Contribution
An expository paper placing Canguilhem’s theory of norms within his vitalism. It adds a reading, not a result: that Canguilhem’s vitalism is “attitudinal” (in Wolfe’s taxonomy), grounded in a philosophy of values he formed in the 1920s and 1930s under Alain, and that his normativity is what lets him extend “life” to knowledge, science and society without reducing them to biology. It proposes the result as a ground for a semiotics of values (section 5).
Key insight
For Canguilhem, a norm is not a statistical average and not a fixed standard: it is a living being’s established way of dealing with its milieu, and health is the capacity to change it. Sickness is not the absence of norms but a narrowing of that capacity.
Assumptions
- Canguilhem as reported. All of Canguilhem is quoted from his texts, chiefly The Normal and the Pathological (Vissio’s reference 13) and Knowledge of Life (reference 11).
- Wolfe’s taxonomy of vitalism (substantival, structural–functional, attitudinal) as the frame (section 1).
- Continuity of the theory of norms across Canguilhem’s work, following the scholars cited in section 1.
Key results
The paper reports and interprets. Its claims, by section:
- Section 1, what kind of vitalism. Canguilhem’s is “an Existential or Attitudinal Vitalism”, like Goldstein’s: no special living matter, no special emergent laws, but a perspective on living beings.
- Section 2, values. In the 1920s and 1930s, under Alain, Canguilhem opposed fact to value (“war” and “peace” name values, not facts); by the 1940s “value” had become a biological concept.
- Section 3, vital norms. “Even for an amoeba, living means preference and exclusion” (Canguilhem, p. 136). “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” (p. 126). “Biological pathology exists but there is no physical or chemical or mechanical pathology” (p. 127). With Goldstein, “disease appears when an organism is changed in such a way that, though in its proper, ‘normal’ milieu, it suffers catastrophic reaction” (p. 185). Vissio’s gloss: “the sick individual is not devoid of any sort of norms, but it finds itself confined and reduced in its capacity to change these norms”, “a state of restricted ability to negotiate norms with the environment”. “Canguilhem calls this ability or capacity to redefine vital norms ‘normativity’” (p. 227): “If biological norms exist it is because life, as not only subject to the environment but also as an institution of its environment, thereby posits values not only in the environment but also in the organism itself. This is what we call biological normativity.”
- Section 4, social norms. In the 1966 New Reflections, Canguilhem criticizes organic models of society: “in the case of the organism the fact of need expresses the existence of a regulatory apparatus” (p. 252), whose regulation “expresses the integration of parts within the whole” (p. 253); a society has no such apparatus, so “the infringement of a social norm or rule is different from sickness and there is not a social pathology”. “If social norms could be perceived as clearly as organic norms, men would be mad not to conform to them. As men are not mad […] social norms are to be invented and not observed” (p. 259). Yet “the form and functions of the human body are the expression not only of conditions imposed on life by the environment but also of socially adopted modes of living” (p. 269).
- Section 5, conclusion. Human values arise from a “debate” between parts of the social body, which human rationality can arrange, and which lets a subject “challenge regimes of injustice”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | For Canguilhem, normativity is the capacity to redefine vital norms; disease restricts it without abolishing norms | strong as a report | Canguilhem quoted, pp. 126–127, 227 |
| C2 | For Canguilhem, social norms differ in kind from vital norms, and there is no social pathology | strong as a report | New Reflections quoted, pp. 250–259 |
| C3 | Canguilhem’s vitalism is attitudinal, not metaphysical | moderate | interpretation, after Wolfe |
| C4 | His theory of norms grew from a philosophy of values formed under Alain | moderate | historical scholarship cited (Limoges, Sirinelli and others) |
| C5 | His normative philosophy can ground a semiotics of values | speculative | proposal, section 5 |
Concepts
- Vital norm — an established regime of life an organism finds “by bargaining with his milieu” (section 3).
- Normativity — the capacity to redefine vital norms (Canguilhem, p. 227 as cited).
- Attitudinal vitalism — vitalism as a stance on living beings, with no claim about special matter or forces (Wolfe).
- Milieu — the environment as evaluated by a living being.
Connections
It cites Giroux’s Après Canguilhem (2010) as the main reference on Canguilhem’s normativity (note 9). Giroux 2021 (LIT-1861, read in NOTE-1452) quotes the same definition of health from the same book and the same refusal to treat society as an organism. Both lean on Goldstein, as does Di Paolo’s paraphrase reported in NOTE-719.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-018: partly. The claim waits on a NOTE that reads Canguilhem’s book, and its defeat condition is a reading on which normativity “is not a capacity to establish new norms under changed conditions”. This paper is a reading of the book by another, and it says the opposite of the defeat condition: normativity is “this ability or capacity to redefine vital norms”, and disease leaves the organism “confined and reduced in its capacity to change these norms” (section 3, after Canguilhem p. 227). Its section 4 reports why the analogy should not be pressed: social norms have no integrating regulatory apparatus and “are to be invented and not observed”, so “there is not a social pathology”, which is the claim’s own caveat that regulatory failure in an institution is not literally disease. Together with Giroux it gives two independent second-hand readings that agree; it does not give the first-hand reading the claim names.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- Short and expository. About 4,000 words of text; most of it situates Canguilhem historically.
- Canguilhem at second hand, with page numbers whose edition is not stated beyond the reference entry, which names both the French and the English editions.
- No engagement with critics of normativism or of Canguilhem’s individualism, such as Giroux’s population argument.
Open questions
- Does the capacity to change norms belong to anything but an organism? Vissio reports Canguilhem’s no for society, without discussing other collectives.