positivity, that continues to haunt the problematics of “demarcation” and the
“break.” Epistemology is coextensive with the recognition of the historicity of
knowledge [savoir], although the recognition is not a “historicism,” since such a
historicity absolutely excludes any relativization of knowledge [savoir]. I do not
believe that I am wrong to see in this the importance of certain of Auguste Comte’s
theses for Canguilhem, especially the idea that the hold of the “theological” had never
been total.

To clarify this point, let us try to better comprehend what is at play in the
relationship between knowledge [connaissance] and ideology by invoking a third text:
the article “Life,” published in 1974 in the Encyclopædia Universalis.14 This synthetic text
(where Canguilhem assembles the results of a great number of inquiries and readings)
allows us to comprehend how the Bachelardian notion of the “epistemological
obstacle” was finally reconceptualized as a necessarily related to the question of
scientific ideologies. Posing the question of “the obstacles to a scientific knowledge
[connaissance] of life,” he recalls that “it is to the work of Gaston Bachelard that
contemporary French epistemology owes its interest in the origin and function of the
obstacles to knowledge [connaissance].” By working on the Bachelardian idea of a
“psychoanalysis of objective knowledge [connaissance],” according to a perspective
both closer to Freud and directly appropriate to the problems of biological knowledge
[connaissance], he organized his reflections on the recurrent conflict between the
objectivity of knowledge [savoir] and the values of human life around the description

14
Encyclopaedia Universalis, Vol. 16, Paris 1974, pp. 764-769.

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of three major “objects of complexes (objets de complexes):” the desire for

metamorphosis, the myth of spontaneous generation, and the technical interest in the
use of the living animal by the living human. Each of these complexes explains in its
way that “the extension of the methods of the knowledge [connaissance] of matter to
life had, until our time, encountered persistent resistance, which was not only an
expression of an affective repugnance, but sometimes of a deliberate refusal a
paradoxical hope of explaining a power by means of concepts and of laws initially
formed from hypotheses that deny it.”
In other words, theory in biology never escapes the conflict between an
analytical explanation that brings the living thing into the universality of natural
phenomena, and a singular experiment that perceives it as an exception to nature (and
that, when all is said and done, will present itself as the “privilege of death”).
The study that is then undertaken of the great theoretical conceptions of life—
at once enacted in time and recurrent in the history of ideas, life as animation, life as
mechanism, life as organization, life as information or communication15—will show
that such “complexes” are, each time, present as a pre-existing foundation in the
construction of a definition of life. This follows from the fact that there is no
conception or conceptualization of life as such, distinct from a simple description or
classification of living things, which is not also a worldview. And reciprocally, any
conception of the world, any “extension to the totality of the human experience,”16
will probably only find what allows it to ground the illusion of its simplicity and its
absolute necessity only in the unconscious force that communicates to it certain
complexes of birth, life and death, as well as the transgression of the limits of the
individual or the species. Yet the “definitions of life” (that are precisely Ideas: the Idea
of the soul, the Idea of the machine, the Idea of the organized body, etc.) are not
fundamentally different from what Canguilhem previously called “scientific ideologies.”17 They are at
least historically inseparable: because in any “scientific ideology,” and especially in
those that truly mark the epoch, a “definition of life”—for example, individuality in
itself, organization endowed with auto-plasticity—is present, whether as its condition,
as a source of conceptual generalization, or as its aim, its by-product (in this regard
the case of Evolutionism, studied in all of its details by Canguilhem and his
collaborators, is absolutely convincing).18 And this is hardly surprising given that the
“unconscious need for direct access to the totality” does not express itself in the
theoretical element, without a schema of life or of the living thing intervening to
homogenize, analogically at least, the representation of the individual, subject of
15
It is astonishing that, in this series, Canguilhem did not include a specific place for the “definition”
of life as evolution or transformation.
16
Idéologie et rationalité…, pp. 43.
17
Canguilhem is here speaking of “medico-philosophical ideologies.”
18
Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, ibid.

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knowledge [connaissance], and of the universe. Any definition of “life,” as

Canguilhem often showed,19 however positive and positivist, is “ideological” at least in
the sense that, in order to enunciate its specificity in a given state of knowledges
[connaissances] and the corresponding means of language [langage], it must
necessarily aim for more than life, in any case beyond the universality of living things.
And in consequence alongside life, insofar as it is a “property” common to living things.
But the same analyses also illuminate the “scientific ideologies,” whose place
the 1969 article had already marked by indicating the link between the discourses of
heredity in the 18th century and “the juridical problems of the subordination of the
sexes, of paternity, of the purity of lineages, of legitimacy of the aristocracy,” or
between Spencerian Evolutionism and “an engineer’s project in the English industrial
society of the 19th century: the legitimation of free enterprise, the corresponding
political individualism and competition.” Without doubt scientific ideologies are not
openly “class ideologies” or more generally socio-political ideologies, whether in the
mode of “false consciousness,” or the discourse of legitimation. There is, however, a
question of whether they are not in all the cases, overdetermined by a representation
of society, of its conflicts of power and of its history, the best example of which is the
interpretation of the organism in terms of a division of labor between the organs or in
terms of a society of cells, which in turn permits the thinking of society as an
organism.

From the moment consensus is identified with solidarity, we no longer know which,
organism or society, is the model, or at least the metaphor, of the other.20

The necessary link between scientific ideologies and socio-political and

theologico-political ideologies from which emerges another tendency to the
totalization of experience, is not presented by Canguilhem as an unconscious link
between desire and resistance, as had been the case in his discussion of complexes, the
definitions of life and of worldviews, but instead as a link between implicit and
teleological presupposition. “The law of differentiation ends with the support given to
the individual against the State. But, if it ends that way explicitly, it is perhaps because
it had begun that way implicitly.” This is another way of “misrecognizing [méconnaître]
its real relationship to the real,” which can be known only by being detached from the
real, given that “ideology is knowledge [connaissance] that is the more separated from its
given object the more it believes itself to be connected to it.”21 Thus the
epistemological obstacle’s multi-dimensional structure, such as it is re-thought by
19
See the discussion with F. Dagognet,“Le vivant,” Revue de l’Enseignment philosophique, 18th year, n 2,
December 1967-January 1968, pp. 55 and on).
20
See “Vie,” p. 768. See also “Le tout et la partie dans la pensée biologique,” in Etudes d’histoire et de
philosophie des sciences, pp. 319ff.
21
Idéologie et rationality, pp. 36, 42, 45.

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Canguilhem, is completed. It is an intellectual and historical formation whose labor of

knowledge permits us, in a recurrent way, to identify a triple relationship: to the
extension of concepts (and therefore to explication, and analytical discursivity), to the
imaginary and the practical aims of Man in society, to the desire for knowledge
[savoir] (or of non-knowledge [non savoir]) proper to the living human.

In recalling these propositions, and by attempting, for better or for worse, to

inscribe them in the same progression, have I not lost view of the problem I initially
posed? I do not think so and we may now have the means of providing some of the
elements of a response. For these propositions contain implicitly both a
conceptualization of the history of knowledge [connaissance] and a thesis on truth (or
on its production, from which it appears indissociable).
I earlier proposed the pair “ideologization/de-ideologization” to characterize
the labor of the concept. We may understand by this the incessant movement of
thought that, at the very moment it advances within the element of language [langage]
towards the unknown, it exposes the unknown to the grasp of the imaginary (of the
species, the individual, the institution), but precisely to offer up this imaginary to
conceptual critique and elaboration. Science in its history is thus the infinite process
that, escaping repetition, but without assignable end, projects the “internal”
conditions of thought (whether unconscious or implicit) into exteriority and
discursivity, in order to be able to free itself from them through objectivity.
Hence, the “developed” formula through which I will attempt to express the
dialectic immanent in the equation science = truth, that Canguilhem, without necessarily
stating it, put into practice:

Science = (historicity = (ideologization/de-ideologization) = objectivity) =

truth

The unity and division of contraries (ideologization / de-ideologization) is at

the very center of this equation: this is why I speak of “dialectic,” a word that
Canguilhem (unlike Bachelard) uses rarely, but which he does not reject.22 This is the
limit of intellectual labor, which marks the impossibility of being “in the true” without
be exposed to the risk of error and thereby to its own rectification. It is also,
reciprocally, the mark of the fact that it is impossible for ideology to remain identical
to itself, or for thought to remain at rest in ideology, that is, not to know. From this

22
Discussing the relationship between the conception of the implied dialectic here, and other
conceptions proposed in the history of philosophy, would demand another work. Let us be content
with evoking a text where, surprisingly, Canguilhem comes to speak the language of the “negation of
the negation” starting from an analysis of Nietzsche: “De la science et de la contre-science,” in
Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, collected works, P.U.F. 1971.

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point on, is not the statement “science and truth are the same thing” the most
adequate way of expressing the fact that neither of these two terms can ever conceal
an immutable essence?
If, to be “in the true,” is necessarily to be in science, its labor and its risks,
would this mean that science is the only thought that thinks itself, the only “thought
of thought”—even if there always remains something new for it to discover on its
own basis by profiting from its errors? “Project, error, marks of thought,” wrote
Canguilhem.23 Science is in any case the only thought whose internal obstacles may
finally become its conditions of possibility. It is also the only thought that may hope
to find its own external and contingent conditions of possibility elsewhere, having
displaced them, as “objects” of necessary thought. This is why, if science is not everything,
or is not the whole (of experience, of life, of thought), it may nevertheless be said that
virtually nothing is external to it, insofar as it can exteriorize everything, including its own
activity — not all at once, but in the “infinity of knowledge.”

Translated by Andrew Fan

23
“Le cerveau et la pensée,” conference at the Sorbonne on the 20th February 1980 (part of the
M.U.R.S. conference series) re-edited in Georges Canguilhem, Philosophe, historien des sciences, Actes du
Colloque du Collège International de philosophie, Albin Michel, Paris 1993.

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