China, 1958.

Hen r i Ca r tier· Bressan/Magn u m P hatas

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Machine and Organism Georges Canguilhem

The relationship between machine and organism has generally been studied

in only one way. Nearly always, the organism has been explained on the basis

of a preconceived idea of the structure and functioning of the machine; but

only rarely have the structure and function of the organism been used to make

the construction of the machine itself more understandable. Even though

mechanistic theory sparked some very impressive technical research, the fact

remained that the very notion of an "organology,;' as well as its basic premises

and methodology, remained undeveloped. l

Philosophers and mechanistic biologists approached the machine as a set

of data, or else made it into a problem that they could solve purely through

mental application. To do this, they called on the engineer, who was for them

a scientist in the truest sense. Misled by the ambiguities of their view of

mechanics, they saw machines only as theorems in concrete form. The opera­

tions necessary to construct machines were only secondary considerations

when compared with the all-important idea that the machine revealed their

theories in concreto. To see this, one needed only to acknowledge what science

could accomplish, and from there it was simply a matter of the confident

application of that knowledge. However, I do not believe that it is possible to

treat the biological problem of the "living machine" by separating it from the ..

technological problem it supposedly resolves - namely, the problem of the re­

lationship between technology and science. This problem is normally resolved

by starting with the idea that, logically and chronologically, knowledge pre­

cedes application. What I want to show is that the construction of machines

can indeed be understood by virtue of certain truly biological principles, with­

out having at the same time to examine how technology relates to science.

I shall address the following topics in successive order: what it means to

compare an organism to a machine; the relationship between mechanical

processes, and the results that might be achieved by using them; and the his­

torical reversal of the traditional relationship between the machine and the

organism and the philosophical consequences of this reversal.

45

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Machine and Organism

For those who have carefully studied living beings and the forms they take, it

is rare - and only in the case of the vertebrates - that one notices any truly

mechanical attributes, at least in the sense that the term is commonly under­

stood by scientists. In La Pensee technique, for example, Julien Pacotte notes

that movements of the joints and the eyeball can be paralleled with what math­

ematicians call a "mechanism."2 A machine can be defined as a man-made,

artificial construction, which essentially functions by virtue of mechanical

operations. A mechanism is made of a group of mobile solid parts that work

together in such a way that their movement does not threaten the integrity

of the unit as a whole. A mechanism therefore consists of movable parts that

work together and periodically return to a set relation with respect to each

other. It consists of interlinking parts, each of which has a determinable

degree of freedom of movement: for example, both a pendulum and a cam

valve have one degree of freedom of movement, whereas a threaded screw

has two. The fact that these varying degrees of freedom of movement can be

quantified means that they can serve as tangible guides for. measuring, for

setting limits on the amount of movement that can be expected between any

two interacting solid objects. In every machine, then, movement is a function,

first, of the way the parts interact and, second, of the mechanical operations

of the overall unit. 3

Mechanics is governed by the principle that every movement of a machi.ne

is geometric and measurable. What is more, every such movement regulates

and transforms the forces and energy imparted to it. Mechanics, though, does

not work in the same way that a motor does: in mechanics, movements are

simply propagated, not created. A rather simple example of how this trans­

formation of movement takes place can be seen in several devices - a wheel

crank or an eccentric crank, for example - that are set into motion by an ini­

tiallateral movement but eventually produce reciprocating, rotary movement.

Of course, mechanical operations can be combined, either by superimposing

them or adding them together. It is even possible to take a basic mechanical

device, modify it and make it capable of performing a variety of other mechan­

ical operations. This is exactly what happens when a bicycle freewheel clutch

is released or stopped.4

What constitutes the rule in human industry is the exception in the struc­

ture of organisms and the exception in nature, and I must add here that in

the history of technology and the inventions of man assembled configurations

are not the most primitive. The oldest known tools are made of a single piece.

The construction of axes or of arrows made by assembling a flint and a han­

dle, or the construction of nets or fabrics, are so many signs that the primi­

tive stage has been passed.

This brief overview of some elementary principles of kinematics helps to

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give a fuller sense of the problem without losing sight of a central paradox:

Why was it necessary to turn to the theory of mechanism, as outlined above,

in order to explain the living organism? The answer can be found, it seems,

in the fact that this mechanical model of living organisms does not rely on

kinematics alone. A machine, as defined above, is not totally self-sufficient: it

must receive and then transform energy imparted to it from an outside source.

To be represented in movement it must be associated with an energy source. 5

For a long time, kinematic mechanisms were powered by humans or ani­

mals. During this stage, it was an obvious tautology to compare the movement

of bodies to the movement of a machine, when the machine itself depended

on humans or animals to run it. Consequently, it has been shown that mecha­

nistic theory has depended, historically, on the assumption that it is possible

to construct an automaton, meaning a mechanism that is miraculous in and

of itself and does not rely on human or animal muscle power.

This is the general idea put forth in the follOwing well-known text:

Examine carefully the physical economy of man: What do you find? The jaws are

armed with teeth, which are no more than pincers. This stomach is nothing but a

retort, or heat chamber; the veins, the arteries and indeed the entire vascular sys­

tem are simply hydraulic tubes; the heart, a pump; the viscera, nothing but filters

and sieves; the lungs, a pair of bellows; and what are muscles if not a system of

cables and ropes. What is the oculomotor nerve, if not a pulley? And so on. Try

as they will, chemists cannot explain nature and set up a separate philosophy sim­

ply by coining a new vocabulary around words like "fusion," "sublimation" and

. "precipitation"; for this does not at all address either the incontrovertible laws of

equilibrium or the laws governing the workings of the wedge, cables, pumps as

elements of mechanical theory.

This text is not where we might think to find it, but in fact comes from the

Praxis medica, written by Baglivi in 1696, an Italian doctor belonging to the

iatromechanical school. This school, founded by Borelli, had apparently been

influenced by Descartes, although for reasons of national prestige, the Italians -

prefer to attribute it to Galileo. 6 This text is interesting because it treats the

wedge, the rope, the cable and the pump as if they could be seen in the same

terms for formulating explanatory principles. It is clear, however, that from

the mechanistic point of view there is a difference between these devices: a

cable essentially transmits a given movement, whereas a pump transforms a

given movement and is also a motor - admittedly, a motor that returns what­

ever energy it receives; but, at certain intervals, it apparently has a degree of

independence of movement. In Baglivi's text, the heart is the primum movens

- the central pump that serves as the motor for the whole body.

Therefore, a crucial element behind the mechanical explanation of bodily

movement is that, in addition to machines that perform as kinematic devices,

47

Machine and Organism

there are also machines that act as motors, deriving their energy, at the mo­

ment it is utilized, from a source other than animal muscle. And this is why,

although Baglivi's text seems linked to Descartes, the idea of the body-as­

machine actually goes back to Aristotle. When dealing with the Cartesian

theory of the animal-machine, it is often difficult to decide whether or not

Descartes had any precursors for this idea. Those who look for Descartes's

predecessors here usually cite Gomez Pereira, a Spanish doctor of the second

half of the sixteenth century: Pereira suggested, before Descartes, that he

could demonstrate that animals were wholly machines and that they do not

possess that sensitive soul so frequently attributed to them.7 But in other

respects, it is unquestionably Aristotle who saw the congruity between animal

movements and automatic mechanical movements, like those observed in

instruments of war, especially catapults. This idea is treated rather extensively

by Alfred Espinas, who discusses the connection between the problems dealt

with by Aristotle in De Motu animalium and those in his compilation of

Quaestiones mechanicae. 8 Aristotle draws a clear parallel between the organs

of animal movement and "oTBana ," or parts of war machines, like the arm of

a catapult about to launch a projectile. Thus catapults, typical automatic

machines of the period, seemed to be articulated like a human limb, as they

were pOised and made to release their great stores of pent-up energy. In the

same work, Aristotle carries the analogy even further by comparing the move­

ment of our limbs to mechanisms; and he makes his case in much the same

way that Plato did when, in the Timaeus, he compared the movement of ver­

tebrates to hinges or pivots. " ,

It is true that in Aristotle the theory of movement is somewhat different

from what it would become in Descartes. According to Aristotle, the soul is

the principle of all movement. All movement first presupposes immobility

and then requires a prime mover or some motivating force. Desire moves

the body, and desire is explained by the soul, just as potentiality is explained

by an act. Despite their differing explanations of movement, for Aristotle as

for Descartes later, the comparison of the body with a machine presupposes

that man is composed of automated mechanical parts reliant on aQ energy

source that produces motor effects over time and continue to do so well after

the original (human or animal) energy has dissipated. It is this discrepancy

between the storage of energy to be released by the mechanism and the mo­

ment of release that allows us to forget the relation of dependence between

the effects of the mechanism and the actions of a body. When Descartes looks

to machines to explain how organisms work, he invokes spring-operated and

hydraulic automata. As a result, he owes a great intellectual debt to the ideas

behind the technical creations of his own time, including clocks"and watches,

water mills and church organs of the early seventeenth century. We can say,

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then, that as long as the concept of the human and animal body is inextricably

"tied" to the machine, it is not possible to offer an explanation of the body

in terms of the machine. Historically, it was not possible to conceive of such

an explanation until the day that human ingenuity created mechanical devices

that not only imitated organic movements - as in the launching of a projec­

tile or the back-and-forth movement of a saw - but also required no human

intervention except to construct them and set them going.

In two instances, I have asserted that an explanation cannot be formulated

without the existence of certain conditions. Is this tantamount to attributing

a historical necessity to scientific explanation? How do I explain'the abrupt

appearance in Descartes of a lucid mechanistic interpretation of biological

phenomena? This theory is clearly related to modifications that occurred in

the economic and political structure of Western society, but the nature of

this relation remains obscure.

This problem has been treated in depth by P.-M. Schuhl, who has shown

that in ancient philosophy the opposition of science and technique paralleled

the opposition of freedom and servitude and, at a deeper level, of art and na­

ture.9 Schuhl supports this parallel with Aristotle's assertion that natural and

violent movement are opposed - a violent movement occurs when mecha­

nisms are used against nature, and its characteristics are that it exhausts itself

rapidly and never becomes habitual - which is to say, a permanent tendency

to reproduce itself never obtains.

Here I must turn to the difficult problem of the history of civilization

and the philosophy of history. With Aristotle, the hierarchy of freedom and

servility, of theory and practice, of nature and art, is paralleled by an eco­

nomic and political hierarchy in the cities, namely, the relations of freemen

and slaves. The slave, according to Aristotle in the Politics, is an animated

machine. 10 This is the crux of the problem to which Schuhl only alludes in

passing: Did the Greek conception of the dignity of science lead to their dis­

dain for technique and the resultant paucity of inventions? And did this in

turn lead to the difficulty of applying the results of technical activity to the

explanation of nature? Or, rather, did the Greeks' high regard for purely

speculative science and detached contemplation explain the absence of tech­

nical invention? Did their disregard for work cause slavery, or did the abun­

dance of slaves due to military supremacy explain their low regard for work?

Are we obliged to explain the ideology in terms of the socioeconomic struc­

ture or, rather, the socioeconomic structure in terms of the ideology? Did

the ease of exploiting human beings make it easier to disdain the techniques

that would allow them to exploit nature? Does the arduousness of exploiting

nature justify the explOitation of man by man? Is there a causal relationship

at work here? And if so, in which direction does it go? Or are we dealing with

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Machine and Organism

a global structure having reciprocal relations and influences?

A similar problem is presented by Father Lucien Laberthonniere, who

contrasts the physics of an artist or an aesthete to that of an engineer and an

artisan.ll Laberthonniere suggests that the determining factor here is ideas,

given that the Cartesian transformation in the philosophy of technique pre­

supposes Christianity. It was necessary to conceive of man as a being who

transcends nature and matter in order to then uphold his right and his duty

to exploit matter ruthlessly. In other words, man had to be valorized so that

nature could be devalorized. Next it was necessary to conceive of men as

being radically and originally equal so that, as the exploitation of humans by

each other was condemned on political grounds, there were increased tech­

nical means to exploit nature and a growing sense of duty to do so. This analy­

sis permits Laberthonniere to speak of a Christian origin for Cartesian physics.

However, he qualifies his own claim: the physics and technique supposedly

made possible by Christianity came, for Descartes, well after Christianity had

been founded as a religion. Moreover, humanist philosophy, which saw man

as master and proprietor of nature, was in direct opposition to Christianity

as humanists saw it: the religion of salvation, of escape into the hereafter, in­

spired by a contempt for the things of this life and unconcerned with whatever

fruits technology might win for mankind in this world below. Laberthonniere

asserts that "time -does not enter into the question," but this is by no means

certain. In any case, several classic texts have demonstrated that certain techni­

cal inventions that transformed the use of animal motor power - for example,

the horseshoe and the shoulder harness - accomplished more for the eman­

cipation of slaves than did the countless preachings of abolitionists.

In Del (jbeI8an8 vomftudalem zum biiI8eIlichen Weltbild, Franz Borkenau

argues that there is a causal relationship between mechanistic philosophy and

the totality of social and economic conditions in which it arises. 12 He claims

that at the start of the seventeenth century the qualitative philosophy of antiq­

uity and the Middle Ages was eclipsed by mechanistic ideas. The success of

these new ideas was, on the level of ideology, an effect of the economic fact

of the new organization and expansion of manufacturing. For Borkenau, the

division of artisanallabor into separate, simplified operations requiring little

skill produced the concept of abstract social labor. Once labor had been de­

composed into simple, identical and easily repeatable movements, price and

wages could be determined simply by comparing the hours worked - and the

result was a process that, preViously qualitative, had become quantifiable. 13

Calculating work in purely quantitative terms that can be treated mathemat­

ically is claimed to be the basis and the starting point for a mechanistic con­

ception of the life world. It is therefore by redUCing all value to economic

value, "to cold hard cash," as Marx puts it in The Communist Manifesto, that

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the mechanistic view of the universe is supposed to be fundamentally a

Weltanschauung of the bourgeoisie. Finally, Borkenau claims that the animal­

machine gives rise to the norms of the nascent capitalist economy. Descartes,

Galileo and Hobbes are thus the unwitting heralds of this economic revolution.

Borkenau's theses have been analyzed and criticized more forcefully by

Henryk Grossmann. 14 According to him, Borkenau ignores five hundred years

of economic and ideological history by seeing mechanistic theory as coincid­

ing with the rise of manufacturing at the beginning of the seventeenth cen­

tury: Borkenau writes as if Leonardo da Vinci had never existed. Referring

to Pierre Duhem's Les Ori8ines de la statique (1905), and the publication of

Leonardo's manuscripts (Herzfeld, 1904; Gabriel Seailles, 1906; Peladan,

1907), Grossmann agrees with Seailles that with the publication of Leonardo's

manuscripts it became clear that the origins of modern science could be

pJlshed back by more than a century. The quantification of the notion of work

occurs first within mathematics, well before its economic rationalization.

The norms of the capitalist evaluation of production, moreover, had been

defined by the Italian bankers even in the thirteenth century. Relying on

Marx, Grossmann reminds us that although in general there was no division

of labor in manufacturing properly speaking, manufacturing at its inception

meant the gathering together in the same place of skilled artisans who had

previously worked independently. According to Grossmann, then, it is not

the calculation of cost per hour of work, but the evolution of mechanization

that is the real cause of the mechanical view of the universe. The development

of mechanization begins during the Renaiss~nce.15 It is, therefore, more accu­

rate to say that Descartes had consciously rationalized a mechanistic technique

than that he had unconsciously expressed the imperatives of a capitalist econ­

omy. For Descartes, mechanics is a theory if machines that presupposes a spon­

taneous invention which science must then consciously promote and develop. -

Which machines did the most to modify the relationship between man

and nature before the time of Descartes, far beyond the wildest imaginations _

of the ancients - and did most to justify and rationalize the hopes men had

vested in machines? Above all there were firearms, which hardly interested

Descartes except in terms of the problem of the projectile. 16 O~ the other

hand, Descartes was very interested in clocks and watches, in lifting machines,

in water-driven machines and other related devices. As a result, one should

say that Descartes made a human phenomenon - the construction of ma­

chines - into an integral part of his philosophy; and one should avoid saying

that he transposed the social phenomena of capitalist production into ideology.

The key question becomes: How does Cartesianism account for an internal

principle of goal-directed activity in mechanisms, as is implied in the compar­

ison of a machine with an organism?

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Machine and Organism

The theory of the animal-machine is inseparable from "I think therefore I

am." The radical distinction between the soul and the body, between thought

and extension, requires the affirmation that matter, whatever form it adopts,

and thought, whatever function it fulfills, are each an undivided substance. 17

Because the only function of the soul is judgment, it is impossible to admit

the existence of a soul in animals, since we have no proof that animals judge,

incapable as they are of language or invention. 18

For Descartes, though, the refusal to attribute a soul- that is, reason - to

animals, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that animals are not alive

(since not much more than a warm, beating heart is at issue); nor must ani­

mals be denied sensibility, to the extent that such sensibility is solely a func­

tion of their organs. 19

In the same discussion, a moral foundation for the animal-machine theory

comes to light. Descartes views the animal as Aristotle had viewed the slave,

devalorizing it in order to justify man's using it to serve his own purposes: "My

opinion is no more cruel to animals than it is overly pious toward men, freed

from the superstitions of the Pythagorians, because it absolves them of the hint

of crime whenever they eat or kill animals."2o And it comes as no small surprise

to find the same argument in reverse in a passage of Leibniz: "if we are com­

pelled to view the animal as being more than a machine, we would have to

become Pythagorians and renounce our domination of animals."21 And so we

confront an attitude typical of Western thought. On the theoretical level, the

mechanization oflife only considers animals to the extent that they serve man's

technological ends. Man can only make himself the master and proprietor of

nature if he denies any natural finality or purpose; and he must consider the

whole of nature, including all life forms other than himself, as solely a means

to serve his purposes.

This is how the mechanical model of the living organism, including the hu-

man body, was legitimized; for already in Descartes the human body, if not Animal testing, c. 1970.

man's entire self, is seen as a machine. As I have already noted, Descartes based

his mechanical model on automata, that is, 'on moving machines.22

In order to see the full implications of Descartes's theory, I now intend to

look at the beginning of his "Treatise on Man:' which was published for the

first time in Leyden in 1662. He wrote there:

These men will be composed, as we are, of a soul and a body. First I must describe

the body on its own, then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must show how

these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute men

who resemble us.

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which

God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.

Thus God not only gives it externally the colors and shapes of all the parts of our

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bodies, but also places inside it all the parts required to make it walk, eat, breathe,

enabling it to imitate all those functions which seem to proceed from matter and

to depend solely on the interacting movements of our organs.

We see clocks, artificial fountains, water mills and other such machines which,

although only man-made, seem to move of their own accord in various ways;

but I am supposing this machine to be made by the hands of God, and so I think

you may reasonably think it capable of a greater variety of movements than I

could possibly imagine in it, and of exhibiting more artistry than I could possibly

ascribe to it. 23

Were we to read this text as naively as possible, the theory of the animal­

machine would seem to make sense only if we put forward two important

and often-neglected postulates. The first is the existence of a God who builds

things, and the second that living bodies are given in essence before machines

are constructed. In other words, to understand the machine-animal, it is

necessary to see it as being preceded, logically and chronologically, by God,

who is an efficient cause, and by a preexisting living model after which it is

to be modeled or imitated, which is a formal and final cause. With all this in

mind, I propose to take the animal-machine theory, which is usually seen as

a departure from the Aristotelian concept of causality, and show how all of

Aristotle's types of causality are nonetheless found in it, but not always in the

same place or simultaneously.

If we read the text more closely, we see that in order to construct the liv­

ing machine24 it is necessary to imitate a preexisting living model. The con­

struction of a mechanical model presupposes a living original (Descartes is

perhaps closer here to Plato than to Aristotle). The platoniC Demiurge copies

the ideas, and the Idea is the model of which the natural object is a copy. The

Cartesian God, the Art!fox maxim us, works to produce something equivalent

to the living body itself. The model for the living machine is that body itself.

Divine art imitates the Idea - but the Idea is the living body. What is more,

in the same way that a regular polygon is inscribed in a circle, and that one

must pass an infinite distance to deduce one from the other, there is some­

thing of the machine in every aspect of life; but to pass from one to the other

would require crossing over an infinite gap, one that only God can close. This

is the idea brought out at the end of the text: "but I am supposing this machine

to be made by the hands of God, and so I think you may reasonably think it

capable of a greater variety of movements than I could possibly imagine in it,

and of exhibiting more artistry than I could possibly ascribe to it." The the­

ory of the animal-machine would, therefore, have the same relation to life

that a set of axioms has to geometry, that is, nothing more than a rational

reconstruction. Thus, the theory operates by deception: it pretends to ignore

the concrete existence of what it must represent, and it denies that what it

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Machine and Organism

actually produces comes only after it has been rationally legitimized.

This aspect of Cartesian theory, moreover, was accurately assessed by a contemporary anatomist, the noted Nicolaus Steno, in the Dissertation on the

Anatomy if the Brain delivered in Paris in 1665, a year after the "Treatise on

Man" had appeared. While paying homage to Descartes (which was remark­

able, since anatomists had not always been very accepting of Cartesian anat­

omy), he notes that Descartes's man was man reconstituted by Descartes

with God as a foil, but that this was not man as the anatomist understands

him. One can therefore say that by substituting the body for the machine,

Descartes removed teleology from life, but in appearance only, because he

has concentrated it in its entirety at the point at which life begins. A dynamic

structure is replaced by an anatomical one; but since this form is produced by

technique, all possible sense of teleology has been confined to the technique

of production. In fact, it appears that mechanical theory and purposiveness

cannot be placed in opposition, nor can mechanism and anthropomorphism.

If the functioning of a machine can be explained by relations of pure causal­

ity, the construction of a machine cannot be understood without taking two

things into consideration: a specific goal-directed activity and man himself.

A machine is made by man and for man, to achieve specific ends, to produce

a given series of effects. 25

The positive element, then, in Descartes's attempt to explain life mechani­

cally is that he eliminates the need to tie mechanism to finality in its anthropo­

morphic aspect. Howev~r, it seems that in doing this, one anthropomorphism

has been substituted for another. A technological anthropomorphism has been

substituted for a political anthropomorphism.

In "Description of the Human Body and All 0'£ Its Functions:' a short trea­

tise written in 1648, Descartes addresses the question of voluntary movement

in man: he offers, in terms so lucid that they were to dominate the entire the­

ory of reflex and automatic movements up until the nineteenth century, the

explanation that the body obeys the soul only on condition that the body is

primed mechanically to do so. For the soul to decide to move is not a suffi­

cient condition to induce the body to move. "The soul," writes Descartes

"cannot produce any movement without the appropriate disposition of the

bodily organs which are required for making the movement. On the contrary,

when all the bodily organs are appropriately disposed for some movement,

the body has no need of the soul in order to produce that movement."26

Descartes means that when the soul moves the body it does not act like a king

or a general commanding his subjects or his troops as is popularly conceived.

Rather, by viewing the body as a clock mechanism he envisions each organ

driving the other like interlocking cogwheels. So Descartes substitutes for

the image of the political chain of command - where commands are passed

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by signals or spoken orders, through a type of magical causality - the techno­

logical image of "control," in which a desired series of operations is activated

by a controlling device or coordinated by a series of mechanical linkups.

Descartes takes the exact opposite position of Claude Bernard who, in his

critique of vitalism, in Le§ons sur les phenomenes de la vie communs aux animaux

et aux vesetaux, refuses to admit that a vital force could have a separate exis­

tence because it "cannot do anything" - but he does admit, surprisingly, that

it can "direct phenomena that it does not produce."z7 In other words, Bernard

replaces the notion of a vital-force-as-worker with the idea of vital-force-as­

legislator or guide. This is a way of admitting that one can direct events with­

out taking action - which borders on a kind of magical concept of direction,

implying that the overall operation transcends the execution of individual

operations. On the contrary, according to Descartes, a mechanical operation

replaces the power of direction and command, but God has fixed the direc­

tion once and for all: the constructor includes the guide-controls within the

mechanical process itself.

In short, with the Cartesian explanation, it might appear that we have not

moved beyond the idea of finality or inner purposiveness. The reason for this

is that if we limit ourselves to the workings of the machine, everything can be

explained by the theory of mechanism; but the theory cannot account for the

construction of the machine itself. Machines do not construct other machines,

and it could even be said that, in a sense, explaining organs or organisms

through mechanical models amounts to explaining the organ by means of it­

self. At bottom, then, we are dealing 'with a tautology; for it can be shown -

and I shall indeed try to justify this view - that machines can be considered as

orsans if the human species. 28 A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are

tools ot machines. And so it is hard to see how mechanism can be distin­

guished from purposiveness. No one doubts that a mechanism is needed to

ensure that a given operation is carried out successfully; and, conversely,

every mechanism must 'follow a precisely determined sequence toward per­

forming some particular task, since a mechanism cannot depend on random­

ness or chance. Therefore, the opposition would be between those mechanisms

whose purpose is manifest and those whose purpose remains latent. In the

case of a lock or a watch, their function is apparent, while the pincers of the '

crab, often considered a marvel of adaptation, have a latent purpose. As a

result, it seems impossible to deny that certain biological mechanisms serve

a set purpose. Let us consider an oft-cited example, which mechanistic biol­

ogists use to argue their case; namely, that of the woman's pelvis, which en- '

larges just before she gives birth. To deny that this enlargement might not in

someway be the fulfillment of a fundamental, purposive activity, we need only

view the question in another way: given that the largest-sized fetus exceeds

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Mach ine and Organism

the maximum size of the pelvis by 1 or 1.5 cm, it would be impossible to give

birth were it not for a loosening of the symphyses and a gradual rocking move­ment toward the sacrococcygien bone which increases the diameter ever so slightly beyond its maximum. It is understandable that one would not want to

believe that an act with such a specific biological purpose is allowed to occur

only by virtue of a mechanism with no real biological function. And "allow" is

indeed the word that applies here, since without this mechanism the act sim­

ply could not take place. It is well known that, when dealing with an unknown

mechanism, we have to make certain that it is in fact a mechanism - that is, we

have to know what ultimate purpose or function it is intended to serve. We

can come to no conclusions about how it is to be used, simply on the basis of

its form or its structure, unless we already know how the machine or similar

machines are used. As a result, it is necessary first to see the machine at work

before attempting to deduce the function from the structure.

We are now at the point where we can see the historical reversal of the Cartesian

relationship between the machine and the organism. It is a well-known fact

- and so need not be belabored - that in all organisms we observe the phe­

nomena of autoconstruction, automaintenance, autoregulation and autorepair.

In the case of the. machine, its construction is beyond its power and depends

on the skill of the mechanic. Its maintenance requires the constant attention

and watchfulness of the machinist; for we all know how the complex workings

of a machine can be irremediably damaged due to inattention and carelessness.

As for maintenance and repair, they demand the same periodic intervention

of human action. While there are machines that are self-regulating, these are

in fact machines that man has grafted onto another machine. The construc­

tion of servomechanisms or electronic automata merely displaces the question

of the man-machine relationship without changing it in any fundamental way.

Further, in the case of the machine there is a strict adherence to rational,

economical rules. The whole is rigorously the sum of its parts. The final effect

depends on the ordering of the causes. What is more, a machine functions

within narrowly defined limits, and these limits become all the more rigid with

the practice of standardization. Standardization leads to the Simplification of

basic models and spare parts, and to unified standards of measurement and

quality, which allows for the interchangeability of parts. Any individual part

can be exchanged for any other part meant for the same place - within, of

course, a margin of tolerance determined by manufacturing constraints.

Now that the properties of a machine have been defined in relation to those

of an organism, can one say that there is more or less purposiveness in a ma­

chine than in an organism?

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One would surely agree that there is more purposiveness in machines

than in organisms, since a machine seems to move uniformly, unidirectionally

toward completing a particular activity. A machine cannot replace another

machine. The more specific the end-result desired, the more the margin of

tolerance is reduced, and the more the machine's directiveness seems con­

centrated, focused on a particular end. It is well known that functions in the

organism are substitutable, organs are polyvalent. Although this substitutabil­

ity of functions and polyvalence of organs is not absolute, in comparison with

the same qualities in the machine, it is so considerable that any comparison

is quite obviously absurd.29 As an example of the substitutability of fu~ctions,

I can give a very simple and well-known case, that of aphasia in children. A

hemiplegia on the right side of the child's brain is almost never accompanied

by aphasia, because the other areas of the brain ensure the continuance of the

linguistic functions. In the case of the child who is less than nine months old,

any existing aphasia disappears very quickly. 30 As for the problem of the poly­

valent organs, I need simply note the fact that for a majority of organs, which

we have traditionally believed to serve some definite function, the truth is

that we have no idea what other functions they might indeed fulfill. This is

the reason that the stomach is said to be, in principle at least, an organ of

digestion. However, it is a fact that after a gastrectomy performed to treat an

ulcer, there are fewer problems with digestion than with those we observe

with hematopoiesis. It was finally discovered that the stomach behaves like

an internal secretive gland. And I might also cite yet another example - and

not,at all to be taken as some sort of miracle - which came to light during

a recent experiment performed by the biologist Courrier, at the College de

France. Courrier made an incision in the uterus of a pregnant rabbit, ex­

tracted a placenta from the uterus and placed it in the peritoneal cavity. This

placenta grafted itself onto the intestine and fed itself normally. When the

graft was performed, the rabbit's ovaries were ablated - meaning that the

function fulfilled by the corpus luteum during pregnancy was suppressed. At

that moment, all the placentas present in the uterus were aborted and only

the placenta situated in the peritoneal cavity came to term. Here is an exam­

ple of the intestine behaving like a uterus, and perhaps, one might even say,

more successfully.

In this case, then, it is tempting to reverse one of Aristotle's formulations

in his Politics: "For nature is not stingy, like the smith who fashions the Del­

phian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every

instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses."31

On the contrary, it seems that this definition of finality or purposiveness

would be more applicable to a machine than to an organism. One must be

willing to acknowledge, ultimately, that in an organism, a given organ can

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accommodate a diversity of functions. Clearly, an organism has a greater range of activity than a machine. It is less bound by purposiveness and more open to potentialities.32 Every aspect and every movement of the machine is calcu­lated; and the working of the machine confirms how each calculation holds

up to certain norms, measures or estimates; whereas the living body functions

according to experience. Life is experience, meaning improvisation, acting as

circumstances permit; life is tentative in every respect. Hence the overwhelm­

ing but often misunderstood fact that life permits monstrosities. There are no

monstrous machines. There is no mechanical pathology, as Xavier Bichat noted

in 1801 in his General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine. 33 Whereas

monsters are still living things, there is no way to distinguish between the nor­

mal and the pathological in physics and mechanics. Only among living beings

is there a distinction between the normal and the pathological.

Above all, it is work in experimental embryology that has led to the aban­

doning of such mechanistic representations when interpreting living phenom­

ena, primarily by demonstrating that once the embryo starts to develop, it

does not contain any kind of "specific mechanism" intended to produce auto­

matically one organ or another. There can be no doubt that this was Descartes's

conception as well. In his "Description of the Human Body:' he wrote: "If we

hc..d a good knowledge of what makes up the semen of some species of animal

in particular, for ~xample man, then we would be able to deduce from this

alone, using certain and mathematical reasoning, the complete shape and

conformation of each of its members, and likewise, reciprocally, if we knew

many particularities about th~s conformation, it would be possible to deduce

from that what the semen is."34 However, as Paul Guillaume remarks, it seems

that the more we compare living beings to automatic machines, the more we

seem to understand their functions but the less we understand their genesis. 35

If the Cartesian conception were accurate, that is, if the living organism were

both preformed in the embryo and developed mechanistically, any modifica­

tion made in the earliest stages would tend to disrupt the development of the

egg or prevent development altogether.

However, this is hardly the case. According to a study in potential egg,devel­

opment, based on research by Driesch, Horstadius, Speman and Mangold, it

was shown that embryonic development cannot be' reduced to a mechanical

model without running into anomalies. Let us take the example of the exper­

iments conducted by Horstadius on the egg of a sea urchin. He cut an egg A

from a sea urchin at stage sixteen so that each part of the egg maintained a

horizontal symmetry, and then he cut egg B, with each part being vertically

symmetrical. He joined half of A with half of B and the egg developed nor­

mally. Driesch took the sea urchin egg at stage sixteen and pressed the egg

between two thin layers of cells, while modifying the reciprocal position of

58

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the cells at the two poles; still, the egg developed normally. The results of these

two studies allow us to conclude that the same effect is achieved regardless of

how conditions are varied.

There is an even more striking experiment, in which Driesch took blasto­

meres from the sea urchin egg at stage two. By removing the blastomeres, either

mechanically or chemically in sea water lacking calcium salts, the result was

that each of the blastomeres gave birth to a larva which was perfectly normal

down to the smallest detail. Here, then, the result is the same regardless of

how the characteristics of a factor are changed. The quantitative change in

a given factor does not lead to a qualitative change in the result. Conversely,

when two sea urchin eggs are joined they result in a single larva that is larger

than normal. This is yet another confirmation that the result is unaffected by

the quantitative change in one of the factors. Whether the factors are multi­

plied or divided, the experiment yields the same results.

I should add that the development of all eggs cannot be reduced to this

schema. For quite some time there was a problem in knowing whether there

were two different kinds of eggs at issue: regulated eggs, like the eggs of sea

urchins, and mosaic eggs, like those of frogs, whose first blastomeres develop

in exactly the same way, whether they are dissociated or remain together. Most

biologists have recently come around to admitting that what distinguishes the

two phenomena is simply that determination occurs earlier in the so-called

mosaic eggs. On the one hand, the regulated egg starts to act like a mosaic

egg at a certain stage; on the other hand, at stage two the blastomere of the

frog egg yields a complete embryo, as does a regulated egg, if it is reversed. 36

Thus, it is illusory to deny the idea of purposiveness in organisms and to

attribute it to automatic functions, however complex we might imagine these

to be. As long as a machine cannot construct itself, and as long as an organ-

ism is not equal to the sum of its parts, it might seem legitimate to think that -

biological organization is the basis and the necessary condition for the exis­

tence and purpose of a inachine. From the philosophical point of view, it is

less important to explain the operation of a machine than to understand it.

And to understand it means to inscribe it in human history by inscribing

human history in life - not overlooking the fact that with the advent of man

there appeared a culture that was no longer entirely reducible to natural causes.

And so we arrive at the point where the machine is seen as afact of culture,

expressed in mechanisms that are themselves nothing more than an explain-

able fact of nature. In a celebrated text in "Principles of Philosophy," Descartes

writes, "It is certain that all the rules of mechanics belong to phYSics, to the

extent that all artificial thin8s are thereby natural. Since, for example, when a

watch counts the hours, by using the cogs from which it is made, this is no

less natural for it than it is for a tree to produce fruit."37 But, from our point

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Machine and Organism

of view, we can and must reverse the relationship of the watch to the tree and

say that the cogs and generally all the components that make up a watch are

designed to produce a desired effect: all the parts of the mechanism are prod­

ucts of imagination, each piece fulfilling some final purpose or design that at

one time was only imagined or dreamed of; they are thus the direct or indirect

products of a technical activity that is as authentically organic as the flower­

ing of trees. And, on a more fundamental level, the process works with great

efficiency even though there is no more conscious observance of the rules

and laws of physics than there might be within vegetal life. Although the con­

struction of a machine might presuppose at some stage the understanding of

the logics of physics, it should not and cannot be forgotten that, as a matter

of chronology and biology, construction of machines took place well before

there was any understanding of physics.

However, another author has asserted, contrary to Descartes, that living

organisms cannot be reduced to a machine and, similarly, art cannot be re­

duced to science. The author in question is Kant, in his Critique ifJudBment.

While it is true that the French have not tended to look to Kant as a philoso'­

pher of technique, it is no less true that German authors greatly interested in

this question, especially after 1870, have done so .

In the "Critique of Teleological Judgment," Kant distinguishes between

the machine and the organism, while drawing on Descartes's favorite exam­

ple of the watch. In a machine, he states, each part exists for the other but

not because of the other: no part produces another part; no one part is pro­

duced by the entire unit; nor does one part produce another part of similar

kind. There is no watch that makes other watches. No part can replace itself.

And no machine can replace one of its own missing parts. And so, while a

machine possesses motor power, it has no transformational energy that might

propagate itself or be transmitted to an object outside the machine itself. Kant

draws a distinction between human skill and technology, which are marked

by intentionality, as opposed to involuntary life processes. But in an impor­

tant passage of the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," Kant defines the origi­

nality of human skill as it relates to knowledge:

Art, regarded as human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from knowledge)

in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a theoretical faculty, as tech­

nique differs from theory. What one is capable of doing, as soon as we merely know

what ought to be done and therefore are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect,

is not called art. Only that which a man, even ifhe knows it completely, may not

therefore have the skill to accomplish belongs to art. Camper describes very exactly

how the best shoes must be made, but he certainly could not make one. 38

This text is cited by Paul Krannhals in Der Weltsinn der Technik, and, following

Kant, he acknowledges that all technique is essentially primordial, meaning that

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it cannot be reduced to a simple question of rationality. 39 Indeed, we tend to see

the skilled hand that adjusts a machine or the mind that carefully orchestrates

a production process as examples of "ingenuity," having their basis in instinct;

but these are in fact as difficult to explain as the production of mammalian eggs

outside the ovary, even in the event that the physiochemical composition of

protoplasm and of sexual hormones had been made entirely clear to us.

This is why the work of anthropologists (and not engineers) seems to shed

more light, however faint, on the question of the construction of machines. 40

Currently in France, ethnologists have come closest to creating a philosophy

of technique in which the philosophers themselves seem to have lost interest,

their main concern having been chiefly the philosophy of science. On the con­

trary, the ethnographers have generally focused their attention on the rela­

tionship between the production of the earliest tools, the first instruments

that were used to act upon and modify nature, and the ways these tools were

assembled or grouped together. The only philosopher in France I know to

have posed these questions is Alfred Espinas, in his classic text on Les OriBines de la technoloBie. 41 This work includes an appendix, the outline for a course

taught at the Faculte des Lettres at Bordeaux around 1890, which dealt with

the will, and in which Espinas addressed, under the guise of will, the ques­

tion of practical human behavior and especially the invention of tools. By

borrowing the theory of organic extension from the German writer Ernst

Kapp, Espinas was able to explain the construction of the first tools. Kapp

first made his theories known in 1877.42 According to the theory of exten­

sion, whose philosophical bases go back to Hartmann's The Philosophy if the Unconscious and further back still to Schopenhauer, the earliest tools were

simply extensions of moving human organs. The flint, the club and the lever

extend and magnify the organic movement of the arm and its ability to strike.

This theory, like all theories, has its limits and runs into certain stumbling

blocks, especially when it is used to explain fundamental inventions, such

as fire and the wheel. In these cases, we would search in vain for the body

movements and the organs that fire and the wheel are supposed to prolong or

extend; but the explanation certainly works for instruments like the hammer

or the lever and all such related tools. In France, then, it was the ethnogra­

phers who sought out and compiled not only the facts but also the hypotheses

from which a biological philosophy of technique could be constituted. The

philosophical path was laid out by the Germans43 - for example, the theory

of the development of inventions based on the Darwinian notion of variation

and natural selection, as advanced by Alard Du Bois-Reymond in his EifindunB und Eifinder (1906), or again, by Oswald Spengler in Der Mensch und die Technik, which presented the theory that machines are constructed as a "life tactic"44

- and is taken up again, independently it seems, by Andre Leroi-Gourhan

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in his book MiJieu et techniques. Leroi-Gourhan attempts to explain the phe­nomenon of the construction of tools by comparing it to the movement of

the amoeba, which extends substances out beyond its mass so that it might

seize and capture an object it wishes to digest: If we are drawn to view the act of percussion as the fundamental technical activ­

ity, it is because we witness an act of touch or contact in almost every technologi­

cal process; but even though the amoeba's expansion always leads its prey through

the same digestive process, there is no one way of explaining the working of that

process - whether we view the material being digested or whether we approach

the question from any given view of technology - since our view must change

according to the circumstances, just as the digestive process itself might be like

the various specialized grasping or striking organs. 45

In the last chapters of this work one finds a theory of machine that is alto­

gether different from the traditional theories that, for lack of a better term,

I shall classify as Cartesian - where technical invention amounted to the

application of a given system of knowledge.

Traditionally, the locomotive is presented as a classic example of a "mar­

vel of science." However, the construction of the steam engine is only under­

standable when placed in light of theoretical knowledge that preceded it, as

the culmination of an age-old problem, and a specifically technological one

at that - how to pump water out of mines. And so it would be necessary to

understand the natural history of the development of the pump, and to know

about the fire pump (which at first did not rely at all on vapor but produced a

vacuum via condensation under the pistons, thereby allowing the atmospheric

pressure acting as a motor to lower the piston) in order to see that the essen­

tial "organ" in a locomotive is a cylinder and a piston.46

Tracing a similar progression of ideas, Leroi-Gourhan goes even further,

pointing back to the wheel as one of the locomotive's ancestors, in the biolog­

ical sense of the word. "It is machines like the wheel," he states, "that gave rise

to steam engines and modern-day motors. All of the highest technological

achievements of the most inventive minds of our time can be grouped around

the circular movements of the crank, the pedal, the drive belt."47 He then goes

on to add: "The way inventions influenced each other has not been studied

sufficiently and we don't seem to take note of the fact that, without the wheel,

we would not have the locomotive."48 Further on:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century no one had yet recognized how to make

use of the elemental forms that would later give birth to the locomotive, the auto­

mobile and the airplane. The underlying principles of mechanics were spread

throughout twenty applications which had been known for many centuries. It i~

here we find the principle that explains invention, but the defining characteristic

is that it in someway manifests itself spontaneously. 49

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In light of these remarks, we see how science and technique must be consid­

ered as two separate areas; that is, they do not graft onto each other but, rather,

each takes from the other either its solutions or its problems. It is the rational­

izing and ordering imposed by technology that makes us forget that machines

have their origin in the irrational. In this area as in all others, it is necessary to

know how to accommodate the irrational, even when - and especially when

- we want to defend rationalism. 50

It must be added that the reversal of the relationship between the machine

and the organism, brought about by a systematic understanding of technical

inventions as if they were extensions of human behavior or life processes,

is in someway confirmed by the belief that the generalized use of machines

has slowly imposed contemporary industrialized society on man. George

Friedmann has shown very clearly the steps by which "body" gradually

became a first-order term in the human machine-body equation. 51 With

Frederick Taylor and the first technicians to make scientific studies of work­

task movements, the human body was measured as if it functioned like a

machine. If we see their aim as the elimination of all unnecessary movement

and their view of output as being expressed only in terms of a certain num­

ber of mathematically determined factors, then rationalization was, for all

intents and purposes, a mechanization of the body. But the realization that

technologically superfluous movements were biologically necessary move­

ments was the first stumbling block to be encountered by those who insisted

on viewing the problem of human-body-as-machine in exclUSively techno­

logical terms. From here on, the systematic examination of certain physio­

logi~al, psychotechnological and even some psychological conditions (since

a consideration of values leads inevitably to questions at the very center of

the origin of human personality) finally culminated in a reversal, called an

inevitable revolution by Friedmann, in which technology would adapt ma­

chines to the human body. As Friedmann saw it, this industrial technology

appeared to take the form of a scientific rediscovery of the same entirely

empirical procedures through which primitive peoples had always sought

to have their tools meet the highest organic norms: that is, their tools had to

carry out a given action effectively while maintaining a biological economy;

. and this occurred at the optimum level, when it most closely approximated

the movement of the body at work, as when the body defends itself sponta­

neously from becoming exclusively subordinate to the mechanical. 52 In this

way, Friedmann could speak, without irony or paradox, of the legitimacy of

considering the industrial development of the West from an ethnographic

point of view. 53

In summary, by considering technology as a universal biological phenom­

enon54 and no longer simply as an intellectual operation to be carried out by

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Machine and Organism

man, I am led to the following conclusions: on the one hand, the creative

autonomy of the arts and skilled crafts in relation to all forms of knowledge

that are capable of annexing them or expanding on them; and, on the other

hand, to inscribe the mechanical into the organic. It is no longer then, a ques­

tion of determining the extent to which an organism can be thought of as a

machine, whether by virtue of its structure or of its functions. But it is neces­

sary to find the reasons that gave rise to the opposite view, the CartesiaI) one.

I have attempted to shed light on this problem, suggesting that the mechanis­

tic conception of the body was no less anthropomorphic, despite appearances,

than a teleological conception of the physical world. The answer I am tempted \

to offer would insist on showing that technology allows man to live in conti-

nuity with life, as opposed to a solution that would see humankind as living

in a state of rupture for which we ourselves are responsible because of sci­

ence. There is no doubt that this answer appears to lend credence to the list

of accusations that all too many writers have offered up nostalgically from

time to time, with no apparent regard to their lack of originality, as they point

out the faults of technology and progress. I have no intention of rushing to

support their cause. It is clear that ifhuman society has embraced the idea of

a technology based on a mechanistic model, the implications are enormous,

and the whole question cannot easily be treated lightly or recalled on demand.

But that model is altogether different from the one just examined.

NOTES '.

1. After having been dogmatically accepted by biologists for many years, the mechanis­

tic theory of the organism is now considered narrow and inadequate by those scientists who

call themselves dialectical materialists. But the fact that they still concern themselves with

formulating a philosophical position could easily support the rather widespread idea that

philosophy does not possess its own domain, that it is a poor relation of speculation, and

must clothe itself in the hand-me-downs scientists have used and then discarded. It will be

my aim to show that the problem of machine and organism is much broader in scope and

more philosophically important than is commonly thought; ;md that it is far more than a

theoretical and methodological dispute among biologists.

2. Julien Pacotte, La Pensee technique (Paris: Alcan, 1931).

3. One example of the fundamental principles of a general theory of mechanisms un­

derstood in this way can be found in Franz Reuleaux's Theoretische Kinematik: Grundziiee

einer Theorie des Maschinwesen (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1875) .

4. For everything concerning machines and mechanisms, see Pacotte, La Pensee tech­

nique, ch. 3.

5. According to Marx, a tool is moved by human power while the machine is moved

by a natural force; see his Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York:

International Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 374-79.

zone

6. For more on this, see Charles Victor Daremberg, Histoire des sciences medicales

(Paris: Bailliere, 1870), vol. 2, p. 879.

7. Gomez Pereira, Antoniana Maraarita: Opus physicis, medicis ac theoloais non minus

utile quam necessarium (Medina del Campo, 1555-58) .

8. Alfred Espinas, "L'Organisation ou la machine vivante en Grece au IVe siecle avant

J.-c.," Revue de metaphysique et de morale (1903), pp. 702-15.

9. P.-M. Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1938).

10. Aristotle's Politics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson (Grinnel,

Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1986), bk. 1, ch. 2, secs. 4-7.

11. Lucien Laberthonniere, Les Etudes sur Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1935), especially the

appendix to volume 2: "La Physique de Descartes et la physique d'Aristote."

12. Franz Borkenau, Der Uberaana yom jeudalem zum biiraerlichen WeltbiJd (Paris:

Alcan, 1934).

13. Jean de la Fontaine's fable, "The Cobbler and the Businessman" (in La Fontaine:

Selected Fables, trans. Jamie Michie [New York: Viking, 1979], pp. 188-91) is an excellent

illustration of the two different conceptions of work and its remuneration.

14. Henryk Grossmann, "Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen

Philosophie und die Manufaktur," Zeitschriftfor Sozia!forschuna, 4th ser., vol. 2 (1935),

pp. 161-231.

15. "Mechanization" here means the generalized use of machines to replace human

labor. However, it was also used to describe Descartes's theory of animals as machines

before the nineteenth century when the above usage was in force - TRANS.

16. In Descartes's "Principles of Philosophy" (4.187 [AT 8A.314], Descartes: Selected

Philosophical Writinas, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch

[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988] , pp. 199-200), there are a few passages

that reveal Descartes to be equally interested in gunpowder, but he did not look for an

analogous explanatory principle for the animal organism in the explosion of gunpowder

as a source of energy. It was an English doctor, Thomas Willis, who explicitly formulated

a theory of muscular movement based on the analogy with what occurs when the powder

explodes in a harquebus. In·the seventeenth century, Willis compared the nerves to pow­

der lines in a manner that remains valid today in some quarters - most notably, W M.

Bayliss comes to mind. Nerves are a sort of Bickford cord. They produce a spark that will

set off, in the muscle, an explosion that, in Willis's view, is the only thing capable of ac­

counting for the phenomena of spasm and prolonged contraction observed by the doctor.

17. "For there is within us but one soul, and this soul has within it no diversity of

parts: it is at once sensitive and rational too, and all its appetites are volitions" ("The

Passions of the Soul" 47, in Selected Philosophical Writinas, p. 236) .

18. "Discourse on Method" 5 (AT 6.56ff.), in ibid., p. 44ff. Letter to the Marquis of

Newcastle, Nov. 23, 1646.

19. Letter to Morus, Feb. 21, 1649, in Descartes, Correspondance, ed. Charles Adam

and Gerard Milhaud (Paris: P.U.F., 1963), vol. 8, pp. 121-39. In order to understand

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adequately the relationship of sensibility to the arrangement of the organs, we must be

familiar with the Cartesian theory of the degrees of sensej on this subject, see Descartes,

"Author's Replies to the Sixth Objections" 9 (AT 7.436-39), in The Philosophical Writinas

cfDescartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge,

Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 294-96.

20. Descartes, Letter to Morus, Feb. 21, 1649, in Correspondance, vol. 8, p. 138.

21. Letter to Conring, March 19, 1678, in Gotifried Wilhelm Leibniz: Siimtliche Schriften

und Briefe (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1926), 2d ser., vol. 1, pp. 397-401. Leibniz's outline of

criteria in particular, which would allow us to distinguish an animal from an automaton,

should be compared to the analogous arguments adduced by Descartes, and also the pro­

found reflections of Edgar Allan Poe on the same subject in his "Maelzel's Chessplayer."

On the Leibnizian distinction between the machine and the organism, see "A New System

of the Nature and the Communication of Substances" 10, in Leibniz: Philosophical Papers

and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956),

vol. 2; and "Monadology" 63-66, in Monadolo8.J and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul

Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (New York: Macmillan, 1985) .

22. It is important to point out that Leibniz was no less interested than Descartes in

the invention and construction of machines, as well as in the problem of automatons. See

especially his correspondence with Duke John of Hanover (1676-1679) in the Siimtliche

Schriften und Briefe (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1927), 1st ser., vol. 2. In a text of 1671, Bedenken

von Atifrichtuna einerAcademie oder Societiit in Deutschland zu Atifnehmen der Kunste und

Wissenschajten, Leibniz exalts the superiority of German art, which has always strived to

produce works that move (watches, clocks, hydraulic machines, and so on), over Italian

art, which has always attached itself exclusively to the fabrication of lifeless objects made

to be contemplated from without (ibid. [Darmstadt: Reichl, 1931], 4th ser., vol. 1, p. 544).

This passage is cited by Jacques Maritain in his Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers cf

Poetry, trans. Joseph W Evans (New York: Scribners, 1962), p. 156.

23. "Treatise on Man" (AT XI. 119-20), in The Philosophical Writinas cfDescartes, trans.

John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), vol. 1, p. 99.

24. This phrase is a traditional equivalent of "the human body," especially in the

eighteenth century - TRANS .

25. Moreover, Descartes can only express the meaning of God's construction of ani­

mal-machines in terms of finality: "considering the machine of the human body as having

been formed by God in order to have in itself all the movements usually manifested there"

("Sixth Meditation," in Philosophical Works cfDescartes [1913], trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane

and G. R. T. Ross [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967], vol. 1, p. 83). [Here the

wording of the older translation is more literal than is the translation of Cottingham et aI.,

Philosophical Writinas cfDescartes, vol. 2, pp. 50-62 - TRANS.]

26. "Description of the Human Body and All of Its Functions" 1 (AT II. 225), in

Philosophical Writinas cfDescartes, vol. 1, p. 315.

66

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zone

27. Claude Bernard, Le§ons sur les phenomenes de la vie communes aux animaux et aux

veaetaux: 1878-1879 (Paris: Masson, 1936) .

28, For more on this idea, see Raymond Ruyer, Elements de psycho-bioloaie (Paris:

P.ll.F., 1946), pp. 46-47.

29. "Artificial means what is aimed at a definite goal . And is opposed therefore to

livina. Artificial or human or anthropomorphic are distinguished from whatever is only

living or vital . Anything that succeeds in appearing in the form of a clear and finite goal

becomes artificial and this is what tends to happen as consciousness grows. It is also true

of man's work when it is intended to imitate an object or a spontaneous phenomenon as

closely as possible. Thpught that is conscious of itself makes itself into an artificial sys­

tem .. .. If life had a goal, it would no longer be life" (Paul Valery, Cahier B [Paris: Gallimard,

1910]).

30. See Ed. Pichon, Le Developpement psychique de l'erifant et de l'adolescent (Paris:

Masson, 1936), p. 126; and Paul Cossa, Physiopatholoaie du systeme nerveux (Paris: Masson,

1936), p. 845.

31. Politics, bk. 1, ch. 1 (1252b), in The Basic Works oj Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon

(New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1128.

32. Max Scheler, in his Mans Place in Nature [1928] (trans. Hans Meyerhoff [Boston:

Beacon, 1961], pp. 75-81), has remarked that it is those living things that are the least

specialized that are the most difficult to explain by the mechanistic idea, pace the mecha­

nists, because in their case all functions are carried out by the whole organism. It is only

with the growing differentiation of functions and the increased complexity of the nervous

system that structures which resemble a machine in some fashion tend to appear.

_ 33. General Anatomy, Applied to PhysioloBY and Medicine, trans. George Hayward

(Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1822).

34. "Description du corps humain" 1 (AT II. 225), in Charles Adam and Paul

Tannery, eds., Ouevres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1974), vol. 11, p. 225. [This pas age is omit­

ted from the English translation of "Description of the Human Body and of All of Its

Functions" - TRANS . ]

35. Paul Guillaume, La' Psycholoaie de la forme (Paris: Flammarion, 1937), p. 131.

36. Pierre Grasse and Max Aron, Precis de bioloaie animale (2d ed., Paris: Flammarion,

1947), p. 647ff.

37. 4.203, in Philosophical Writinas ojDescartes, p. 288. See also my study "Descartes

et la technique," Travaux du Conares International de Philosophie, vol. 2: Etudes cartesiennes

(Paris: Hermann, 1937), p. 77ff.

38. "An organized being is not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but

it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates to

its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and this can­

not be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion" (Critique oj judament, trans.

J. H. Bernard [New York: Hafner, 1951], p. 22).

39. Krannhals, Der Weltsin der Technik (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1932), p. 68.

~j

Ii • I

·]1 I

i

Machine and Organism

40. The starting point for these works must be sought in Darwin, The Descent if Man -

whose ideas Marx saw clearly as immensely significant.

41. Alfred Espinas, Les OriBines de la techn%Bie (Paris: Alcan, 1897).

42. Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig:

Westermann, 1877). This work, which was a classic in Germany, has remained so misun­

derstood in France that certain psychologists who took up the problem of how animals

utilize tools, and animal intelligence, and who took the research of Kohler and Guillaume

as their starting point, attributed this theory of projection to Espinas himself, without

noting that Espinas states explicitly, at numerous junctures, that he borrowed it from

Kapp. I am alluding here to the excellent little book by Gaston Viaud, L'Int~lJiBence: Son

evolution et sesJormes (Paris: P.U.F., 1946).

43. See Eberhard Zschimmer's Deutsche Philosophen der Technik (Stuttgart: Enke, 1937).

44. Alard Du BOis-Reymond, EifindunB und Eifinder. (Berlin: Springer, 1906); and

Oswald Spengler, DeI Mensch und die Technik (Munich: Beck, 1931). Alain outlined a

Darwinian interpretation of technical constructions in a fine remark (Les Propos d~ain

[Paris: N.R.F., 1920], vol. 1, p. 60), preceded and followed by some others that are most

pertinent to our problem. The same idea is referred to many times in the Systeme des

Beaux-Arts, concerning the making of the violin (4.5), furniture (6.5), houses in the coun­

tryside (6.3, 6.8) .

45. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Evolution et technique, vol. 2: Milieu et techniques (Paris:

Michel, 1945) .

46. The double-acting engine, in which the steam acted on the upper and lower sides

of the piston alternately, was perfected by Watt in 1784. Sadi Carnot's Rijlexions sur la

puissance motrice du feu dates from 1824, and we know that it was ignored until the middle

of the nineteenth century. On this subject, see Pierre Ducasse, Histoires des techniques

(Paris: P.U.F., 1945), which stresses that technique precedes theory.

On the subject of the empirical succession of the various organs and uses of the steam

engine, consult Arthur Vierendeel's Esquisse d'une histoire de la technique (Brussels and

Paris: Vromant, 1921), which summarizes Thurston's extensive work, History if the Steam

EnBine. For more about the history of Watt's work as an engineer read the chapter enti­

tled "James Watt ou Ariel ingenieur," in Pierre Devaux's Les Aventures de la science (Paris:

Gallimard, 1943).

47. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques, p. 100. The same view can be found in an

article by A. Hadricourt on "Les Moteurs animes en agriculture" (Revue de botanique

appliquee et d'aBriculture tropicale 20 [1940], p. 762) : "We must not forget that we owe our

inanimate motors to irrigation: the noria is at the origin of the hydraulic mill, just as the

pump is at the origin of the steam engine." This excellent study sets out the principles for

explaining tools from the perspective of their relationship to organic commodities and

the traditional ways they were used.

48. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques, p. 104.

49. Ibid., p. 406.

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50. In his The Two Sources of Morality and Reliaion (trans. R. Ashley Andra and

Cloudesley Brereton [New York: Holt, 1949]), Henri Bergson thinks very explicitly that

the spirit of mechanical invention, although it is fed by science, remains distinct from

it and can even, if necessary, be separated from it (pp. 329-30). The fact is that Bergson

is also one of the rare ·French philosophers, if not the only one, who has considered me­

chanical invention as a biological function, an aspect of the organization of matter by life:

Creative Evolution (trans. Arthur Mitchell [New York: Modern Library, 1944) is, in some

sense, a treatise of general organology.

On the subject of the relationship between explanation and action see also Paul Valery,

"L'Homme et la coquille" and "Discours aux chirurgiens;' in Varifi"te V (Paris: Gallimard,

1945), and his description of boat building in Eupalinos.

And, finally, read the admirable "In Praise of Hands" in Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 157-84.

51. George Friedmann, Problemes humains du machinisme industrielle (Paris: Gallimard,

1946) .

52. Ibid., p. 96, note.

53. Ibid., p. 369.

54. This attitude is one that has begun to be familiar among biologists. In particular,

see L. Cuenot, Invention etflnalite en bioloaie (Paris: Flammarion, 1941); and Andree Tetry,

Les Outils chez les etres vivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) - especially the latter's reflections

on "Adaptation and Invention" (p. 120ff.). It is impossible to mistake the impetus given to

these treatments by the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin.

A new discipline, Bionics, which emerged around ten years ago in the United States,

studies biological structures and systems able to be utilized as models or analogues by

technology, notably by builders of systems for detection, direction and equilibration

meant for equipping planes or missiles. Bionics is the extremely subtle art of information

that has taken a leaf from natural life. The frog, with its eye capable of selecting informa­

tion that is instantly usable, the rattlesnake, with its thermoceptor which traces the blood

of its prey at night, the common fly, balancing itself in flight by means of two vibratile

filaments, have all furnished models for this new breed of engineers. In many American

universities, special training in Bioengineering is available, for which the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology seems to have been the instigator. See the article by J. Dufrenoy,

"Systemes biologiques servant de modeles 11 la technologie," Cahiers des inaenieurs aaronomes

(June-July, 1962), p. 21.

Translated from the French by Mark Cohen and Randall Cherry

r

The Living and Its MilieuGEORGES CANGUILHEMTRANSLATED BY JOHN SAVAGE

The notion of milieu is in the process of becoming a universaland obligatory means of registering the experience and exis-tence of living things, and one could almost speak of its consti-tution as a basic category of contemporary thought.1 But untilnow, the historical stages of the formation of the concept, itsdiverse uses, as well as the successive reconfigurations of therelationships in which it takes part, whether in geography, biol-ogy, psychology, technology, or social and economic history, allmake it rather difficult to make out a coherent whole. For thisreason philosophy must, here, initiate a synoptic study of themeaning and value of the concept. By “initiate” I do not simplymean the pretense of an initiative that would consist in taking aseries of scientific investigations for reality and then con-fronting expectations with results. Rather, it is a question ofusing several approaches and engaging them in a critical con-frontation with each other to locate, if possible, their commonpoint of departure and to explore its potential richness for aphilosophy of nature that focuses on the problem of individu-ality. It is therefore appropriate to examine the simultaneousand successive elements of the notion of milieu each in turn, thevarious usages of this notion from 1800 to the present, the manyinversions of the relationship between organism and milieu,and finally the general philosophical impact of these inversions.

Historically considered, the notion and the term “milieu”are imported from mechanics to biology in the second half ofthe eighteenth century. The mechanical idea, but not the term,appears with Newton, and the word “milieu” is present ind’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedia with its mechanicalmeaning, in the article of the same name. It is introduced tobiology by Lamarck, who was himself inspired by Buffon,though he never used the term other than in the plural. DeBlainville seals this usage. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in1831 and Comte in 1838 use the term in the singular, in anabstract sense. Balzac opens the gates to literature in 1842, inthe preface of the Comédie Humaine, and it is Taine who firstuses it as one of the three analytical principles used to explainhistory, the two others being race and event, as is well known. It is more due to Taine than Lamarck himself that neo-Lamarckian biologists in post-1870 France, such as Giard, LeDantec, Houssay, Costantin, Gaston Bonnier, and Roule, usethis term. They get the idea, in a sense, from Lamarck, but the

Grey Room 03, Spring 2001, pp. 7–31. © 2001 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

term as an abstract and universal one comes to them from Taine.French mechanists of the eighteenth century called milieu

what Newton meant when he said “fluid.” The model for this,if not the sole archetype in Newton’s physics, was ether. InNewton’s day, the problem facing mechanics was that of theaction of distinct physical bodies at a distance. This was thefundamental problem of the physics of central forces. It was aproblem that had not existed for Descartes. For him, there wasonly one mode of physical action, impact, in only one possiblephysical situation, that of contact. This is why we can say thatin Cartesian physics the notion of milieu has no place. Subtlematter is not in any way a milieu. But it was difficult to extendthe Cartesian theory of impact and contact to the case of sepa-rate point particles, since in this case they could not act with-out being confounded by this action. As a result, we can seethat Newton was led to pose the problem of the means of theaction. Luminous ether was for him the fluid that served as thevehicle of action at a distance. This explains the passage fromthe notion of fluid as a vehicle to its designation as a medium[milieu]. The fluid is the intermediary between two bodies; it istheir milieu; and to the extent that it penetrates these bodies,they are situated within it. According to Newton and to thephysics of central forces, it is only because there are centers offorce that we can speak of environment, that we can speak of amilieu. The notion of milieu is a fundamentally relative notion.To the extent that we consider separately the body on which theaction, transmitted through the medium, is exercised, we mayforget that the milieu is a between two centers and rememberonly its function of centripetal transmission, and one might sayits ambient situation. In this way the milieu tends to lose its rel-ative meaning and takes on an absolute one. It becomes a real-ity in itself.

It was perhaps Newton who was responsible for importingthe term from physics to biology. Ether helped him not onlyresolve the problem of illumination, but also explain the phys-iological phenomenon of vision and even explain the physio-logical effects of luminous sensation, in other words, explainmuscular reactions. In his Optics, Newton considered ether tobe continuous with air, something found in the eye, in thenerves, even in muscles. It was therefore the action of a milieuthat ensured the dependent connection between the spark ofthe perceived luminous source and the movement of musclesby which man reacts to this sensation. This, it would seem, wasthe first example of an explanation of an organic reaction by theaction of a milieu, that is, of a fluid strictly defined by physicalproperties.2 Indeed, the article in the Encyclopedia cited aboveconfirmed this way of seeing things. All of the examples ofmilieus given in the article were drawn from Newton’s physics.

8 Grey Room 03

And it is in a purely mechanical sense that one says that wateris a milieu for the fish who move around in it. It is also primar-ily in this mechanical sense that Lamarck understood it.

Lamarck always speaks of milieus in the plural, and by thishe specifically means fluids like water, air, and light. WhenLamarck wants to designate the whole set of outside actionsthat are exercised on a living thing, in other words what we calltoday the “milieu,” he never says “milieu” but always “influ-ential circumstances.” As a result, circumstance is a genuswithin which climate, place, and milieu are species. And thisis why Léon Brunschvicg, in Les Etapes de la philosophiemathématique, wrote that Lamarck borrowed from Newton thephysicomathematical model of explaining the living through asystem of connections with its environment.3 The relationshipbetween Lamarck and Newton is intellectually direct and his-torically indirect, as they are linked through Buffon. We can,for example, recall that Lamarck was Buffon’s pupil and hisson’s tutor.

Buffon, in fact, combines two influences in his conceptionof the relationship between organism and milieu. The first isprecisely Newton’s cosmology, of which Buffon was a lifelongadmirer.4 The second influence is the tradition of anthropo-geography, which had been kept alive in France by Montesquieubefore him,5 following Bodin, Machiavelli, and Arbuthnot. TheHippocratic treatise On Airs Waters and Places can be consid-ered the first work that gave philosophical form to this idea.These are the components that Buffon brought together in hisprinciples of animal ethology, to the extent that animal moresare of a distinct and specific character and that these mores canbe explained by the same method that allows geographers toexplain the diversity of the earth’s men, races, and peoples.6

Therefore, as Lamarck’s teacher and precursor in his theoryof milieu, Buffon is positioned at the convergence of the theory’stwo components, the mechanical component and the anthro-pogeographic one. At this point, we are faced with a problemof epistemology and historical psychology of knowledge that isfar more involved than the specific example that raised it.Shouldn’t the fact that two or more guiding ideas come togetherat a given time to form the same theory be interpreted as a sign that, as different as they may seem when first used in the analysis, they have a common origin whose meaning andvery existence is forgotten when one considers the differentpieces separately? This is the problem we will come back to in the end.

The Newtonian origins of the notion of milieu are enough toaccount for the initial mechanical meaning of this notion andthe use that was first made of it. The origin determines themeaning, and the meaning determines the usage. This is so true

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 9

that in 1838, in proposing a general biological theory of themilieu in the fortieth lesson of his Cours de Philosophie posi-tive, Auguste Comte believed that he was using “milieu” as aneologism and claimed the credit for introducing it as a uni-versal and abstract explanatory concept in biology. And Comtesays that from this point on he would understand the term tomean not only the “fluid in which a body is immersed” (whichclearly confirms the mechanical origins of the notion), but “thesum total of outside circumstances necessary to the existenceof each organism.”7 However, with Comte (who has a perfectlyclear idea of the origins of the notion, as well as the new mean-ing he wishes to give it in biology) we also observe that its usewill remain dominated by the mechanical origins of the notion,if not of the term.

In fact, it is quite interesting to note that Auguste Comte wason the verge of creating a dialectical conception of the rela-tionship between organism and milieu. I am referring to pas-sages in which he defines the relationship between “theadapted organism” and the “favorable milieu” as a “conflict offorces” in which action is constituted by function. He positsthat “the ambient system cannot modify the organism withoutthe latter in turn exercising a corresponding influence.” But,except in the case of the human species, Auguste Comtebelieves this action of the organism on the milieu to be negligi-ble. As for the case of the human species, true to his philo-sophical conception of history, Comte allows that through theintermediary of collective action humanity modifies its milieu.However, for the living in general, Comterefuses to consider this action of the organ-ism on the milieu seriously, reckoning that itis simply negligible. This is because he islooking for a very explicit guarantee of adialectical connection, of a reciprocal rela-tionship between milieu and organism, thatwould follow the Newtonian principle ofaction and reaction. It is in fact clear, from amechanical point of view, that the action ofthe living on the milieu is practically negli-gible. And Comte ends up posing the biolog-ical problem of the relationship betweenorganism and milieu as a mathematical one:“In a given milieu, given the organ, find thefunction, and vice versa.” The connection oforganism and milieu is therefore that of afunction to a set of variables, an equal rela-tionship that allows us to determine thefunction using the variables, and the vari-ables separately starting with the function,

10 Grey Room 03

“all other things being equal.”8

The analysis of variables for which the milieu turns out to bethe function is conducted by Comte in lesson 43 of the Coursde Philosophie positive. These variables are weight, air andwater pressure, movement, heat, electricity, and chemical ele-ments, all factors capable of being studied experimentally andmeasured quantitatively. The quality of an organism finds itselfreduced to a set of quantities, despite the skepticism Comteprofesses elsewhere toward the practice of treating biologicalproblems mathematically, a skepticism that, as we know, comesto him from Bichat.

In short, even a summary history of the importation of theterm “milieu” to biology in the first years of the nineteenth cen-tury brings out the initial, strictly mechanistic use of the term.If the hint of an authentically biological acceptation and a moreflexible usage appears with Comte, it immediately succumbs tothe prestige of mechanics, an exact science that bases predic-tions on calculations. The theory of milieu appears clearly toComte as a variant of the fundamental project that the Cours dePhilosophie positive seeks to fulfill: the world first, then man;to go from the world to man. If the idea of the subordination ofthe mechanical to the vital is assumed, as Le Système de Politiquepositive and La Synthèse subjective later suggest, it is never-theless formally rejected.

But there is still another lesson to get out of the use of theterm “milieu” that is, beyond any question, definitively conse-crated by Comte. The equivalent of what this term designateswould be “circumstances” in the work of Lamarck. EtienneGeoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his report to the Academy of Sciencesin 1831, spoke of “surroundings.” These terms of “circum-stance” and “surroundings” come from a certain intuition of acentered formation. In the success of the term “milieu,” themetaphor of the line or the indefinitely extendable plane, beingboth continuous and homogeneous, with no definite shape orprivileged position, wins out over the metaphor of the sphereor circle, shapes that are still defined qualitatively and, wemight even say, attached to a fixed central reference point.Circumstances and surroundings still retain a symbolic value,but milieu abandons any evocation other than a position indef-initely denied by exteriority. The now refers to the future, thehere refers to its beyond, and so forth always ad infinitum. Themilieu is really a pure system of relationships without supports.

From this point we may understand the prestige of thenotion of milieu for analytical scientific thought. The milieubecomes a universal instrument of the dissolution of individu-alized organic synthesis in the anonymity of elements and uni-versal movements. When the French neo-Lamarckians borrowfrom Lamarck—if not the term in the absolute sense and in the

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 11

Cyclidium.

singular, at least the idea—they keep only the formation by out-side conditioning and, so to speak, the deformation of the mor-phological character and functions of the living. It is enough torecall Costantin’s experiments on the shapes of sagittate leavesand Houssay’s experiments on the shape, fins, and metamerismof fish. In a little book entitled La Vie des Rivières, Louis Roulewas capable of writing, “Fish don’t lead their lives themselves,it is the river that makes them lead it, they are persons withoutwill.” 9 We have here an example of what a strictly mechanisticuse of the notion of milieu must lead to.10 We have returned tothe idea of animal-machines. In the end, Descartes was sayingthe same thing when he said of animals, “It is nature that actsin them through the medium of their organs.”

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Starting in 1859, in other words with the publication of Darwin’sOrigin of Species, the problem of the relationship betweenorganism and milieu is dominated by the polemical oppositionbetween Lamarckians and Darwinians. It seems necessary to recall the originality of these respective starting points tounderstand the meaning and importance of the polemic.

Lamarck wrote in his Philosophie zoologique (1809) that if,by action of circumstance or action of milieus, we understand adirect action of the external milieu on the living, we are impos-ing a meaning that is unwarranted.11 It is due to a need, a sub-jective notion that implies a reference to a positive pole of lifevalues, that the milieu dominates and commands the evolutionof living things. Changes in circumstance bring about changesin needs; changes in needs bring about changes in actions. Aslong as these actions last, the use or nonuse of certain organscauses them to strengthen or atrophy, and these morphologicallosses and gains acquired by individual habit are preserved bythe mechanism of heredity whenever the new morphologicalcharacter is common to the two parents.

According to Lamarck, the situation of the living in themilieu is a situation that we can call both distressful and dis-tressed. The life and the milieu that is unaware of it are twoasynchronous series of events. The change of circumstancescomes first, but it is the living itself that, in the end, initiates theeffort to not be let go by its milieu. Adaptation is a repeatedeffort on the part of life to continue to “stick” to an indifferentmilieu. Adaptation as the result of an effort is therefore neitherharmonious nor providential; it is earned and never guaran-teed. Lamarckism is not mechanism, and it would be inexact tocall it finalism. In reality, it is a naked vitalism. There is an orig-inality of life that the milieu cannot render, that it does notknow. The milieu is in this case really external in the proper

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sense of the word. It is foreign; it does nothing for life. This istruly vitalism because it depends on this dichotomy. Life, saidBichat, is the collection of functions that resist death. InLamarck’s conception, life resists only by transforming in orderto outlive itself. To my knowledge, no portrait of Lamarck, nosummary of his doctrine, is better than the one given by Sainte-Beuve in his novel Volupté.12 Here we can see how much dis-tance lies between Lamarckian vitalism and the mechanicism ofthe French neo-Lamarckians. Cope, an American neo-Lamarckian,was truer to the spirit of the doctrine.

Darwin has a totally different explanation of the environ-ment of the living, as well as the appearance of new forms. Inthe introduction to Origin of Species, he writes, “Naturalistsare always referring to external conditions like climate andfood as the only possible cause of variations; they are only rightin a very narrow sense.”13 It seems that Darwin later regrettedhaving attributed only a minor role to the direct action of phys-ical forces on the living. This is manifest in his correspon-dence. On this point, in the introduction he wrote for selectedtexts of Darwin, Marcel Prenant published a certain number ofparticularly interesting passages.14 Darwin was looking for theappearance of new forms in the interplay of two mechanisms:a mechanism of production of differences that is variation, anda mechanism of reduction and criticism of the differences pro-duced, that is, the struggle for existence [la concurrence vitale]and natural selection. The fundamental biological relationship,in Darwin’s eyes, is a relationship between living things andother living things. It trumps the relationship between livingand milieu, conceived of as a collection of physical forces. Theprimary milieu an organism lives in is the set of living thingsaround it that are enemies or allies, prey or predators. Amongthe living, relationships of use, destruction, and defense areestablished. In this test of strength, accidental variations ofmorphology play out as advantages or disadvantages. In fact,variation, that is to say the appearance of slight morphologicaldifferences by which a descendant does not look exactly likehis ancestors, emerges from a complex process: the use ornonuse of organs (the Lamarckian factor concerns only adults),correlations or compensations of growth (for the young), or eventhe direct action of the milieu (on the germ).

In this sense we can therefore say that according to Darwin,unlike Lamarck, the initiative of variation sometimes, but onlysometimes, comes from the milieu. According to whether weemphasize or play down this action, whether we limit our-selves to his classic works or on the contrary to the whole of histhought in the way it is revealed by his correspondence, we get aslightly different idea of Darwin’s thought. At any rate, for Darwin,to live is to submit individual difference to the judgment of all

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 13

of the living. This judgment has only two outcomes: eitherdeath or one’s recruitment in turn, for a time, to the jury. But aslong as we live, we are always judged and judging. We can see,as a result, that in the body of work Darwin left us, the threadthat ties the formation of living things to the physicochemicalmilieu seems quite tenuous. And the day a new explanation ofthe evolution of the species, mutationism, was combined withan explanation that suddenly saw the appearance of specificvariations as hereditary (an explanation that Darwin was awareof but that he underestimated) was the day that the milieu was reduced to the role of eliminating the worst without being involved in the production of new beings, normalized bytheir nonpremeditated adaptation to new conditions of exis-tence, with monstrosity becoming the rule and uniqueness afleeting banality.

In the polemic that pitted Lamarckians against Darwinians,it is useful to note that the arguments and objections came undertwo categories and had two sets of implications. Finalism wasdenounced and mechanicism celebrated, first on one side, thenon the other. This is a clear sign that the issue was poorly framed.Darwin, we can say, uses the language rather than the substanceof finalism (he has been sufficiently reproached for using theterm “selection”). With Lamarck, there is less finalism thanvitalism. Both of these men were true biologists, who take lifeas a piece of data that they attempt to characterize without tak-ing too much time to come to terms with it analytically. In fact,these two genuine biologists complement one another. Lamarckthinks of life in terms of duration, and Darwin more accordingto interdependence. One life-form implies a plurality of otherforms with which it is in contact. The synoptic vision thatmakes up the core of Darwin’s genius underscores Lamarck’sweaknesses. Darwin is more closely related to geographers, and we know what he drew from his voyages and explorations.The milieu in which Darwin imagined the life of the living is abiogeographical milieu.

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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two names sum upthe emergence of geography as a science newly cognizant ofboth its status and its method: Ritter and Humboldt.

In 1817, Carl Ritter published his Geographie générale com-parée ou Science de la Terre dans ses rapports avec la natureet l’histoire de l’homme. Starting in 1845, over the course of tenyears Alexander von Humboldt published a book whose spiritis precisely captured in the title Kosmos. These two authorsbrought together the traditions of Greek geography, that is, ofAristotle and Strabo’s science of the human ecumene, and the

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Lacrymaria.

science of the coordination of human space in relation to celes-tial configurations and movements, that is, the mathematicalgeography whose founders we consider to be Eratosthenes,Hipparchus, and Ptolemy.

According to Ritter, human history is unintelligible withoutunderstanding the connection of humanity to the land and to thewhole earth. The terrestrial globe, considered as a whole, is thestable support for the vicissitudes of history. As a result, terres-trial space and its configuration are the object not only of geo-metric or geological knowledge, but also sociology and biology.

Humboldt was a naturalist and voyager who traveled severaltimes over what one could travel of the world of his time andwho applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric, andother measurements in his investigations. Humboldt was espe-cially interested in the distribution of plants according to cli-mate: he was the founder of botanical geography and zoologicalgeography. Kosmos is a synthesis of learning that focuses on lifeon earth and the relations between life and physical milieu. Thissynthesis is not an attempt to be encyclopedic, but is rather astep toward an intuition of the universe. It begins with a his-tory of Weltanschauung through a history of the cosmos whoseequivalent could not easily be found in a work of philosophy.It is a critical commentary that is nothing short of remarkable.

It is essential to note that Ritter and Humboldt applied thecategory of totality to their object: the relationship between his-torical man and milieu. Their object is all of humanity over thewhole world. As a result of their work, the idea of a historical

relationship determined by environmentwas consolidated in geography, leading firstto Ratzel and anthropogeography in Germany,then to geopolitics, and spreading to historythrough Michelet. One has only to recall LeTableau de la France.15 And finally Taine, as I have already mentioned, contributes to the spread of the idea in all fields [milieux],including the literary. One can summarizethe spirit of this theory of the relationshipbetween man and his geographic milieu bysaying that doing history consists of readinga map, if we understand by map the configu-ration of a set of metric, geodesic, geological,climatological, and descriptive biogeograph-ical data.

The approach to problems in anthropol-ogy and human ethology (an approach that is more and more deterministic, or more pre-cisely mechanistic, as we get further fromthe spirit of the founders) is coupled with a

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 15

parallel, if not exactly contemporaneous, methodology in the areaof animal ethology. A mechanistic explanation of the organism’smovement within the milieu succeeds the mechanistic inter-pretation of the development of organic forms. Let us simplyrecall the work of Jacques Loeb and that of Watson. Generalizingthe conclusions of his studies of phototropism in animals, Loebconsiders all movement of the organism in the milieu as amovement that is forced upon the organism by the milieu. Thereflex, considered the elementary response of a part of the bodyto an elementary physical stimulus, is the simple mechanismwhose constitution allows us to explain all behavior of the living. There is no question that such exorbitant Cartesianismlies, along with Darwinism, at the origin of the postulates ofbehaviorist psychology.16

Watson assigned the analytical study of the conditions ofadaptation of the living to the milieu as a program for psychol-ogy by experimenting with the production of relations of exci-tation and response (the coupling of stimulus-response). Thedeterminism of the relationship between excitation andresponse is physical. The biology of behavior is reduced to neu-rology, and the latter is reduced to an energetics. Watson’s ideasled him from a conception in which he simply neglected con-sciousness because he saw it as unuseful, to a conception inwhich he rejected it as outright illusory. The milieu finds itselfinvested with all powers with respect to individuals; its powerdominates and even does away with the influence of heredityand genetic makeup. Once given a milieu, the organism itselfgives nothing that, in reality, it doesn’t receive. The situation ofthe living, its being in the world, is thus its condition, or moreprecisely its conditioning.

Albert Weiss wished to construct biology as a deductivephysics, and he proposed an electronic theory of behavior. Itwas left to psychotechnicians, who extended Taylorist tech-niques of time and motion studies by means of the analysis ofhuman reactions, to perfect the work of behavioral psychologyand to ingeniously constitute man as a machine reacting toother machines, an organism determined by the “new milieu”(Friedmann).

In short, as a result of its origins, the notion of milieu firstdeveloped and spread in a perfectly predictable manner; andthus we may say, applying to it the methodological approachthat it implies, that its intellectual power was a function of theintellectual milieu in which it was formed. The theory ofmilieu was the positive and apparently verifiable translation of Condillac’s fable of the statue: “To us it is a statue smelling arose, to itself it is smell of rose.”17 Similarly, in the physicalmilieu, the living simply is light and heat; it is carbon and oxygen,calcium, and heaviness. It responds by muscular contractions to

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sensory stimuli, from scratching to tickling, from leaking to burst-ing. But we may, and we must, ask where the living is to be found?We can clearly see individuals, but they are objects; we see ges-tures, but they are displacements; centers, but they are environ-ments; machine operators, but they are machines. The behavioralmilieu coincides with the geographic milieu, the geographicmilieu with the physical milieu.

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It was normal, in the strong sense of that word, for this method-ological norm to be both pushed to its limits and ultimatelyoverturned in geography. Geography deals with complexes,complexes of elements whose actions limit each other recipro-cally and for which the effects of causes in turn become causes,modifying the causes that brought them into being. For this rea-son, trade winds provide a prototypical example of a complex.Trade winds displace surface seawater warmed through con-tact with the air, deeper cold waters rise to the surface and coolthe atmosphere, the low temperatures lead to low pressures,which give rise to winds, and the cycle is closed and beginsagain. This is a type of complex that we might also observe inplant geography. Vegetation is spread out in natural groupswithin which different species limit each other reciprocallyand in which, as a result, each one contributes to creating anequilibrium for the others. The whole set of these plant speciesends up constituting its own milieu. In this way exchangesbetween plants and the atmosphere end up creating a sort ofscreen of water vapor around the plant kingdom that ends uplimiting the effects of radiation, and the cause leads to the effectthat it in turn attenuates, etc.18

The same approach should be applied to animals and toman, although we find that human response to the stimulus ofthe milieu is varied. Man can find several solutions to the sameproblem posed by the milieu. The milieu proposes withoutever imposing a solution. Of course the possibilities are notendless within a given state of civilization and culture. But thefact of seeing something as an obstacle at one time that later canbecome a tool is clearly tied to the idea, to the representation,that man (I am speaking of humanity as a whole, of course)makes of his own possibilities and needs. In short, it relies onwhat he sees as desirable, and that is something that cannot beseparated from the whole of his value system.19

In this way, we end up inverting the relationship betweenmilieu and living thing. At this point, to the extent that heexists in history, man becomes a creator of the geographicalconfiguration; he is a geographical factor. We may here simplyrecall that the work of Vidal-Lablache, Brunhes, Demangeon,

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 17

and Lucien Febvre and his school showed that man has no purephysical milieu. In a human milieu, man is obviously subjectto a determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial con-structions. The spirit of invention that brought them into exis-tence has been alienated from him. In the same line of thinking,the work of Friedmann shows how, in the new milieu thatmachines create for man, the same reversal has already occurred.Pushed to the extreme limits of its ambition, the psychotech-nique of engineers that grew out of Taylorist philosophy hassucceeded in locating an irreducible center of resistance, thepresence of man’s true originality in the form of his sense ofvalues. Man, even when subordinated to machines, cannotconceive of himself as a machine. His productive efficiencyincreases the more he is aware of his centrality in relation to themechanisms that serve him.

Well before this, the same reversal of the relationshipbetween organism and milieu had occurred in matters of ani-mal psychology and behavioral studies. Loeb led to Jennings,and Watson led to Kantor and Tolmann.

At this point, the influence of pragmatism is clear and wellestablished. If, in one sense, pragmatism served as an interme-diary between Darwinism and behaviorism by extending theidea of adaptation to a general theory of knowledge and, inanother sense, by putting the accent on the role of values in relation to the interests of action, Dewey was to lead behav-iorists to regard the connection between organic movementsand the organism itself as essential. The organism was consid-ered as a being on which not everything could beimposed, because its existence as an organism con-sists in presenting itself to things, according to certainorientations that are specific to it. First explored byKantor, Tolmann’s teleological behaviorism consists ofresearching and recognizing the meaning and inten-tion of animal movement. It seems essential to themovement of response to persist in a set of phases thatcan be mistakes or unfulfilled acts, up until the momentwhen the reaction puts an end to the stimulus andreestablishes a state of rest or leads to a new series ofactions that is totally different from the ones that wereclosed unto themselves.

Before him Jennings had shown, in his theory oftrial and error, contra Loeb, that the animal does notreact by the sum of molecular reactions to a stimulusthat can be broken down into units of stimulation, butrather that it reacts as a whole to total objects and thatthese reactions regulate the needs that command them.Naturally, one must recognize here the considerablecontribution of Gestalttheorie, especially the distinction

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between behavioral milieu and geographical milieu that weowe to Koffka.20

Finally, the organism-milieu relationship finds itselfreversed in von Uexküll’s studies of animal psychology andGoldstein’s studies of human pathology. Each of these illustratethe reversal with a clarity that comes from a completely philo-sophical approach to the problem. Uexküll and Goldstein agreeon this fundamental point: that to study a living thing underexperimentally constructed conditions is to create a milieu forit, to impose a milieu upon it. In fact, it is a fundamental char-acteristic of the living thing that it makes its own milieu; itbuilds one for itself. Of course, even from a materialist point ofview we can speak of the interaction between the living and the milieu, between the physicochemical system interspersedwithin a larger whole and its environment. But talk of interac-tion is not enough to offset the difference that exists between arelationship of a physical type and one of a biological type.

From the biological point of view, one must understand thatbetween organism and environment there is the same relation-ship that exists between the parts and the whole within theorganism itself. The individuality of the living does not cometo an end at its ectodermal boundaries, no more than it beginsat the level of the cell. The biological relationship between thebeing and its milieu is a functional one, and as a result itchanges as the variables successively exchange roles. The cellis a milieu for intracellular elements; it lives in an interiormilieu that is either on the scale of the organ or the organism,which organism itself lives in a milieu that is for it, in a sense,what the organism is for its component parts. We can thereforemove toward using a biological reasoning to evaluate biologicalproblems. A reading of Uexküll and Goldstein can contributea great deal to mapping out this reasoning.21

Let us take the terms Umwelt, Umgebung, and Welt. Uexkülldistinguishes between them with great care. Umwelt designatesthe behavioral milieu that is proper to a given organism;Umgebung is the simple geographical environment; and Weltis the scientific universe. For the living, the specific behavioralmilieu (Umwelt) is a set of stimuli that have the value and sig-nificance of signals. To act on a living thing, it is not enoughthat physical stimuli be produced; they must also be noticed.As a result, to the extent that a stimulus acts on the living, itpresupposes an orientation of its interest. The stimulus doesnot proceed from the object, but from this interest. It is neces-sary, in other words, for the stimulus to be effective, that it beanticipated by the subject’s attitude. If the living does not golooking for something, it gets nothing. A living thing is not amachine that responds by movement to stimuli, it is a machin-ist who responds to signals by operations. Naturally, this does

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 19

Neobursaridium.

not mean that one should call into question the fact that thereare reflexes whose mechanism is physicochemical. For the biol-ogist, the problem is elsewhere. The question is rather to befound in the fact that out of the exuberance of the physicalmilieu, as a producer of stimuli whose number is theoreticallyunlimited, the animal retains only a few signals (Merkmale). Itsbiorhythm orders the temporality of this Umwelt, just as itorders its space. Along with Buffon, Lamarck said: time andfavorable circumstances constitute the living little by little.Uexküll reverses the relationship and says: time and favorablecircumstances exist only in relation to a specific living thing.

Umwelt is therefore a voluntary sample drawn from theUmgebung, the geographical environment. But the environ-ment is precisely nothing other than man’s Umwelt, that is, theusual world of his practical perspective and experience. Likethis Umgebung, this geographical environment that is externalto the animal is, in a sense, centered, ordered, and oriented bya human subject (that is to say a creator of techniques and val-ues). Similarly, the animal’s Umwelt is nothing other than amilieu centered around the subject of life values that makes upthe essential part of what constitutes the living. At the root ofthis organization of the Umwelt we must conceive of a subjec-tivity that is analogous to the one we are bound to think of asbeing at the root of the human Umwelt. One of the most com-pelling examples cited by Uexküll is the Umwelt of the tick.

Ticks grow by imbibing the warm blood of mammals. Aftercoupling, the adult female climbs to the end of a tree branchand waits. It can wait eighteen years. At the Institute of Zoologyin Rostock, ticks have stayed alive, closed up, in a state of ina-nition, for eighteen years. When a mammal passes under thetree, under the tick’s hunting and trapping post, it lets itself fall.What guides it is the odor of rancid butter that emanates fromthe animal’s cutaneous glands. This is the only stimulus thatcan set off the falling motion. This is the first step. Once the tickhas fallen on the animal, it attaches itself to it. If the odor of ran-cid butter has been produced artificially, on a table, for exam-ple, the tick does not attach itself, but climbs back up to itsobservation post. The only reason it attaches to the animal is itsblood temperature. It attaches to the animal because of its senseof heat; and guided by its sense of touch, it looks preferably forareas of the skin that are hairless, it digs in just beyond thehead, and sucks the blood. It is only at the moment when themammal’s blood enters its stomach that the tick’s eggs (encap-sulated since the moment of coupling and able to remainencapsulated for eighteen years) open up, mature, and grow.The tick can live eighteen years to complete its reproductivefunction in a few hours. It should be noted that, for a consider-able amount of time, the tick can remain totally indifferent,

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insensitive to all stimuli coming from a milieu like the forest,and that the only stimulus capable of setting off its movement,to the exclusion of all others, is the odor of rancid butter.22

A confrontation with the work of Goldstein was inevitable,since his theory is based on a critique of the mechanical theoryof reflexes. The reflex is not an isolated or gratuitous reaction.The reaction is always a function of the opening of the sensesto stimuli and its orientation relative to them. This orientationdepends on the meaning of a situation as it is perceived in itsentirety. Separate stimuli may have meaning in the social sci-ences, but they mean nothing when it comes to the senses of aliving thing. An animal in an experimental setting is in anabnormal situation that is imposed upon it; it is neither neces-sary nor of its own choosing. An organism is therefore neverequal to the theoretical sum of its possibilities. We cannotunderstand its action without thinking of it in terms of a privi-leged form of behavior. “Privileged” does not mean objectivelysimpler in this case; it is rather the opposite. The animal finds iteasier to do what it favors: it follows its own norms of living.

The relationship established between the living and themilieu is like a debate (Auseinandersetzung) in which the liv-ing brings its own norms of appreciating the situation, where itis in command of the milieu and accommodates itself to it. Thisrelationship does not consist primarily, as one might think, ofa struggle or a confrontation. Those are things that characterizethe pathological state. A life that affirms itself in opposition isalready a life threatened. Movements involving strength, as forexample extensive muscular reactions, translate the domina-tion of the exterior onto the organism.23 A healthy life, a lifethat is confident in its existence and in its values, is a life thatextends itself yet that is also almost gentle in its flexibility. Thesituation of the living demanded by the milieu from the outsideis what Goldstein holds up as the prototype of a catastrophicsituation. This is the situation of the living in the laboratory.The relations between the living and the milieu as they arestudied experimentally and objectively are of all possible rela-tions those that have the least biological significance: they arepathological relations. Goldstein says that “the meaning of anorganism is its being”; we may say that the being of the organ-ism is its meaning. Of course, the physicochemical analysis ofthe living can and should be undertaken. It has a theoreticaland practical interest. But this constitutes a chapter of physics.Everything remains to be done in biology. Biology must there-fore first consider the living as a meaningful being, and its indi-viduality not as an object, but as a term within the order ofvalues. To live is to spread out; it is to organize a milieu startingfrom a central reference point that cannot itself be referred towithout losing its original meaning.

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 21

While the reversal of the organism-milieu relationship wasbeing completed in animal ethology and in behavioral studies,a revolution was occurring in the way that morphological char-acteristics were being used to explain the autonomy of the liv-ing relative to the milieu. I am alluding here to the now verywell known work of Bateson, Cuénot, Thomas Morgan, H.Müller, and their collaborators, who took up and extendedGregor Mendel’s research on hybridization and heredity. In theprocess of creating the science of genetics, these thinkers endedup claiming that in a given milieu the acquisition of the form,and therefore the function, of the living depends on its partic-ular hereditary potential and that the action of the milieu onphenotype leaves genotype unchanged. The genetic explana-tion of heredity and evolution (i.e., the theory of mutation) con-verged with Weissman’s theory. The precocious isolation of agerminating plasma in the course of ontogenesis would nullifythe influence of somatic modifications determined by themilieu on the evolution of the species. In his book La Vie créa-trice des Formes, Albert Brachet wrote that “the milieu is not,properly speaking, an agent of formation, but in fact of realiza-tion,” by invoking the multiformity of sea creatures within anidentical milieu in support of his argument.24 And Caulleryconcluded his study of The Present State of the Problem ofEvolution25 by recognizing that evolution depends much moreon the intrinsic properties of organisms than on the surround-ing milieu.26

Yet we know that the idea of the total autonomy of hereditarygenetic assortment did not go without criticism. At first criticsemphasized the fact that nucleoplasmatic disharmony tends tolimit the hereditary omnipotence of genes. In sexual reproduc-tion, if it is true that the two parents each provide half of thegenes, the mother provides cytoplasm for the egg. Given thatthe mixed offspring of two different species are not the same,depending on whether one or the other species is representedby the father or the mother, we are led to suppose that the powerof genes differs as a function of the cytoplasmic milieu. In addi-tion to this, H. Müller’s experiments (1927) provoking mutationsin Drosophila by the action of a milieu of penetrating radiation(X rays) seemed to shed some light on the external conditioningof an organic phenomenon, perhaps too easily underscoring thedistinction between organism and environment.

Finally, Lamarckism has become topical once again thanksto the ideological, as much as scientific, polemics around theindignant repudiation of genetic “pseudo-science” by theRussian biologists that Lysenko had brought back to the“healthy method” of Mitchourine (1855–1935). Experiments onthe vernalization of cultivated plants like wheat and rye ledLysenko to claim that hereditary modifications can be obtained

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Pennate diatoms.

and consolidated by variations in feeding, upkeep, and climaticconditions, leading to the dislocation or rupture of the heredi-tary constitution of the organism that geneticists had falselyimagined to be stable. To the extent that we can summarizecomplex experimental findings, it should be said that accord-ing to Lysenko, heredity is dependent on metabolism, and thelatter is dependent on the conditions of existence. Heredity isto be seen here as the assimilation of outside conditions by theliving over successive generations. Remarks of an ideologicalnature concerning these facts and this theory actually help clar-ify its meaning, regardless of their authors’ inability to accept,let alone tolerate, the counterexperiments and criticisms thatare the norm in matters of scientific discussion; all of whichthings lie, of course, outside of my realm of competence.27 Itseems that the technical, that is to say agronomic, aspect of theproblem is crucial. In justifying the spontaneous character ofmutations, Mendelian theories of heredity tend to moderatehuman, and specifically Soviet, ambitions to completely dom-inate nature and the possibility of intentionally altering livingspecies. Finally and above all, the recognition of the determin-ing influence of the milieu has a political and social impact inthat it authorizes man’s unlimited action upon himself throughthe medium of the milieu. It justifies hope in an experimentalrenewal of human nature. In this way, it appears, at first sight,to be progressive. Theory and praxis are indissociable, as isrequired by Marxist-Leninist dialectics. As a result, we can seehow genetics could be charged with all of the sins of racism and

slavery and how Mendel was presented asthe leading spokesman for a retrograde, cap-italist, and even idealist biology.

It is clear that the return to legitimacy oftheories of the heredity of acquired charac-teristics does not in itself authorize us tounreservedly qualify the recent Soviet bio-logical theories as Lamarckian. This isbecause the essence of Lamarck’s ideas, aswe have seen, consists in attributing theorganism’s adaptation to the milieu to itsown initiative, needs, and continuous reac-tions. The milieu provokes the organism to orient its own development. Biologicalresponse far outweighs physical stimulation.By rooting adaptive phenomena in necessity,which means both pain and impatience,Lamarck was focusing on the point wherelife coincides with its own meaning, wherethrough its sensory experience, the living sit-uates itself absolutely, for better or worse, in

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 23

existence: the indivisible totality of organism and milieu.With Lamarck, as is the case among the first theorists of

milieu, the notions of “circumstances” and “surroundings”have an altogether different meaning than they have in normallanguage. These words genuinely evoke a spherical, centereddisposition. The terms “influences” and “influential circum-stances,” used by Lamarck, take their meaning from astrologi-cal concepts. When Buffon, in La Dégénération des Animaux,speaks of the “tint” of the sky that takes man so long to per-ceive, he is using, no doubt unconsciously, a term borrowedfrom Paracelsus. Even the notion of “climate” in the eigh-teenth28 and early nineteenth centuries is a unified notion com-mon to geography, astronomy, and astrology. Climate is thechange in appearance of the sky, degree by degree, from equatorto pole; it is also the influence exercised by the sky on the earth.

I have already indicated that the biological notion of milieuat first brought together an anthropogeographic component anda mechanical one. The anthropogeographic component couldeven be considered to make up the whole idea, since itincluded in itself the astronomical component, the one Newtonhad converted to a theory of celestial mechanics. For in thebeginning geography was for the Greeks the projection of thesky onto the earth, the coming together of earth and sky, a cor-respondence that went in two directions at the same time: atopographical correspondence (geometry and cosmography)and a hierarchical correspondence (physics and astrology). Themapping of parts of the earth and the subordination of amapped area to the sky were understood in the astrobiologicalintuition of the cosmos. Greek geography had its own philoso-phy, that of the Stoics.29 The intellectual relations betweenPosidonius on one hand, and Hipparchus, Strabo, and Ptolemyon the other, are undeniable. It is the theory of universal sym-pathy, a vitalist intuition of universal determinism, that givesits meaning to the geographical theory of the milieu. This theorysupposes the assimilation of the totality of things to an organism,and the representation of this totality in the form of a sphere,centered on the situation of a privileged living thing: man. Thisbiocentric conception of the cosmos carried over from the MiddleAges to blossom in the Renaissance.

We know what happened to the notion of cosmos with theappearance of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, as well as howdramatic the conflict was between the organic conception ofthe world and the conception of a universe that was decenteredrelative to the center privileged in the classical world, the earthof the living and of man. With Galileo and also Descartes itbecame necessary to choose between two theories of milieu,that is, in the final analysis, theories of space: a centered space,defined as being where the mi-lieu is a center; a decentered

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space, defined as being where the mi-lieu is an intermediaryfield. Pascal’s famous text, Disproportion de l’Homme, showsthe ambiguity of the term well in a spirit that cannot or will notchoose between its existential security and the demands of sci-entific knowledge.30 Pascal knew that the cosmos had shatteredinto pieces, but the eternal silence of infinite spaces frightenedhim. Man was no longer at the center [au milieu] of the world,but he is a milieu (a milieu between two infinites, a milieubetween nothing and everything, a milieu between twoextremes); the milieu is the state in which nature placed us; weare floating on a vast milieu; man is in proportion with theparts of the world; he relates to all that he knows: “He needs aplace to contain him, time in which to endure, movement tolive, elements to make him up, heat and food to nourish him,air to breath . . . and in the end, everything is his ally.” We mayobserve that three meanings of the word “milieu” come intoplay here: a median situation, a fluid of suspension, a life envi-ronment. It was in developing this last meaning that Pascalrevealed his organic conception of the world, a return to sto-icism that went both beyond and against Descartes: “All thingsbeing caused and causal, helped and helping, mediated andimmediate, and all intertwined by a natural and insentient con-nection that links the most distant and different among them, Ihold that it is impossible to know the parts without knowingthe whole, any more than we can know the whole without par-ticularly knowing the parts.” And when he defines the universeas “an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere, thecircumference nowhere,” Pascal is paradoxically using animage borrowed from the theosophic tradition to try to recon-cile the new scientific conception that sees the universe as aninfinite and undifferentiated milieu and the ancient cosmolog-ical vision that sees the world as a finite whole connecting toits center. It has been established that the image used here byPascal is a permanent myth of mystic thought of neo-Platonicorigin in which an intuition of the spherical world centered inand by the living and the already heliocentric cosmology of thePythagoreans are reconciled.31

Before Newton, the symbolic representation of the potentialubiquitousness of a spreading action starting from a centralpoint described in the neo-Platonic cosmology of Jacob Boehmeand Henry More, “the Cambridge Platonist,” was universallyrecognized. Newtonian space and ether, the first as a means forthe omnipresence of God, the second as a medium and vehicleof forces, both retain, as we know, an absolute character thateighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars failed to remarkupon. Newtonian science, which was to anchor so manyempiricist and relativist professions of faith, is itself foundedon metaphysics. Empiricism masks its theological foundations.

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 25

And in this way the natural philosophy or the positivist andmechanistic conception of milieu has as its source, finds itselfanchored by in fact, the mystical intuition of a sphere of energyin which the central action is uniformly present and efficientat every point.32

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If today it seems normal to anyone trained in the mathematicaland physical disciplines that the objectivity of knowledgerequires a decentering of perspective, the moment also finallyseems to have arrived where, from the perspective of biology,according to the formulation of J. S. Haldane in The Philosophyof a Biologist, “it is physics that is not an exact science.” Indeed,as Claparède wrote, “What distinguishes the animal is the factthat he is a center relative to surrounding forces that are nolonger, relative to it, anything but signals or stimuli; a center,in other words an internally regulated system in which reac-tions are controlled by an internal cause: immediate neces-sity.”33 In this sense, the milieu on which the organism dependsis structured and organized by the organism itself. What themilieu gives to the living is a function of its demand. This iswhy within what appears to man to be a unique milieu, severalliving things draw their own specific and singular milieu. Forthat matter, as a living thing, man does not escape the generallaw of the living. The milieu that is proper to man is the worldof his perception, that is to say the field of his practical experi-ence in which his actions, oriented andregulated by values that are immanentto his tendencies, carve out certainobjects, situate them relative to eachother and all of them in relation to him-self. This occurs in such a way that theenvironment he is supposed to be react-ing to finds itself originally centered inand by him.

But man the scholar constructs a uni-verse of phenomena and laws that heholds up as absolute. The essentialfunction of science is to devalue thequalities of objects that make up themilieu proper, by offering itself as a general theory of the real, that is to saynonhuman, milieu. Sensory data are dis- qualified, quantified, and identified. Thatwhich is imperceptible is first placedunder suspicion, then exposed andavowed. Measurements are substituted

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for appreciations, laws for habits, causality for hierarchy, andthe objective for the subjective.

In fact, this universe of man the scholar, of which Einstein’sphysics is the ultimate representation (a universe in which fun-damental equations of intelligibility are the same regardless ofthe system of reference) because it maintains a direct, if negat-ing and reductive, relationship with the living man’s propermilieu, endows this milieu with a sort of privilege over themilieus that are proper to other living things. Living man takesfrom his relationship with man the scholar, in whose workordinary perceptive experience finds itself contradicted andcorrected, a sort of unconscious fatuousness that leads him toprefer his own milieu to that of other living things as having notonly a different value, but a higher degree of reality. In fact, as aproper milieu of behavior and life, the milieu of man’s sensoryand technical values does not in itself have more reality thanthe milieu proper to a wood louse or a grey mouse. The qualifi-cation of “real” can only be applied rigorously to an absoluteuniverse, to the universal milieu made up of elements andmovements authenticated by science, in which this recognitionis as such necessarily accompanied by the disqualification ofall subjective understandings of milieu as illusions or errors of life, including those of man.

The pretension of science to dissolve these centers of orga-nization, adaptation, and invention that are living things intothe anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical envi-ronment must be complete, that is to say that it must includethe living human himself. And as is well known, this projecthas not seemed too audacious to many thinkers. But we mustthen ask ourselves from a philosophical point of view if the ori-gins of science do not better reveal its meaning than the pre-tensions of a few scholars. For the birth, development, andprogress of science must be seen as a remarkably audaciousenterprise if we are rightfully to deny the innate genius ofhumanity, from the point of view of scientism and even mate-rialism. If we do not, it would be necessary to admit the absurdproposition according to which reality contains the science ofreality within itself a priori. And we would then have to askwhat need that has its origins in reality is truly being served bythe ambition to scientifically determine that same reality.

But if science is the work of a humanity that is rooted in lifebefore being enlightened by knowledge, if it is a fact in theworld while also being a vision of the world, then it perpetu-ates a permanent and necessary relationship with perception.And therefore man’s proper milieu is not situated in the uni-versal milieu like a thing contained within its container. A cen-ter does not dissolve into its environment. A living thing doesnot reduce itself to an intersection of influences. These ideas

Canguilhem | The Living and Its Milieu 27

Amoeba proteus.

point to the inadequacy of any biology that would eliminateany consideration of meaning from its domain out of an uttersubmissiveness to the spirit of the physicochemical sciences.A meaning, from the biological and psychological point ofview, is an appreciation of values in relation to a need. And aneed is, for whoever feels it and lives it, an irreducible systemof reference, and for that reason it is absolute.

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Notes“Le Vivant et son milieu” was originally presented as a lecture at the Collègephilosophique in Paris in 1946–47 and was subsequently published in LaConaissance de la vie in 1952. It is translated and published here with per-mission from Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris.

1. I have chosen to translate the author’s le vivant as “the living,” despiteits apparent awkwardness. The French original is similar in this regard, andother formulations such as “living thing,” “life-form,” and “organism” placetoo much emphasis on the definite boundary between these entities and theirsurrounding environment, a distinction that the author clearly wishes tointerrogate. I have also kept the term milieu, though its English usage is morelimited than in French. I have used brackets in the text to note those placeswhere the French use of milieu required a different translation. Along withthe editors, I would like to acknowledge the numerous invaluable suggestionsreceived from Warwick Anderson, in particular with regard to scientific ter-minology. Trans.

2. On all these points, see Léon Bloch, Les Origines de la Théorie de l’etheret la physique de Newton (1908).

3. Léon Brunschvicg, Les Etapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris:Alcan, 1912), 508.

4. See Georges Canguilhem, “La Théorie Cellulaire,” in La Connaissancede la Vie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992), 54.

5. See Esprit des Lois, books XIV–XIX, on the relationship between lawsand climate.

6. The chapter on “the degeneration of animals” in the Histoire naturelledes animaux (Paris, 1786–1791) examines the effects of habitat and food onthe animal organism.

7. I have translated these and other quotations myself, unless otherwiseindicated. The translation of Comte by Harriet Martineau is extremely loose:see The Positivist Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton,2 vols., 1853), 364. Trans.

8. Tolman’s behavioral psychology also conceives of the relationshipbetween organism and milieu in the form of the relation of a function to avariable. Compare André Tilquin, Le Behaviorisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 439.

9. Louis Roule, La Vie des Rivières (Paris: Stock, 1930), 61.10. A striking summary of this thesis can be found in Houssay’s Force et

Cause (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), in which the author describes “certain typesof units that we call living things, that we set apart as if they had an inde-pendent and separate existence, when in fact they have no isolated reality andthey cannot be, but for an absolute and permanent linkage with the surround-ing milieu in which they are but a simple local and momentary concentration.”

11. These comments especially concern animals. Lamarck is more reservedon the subject of plants.

12. “Several times each month [décade] I frequented M. de Lamarck’sNatural History course at the Jardin des Plantes. . . . At that time, M. deLamarck was perhaps the last representative of that great school of physicistsand general observers who had reigned from Thales and Democritus toBuffon. . . . He presented his ideas quite nakedly, with great simplicity andmuch sadness. He constructed a world with the fewest possible elements, thelowest number of crises and the greatest possible duration. A long, blindpatience, that was his idea of the genius of the Universe. . . . In the same way,in the organic order of things, once he recognized this mysterious power oflife, as small and elementary as it is, Lamarck imagined it developing, buildingitself up over time, little by little; deaf necessity, habit alone, gave birth to

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organs within a diverse range of milieux, in opposition to the relentlesspower of nature that set out to destroy them; for M. de Lamarck distinguishedbetween nature and life. In his eyes, nature was stone and ash, a granite tomb,death. Life came into play only as a strange and singularly productive acci-dent, a prolonged struggle with here or there more or less balance or success,but always defeated in the end; cold motionlessness reigned afterwards asbefore.” Sainte-Beuve, Volupté.

13. Here I have translated Canguilhem’s version of Darwin directly. Theoriginal passage is as follows: “Naturalists continually refer to external con-ditions, such as climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. Inone limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true.” Charles Darwin,On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1964), 3. Trans.

14. Marcel Prenant, Darwin (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales,1938), 145–49.

15. See Lucien Febvre’s La Terre et l’Evolution humaine for a historicaldescription of the evolution of the idea and a critique of its exaggerations.

16. André Tilquin, Le Behaviorisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1942), 34–35. It is ofcourse from this well-documented work that I have borrowed much of theinformation that follows.

17. Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London:Favil Press, 1930), 3.

18. Compare Henri Baulig, “La Géographie est-elle une science?” Annalesde Géographie 57 (January–March 1948); and “Causalité et Finalité enGéomorphologie,” Geografiska Annaler (winter 1949): 1–2.

19. A fascinating consideration of this inversion of perspective in humangeography is found in an article by L. Poirier, “L’Evolution de la Géographiehumaine,” which appeared in Critique 8–9 (January–February 1947).

20. On this point, compare Paul Gillaume, Psychologie de la Forme (Paris:Flammarion, 1937), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Structure du Comportement(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), translated by Alden L. Fisheras Structure of Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

21. Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 2d ed. (Berlin,1921); and Theoretische Biologie, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1928); von Uexküll andGeorg Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen(Berlin, 1934). Goldstein, however, accepts von Uexküll’s views only withimportant reservations. By not differentiating the living from its environ-ment, any research on their relationship becomes, in a sense, impossible. Inthis perspective, determinism disappears in favor of reciprocal penetration,and taking into consideration the whole effectively stifles knowledge. Forknowledge to remain possible, it is necessary that a nonconventional centerfrom which a range of relations can emerge appears within this organism-environment totality. Compare La Structure de l’Organisme, 75–76, a critiqueof any exclusively environmental theory.

22. According to von Uexküll, the example of the tick is taken up by Louis Bounoure in his book L’Autonomie de l’Etre vivant (Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1949), 143.

23. For a discussion of this argument of Goldstein’s, compare the conclusionof François Dagognet’s Philosophie biologique (Paris: Presses Universitairesde France, 1955).

24. Albert Brachet, La Vie créatrice des Formes (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 171.25. Maurice Caullery, The Present State of the Problem of Evolution

(Washington, 1917).26. One can find an anticipation of these ideas in Nietzsche’s Will to Power.

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To be honest, the criticism that Nietzsche addresses to Darwin would be moreappropriately applied to the Neo-Lamarckians.

27. For an examination of the subject, see “Une Discussion scientifique enU.R.S.S.,” Europe 33–34 (1948); and also Claude-Charles Mathon, “QuelquesAspects du Mitchourinisme,” etc., in Revue générale des Sciences pures etappliquées 3–4 (1951). On the ideological dimensions of the controversy,compare Julian Huxley. Jean Rostand has written a good historical and critical study on the question, “L’Offensive des Mitchouriniens contre laGénétique mendelienne,” in Les Grands Courants de la Biologie (Paris:Gallimard, 1951), which is followed by a bibliography. Finally, see the workof Hovasse, Adaptation et Evolution (Hermann, 1951).

28. See the article on “climate” in the Encyclopédie.29. See the excellent abridged history of Greek geography in Theodor

Breiter’s introduction to volume 2 (commentaries) of the Astronomica byManilus (Leipzig, 1908).

30. Pascal’s Pensées, trans. Martin Turnell (New York: Harper and Brothers,1962), 215–20.

31. Dietrich Mahnke, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt (Niemeyer:Halle, 1937); the author devotes several very interesting pages to the usageand meaning of the expression in Leibniz and Pascal. According to Havet,Pascal supposedly borrowed the expression from Mademoiselle de Gournay(see the 1595 preface to Montaigne’s Essays) or from Rabelais (Tiers livre,chapter 13).

32. Compare Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, 378–379,504; and “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis,” Archives interna-tionales d’Histoire de Sciences 11 (1950).

33. Preface to F. J. J. Buytendijk’s Psychologie des Animaux (Paris: Payot,1928).

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