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The relationship between machine and organism has generally been studied in only one way. Philosophers and mechanistic biologists approached the machine as a set of data. Canguilhem: machines can be understood by virtue of certain biological principles.
The relationship between machine and organism has generally been studied in only one way. Philosophers and mechanistic biologists approached the machine as a set of data. Canguilhem: machines can be understood by virtue of certain biological principles.
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The relationship between machine and organism has generally been studied in only one way. Philosophers and mechanistic biologists approached the machine as a set of data. Canguilhem: machines can be understood by virtue of certain biological principles.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Scarica in formato PDF, TXT o leggi online su Scribd
zone 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 ;' "' 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 l ~ " .. ~ . , i ! i I I I ! ; , I '. zone 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, , i " zone 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 49 .1 ... ~ ...... 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 50 ',' -. ." I ' I . zone 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 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 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? 51 ~ .-- 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 I I i zone 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 machine 24 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 53 :" 1 \ ' " .j- ' I I ,
"' I
J l i ! 1 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. 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 S4 " zone 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 Leons 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 55 Mach i ne 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 move- ment 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? ,J i . zone 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 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 57 r./". " .. Ii ,I I I j
! i I' I I i Machi ne and Organism 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 calcu- lated; 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 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 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 zone 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 S9 1 1 "j i
! J 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 60 J 1 I 1 j 1 i j ~ , zone 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 Germans 43 - 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 61 1: Machi ne and Organi sm in his book MiJieu et techniques. Leroi-Gourhan attempts to explain the phe- nomenon 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 62 r zone 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- l o g i ~ a l , 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- enon 54 and no longer simply as an intellectual operation to be carried out by I r I I 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. Inthe 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 6S 'I I l! Machine and Organism 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 ,. ?- j " zone 27. Claude Bernard, Leons 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.
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, 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 [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. 68 " zone 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 Milieu GEORGES CANGU I LH EM TRANSLATED BY JOHN SAVAGE The notion of milieu is in the process of becoming a universal and 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 until now, the historical stages of the formation of the concept, its diverse uses, as well as the successive recongurations of the relationships in which it takes part, whether in geography, biol- ogy, psychology, technology, or social and economic history, all make it rather difcult to make out a coherent whole. For this reason philosophy must, here, initiate a synoptic study of the meaning and value of the concept. By initiate I do not simply mean the pretense of an initiative that would consist in taking a series of scientific investigations for reality and then con- fronting expectations with results. Rather, it is a question of using several approaches and engaging them in a critical con- frontation with each other to locate, if possible, their common point of departure and to explore its potential richness for a philosophy of nature that focuses on the problem of individu- ality. It is therefore appropriate to examine the simultaneous and successive elements of the notion of milieu each in turn, the various usages of this notion from 1800 to the present, the many inversions of the relationship between organism and milieu, and nally 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 of the eighteenth century. The mechanical idea, but not the term, appears with Newton, and the word milieu is present in dAlembert and Diderots Encyclopedia with its mechanical meaning, in the article of the same name. It is introduced to biology by Lamarck, who was himself inspired by Buffon, though he never used the term other than in the plural. De Blainville seals this usage. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1831 and Comte in 1838 use the term in the singular, in an abstract sense. Balzac opens the gates to literature in 1842, in the preface of the Comdie Humaine, and it is Taine who rst uses it as one of the three analytical principles used to explain history, 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, Le Dantec, Houssay, Costantin, Gaston Bonnier, and Roule, use this term. They get the idea, in a sense, from Lamarck, but the Grey Room 03, Spring 2001, pp. 731. 2001 Grey Room, I nc. and Massachusetts I nstitute 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 uid. The model for this, if not the sole archetype in Newtons physics, was ether. In Newtons day, the problem facing mechanics was that of the action of distinct physical bodies at a distance. This was the fundamental problem of the physics of central forces. It was a problem that had not existed for Descartes. For him, there was only one mode of physical action, impact, in only one possible physical situation, that of contact. This is why we can say that in Cartesian physics the notion of milieu has no place. Subtle matter is not in any way a milieu. But it was difcult to extend the 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 see that Newton was led to pose the problem of the means of the action. Luminous ether was for him the uid that served as the vehicle of action at a distance. This explains the passage from the notion of uid as a vehicle to its designation as a medium [milieu]. The uid is the intermediary between two bodies; it is their milieu; and to the extent that it penetrates these bodies, they are situated within it. According to Newton and to the physics of central forces, it is only because there are centers of force that we can speak of environment, that we can speak of a milieu. The notion of milieu is a fundamentally relative notion. To the extent that we consider separately the body on which the action, transmitted through the medium, is exercised, we may forget that the milieu is a between two centers and remember only its function of centripetal transmission, and one might say its 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 importing the term from physics to biology. Ether helped him not only resolve 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, explain muscular reactions. In his Optics, Newton considered ether to be continuous with air, something found in the eye, in the nerves, even in muscles. It was therefore the action of a milieu that ensured the dependent connection between the spark of the perceived luminous source and the movement of muscles by which man reacts to this sensation. This, it would seem, was the rst example of an explanation of an organic reaction by the action of a milieu, that is, of a uid strictly dened by physical properties. 2 Indeed, the article in the Encyclopedia cited above confirmed this way of seeing things. All of the examples of milieus given in the article were drawn from Newtons physics. 8 Grey Room 03 And it is in a purely mechanical sense that one says that water is a milieu for the sh 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 this he specifically means fluids like water, air, and light. When Lamarck wants to designate the whole set of outside actions that are exercised on a living thing, in other words what we call today the milieu, he never says milieu but always influ- ential circumstances. As a result, circumstance is a genus within which climate, place, and milieu are species. And this is why Lon Brunschvicg, in Les Etapes de la philosophie mathmatique, wrote that Lamarck borrowed from Newton the physicomathematical model of explaining the living through a system of connections with its environment. 3 The relationship between Lamarck and Newton is intellectually direct and his- torically indirect, as they are linked through Buffon. We can, for example, recall that Lamarck was Buffons pupil and his sons tutor. Buffon, in fact, combines two influences in his conception of the relationship between organism and milieu. The first is precisely Newtons cosmology, of which Buffon was a lifelong admirer. 4 The second influence is the tradition of anthropo- geography, which had been kept alive in France by Montesquieu before him, 5 following Bodin, Machiavelli, and Arbuthnot. The Hippocratic 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 his principles of animal ethology, to the extent that animal mores are of a distinct and specic character and that these mores can be explained by the same method that allows geographers to explain the diversity of the earths men, races, and peoples. 6 Therefore, as Lamarcks teacher and precursor in his theory of milieu, Buffon is positioned at the convergence of the theorys two components, the mechanical component and the anthro- pogeographic one. At this point, we are faced with a problem of epistemology and historical psychology of knowledge that is far more involved than the specific example that raised it. Shouldnt the fact that two or more guiding ideas come together at 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 and very existence is forgotten when one considers the different pieces separately? This is the problem we will come back to in the end. The Newtonian origins of the notion of milieu are enough to account for the initial mechanical meaning of this notion and the use that was first made of it. The origin determines the meaning, and the meaning determines the usage. This is so true Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 9 that in 1838, in proposing a general biological theory of the milieu in the fortieth lesson of his Cours de Philosophie posi- tive, Auguste Comte believed that he was using milieu as a neologism and claimed the credit for introducing it as a uni- versal and abstract explanatory concept in biology. And Comte says that from this point on he would understand the term to mean not only the uid in which a body is immersed (which clearly conrms the mechanical origins of the notion), but the sum total of outside circumstances necessary to the existence of each organism. 7 However, with Comte (who has a perfectly clear 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 use will 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 was on 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 the adapted organism and the favorable milieu as a conict of forces in which action is constituted by function. He posits that the ambient system cannot modify the organism without the latter in turn exercising a corresponding influence. But, except in the case of the human species, Auguste Comte believes 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 the intermediary of collective action humanity modies its milieu. However, for the living in general, Comte refuses to consider this action of the organ- ism on the milieu seriously, reckoning that it is simply negligible. This is because he is looking for a very explicit guarantee of a dialectical connection, of a reciprocal rela- tionship between milieu and organism, that would follow the Newtonian principle of action and reaction. It is in fact clear, from a mechanical point of view, that the action of the living on the milieu is practically negli- gible. And Comte ends up posing the biolog- ical problem of the relationship between organism and milieu as a mathematical one: In a given milieu, given the organ, nd the function, and vice versa. The connection of organism and milieu is therefore that of a function to a set of variables, an equal rela- tionship that allows us to determine the function 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 be the function is conducted by Comte in lesson 43 of the Cours de Philosophie positive. These variables are weight, air and water pressure, movement, heat, electricity, and chemical ele- ments, all factors capable of being studied experimentally and measured quantitatively. The quality of an organism nds itself reduced to a set of quantities, despite the skepticism Comte professes elsewhere toward the practice of treating biological problems mathematically, a skepticism that, as we know, comes to him from Bichat. In short, even a summary history of the importation of the term milieu to biology in the rst 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 more exible usage appears with Comte, it immediately succumbs to the prestige of mechanics, an exact science that bases predic- tions on calculations. The theory of milieu appears clearly to Comte as a variant of the fundamental project that the Cours de Philosophie positive seeks to fulll: the world rst, then man; to go from the world to man. If the idea of the subordination of the mechanical to the vital is assumed, as Le Systme de Politique positive and La Synthse subjective later suggest, it is never- theless formally rejected. But there is still another lesson to get out of the use of the term milieu that is, beyond any question, denitively conse- crated by Comte. The equivalent of what this term designates would be circumstances in the work of Lamarck. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his report to the Academy of Sciences in 1831, spoke of surroundings. These terms of circum- stance and surroundings come from a certain intuition of a centered formation. In the success of the term milieu, the metaphor of the line or the indenitely extendable plane, being both continuous and homogeneous, with no denite shape or privileged position, wins out over the metaphor of the sphere or circle, shapes that are still defined qualitatively and, we might 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, the here refers to its beyond, and so forth always ad innitum. The milieu is really a pure system of relationships without supports. From this point we may understand the prestige of the notion of milieu for analytical scientific thought. The milieu becomes 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 borrow from Lamarckif not the term in the absolute sense and in the Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 11 Cyclidium. singular, at least the ideathey 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 to recall Costantins experiments on the shapes of sagittate leaves and Houssays experiments on the shape, ns, and metamerism of sh. In a little book entitled La Vie des Rivires, Louis Roule was capable of writing, Fish dont lead their lives themselves, it is the river that makes them lead it, they are persons without will. 9 We have here an example of what a strictly mechanistic use of the notion of milieu must lead to. 10 We have returned to the idea of animal-machines. In the end, Descartes was saying the same thing when he said of animals, It is nature that acts in them through the medium of their organs. | | | | | Starting in 1859, in other words with the publication of Darwins Origin of Species, the problem of the relationship between organism and milieu is dominated by the polemical opposition between Lamarckians and Darwinians. It seems necessary to recall the originality of these respective starting points to understand 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 a direct 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 life values, that the milieu dominates and commands the evolution of living things. Changes in circumstance bring about changes in needs; changes in needs bring about changes in actions. As long as these actions last, the use or nonuse of certain organs causes them to strengthen or atrophy, and these morphological losses and gains acquired by individual habit are preserved by the mechanism of heredity whenever the new morphological character is common to the two parents. According to Lamarck, the situation of the living in the milieu is a situation that we can call both distressful and dis- tressed. The life and the milieu that is unaware of it are two asynchronous series of events. The change of circumstances comes rst, but it is the living itself that, in the end, initiates the effort to not be let go by its milieu. Adaptation is a repeated effort on the part of life to continue to stick to an indifferent milieu. Adaptation as the result of an effort is therefore neither harmonious nor providential; it is earned and never guaran- teed. Lamarckism is not mechanism, and it would be inexact to call it nalism. In reality, it is a naked vitalism. There is an orig- inality of life that the milieu cannot render, that it does not know. The milieu is in this case really external in the proper 12 Grey Room 03 sense of the word. It is foreign; it does nothing for life. This is truly vitalism because it depends on this dichotomy. Life, said Bichat, is the collection of functions that resist death. In Lamarcks conception, life resists only by transforming in order to outlive itself. To my knowledge, no portrait of Lamarck, no summary of his doctrine, is better than the one given by Sainte- Beuve in his novel Volupt. 12 Here we can see how much dis- tance lies between Lamarckian vitalism and the mechanicism of the 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. In the introduction to Origin of Species, he writes, Naturalists are always referring to external conditions like climate and food as the only possible cause of variations; they are only right in a very narrow sense. 13 It seems that Darwin later regretted having 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 selected texts of Darwin, Marcel Prenant published a certain number of particularly interesting passages. 14 Darwin was looking for the appearance of new forms in the interplay of two mechanisms: a mechanism of production of differences that is variation, and a 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 Darwins eyes, is a relationship between living things and other living things. It trumps the relationship between living and milieu, conceived of as a collection of physical forces. The primary milieu an organism lives in is the set of living things around it that are enemies or allies, prey or predators. Among the living, relationships of use, destruction, and defense are established. In this test of strength, accidental variations of morphology play out as advantages or disadvantages. In fact, variation, that is to say the appearance of slight morphological differences by which a descendant does not look exactly like his ancestors, emerges from a complex process: the use or nonuse of organs (the Lamarckian factor concerns only adults), correlations or compensations of growth (for the young), or even the 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 only sometimes, comes from the milieu. According to whether we emphasize or play down this action, whether we limit our- selves to his classic works or on the contrary to the whole of his thought in the way it is revealed by his correspondence, we get a slightly different idea of Darwins thought. At any rate, for Darwin, to live is to submit individual difference to the judgment of all Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 13 of the living. This judgment has only two outcomes: either death or ones recruitment in turn, for a time, to the jury. But as long 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 thread that ties the formation of living things to the physicochemical milieu seems quite tenuous. And the day a new explanation of the evolution of the species, mutationism, was combined with an explanation that suddenly saw the appearance of specific variations as hereditary (an explanation that Darwin was aware of 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 by their nonpremeditated adaptation to new conditions of exis- tence, with monstrosity becoming the rule and uniqueness a eeting banality. In the polemic that pitted Lamarckians against Darwinians, it is useful to note that the arguments and objections came under two categories and had two sets of implications. Finalism was denounced and mechanicism celebrated, rst on one side, then on the other. This is a clear sign that the issue was poorly framed. Darwin, we can say, uses the language rather than the substance of finalism (he has been sufficiently reproached for using the term selection). With Lamarck, there is less finalism than vitalism. Both of these men were true biologists, who take life as 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. Lamarck thinks of life in terms of duration, and Darwin more according to interdependence. One life-form implies a plurality of other forms with which it is in contact. The synoptic vision that makes up the core of Darwins genius underscores Lamarcks weaknesses. 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 a biogeographical milieu. | | | | | At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two names sum up the emergence of geography as a science newly cognizant of both its status and its method: Ritter and Humboldt. In 1817, Carl Ritter published his Geographie gnrale com- pare ou Science de la Terre dans ses rapports avec la nature et lhistoire de lhomme. Starting in 1845, over the course of ten years Alexander von Humboldt published a book whose spirit is precisely captured in the title Kosmos. These two authors brought together the traditions of Greek geography, that is, of Aristotle and Strabos science of the human ecumene, and the 14 Grey Room 03 Lacrymaria. science of the coordination of human space in relation to celes- tial congurations and movements, that is, the mathematical geography whose founders we consider to be Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy. According to Ritter, human history is unintelligible without understanding the connection of humanity to the land and to the whole earth. The terrestrial globe, considered as a whole, is the stable support for the vicissitudes of history. As a result, terres- trial space and its conguration are the object not only of geo- metric or geological knowledge, but also sociology and biology. Humboldt was a naturalist and voyager who traveled several times over what one could travel of the world of his time and who applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric, and other 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 zoological geography. Kosmos is a synthesis of learning that focuses on life on earth and the relations between life and physical milieu. This synthesis is not an attempt to be encyclopedic, but is rather a step toward an intuition of the universe. It begins with a his- tory of Weltanschauung through a history of the cosmos whose equivalent 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 the category of totality to their object: the relationship between his- torical man and milieu. Their object is all of humanity over the whole world. As a result of their work, the idea of a historical relationship determined by environment was consolidated in geography, leading rst to Ratzel and anthropogeography in Germany, then to geopolitics, and spreading to history through Michelet. One has only to recall Le Tableau de la France. 15 And finally Taine, as I have already mentioned, contributes to the spread of the idea in all elds [milieux], including the literary. One can summarize the spirit of this theory of the relationship between man and his geographic milieu by saying that doing history consists of reading a map, if we understand by map the congu- 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 from the spirit of the founders) is coupled with a Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 15 parallel, if not exactly contemporaneous, methodology in the area of animal ethology. A mechanistic explanation of the organisms movement within the milieu succeeds the mechanistic inter- pretation of the development of organic forms. Let us simply recall the work of Jacques Loeb and that of Watson. Generalizing the conclusions of his studies of phototropism in animals, Loeb considers all movement of the organism in the milieu as a movement that is forced upon the organism by the milieu. The reex, considered the elementary response of a part of the body to an elementary physical stimulus, is the simple mechanism whose constitution allows us to explain all behavior of the living. There is no question that such exorbitant Cartesianism lies, along with Darwinism, at the origin of the postulates of behaviorist psychology. 16 Watson assigned the analytical study of the conditions of adaptation 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). The determinism of the relationship between excitation and response is physical. The biology of behavior is reduced to neu- rology, and the latter is reduced to an energetics. Watsons ideas led him from a conception in which he simply neglected con- sciousness because he saw it as unuseful, to a conception in which he rejected it as outright illusory. The milieu nds itself invested with all powers with respect to individuals; its power dominates and even does away with the inuence of heredity and genetic makeup. Once given a milieu, the organism itself gives nothing that, in reality, it doesnt receive. The situation of the living, its being in the world, is thus its condition, or more precisely its conditioning. Albert Weiss wished to construct biology as a deductive physics, and he proposed an electronic theory of behavior. It was left to psychotechnicians, who extended Taylorist tech- niques of time and motion studies by means of the analysis of human reactions, to perfect the work of behavioral psychology and to ingeniously constitute man as a machine reacting to other machines, an organism determined by the new milieu (Friedmann). In short, as a result of its origins, the notion of milieu rst developed and spread in a perfectly predictable manner; and thus we may say, applying to it the methodological approach that it implies, that its intellectual power was a function of the intellectual milieu in which it was formed. The theory of milieu was the positive and apparently verifiable translation of Condillacs fable of the statue: To us it is a statue smelling a rose, to itself it is smell of rose. 17 Similarly, in the physical milieu, the living simply is light and heat; it is carbon and oxygen, calcium, and heaviness. It responds by muscular contractions to 16 Grey Room 03 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 behavioral milieu coincides with the geographic milieu, the geographic milieu with the physical milieu. | | | | | It was normal, in the strong sense of that word, for this method- ological norm to be both pushed to its limits and ultimately overturned 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 cool the atmosphere, the low temperatures lead to low pressures, which give rise to winds, and the cycle is closed and begins again. This is a type of complex that we might also observe in plant geography. Vegetation is spread out in natural groups within which different species limit each other reciprocally and in which, as a result, each one contributes to creating an equilibrium for the others. The whole set of these plant species ends up constituting its own milieu. In this way exchanges between plants and the atmosphere end up creating a sort of screen of water vapor around the plant kingdom that ends up limiting the effects of radiation, and the cause leads to the effect that it in turn attenuates, etc. 18 The same approach should be applied to animals and to man, although we nd that human response to the stimulus of the milieu is varied. Man can nd several solutions to the same problem posed by the milieu. The milieu proposes without ever imposing a solution. Of course the possibilities are not endless within a given state of civilization and culture. But the fact of seeing something as an obstacle at one time that later can become 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 on what he sees as desirable, and that is something that cannot be separated from the whole of his value system. 19 In this way, we end up inverting the relationship between milieu and living thing. At this point, to the extent that he exists in history, man becomes a creator of the geographical conguration; he is a geographical factor. We may here simply recall that the work of Vidal-Lablache, Brunhes, Demangeon, Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 17 and Lucien Febvre and his school showed that man has no pure physical milieu. In a human milieu, man is obviously subject to 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 that machines 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 has succeeded in locating an irreducible center of resistance, the presence of mans true originality in the form of his sense of values. Man, even when subordinated to machines, cannot conceive of himself as a machine. His productive efficiency increases the more he is aware of his centrality in relation to the mechanisms that serve him. Well before this, the same reversal of the relationship between 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 inuence of pragmatism is clear and well established. If, in one sense, pragmatism served as an interme- diary between Darwinism and behaviorism by extending the idea of adaptation to a general theory of knowledge and, in another 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 movements and the organism itself as essential. The organism was consid- ered as a being on which not everything could be imposed, because its existence as an organism con- sists in presenting itself to things, according to certain orientations that are specific to it. First explored by Kantor, Tolmanns teleological behaviorism consists of researching and recognizing the meaning and inten- tion of animal movement. It seems essential to the movement of response to persist in a set of phases that can be mistakes or unfullled acts, up until the moment when the reaction puts an end to the stimulus and reestablishes a state of rest or leads to a new series of actions that is totally different from the ones that were closed unto themselves. Before him Jennings had shown, in his theory of trial and error, contra Loeb, that the animal does not react by the sum of molecular reactions to a stimulus that can be broken down into units of stimulation, but rather that it reacts as a whole to total objects and that these reactions regulate the needs that command them. Naturally, one must recognize here the considerable contribution of Gestalttheorie, especially the distinction 18 Grey Room 03 between behavioral milieu and geographical milieu that we owe to Koffka. 20 Finally, the organism-milieu relationship finds itself reversed in von Uexklls studies of animal psychology and Goldsteins studies of human pathology. Each of these illustrate the reversal with a clarity that comes from a completely philo- sophical approach to the problem. Uexkll and Goldstein agree on this fundamental point: that to study a living thing under experimentally constructed conditions is to create a milieu for it, to impose a milieu upon it. In fact, it is a fundamental char- acteristic of the living thing that it makes its own milieu; it builds one for itself. Of course, even from a materialist point of view we can speak of the interaction between the living and the milieu, between the physicochemical system interspersed within a larger whole and its environment. But talk of interac- tion is not enough to offset the difference that exists between a relationship of a physical type and one of a biological type. From the biological point of view, one must understand that between organism and environment there is the same relation- ship that exists between the parts and the whole within the organism itself. The individuality of the living does not come to an end at its ectodermal boundaries, no more than it begins at the level of the cell. The biological relationship between the being and its milieu is a functional one, and as a result it changes as the variables successively exchange roles. The cell is a milieu for intracellular elements; it lives in an interior milieu 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 therefore move toward using a biological reasoning to evaluate biological problems. A reading of Uexkll and Goldstein can contribute a great deal to mapping out this reasoning. 21 Let us take the terms Umwelt, Umgebung, and Welt. Uexkll distinguishes between them with great care. Umwelt designates the behavioral milieu that is proper to a given organism; Umgebung is the simple geographical environment; and Welt is the scientic universe. For the living, the specic behavioral milieu (Umwelt) is a set of stimuli that have the value and sig- nicance of signals. To act on a living thing, it is not enough that physical stimuli be produced; they must also be noticed. As a result, to the extent that a stimulus acts on the living, it presupposes an orientation of its interest. The stimulus does not proceed from the object, but from this interest. It is neces- sary, in other words, for the stimulus to be effective, that it be anticipated by the subjects attitude. If the living does not go looking for something, it gets nothing. A living thing is not a machine that responds by movement to stimuli, it is a machin- ist who responds to signals by operations. Naturally, this does Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 19 Neobursaridium. not mean that one should call into question the fact that there are reexes whose mechanism is physicochemical. For the biol- ogist, the problem is elsewhere. The question is rather to be found in the fact that out of the exuberance of the physical milieu, as a producer of stimuli whose number is theoretically unlimited, the animal retains only a few signals (Merkmale). Its biorhythm orders the temporality of this Umwelt, just as it orders its space. Along with Buffon, Lamarck said: time and favorable circumstances constitute the living little by little. Uexkll reverses the relationship and says: time and favorable circumstances exist only in relation to a specic living thing. Umwelt is therefore a voluntary sample drawn from the Umgebung, the geographical environment. But the environ- ment is precisely nothing other than mans Umwelt, that is, the usual world of his practical perspective and experience. Like this Umgebung, this geographical environment that is external to the animal is, in a sense, centered, ordered, and oriented by a human subject (that is to say a creator of techniques and val- ues). Similarly, the animals Umwelt is nothing other than a milieu centered around the subject of life values that makes up the essential part of what constitutes the living. At the root of this organization of the Umwelt we must conceive of a subjec- tivity that is analogous to the one we are bound to think of as being at the root of the human Umwelt. One of the most com- pelling examples cited by Uexkll is the Umwelt of the tick. Ticks grow by imbibing the warm blood of mammals. After coupling, the adult female climbs to the end of a tree branch and waits. It can wait eighteen years. At the Institute of Zoology in Rostock, ticks have stayed alive, closed up, in a state of ina- nition, for eighteen years. When a mammal passes under the tree, under the ticks hunting and trapping post, it lets itself fall. What guides it is the odor of rancid butter that emanates from the animals cutaneous glands. This is the only stimulus that can set off the falling motion. This is the rst step. Once the tick has fallen on the animal, it attaches itself to it. If the odor of ran- cid butter has been produced articially, on a table, for exam- ple, the tick does not attach itself, but climbs back up to its observation post. The only reason it attaches to the animal is its blood temperature. It attaches to the animal because of its sense of heat; and guided by its sense of touch, it looks preferably for areas of the skin that are hairless, it digs in just beyond the head, and sucks the blood. It is only at the moment when the mammals blood enters its stomach that the ticks eggs (encap- sulated since the moment of coupling and able to remain encapsulated for eighteen years) open up, mature, and grow. The tick can live eighteen years to complete its reproductive function in a few hours. It should be noted that, for a consider- able amount of time, the tick can remain totally indifferent, 20 Grey Room 03 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 theory of reexes. The reex is not an isolated or gratuitous reaction. The reaction is always a function of the opening of the senses to stimuli and its orientation relative to them. This orientation depends on the meaning of a situation as it is perceived in its entirety. Separate stimuli may have meaning in the social sci- ences, but they mean nothing when it comes to the senses of a living thing. An animal in an experimental setting is in an abnormal situation that is imposed upon it; it is neither neces- sary nor of its own choosing. An organism is therefore never equal to the theoretical sum of its possibilities. We cannot understand its action without thinking of it in terms of a privi- leged form of behavior. Privileged does not mean objectively simpler in this case; it is rather the opposite. The animal nds it easier to do what it favors: it follows its own norms of living. The relationship established between the living and the milieu is like a debate (Auseinandersetzung) in which the liv- ing brings its own norms of appreciating the situation, where it is in command of the milieu and accommodates itself to it. This relationship does not consist primarily, as one might think, of a struggle or a confrontation. Those are things that characterize the pathological state. A life that afrms itself in opposition is already a life threatened. Movements involving strength, as for example extensive muscular reactions, translate the domina- tion of the exterior onto the organism. 23 A healthy life, a life that is condent in its existence and in its values, is a life that extends itself yet that is also almost gentle in its exibility. The situation of the living demanded by the milieu from the outside is what Goldstein holds up as the prototype of a catastrophic situation. This is the situation of the living in the laboratory. The relations between the living and the milieu as they are studied experimentally and objectively are of all possible rela- tions those that have the least biological signicance: they are pathological relations. Goldstein says that the meaning of an organism is its being; we may say that the being of the organ- ism is its meaning. Of course, the physicochemical analysis of the living can and should be undertaken. It has a theoretical and practical interest. But this constitutes a chapter of physics. Everything remains to be done in biology. Biology must there- fore rst consider the living as a meaningful being, and its indi- viduality not as an object, but as a term within the order of values. To live is to spread out; it is to organize a milieu starting from a central reference point that cannot itself be referred to without losing its original meaning. Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 21 While the reversal of the organism-milieu relationship was being 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 very well known work of Bateson, Cunot, Thomas Morgan, H. Mller, and their collaborators, who took up and extended Gregor Mendels research on hybridization and heredity. In the process of creating the science of genetics, these thinkers ended up 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 on phenotype leaves genotype unchanged. The genetic explana- tion of heredity and evolution (i.e., the theory of mutation) con- verged with Weissmans theory. The precocious isolation of a germinating plasma in the course of ontogenesis would nullify the influence of somatic modifications determined by the milieu on the evolution of the species. In his book La Vie cra- 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 an identical milieu in support of his argument. 24 And Caullery concluded his study of The Present State of the Problem of Evolution 25 by recognizing that evolution depends much more on the intrinsic properties of organisms than on the surround- ing milieu. 26 Yet we know that the idea of the total autonomy of hereditary genetic assortment did not go without criticism. At rst critics emphasized the fact that nucleoplasmatic disharmony tends to limit the hereditary omnipotence of genes. In sexual reproduc- tion, if it is true that the two parents each provide half of the genes, the mother provides cytoplasm for the egg. Given that the mixed offspring of two different species are not the same, depending on whether one or the other species is represented by the father or the mother, we are led to suppose that the power of genes differs as a function of the cytoplasmic milieu. In addi- tion to this, H. Mllers experiments (1927) provoking mutations in Drosophila by the action of a milieu of penetrating radiation (X rays) seemed to shed some light on the external conditioning of an organic phenomenon, perhaps too easily underscoring the distinction between organism and environment. Finally, Lamarckism has become topical once again thanks to the ideological, as much as scientific, polemics around the indignant repudiation of genetic pseudo-science by the Russian biologists that Lysenko had brought back to the healthy method of Mitchourine (18551935). Experiments on the vernalization of cultivated plants like wheat and rye led Lysenko to claim that hereditary modications can be obtained 22 Grey Room 03 Pennate diatoms. and consolidated by variations in feeding, upkeep, and climatic conditions, leading to the dislocation or rupture of the heredi- tary constitution of the organism that geneticists had falsely imagined to be stable. To the extent that we can summarize complex experimental ndings, it should be said that accord- ing to Lysenko, heredity is dependent on metabolism, and the latter is dependent on the conditions of existence. Heredity is to be seen here as the assimilation of outside conditions by the living over successive generations. Remarks of an ideological nature 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 that are the norm in matters of scientific discussion; all of which things lie, of course, outside of my realm of competence. 27 It seems that the technical, that is to say agronomic, aspect of the problem is crucial. In justifying the spontaneous character of mutations, Mendelian theories of heredity tend to moderate human, and specically Soviet, ambitions to completely dom- inate nature and the possibility of intentionally altering living species. Finally and above all, the recognition of the determin- ing inuence of the milieu has a political and social impact in that it authorizes mans unlimited action upon himself through the medium of the milieu. It justies hope in an experimental renewal of human nature. In this way, it appears, at rst sight, to be progressive. Theory and praxis are indissociable, as is required by Marxist-Leninist dialectics. As a result, we can see how genetics could be charged with all of the sins of racism and slavery and how Mendel was presented as the leading spokesman for a retrograde, cap- italist, and even idealist biology. It is clear that the return to legitimacy of theories of the heredity of acquired charac- teristics does not in itself authorize us to unreservedly qualify the recent Soviet bio- logical theories as Lamarckian. This is because the essence of Lamarcks ideas, as we have seen, consists in attributing the organisms adaptation to the milieu to its own initiative, needs, and continuous reac- tions. The milieu provokes the organism to orient its own development. Biological response far outweighs physical stimulation. By rooting adaptive phenomena in necessity, which means both pain and impatience, Lamarck was focusing on the point where life coincides with its own meaning, where through its sensory experience, the living sit- uates itself absolutely, for better or worse, in Canguilhem | The Living and I ts 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 normal language. These words genuinely evoke a spherical, centered disposition. The terms influences and influential circum- stances, used by Lamarck, take their meaning from astrologi- cal concepts. When Buffon, in La Dgnration 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 borrowed from Paracelsus. Even the notion of climate in the eigh- teenth 28 and early nineteenth centuries is a unied notion com- mon to geography, astronomy, and astrology. Climate is the change in appearance of the sky, degree by degree, from equator to pole; it is also the inuence exercised by the sky on the earth. I have already indicated that the biological notion of milieu at rst brought together an anthropogeographic component and a mechanical one. The anthropogeographic component could even be considered to make up the whole idea, since it included in itself the astronomical component, the one Newton had converted to a theory of celestial mechanics. For in the beginning geography was for the Greeks the projection of the sky onto the earth, the coming together of earth and sky, a cor- respondence that went in two directions at the same time: a topographical correspondence (geometry and cosmography) and a hierarchical correspondence (physics and astrology). The mapping of parts of the earth and the subordination of a mapped area to the sky were understood in the astrobiological intuition of the cosmos. Greek geography had its own philoso- phy, that of the Stoics. 29 The intellectual relations between Posidonius on one hand, and Hipparchus, Strabo, and Ptolemy on the other, are undeniable. It is the theory of universal sym- pathy, a vitalist intuition of universal determinism, that gives its meaning to the geographical theory of the milieu. This theory supposes 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. This biocentric conception of the cosmos carried over from the Middle Ages to blossom in the Renaissance. We know what happened to the notion of cosmos with the appearance of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, as well as how dramatic the conflict was between the organic conception of the world and the conception of a universe that was decentered relative to the center privileged in the classical world, the earth of the living and of man. With Galileo and also Descartes it became necessary to choose between two theories of milieu, that is, in the nal analysis, theories of space: a centered space, defined as being where the mi-lieu is a center; a decentered 24 Grey Room 03 space, defined as being where the mi-lieu is an intermediary field. Pascals famous text, Disproportion de lHomme, shows the ambiguity of the term well in a spirit that cannot or will not choose between its existential security and the demands of sci- entic knowledge. 30 Pascal knew that the cosmos had shattered into pieces, but the eternal silence of innite spaces frightened him. Man was no longer at the center [au milieu] of the world, but he is a milieu (a milieu between two infinites, a milieu between nothing and everything, a milieu between two extremes); the milieu is the state in which nature placed us; we are floating on a vast milieu; man is in proportion with the parts of the world; he relates to all that he knows: He needs a place to contain him, time in which to endure, movement to live, elements to make him up, heat and food to nourish him, air to breath . . . and in the end, everything is his ally. We may observe that three meanings of the word milieu come into play here: a median situation, a uid of suspension, a life envi- ronment. It was in developing this last meaning that Pascal revealed his organic conception of the world, a return to sto- icism that went both beyond and against Descartes: All things being caused and causal, helped and helping, mediated and immediate, and all intertwined by a natural and insentient con- nection that links the most distant and different among them, I hold that it is impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, any more than we can know the whole without par- ticularly knowing the parts. And when he denes the universe as an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere, Pascal is paradoxically using an image borrowed from the theosophic tradition to try to recon- cile the new scientic conception that sees the universe as an innite and undifferentiated milieu and the ancient cosmolog- ical vision that sees the world as a finite whole connecting to its center. It has been established that the image used here by Pascal is a permanent myth of mystic thought of neo-Platonic origin in which an intuition of the spherical world centered in and by the living and the already heliocentric cosmology of the Pythagoreans are reconciled. 31 Before Newton, the symbolic representation of the potential ubiquitousness of a spreading action starting from a central point described in the neo-Platonic cosmology of Jacob Boehme and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, was universally recognized. Newtonian space and ether, the rst as a means for the omnipresence of God, the second as a medium and vehicle of forces, both retain, as we know, an absolute character that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars failed to remark upon. Newtonian science, which was to anchor so many empiricist and relativist professions of faith, is itself founded on metaphysics. Empiricism masks its theological foundations. Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 25 And in this way the natural philosophy or the positivist and mechanistic conception of milieu has as its source, nds itself anchored by in fact, the mystical intuition of a sphere of energy in which the central action is uniformly present and efficient at every point. 32 | | | | | If today it seems normal to anyone trained in the mathematical and physical disciplines that the objectivity of knowledge requires a decentering of perspective, the moment also nally seems to have arrived where, from the perspective of biology, according to the formulation of J. S. Haldane in The Philosophy of a Biologist, it is physics that is not an exact science. Indeed, as Claparde wrote, What distinguishes the animal is the fact that he is a center relative to surrounding forces that are no longer, 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 depends is structured and organized by the organism itself. What the milieu gives to the living is a function of its demand. This is why within what appears to man to be a unique milieu, several living things draw their own specic and singular milieu. For that matter, as a living thing, man does not escape the general law of the living. The milieu that is proper to man is the world of his perception, that is to say the eld of his practical experi- ence in which his actions, oriented and regulated by values that are immanent to his tendencies, carve out certain objects, situate them relative to each other and all of them in relation to him- self. This occurs in such a way that the environment he is supposed to be react- ing to nds itself originally centered in and by him. But man the scholar constructs a uni- verse of phenomena and laws that he holds up as absolute. The essential function of science is to devalue the qualities of objects that make up the milieu proper, by offering itself as a general theory of the real, that is to say nonhuman, milieu. Sensory data are dis- qualied, quantied, and identied. That which is imperceptible is first placed under suspicion, then exposed and avowed. Measurements are substituted 26 Grey Room 03 for appreciations, laws for habits, causality for hierarchy, and the objective for the subjective. In fact, this universe of man the scholar, of which Einsteins physics is the ultimate representation (a universe in which fun- damental equations of intelligibility are the same regardless of the system of reference) because it maintains a direct, if negat- ing and reductive, relationship with the living mans proper milieu, endows this milieu with a sort of privilege over the milieus that are proper to other living things. Living man takes from his relationship with man the scholar, in whose work ordinary perceptive experience finds itself contradicted and corrected, a sort of unconscious fatuousness that leads him to prefer his own milieu to that of other living things as having not only a different value, but a higher degree of reality. In fact, as a proper milieu of behavior and life, the milieu of mans sensory and technical values does not in itself have more reality than the milieu proper to a wood louse or a grey mouse. The quali- cation of real can only be applied rigorously to an absolute universe, to the universal milieu made up of elements and movements authenticated by science, in which this recognition is as such necessarily accompanied by the disqualification of all 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 into the anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical envi- ronment must be complete, that is to say that it must include the living human himself. And as is well known, this project has not seemed too audacious to many thinkers. But we must then 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, and progress of science must be seen as a remarkably audacious enterprise if we are rightfully to deny the innate genius of humanity, from the point of view of scientism and even mate- rialism. If we do not, it would be necessary to admit the absurd proposition according to which reality contains the science of reality within itself a priori. And we would then have to ask what need that has its origins in reality is truly being served by the ambition to scientically determine that same reality. But if science is the work of a humanity that is rooted in life before being enlightened by knowledge, if it is a fact in the world while also being a vision of the world, then it perpetu- ates a permanent and necessary relationship with perception. And therefore mans 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 does not reduce itself to an intersection of influences. These ideas Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 27 Amoeba proteus. point to the inadequacy of any biology that would eliminate any consideration of meaning from its domain out of an utter submissiveness to the spirit of the physicochemical sciences. A meaning, from the biological and psychological point of view, is an appreciation of values in relation to a need. And a need is, for whoever feels it and lives it, an irreducible system of reference, and for that reason it is absolute. 28 Grey Room 03 Notes Le Vivant et son milieu was originally presented as a lecture at the Collge philosophique in Paris in 194647 and was subsequently published in La Conaissance 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 authors le vivant as the living, despite its apparent awkwardness. The French original is similar in this regard, and other formulations such as living thing, life-form, and organism place too much emphasis on the denite boundary between these entities and their surrounding environment, a distinction that the author clearly wishes to interrogate. I have also kept the term milieu, though its English usage is more limited than in French. I have used brackets in the text to note those places where the French use of milieu required a different translation. Along with the editors, I would like to acknowledge the numerous invaluable suggestions received from Warwick Anderson, in particular with regard to scientic ter- minology. Trans. 2. On all these points, see Lon Bloch, Les Origines de la Thorie de lether et la physique de Newton (1908). 3. Lon Brunschvicg, Les Etapes de la philosophie mathmatique (Paris: Alcan, 1912), 508. 4. See Georges Canguilhem, La Thorie Cellulaire, in La Connaissance de la Vie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992), 54. 5. See Esprit des Lois, books XIVXIX, on the relationship between laws and climate. 6. The chapter on the degeneration of animals in the Histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris, 17861791) examines the effects of habitat and food on the animal organism. 7. I have translated these and other quotations myself, unless otherwise indicated. 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. Tolmans behavioral psychology also conceives of the relationship between organism and milieu in the form of the relation of a function to a variable. Compare Andr Tilquin, Le Behaviorisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 439. 9. Louis Roule, La Vie des Rivires (Paris: Stock, 1930), 61. 10. A striking summary of this thesis can be found in Houssays Force et Cause (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), in which the author describes certain types of 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 and they 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 reserved on the subject of plants. 12. Several times each month [dcade] I frequented M. de Lamarcks Natural History course at the Jardin des Plantes. . . . At that time, M. de Lamarck was perhaps the last representative of that great school of physicists and general observers who had reigned from Thales and Democritus to Buffon. . . . He presented his ideas quite nakedly, with great simplicity and much sadness. He constructed a world with the fewest possible elements, the lowest number of crises and the greatest possible duration. A long, blind patience, 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 of life, as small and elementary as it is, Lamarck imagined it developing, building itself up over time, little by little; deaf necessity, habit alone, gave birth to Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 29 organs within a diverse range of milieux, in opposition to the relentless power of nature that set out to destroy them; for M. de Lamarck distinguished between 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 as before. Sainte-Beuve, Volupt. 13. Here I have translated Canguilhems version of Darwin directly. The original passage is as follows: Naturalists continually refer to external con- ditions, such as climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. In one 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: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3. Trans. 14. Marcel Prenant, Darwin (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1938), 14549. 15. See Lucien Febvres La Terre et lEvolution humaine for a historical description of the evolution of the idea and a critique of its exaggerations. 16. Andr Tilquin, Le Behaviorisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1942), 3435. It is of course from this well-documented work that I have borrowed much of the information that follows. 17. Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London: Favil Press, 1930), 3. 18. Compare Henri Baulig, La Gographie est-elle une science? Annales de Gographie 57 (JanuaryMarch 1948); and Causalit et Finalit en Gomorphologie, Geograska Annaler (winter 1949): 12. 19. A fascinating consideration of this inversion of perspective in human geography is found in an article by L. Poirier, LEvolution de la Gographie humaine, which appeared in Critique 89 (JanuaryFebruary 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. Fisher as Structure of Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 21. Jakob von Uexkll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1921); and Theoretische Biologie, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1928); von Uexkll and Georg Kriszat, Streifz ge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Berlin, 1934). Goldstein, however, accepts von Uexklls views only with important reservations. By not differentiating the living from its environ- ment, any research on their relationship becomes, in a sense, impossible. In this perspective, determinism disappears in favor of reciprocal penetration, and taking into consideration the whole effectively stifles knowledge. For knowledge to remain possible, it is necessary that a nonconventional center from which a range of relations can emerge appears within this organism- environment totality. Compare La Structure de lOrganisme, 7576, a critique of any exclusively environmental theory. 22. According to von Uexkll, the example of the tick is taken up by Louis Bounoure in his book LAutonomie de lEtre vivant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 143. 23. For a discussion of this argument of Goldsteins, compare the conclusion of Franois Dagognets Philosophie biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955). 24. Albert Brachet, La Vie cratrice des Formes (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 171. 25. Maurice Caullery, The Present State of the Problem of Evolut ion (Washington, 1917). 26. One can nd an anticipation of these ideas in Nietzsches Will to Power. 30 Grey Room 03 To be honest, the criticism that Nietzsche addresses to Darwin would be more appropriately applied to the Neo-Lamarckians. 27. For an examination of the subject, see Une Discussion scientique en U.R.S.S., Europe 3334 (1948); and also Claude-Charles Mathon, Quelques Aspects du Mitchourinisme, etc., in Revue gnrale des Sciences pures et appliques 34 (1951). On the ideological dimensions of the controversy, compare Julian Huxley. Jean Rostand has written a good historical and critical study on the question, LOffensive des Mitchouriniens contre la Gntique mendelienne, in Les Grands Courants de la Biologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), which is followed by a bibliography. Finally, see the work of Hovasse, Adaptation et Evolution (Hermann, 1951). 28. See the article on climate in the Encyclopdie. 29. See the excellent abridged history of Greek geography in Theodor Breiters introduction to volume 2 (commentaries) of the Astronomica by Manilus (Leipzig, 1908). 30. Pascals Penses, trans. Martin Turnell (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 21520. 31. Dietrich Mahnke, Unendliche Sphre und Allmittelpunkt (Niemeyer: Halle, 1937); the author devotes several very interesting pages to the usage and 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 Montaignes Essays) or from Rabelais (Tiers livre, chapter 13). 32. Compare Alexandre Koyr, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, 378379, 504; and The Signicance of the Newtonian Synthesis, Archives interna- tionales dHistoire de Sciences 11 (1950). 33. Preface to F. J. J. Buytendijks Psychologie des Animaux (Paris: Payot, 1928). Canguilhem | The Living and I ts Milieu 31