Biology, Structure, and Temporality in Twentieth-Century French Thought

“The flesh procreates of the flesh: it does not create.”  With these words, written in the nineteen-seventies, Cornelius Castoriadis expressed his skepticism about the uses of biological science by the previous generation of French philosophers, most notably his own teacher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Biological thought, Castoriadis believed, relied on a static conception of materiality that was incompatible with both history and politics.  In this paper, I argue that the histories of structuralism and post-structuralism should be understood as part of a longer-term engagement, beginning in the 1930s, between French intellectuals and several fields of biology. I highlight the importance in particular of Raymond Ruyer’s 1950s philosophy of structure, which was based directly on his knowledge of embryology.