Logique et psychologie chez Canguilhem et Lacan

Abstract

ContextSince Foucault, Canguilhem has usually been classified on the side of the philosophy of the concept as opposed to the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness and the subject. On the other hand, Canguilhem is considered as a general critic of all psychology for mainly ethical reasons. These receptions led to make of Canguilhem a fellow traveler of structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. An alliance realized by “the Lacanians” of the Cahiers pour l’analyse which will be philosophically justified by Foucault. ObjectiveOur objective is to question the reality of these affinities. We contribute to question the genealogical positioning of Canguilhem by Foucault, by showing the transversal dimension of his philosophy from the point of view of Foucauldian sharing. At the same time, we revisit the “Canguilhemian critique of psychology” in order to bring the complementary positive piece that seems to have been missing in his understanding. MethodTo give a particular acuity to these problems, we study Canguilhem's psychological conceptions within the Traité de logique et de morale. At the same time, we re-examine the program of the Cahiers pour l’analyse as the main space where the Lacan/Canguilhem relationship was established. We also rely on the little known and unpublished Traité de psychologie written by Canguilhem and Planet in 1940. Our work is related to the history of contemporary philosophy and the epistemology of psychological disciplines. ResultsIf the alliance of the “Lacanians” with Canguilhem could be made on the ground of the criticism of psychology and the valorization of a philosophy of the concept without personal subject, the historian of sciences does not share the antipsycholgist and logicist principles of the hyperstructuralists. We show that the criticism of psychology rests first of all in Canguilhem's misunderstanding of its scientific impossibility by covering the normative and indivisible dimension of subjective life. This normativity of mental life commands for Canguilhem the epistemological and scientific activity itself. Canguilhem is the opposite of the ontological and logicist perspectives of the Cahiers pour l’analyse. He will never cease to be faithful to a philosophy defined in the Traité de logique as “axiological”, in the sense of a primacy given to Value over Being. This primacy, which pilots the tasks of the logical activity, rests on a psychology: a definition of the mental life as a position of norms, rules and values, first to any position of truth. Canguilhem's philosophy of values and his epistemology are based on a philosophical psychology that conditions his examination of psychological disciplines. ConclusionCanguilhem criticizes psychologies insofar as he values one of them. His criterion of appreciation is the recognition of the originality of the appearances of the psychic life from his own subjective point of view, contrary by definition to that of the metric decomposition. This individual perspective must be distinguished from the refusal of any psychology by structural and logical preference. There is in the historian of sciences, a philosophy of the subject as axiological subject: point of departure of any possible psychology as of any valid medicine.