Georges Canguilhem
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Being is not reducible to a crossroads of influences. From this stems the insufficiency of any biology that, in complete submission to the spirit of the physico-chemical sciences, would seek to eliminate all consideration of sense from its domain.
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The Body is defined necessarily in relation to its milieu. Just as it is odd to say that living being does not begin at the cell, so too is it odd to say that it ends at the skin. The relationship between a being and its milieu is functional.
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Disease is a narrow mode of life and a shrunken milieu. It is also a new life with new physiological constants and new mechanisms.
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Disease is a situation in which human beings are tethered to norms, often new norms, but nonetheless ones that affect suffering, the efforts to escape from it, and the now-glorified memory of health... disease makes it impossible to live without constant reference to norms and to deficiency and failure visa`-vis these norms.1.
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Health is a margin of tolerance for the inconstancies of the environment. The healthy organism follows a ''privileged'' path through its environment.
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Health is life lived in the silence of the organs. Disease is what irritates men in the normal course of their lives and work, and above all what makes them suffer.
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Life is a concept too generic and crude to be productive. ''The living,'' differs further from ''life,'' la vie, in that it is mediated, as living, by the specific milieu it experiences.
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Life is a relation not essentially in struggle (which is a mark of the pathological state). A life that affirms itself against the milieu is a life already threatened.
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Life is healthy life when it is a life not dominated by its milieu, but rather a life confident in its existence, in its values. Such a life is a life of flexion, suppleness, almost softness.
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Life is irreducible to a crossroads of influences. As such, biology, which is in complete submission to the physico-chemical sciences, proves itself insufficient in grasping it.
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Life is healthy, confident in its existence, and in its values when it is a life of flexion, suppleness, almost softness.
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Life is not about struggle. The relation between an organism and a milieu does not essentially consist (as one might think) in a struggle, in an opposition. A life that affirms itself against the milieu is a life already threatened.
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Life is 'meaning inscribed in matter.' To say this is to acknowledge the existence of an a priori objective that is inherently material and not merely formal.
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Man is a being for which everything is related to him: He needs space to contain him, time to exist in, motion to be alive, elements to constitute him, warmth and food for nourishment, air to breathe. He sees light, he feels bodies.
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Milieu is the representation of an indefinitely extendible line or plane, at once continuous and homogenous, and with neither definite shape nor privileged position, prevailed over the representation of a sphere or circle, attached to a fixed center of reference -- milieu does not evoke any relation except that of a position endlessly negated by exteriority.
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Milieu is, in a mechanistic view, the idea that it is the river that makes fishes lead their lives just how they lead it, such that they are persons without personality.
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Milieu is put in poetic terms, the idea that, following condillac's fable of the statue, 'when the air smells like roses, a statue is rose-scented'.
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Nature is harmony and equilibrium. Disturbance, by contrast, is disease. There are no exceptions to the laws of nature, only exceptions to the laws of naturalist.
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Need is for the one who experiences it, an irreducible and thereby absolute system of reference.