Abstract
The chapter addresses the problem of the relationship between life (vitality) and mind (thought) by drawing on the resources available in Canguilhem’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies. It consists of six sections. In the first and second section, I outline the so-called ‘mind-life problem’ and two diametrically opposed responses to it: life philosophy (life subsumes mind) and transcendentalism (mind subsumes life). Against this background, I flesh out Canguilhem’s ‘slantwise’ resolution, which argues that, while it is true that life feeds into mind, it is equally true that mind takes up and subl(im)ates life. In the third and fourth section, I focus on the first half of the proposed solution: I start by putting forward a non-reductionist account of life grounded on the idea of vital normativity, and then go on to show how this vital dynamism translates into human cognition via praktognosia (embodied and techn(olog)ical know-how). In the fifth section I tackle the second half of the solution: by delineating the idea of symbolic behavior and ex-centric positionality I try to indicate how mind, while grounded in life, is nonetheless able to transcend it. Finally, in the last section, I suggest that this Janus-faced dynamism between life and mind also holds true for the researcher investigating these topics, and hint at the broader philosophical implication of such a view for the practice of science and philosophy.
We suspect that, to do mathematics, it would suffice that we be angels. But to do biology, even with the aid of intelligence, we sometimes need to feel like beasts ourselves.
(Canguilhem 2008: xx)
The research included in this chapter was funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) under the research program “Philosophical Investigations” (P6-0252).
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Notes
- 1.
I am, of course, referring here to so-called philosophy of life, or Lebensphilosophie, a philosophical movement – if, given its enormous heterogeneity, so it can be called – from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which included such diverse authors as Henri Bergson, Wihelm Dilthey, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, and others (see e.g. Albert, 1995).
- 2.
This sentiment is expressed with remarkable vividness by Helmuth Plessner: “Every age finds its own redeeming word. The terminology of the eighteenth century culminated in the concept of reason; that of the nineteenth in the concept of progress; that of the current one [early twentieth century] in the concept of life. […] The only thing capable of enchanting was something irrefutable, to be grasped on this side of all ideologies, on this side of God and the state, of nature and history […] in short: life.” (Plessner, 2019, 1–2)
- 3.
In what follows, I will use ‘thought,’ ‘cognition,’ and ‘knowledge’ as roughly synonymous. This is so not only because Canguilhem himself uses them in this way but also because, for our present purposes, what is crucial is that they can all be said to belong to the domain of mindedness.
- 4.
I provide a more thorough account of this distinction in the next section.
- 5.
In fact, these similarities did not escape the attention of Canguilhem who, in his preface to the second edition of the Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (published in 1950), points out that, during the inception of the Essay (first published in 1943), he would have profited by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (SB; first published in 1942). However, as it was brought to his attention when the manuscript had already been in print (NP, 29), he could give it but a passing nod of recognition. Yet to his mind, such an omission is not necessarily something to be regretted, since “a convergence whose fortuitous character better emphasizes the value of intellectual necessity to an acquiescence, even fully sincere, in the view of others” (NP, 29–30).
- 6.
This is an implicit reference to Hans Jonas’s idea that life is characterized by “needful freedom” or “hazardous independence”: on the one hand, the organism constitutes an autonomous whole separate from its material surroundings; on the other hand, it has to engage in ongoing interactions with this selfsame milieu to maintain its autonomy. Thus, the living form “is never the same materially and yet it persists as its same self, by not remaining the same matter” (Jonas, 2001, 4, 76).
- 7.
A similar impetus can be found in recent attempts to transmute the mind-body problem into a body-body (Thompson, 2007, 235ff) or a mind-body-body problem (Hanna & Thompson, 2003), i.e., into a question about the interrelationship between the mind, the physical body (Ger. Körper), and the living-lived body (Ger. Leib) (the conceptual distinction between Körper and Leib was developed in the context of phenomenology and philosophical anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, and has been recently taken up and developed further by so-called enactivist and embodied approaches in cognitive science). Here, too, the notion of life or vitality (here in the form of the animate vehicle of experience) is considered as a means to bridge and surpass the age-old philosophical dichotomies.
- 8.
Having both been influenced by Kurt Goldstein (1995) and Gestalt psychologists (Ash, 1995), Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty often talk about the unity of life in terms of Gestalten (usually translated into English as ‘structures’ or ‘forms’). The reason for doing so has to do with their conviction that the notion of structure/form allows them to steer the middle path between the extremes of mechanism and substantivist vitalism (cf. Wolfe, 2011). According to Merleau-Ponty, for instance, ‘Gestalt’ stands for a dynamically structured whole, such that: (i) it has “original properties with regard to those of the parts” (SB, 47), and therefore cannot be (pace mechanism) reduced to a sum of independent and causally interrelated elements (SB, 50); and yet, (ii) it is not (pace vitalism) an ontologically distinct ‘substance’ or ‘principle,’ as it is nothing over and above the network of its interdependent and dynamically co-constitutive parts (SB, 131). In Gestalt, what matters is not its ‘elements’ or ‘constituents,’ but the overall configuration of their relations, for it is only by taking place in such a configuration that a given ‘aspect’ of the whole can be called its ‘part’ (ibid.; see also Sheredos, 2017).
- 9.
On this view, the transition from vitality to mentality is characterized not by addition (of some extra entity, faculty, etc.) but rather by transformation, by “a retaking and a ‘new’ structuration of the preceding [order]” (SB, 184). For a critical comparison of additivist and transformativist accounts of mind see Boyle, 2016.
- 10.
- 11.
The reason why Canguilhem puts so much emphasis on issues related to health and disease is because, in his view, “[t]he distinction between the normal and the pathological holds for living beings alone” (MO, 90). A famous example he uses to substantiate this claim is “a massive and often neglected fact: life tolerates monstrosities” (MO, 90). Canguilhem elaborates: “There are no mineral monsters. There are no mechanical monsters. […]. One could say that a rock is enormous, but not that a mountain is monstrous. […] The monster is a living being with a negative value.” (MM, 135)
- 12.
This bears striking resemblance to work in the autopoietic-enactivist lineage. Take, for instance, the now famous example of a bacterium swimming in a sucrose gradient. While the sucrose molecule itself is characterized by a series of physico-chemical properties it “has significance or value as food […] only in the milieu that the organism itself brings into existence” (Thompson, 2007, 74). Put differently, the organism’s normative activity brings forth what Varela calls the surplus of signification: “Remove the bacteria as a unit, and all correlations between gradients and hydrodynamic properties become environmental chemical laws, evident to us as observers but devoid of any special significance” (Varela, 1992, 79). What often gets overlooked in these accounts is that, with the onset of human mindedness, this surplus of signification gets trans-formed into the surplus of negation expressive of the ex-centric positionality of the human (see Section VI).
- 13.
See also the following passage in Merleau-Ponty: “This rich notion [of sensation] is still to be found in the Romantic usage, for example in Herder. It points to an experience in which we are given not ‘dead’ qualities, but active ones.” (PP, 60)
- 14.
See also: “Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting to our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the perceived subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue which the effort to know will try to take apart.” (PP, 61; my emphases)
- 15.
Merleau-Ponty himself borrows the term from the language theorist Abraham Grünbaum (PP, 162), and uses it to designate the implicit or tacit modes of somatic knowledge as expressed in our habitual, skilled engagements with the world.
- 16.
I will, in what follows, underlie the close interrelatedness between “technique” and “technology” by utilizing a perhaps somewhat cumbersome term “techn(olog)ical”. The main purpose of the said neologism is to remind the reader how, in human behaviour, techniques (stylized ways of attending to, and engaging with, a specific problem domain) have a tendency to actualize themselves as, and to be recursively modified by, technologies (systematized implementation of various types of appropriated or constructed ‘externalities’ – tools, instruments, symbolic frameworks, etc. – for the more efficient, off-loaded implementation of a given technique or set of techniques).
- 17.
The point of departure for my reflections will be Merleau-Ponty’s critical engagement with Köhler’s (1925) famous study of chimpanzee behaviour. In his analysis, Merleau-Ponty focuses primarily on those cases where chimpanzees failed to successfully solve the task they were presented with, and arrives to conclusions that are conspicuously close to those independently arrived at by Plessner (see esp. Plessner, 2019, Ch 6). For an exhaustive, and interpretatively brilliant, treatment of this topic, see Moss Brender, 2017, 142–7; see also Vörös, 2022.
- 18.
The foremost techn(olog)ical vehicle of symbolic behaviour is, of course, language (see Vörös, 2021). The reasons for this are at least twofold. On the one hand, it is “able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships” (PP, 220): technologies of writing populate intersubjectively enacted domains of meaning with treatises, novels, and sagas, thereby instituting artistic, philosophical, etc., ‘traditions’, which lend themselves to the perusal of subsequent generations. On the other hand, and unlike some other cultural practices (e.g., painting and music), language can be infinitely recursive, which is why “it is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible to paint about painting” (PP, 221). Thus, linguistic meaning, once constituted, can serve not only to disclose new meanings, but also to use the latter to thematize the former – and so on, indefinitely. In fact, it could be said that it is only with the onset of language that thought, in its full sense, truly manifests itself: speech “does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it” (PP, 207).
- 19.
- 20.
In Merleau-Ponty’s words: “We are certainly not denying […] the originality of the order of knowledge vis-à-vis the [vital] order. We are trying only to loose the intentional web which ties them to one another, to rediscover the paths of the sublimation which preserves and transforms the perceived [lived] world into the spoken [thought] world.” (PW, 123–4)
- 21.
To do justice to this two-way process, dynamic ways of thinking need to be developed that would allow us to recapture the circulatory relation between ‘higher’ cognitive superstructures and ‘lower’ vital substructures, without either absolutizing their separation or subsuming one under the other. Space constraints prevent me to pursue this matter further, but I would like to direct the reader’s attention to one promising candidate for this role, namely the phenomenological notion of ‘founding’ or Fundierung (e.g., PP, 458; see also an illuminating and accessible account in: Matherne, 2018, esp. 783).
References
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AV Canguilhem, Georges. (2008). Aspects of Vitalism. In Knowledge of Life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.) (pp. 59–74). Fordham University Press.
LM Canguilhem, Georges. (2008). The Living and its Milieu. In Knowledge of Life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.) (pp. 98–120). Fordham University Press.
MM Canguilhem, Georges. (2008). Monstrosity and the Monstrous. In Knowledge of Life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.) (pp. 134–146). Fordham University Press.
MO Canguilhem, Georges. (2008). Machine and Organism. In Knowledge of Life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.) (pp. 75–97). Fordham University Press.
NP Canguilhem, Georges. (1991). The Normal and the Pathological (C.R. Fawcett, Trans.). Zone Books.
PP Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge Classics.
PSM Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man. In The Primacy of Perception (W. Cobb, Trans.) (pp. 43–95). Northwestern University Press.
PW Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1973). Prose of the World (J. O’Neill, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.
SB Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1963). The Structure of Behavior (A.L. Fisher, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.
TL Canguilhem, Georges. (2008). Thought and The Living. In Knowledge of Life (S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg, Trans.) (pp. xvii–xx). Fordham University Press.
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Vörös, S. (2023). Neither Angel Nor Beast: Life and/Versus Mind in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty. In: Bianco, G., Wolfe, C.T., Van de Vijver, G. (eds) Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20529-3_9
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