I'm prepping for this workshop next week, reading Canguilhem's wonderful La connaissance de la vie (a recent English translation has been done by Fordham UP here).
In discussing the political transpositions of vitalism, Canguilhem writes on p 124 of the French (my translation):
Certainly the thought of Dreisch offers a typical case of the transplantation onto the political terrain of the biological concept of an organic totality. After 1933, the entelechy became a Führer of the organism. [Canguilhem provides the original in a note: Die Ueberwindung des Materialismus, 1935: "Eine Maschine als Werkzeug für den Führer -- aber der Führer ist die Hauptsache," p. 59.] Is it vitalism or the character of Driesch which is responsible for this pseudo-scientific justification of the Führerprinzip?
A very Important example, but what I thought worth a post is the following, which testifies to the greatness of Canguilhem, who, writing in 1946, after heroic service in the Resistance -- which he joined at the encouragement of his colleague Jean Cavaillès, later tortured and killed by the Nazis -- does not rest with a denunciation of recent examples, but drives deep into history to find the bio-political conceptual field -- the field of political physiology -- that authorizes these transpositions.
Could one not think that politics takes from [retire de] biology that which if had first lent it? The Aristotelian notion of a soul that is to the body what the political or domestic ruler [chef] is to the city or the family... [is] a prefiguration of the theories of Dreisch. Thus, in Aristotle, the structure and functions of the organism are set forth by analogies with the intelligently directed tool and with human society unified by rule. What is in question, in the case of the exploitation by Nazi sociologists of anti-mechanistic biological concepts, is the problem of the relations between organism and society.
One of the sources for Canguilhem's claims about Aristotle is the following passage from the Politics, which completes the analogy: the soul as despotic ruler rules over an enslaved, slavish, body:
At all events we may firstly observe in living creatures both a despotical and a constitutional rule; for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule.... When then there is such a difference as between soul and body ... the lower sort are by nature slaves ... (Politics 1.5.1254b4-6; translation from the Barnes edition)
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