Symptoms

Canguilhem on considering a disease as covering the whole of organism:

To return once more to diabetes, it is not a kidney disease because of glycosuria, nor a pancreatic disease because of hypoinsulinemia, nor a disease of the pituitary; it is the disease of an organism all of whose functions are changed, whose limbs are rendered useless by arteritis and gangrene; moreover, it can strike man or woman, threaten them with coma, often hit them with impotence or sterility, for whom pregnancy, should it occur, is a catastrophe, whose tears — oh irony of secretions! — are sweet.

Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

To be sick means that a man really lives another life, even in the biological sense of the word.

Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

Secondly it should be pointed out that despite the reciprocal nature of the clarification achieved through the comparison of the normal with the pathological and the assimilation of the pathological and the normal, Comte insists repeatedly on the necessity of determining the normal and its true limits of variation first, before methodically investigating pathological cases. Strictly speaking, knowledge of normal phenomena, based solely on observation, is both possible and necessary without knowledge of disease, particularly based on experimentation. But we are presented with a serious gap in that Comte provides no criterion which would allow us to know what a normal phenomena is. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

Broussais saw the vital primordial fact in excitation. Man exists only through the excitation exercised on his organs by the environment in which he is compelled to live. Through their innervation both the internal and external surfaces of contact transmit this excitation to the brain which sends it back to all the tissues including the surfaces of contact. These surfaces are exposed to two kinds of excitation: foreign bodies and the influence of the brain. It is under the continuous action of these multiple sources of excitation that life is sustained. Applying the physiological doctrine to pathology means trying to find out how "this excitation can deviate from the normal state and constitute an abnormal or diseased state". These deviations are either deficiencies or excesses. Irritation differs from excitation only in terms of degree; it can be defined as the ensemble of disturbances "produced in the economy by agents which make vital phenomena more or less pronounced than they are in the normal state". Irritation is thus "normal citation transformed by its excess". For example, through lack of oxygen, asphyxia deprives lungs of its normal excitant. Inversely, air with too high an oxygen content "overexcites the lungs so much more strongly that the organ is more excitable and inflammable is the result". The two deviations, brought about by deficiency or excess, do not have the same importance in pathology, the latter considerably outweighing the former: "This second source of disease, the excess of excitation converted into irritation is thus much richer than the first, the lack of excitation and it can be stated that most our ills stem from this second source". In using them interchangably, Broussais equates the terms abnormal, pathological, and the morbid. The distinction between the normal or physiological and the abnormal or pathological would then be a simple quantitative one limited to the terms of deficiency and excess. And once Broussais admitted the physiological theory of the intellectual faculties, this distinction is valid for mental as well as organic phenomena. This, then, in summary is the thesis whose fortune owes more to the personality of the author than to the coherence of his text. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

But just as the followers of Harvey and Haller 'breathed life' into anatomy by turning it into physiology, so pathology became a natural extension of physiology. The end result of this evolutionary process is the formation of a theory of the relations between the normal and the pathological, according to which the pathological phenomena found in living organisms are nothing more than quantitative variations, greater or lessor, according to corresponding physiological phenomena. Semantically, the pathological is designated as departing from the normal not so much by a or dys as by hyper or hypo. While retaining the ontological theory's soothing confidence in the possibility of technical conquest of disease, this approach is far from considering health and sickness as qualitatively opposed, or as forced joined in battle. The need to reestablish continuity in order to gain more knowledge for more effective action is such that the concept of disease would finally vanish. The conviction that one can scientifically restore the norm is such that in the end it annuls the pathological. Disease is no longer the object of anguish for the healthy man; it has become instead the object of study for the theoretist of health. It is in pathology, writ large, that we can unravel the teachings of health, rather as Plato sought in the institutions of the State the larger and more easily readable equivalent virtues and vices of the individual soul. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

Medical thought has never stopped alternating between these two representations of disease, between these two kinds of optimism, always finding some good reason for one or the other attitude in a newly explained pathogenesis. Deficiency diseases and all infectious or parasitic diseases favor the ontological theory, while endocrine disturbances and all diseases beginning with dys support the dynamic or functional theory. However, these two conceptions do have one point in common: in disease, or better, in the experience of being sick, both envision a polemical situation: either a battle between the organism and a foreign substance, or an internal struggle between opposing forces. Disease differs from a state of health, the pathological from the normal, as one quality differs from another, either by the presence of absence of a definite principle, or by an alteration of the total organism. This heterogeneity of normal and pathological states persists today in the naturalist conception, which expects from little human efforts to restore the norm, in which nature will find the ways toward cure. But it proved difficult to maintain the qualitative modification separating the normal from the pathological in a conception which allows, indeed expects, man to be able to compel nature and bend it to his normative desires. Wasn't it said repeatedly after Bacon's time that one governs nature only by obeying it? To govern disease means to become acquainted with its relations with the normal state, which the living man—loving life—wants to regain. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

It is necessary to state that it is not a question of teaching a lesson, or of bringing a normative judgment to bear upon medical activity. We are not so presumptuous as to pretend to renovate medicine by incorporating a metaphysics into it. If medicine is to be renovated, it is upto physicians to do so at their risk and to their credit. But we want to contribute to the renewal of certain methodological concepts by adjusting their comprehension through contact with medical information. May no one expect more from us than we wanted to give. Medicine is very often prey and victim to certain pseudo-philosophical literature, not always known, it must be said, to doctors, in which medicine and philosophy rarely come out well. It is not our intention to bring grist to the mill. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1966)

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1979)

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1976)

Novalis, Hymns to the Night (1800)

Novalis, Freiberg Natural Scientific Studies (1789)

Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798)

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010)

For as long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body. Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

Now it is clear that this impulsion, which the lazy mind cannot find in itself but which has to come to it from another, must be received in that solitude outside of which, as we have seen, the very activity of creation that is to be resuscitated cannot occur. From pure solitude the lazy mind can derive nothing, since it is incapable of setting its creative activity in motion of its own accord. But the most lofty conversation and the most pressing advice are of no assistance to it either, for they cannot produce this original activity directly. What it takes then, is an intervention which, though it comes from someone else, occurs deep inside ourselves, the impulsion certainly of another mind but received in the midst of our solitude. But we have already seen that this was exactly the definition of reading, and applicable to reading alone. Thus the one discipline that can exercise a favourable influence on such minds is reading: quod erat demonstrandum, as the geometers say. Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (1989)

Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (1989)

Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (1989)