The Philosophy Book
Page 39
"Man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge."
Michel Foucault
The 19th century saw a revolution in anatomy, as shown in this illustration from a medical text book. Foucault believes that our modern concept of man dates from this period.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926 to a family of doctors. After World War II, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy under Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1954 he spent time in Uppsala, Sweden, and then lived for a time both in Poland and Germany, only returning to France in 1960.
He received a PhD in 1961 for his study A History of Madness, which argued that the distinction between madness and sanity is not real, but a social construct. After the month-long student strikes in Paris of 1968, he became involved in political activism, and continued to work both as a lecturer and an activist for the rest of his life.
Key works
1961 A History of Madness
1963 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
1966 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
1975 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
See also: Immanuel Kant • Friedrich Nietzsche • Martin Heidegger • Maurice Merleau-Ponty • Daniel Dennett
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Universalism
BEFORE
c.380 BCE In The Republic, Plato claims that many of us live in a world of illusion.
1739 David Hume publishes A Treatise of Human Nature. Though an empiricist, he claims that there must be some fixed principles from which morality derives.
1785 Immanuel Kant, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, argues that morality should be based on universality.
Early 20th century John Dewey argues that politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
1971 John Rawls revives Kant’s notion of universality in his A Theory of Justice.
Although originally famous for his work in linguistics, Noam Chomsky is today best known for his analyses of political power. Since the publication of his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, in 1969, he has claimed that there is often a mismatch between the way that states exert power and the rhetorical claims that they make. He maintains that rhetorical claims by governments are not by themselves sufficient for us to reach the truth about political power. Governments may speak the language of “facts” as a way of justifying their actions, but unless their claims are supported by evidence, then they are only illusions, and the actions to which they lead lack justification. If we are to understand more clearly how states operate, it is necessary to move beyond the battle between rival forms of rhetoric, and instead to look at history, at institutional structures, at official policy documents, and so forth.
"States are not moral agents; people are."
Noam Chomsky
Ethics and universality
Chomsky’s ethical analyses are based on what he calls the “principle of universality.” At root, this principle is relatively simple. It says that at the very least we should apply to ourselves the same standards that we apply to others. This is a principle that Chomsky claims has always been central to any responsible system of ethics. The central psychological insight here is that we are fond of using ethical language as a way of protesting about others, but that we are less inclined to pass judgment on ourselves. Nevertheless, if we claim to uphold any set of ethical or moral standards, and if we wish to be consistent, then we must apply to others the standards we apply to ourselves. In terms of government, this means that we must analyze our political actions rigorously, instead of allowing ourselves to be blinded by rhetoric.
This is both a moral and an intellectual imperative. For Chomsky, these are closely related. He points out that if anyone making a moral claim is also violating universality, then their claim cannot be taken seriously and should be rejected.
If we are to cut through the rhetoric and examine political morality in a rigorous fashion, it seems that universality is a necessary starting point. Some of Chomsky’s specific claims about the nature of global power have caused considerable controversy, but this does not invalidate his central insight. For if we wish to call his specific claims into question, then we should do so in the light of universality and of all the available evidence. If his claims turn out to be false, then they should be rejected or modified; but if they turn out to be true, then they should be acted upon.
Uncle Sam, the personification of the United States, is one of countless props used by governments to foster public support. Chomsky warns that such images can distract us from the truth.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Chomsky was born in 1928 in Pennsylvania, USA, and was raised in a multilingual Jewish household. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a groundbreaking thesis on philosophical linguistics. In 1957, his book Syntactic Structures secured his reputation as one of the leading figures in linguistics, and revolutionized the field.
Although continuing to teach and publish in linguistics, Chomsky became increasingly involved in politics. He was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to publish his critique of US intellectual culture, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in 1967. Today, he continues to write and lecture on linguistics, philosophy, politics, and international affairs.
Key works
1967 The Responsibility of Intellectuals
1969 American Power and the New Mandarins
2001 9-11
2006 Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
See also: Plato • David Hume • Immanuel Kant • John Dewey • John Rawls
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Social theory
BEFORE
1789 The French Revolution begins, marking the end of a “representational” power structure in France.
1791 Jeremy Bentham writes Of Publicity, an early exploration of the idea of the “public.”
1842 Karl Marx writes his essay On Freedom of the Press.
AFTER
1986 Edward Said criticizes Habermas and the Frankfurt School for their Eurocentric views and their silence on racist theory and imperialism.
1999 Canadian author Naomi Klein’s No Logo explores the fate of the public sphere in an era dominated by advertising and the mass media.
According to the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, modern society depends not only on technological advances, but also upon our ability to criticize and reason collectively about our own traditions. Reason, says Habermas, lies at the heart of our everyday communications. Somebody says or does something, and we say, “Why did you do that?” or “Why did you say that?” We continually ask for justifications, which is why Habermas talks about “communicative” reason. Reason, for him, is not about discovering abstract truths, but about the need we have to justify ourselves to others.
Creating a public sphere
In the 1960s and 1970s, Habermas concluded that there was a link between communicative reason and what he calls the “public sphere.” Up until the 18th century, he states, European culture was largely “representational”, meaning that the ruling classes sought to “represent” themselves to their subjects with displays of power that required no justification, such as impressive pageants or grand architectural projec
ts. But in the 18th century, a variety of public spaces emerged that were outside state control, including literary salons and coffee houses. These were places where individuals could gather to engage in conversation or reasoned debate. This growth of the public sphere led to increased opportunities to question the authority of representational state culture. The public sphere became a “third space”, a buffer between the private space of our immediate friends and family, and the space occupied by state control.
By establishing a public sphere, we also open up more opportunities for recognizing that we have interests in common with other private individuals—interests that the state may fail to serve. This can lead to questioning the actions of the state. Habermas believes that the growth of the public sphere helped to trigger the French Revolution in 1789.
The expansion of the public sphere, from the 18th century onward, has led to a growth of democratically elected political institutions, independent courts, and bills of rights. But Habermas believes that many of these brakes on the arbitrary use of power are now under threat. Newspapers, for example, can offer opportunities for reasoned dialogue between private individuals, but if the press is controlled by large corporations, such opportunities may diminish. Informed debate on issues of substance is replaced with celebrity gossip, and we are transformed from critical, rational agents into mindless consumers.
Coffee houses became a focus of social and political life in the major cities of 18th-century Europe. Noted as places where “the dissaffected met”, attempts were frequently made to close them.
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
Jürgen Habermas grew up in Germany under the Nazi regime. His realization that “we had been living in a criminal system”, following the Nuremburg trials (1945–46), was to have a lasting effect on his philosophy.
On completing his doctorate in 1954, he studied with members of the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. During the 1960s and 1970s, he lectured at universities in Bonn and Gottingen. In 1982, he became Professor of Philosophy at the University at Frankfurt, where he taught until his retirement in 1993. More recently, Habermas has himself taken an active role in the public sphere, entering into debates on Holocaust denial and global terrorism.
Key works
1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
1981 The Theory of Communicative Action
1985 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
2005 Between Naturalism and Religion
See also: Jeremy Bentham • Karl Marx • Theodor Adorno • Edgar Morin • Niklas Luhmann • Noam Chomsky • Edward Said
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Deconstruction
BEFORE
4th century BCE Plato’s Meno explores the idea of “aporia.”
Early 20th century Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure begin the study of signs and symbols (semiotics), which would become a key influence on Of Grammatology.
1961 Emmanuel Levinas publishes Totality and Infinity, which Derrida would respond to in Writing and Difference. Levinas becomes a growing influence in Derrida’s later explorations of ethics.
AFTER
1992 English philosopher Simon Critchley’s Ethics of Deconstruction explores aspects of Derrida’s work.
Jacques Derrida remains one of the most controversial 20th-century philosophers. His name is associated, first and foremost, with “deconstruction”, a complex and nuanced approach to how we read and understand the nature of written texts. If we are to understand what Derrida means when he says in his famous book Of Grammatology that there is nothing outside of the text (the original French is “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, also translated as “there is no outside-text”), we need to take a closer look at Derrida’s deconstructive approach in general. Often when we pick up a book, whether a philosophy book or a novel, we imagine that what we have in our hands is something that we can understand or interpret as a relatively self-contained whole. When it comes to philosophical texts, we might be expected to imagine that these are especially systematic and logical. Imagine that you go into a bookshop and pick up a copy of Of Grammatology. You would think that, if you were to read the book, by the end of it you would have a reasonable grasp of what “grammatology” itself might be, what Derrida’s main ideas were on the subject, and what this said about the world. But, for Derrida, texts do not work in this way.
"We are all mediators, translators."
Jacques Derrida
Aporia and différance
Even the most straightforward texts (and Of Grammatology is not one such text) are riddled with what Derrida calls “aporias.” The word “aporia” comes from the Ancient Greek, where it means something like “contradiction”, “puzzle”, or “impasse.” For Derrida, all written texts have such gaps, holes, and contradictions and his method of deconstruction is a way of reading texts while looking out for these puzzles and impasses. In exploring these contradictions as they appear in different texts, Derrida aims to broaden our understanding of what texts are and what they do, and to show the complexity that lies behind even the most apparently simple works. Deconstruction is a way of reading texts to bring these hidden paradoxes and contradictions out into the open. This is not, however, just a matter of how we read philosophy and literature; there are much broader implications to Derrida’s approach that bring into question the relationship between language, thought, and even ethics.
At this point, it would help to introduce an important technical term from Derrida’s vocabulary: “différance.” This may look like a typographical error—and indeed, when the term différance first entered the French dictionary, the story goes that even Derrida’s mother sternly said to him, “But Jacques, that is not how you spell it!” But in fact différance is a word that Derrida coined himself to point to a curious aspect of language.
“Différance” (with an “a”) is a play both on the French “différence” (with an “e”), meaning “to differ”, and the French “deférrer” meaning “to defer.” To understand how this word works, it would be useful to consider how this deferring and differing might actually take place in practice. Let us start with deferring. Imagine that I say “The cat…”, then I add, “that my friend saw….” After a pause, I say, “in the garden was black and white…”, and so on. The precise meaning of the word “cat” as I am using it is continually deferred, or put off, as more information is given. If I had been cut off after saying “The cat…” and had not mentioned my friend or the garden, the meaning of “cat” would have been different. The more I add to what I say, in other words, the more the meaning of what I have already said is revised. Meaning is deferred in language.
But there is something else going on as well. The meaning of “cat”, Derrida believes, cannot be considered as something that rests in the relationship between my words and actual things in the world. The word takes its meaning from its position in a whole system of language. So when I say “cat”, this is meaningful not because of some mysterious link between the word and an actual cat, but because this term differs from, for example, “dog” or “lion” or “zebra.”
Taken together, these two ideas of deferring and differing say something quite strange about language in general. On the one hand, the meaning of anything we say is ultimately always deferred, because it depends on what else we say; and the meaning of that, in turn, depends on what else we say, and so on. And on the other hand, the meaning of any particular term we use depends on all the things
that we don’t mean. So meaning is not self-contained within the text itself.
A typesetter can check plates of type closely before they are printed, but the ideas they express are full of “aporias”, or contradictions, says Derrida, which no amount of analysis can eliminate.
The meaning of what we write is, for Derrida, changed by what we write next. Even the deceptively simple act of writing a letter can lead to a deferral of meaning in the text itself.
The written word
For Derrida, différance is an aspect of language that we become aware of thanks to writing. Since ancient Greek times, philosophers have been suspicious of written language. In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a legend about the invention of writing, and says that writing provides only “the appearance of wisdom” and not its reality. Writing, when philosophers have thought about it at all, has tended to be seen simply as a pale reflection of the spoken word; the latter has been taken as the primary means of communication. Derrida wants to reverse this; according to him, the written word shows us something about language that the spoken word does not.