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Bernard is great. It sounds prescient in retrospect because, as ~biology has become more empirical, it's become less philosophical. But the flipside is that if you go back, that kind of philosophical aspect, which was more common, can now seem like — and really *be* — a revelation. You might really enjoy Georges Canguilhem's history of how definitions of *health* have evolved over the last few centuries, _The Normal and the Pathological_ (1943). For context, he was Michel Foucault's doctoral advisor, so it's pretty, uh, 'theory'; but it's *full* of brilliant passages like this. My fave, from René Leriche: health understood as "life in the silence of the organs," IOW an experience of life in which the components and systems that make us up don't draw attention to themselves — these days we might say "transparent." The fabulously named Jakob Johann von Uexküll (pron. "ewks-kewl," more or less) is 🔥 too. His theory of the "umwelt" is genuinely beautiful: rather than assume a living being is distinct and separate from its environment, he treats that ~boundary — many, really — as a thing in its own right, a space of mutual adaptation and transformation. A lot of these ideas will ring all kinds of bells for an expert like yourself 🌞 — but, like the Bernard passage you shared, actually reading them laid out clearly can be really refreshing and even inspiring.