Foucault_A Very Short Introduction
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Whatever we may think of this general defence, it is not clear that Foucault really needs it. He is, in the end, not interested in the sort of theoretical generalizations that lead to radical relativism and scepticism. Despite occasional unguarded univeral claims, he is only committed to regional, not global, scepticism. His project is to question quite specific claims to cognitive authority: roughly, those made by psychologists and social scientists (and not even all such claims). He clearly has no problem with many other domains, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and much of biology. His genealogies, therefore, should present particular reasons why we should doubt the claims to cognitive authority made by specific disciplines, not reasons to doubt any such claim at all. They should show that there is something particularly wrong with psychiatry or criminology that makes it a ‘dubious discipline’. As we will soon see, this is precisely what they do.
Chapter 6
The masked philosopher
I am not very philosophical.
[My writings] are the record of a long and tentative … philosophical exercise.
Typically elusive regarding identity, Foucault sometimes allows and sometimes denies that he is a philosopher. When he consented to an interview in a series presenting the views of ‘philosophers’, he insisted on anonymity, presenting himself as a ‘masked philosopher’ (‘The Masked Philosopher’, EW I, 321–8).
The bureaucrats were quite certain that Foucault was a philosopher. He possessed advanced degrees in the subject (including the highest level, the doctorat d’état) and was a professor in several philosophy departments. Why, then, his own – and our – ambivalence?
To find an interesting answer to the question ‘is X a philosopher?’, we need a relevant context, which is most easily supplied by paradigm examples of philosophical activity. Is Foucault a philosopher in the sense of Socrates drinking the hemlock, of Diogenes searching with his lamp, of Descartes meditating in his room? In our time, the paradigm is Kant, who established philosophy as an autonomous theoretical enterprise: not, as for the ancients, a life-guiding wisdom; nor, as for the medievals, a handmaid to theology; nor even, as for Descartes and other early moderns, as part of a new scientific account of the world. In Kant – at least as the author of his three great critiques – philosophy presents itself as an academic discipline, alongside other disciplines, such as physics and mathematics, with its own theoretical goals, methods, and domain of inquiry. As a result, philosophy became a technical, specialist subject, not accessible to even highly educated non-professionals. Lord Macaulay, for example, complained that he, who had no problem with Plato, Descartes, or Hume, simply could not read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (a book that, as Richard Rorty has said, anyone who is a philosopher must have read).
So, we might well ask, is Foucault a philosopher in this modern Kantian sense? The bureaucrats’ criteria tells us that, at least, he was trained and certified as a philosopher in this sense. But was his work actually a contribution to the modern (Kantian) philosophical project?
Here we can turn to Foucault’s own discussion of Kant and modern philosophy in an essay, published the year he died (1984), entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’. Quite typically, Foucault does not take as his touchstone Kant’s ‘major’ works, such as the three critiques, but a short essay, ‘a minor text, perhaps’ (EW III, 303), that Kant also called ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’. Foucault begins this essay with the suggestion that modern philosophy may well be defined as the effort to answer Kant’s question: What is Enlightenment?
8. Immanuel Kant
But what does this question mean? The Enlightenment was a distinctively modern movement, directed towards using reason to free mankind from the constraints imposed by traditional authorities – intellectual, religious, and political. In his essay, Kant said that the point of Enlightenment was to overcome our ‘immaturity’ by daring to think for ourselves (sapere aude), rather than accepting the authority of others. Foucault summarizes Kant’s three examples: ‘we are in a state of “immaturity” when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, and when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be’ (EW III, 305).
Thinking for ourselves means reasoning: ‘Kant, in fact, describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority’. Kant understands his own philosophical project of the critique of reason as a necessary precondition of Enlightenment: ‘it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate’ (EW III, 308); that is, the conditions that limit the proper employment of reason. Kant, for example, argued in his First Critique that theoretical reason could not be legitimately applied to ‘limit-questions’ such as the origin of the universe or the immortality of the soul.
But what Foucault finds distinctive and important about Kant’s discussion of Enlightenment is not the details of his critique of reason but the fact that he is reflecting on ‘the contemporary status of his own enterprise’ (EW III, 309). Nor is the question how contemporary philosophy fits into the general scheme of history (for example, as herald of a bright new future or a falling away from a golden age). The question is simply what makes our present way of doing philosophy different from what was done previously. This, Foucault maintains, is a new and important development: to focus philosophy not on perennial questions but on the question of what is distinctive about our current situation.
So, then, what is distinctive about our current situation? To answer this question, Foucault redirects his discussion from Kant on Enlightenment to Baudelaire on modernity. In one sense, this is simply a move to a new terminology – Enlightenment being the distinctive feature of the modern age – and to a new example, Baudelaire’s aesthetic rather than Kant’s moral and political perspective. But in fact the shift reflects what Foucault sees as some crucial differences between our situation and Kant’s. Our (Baudelairean) modernity is a historical development from Kant’s Enlightenment, but one that has substantively transformed it. Accordingly, just as Kant (in ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’) asks how his situation is different from that of his predecessors, so Foucault asks how his situation is different from Kant’s.
To begin with, we cannot follow Kant in thinking that the critique of reason discovers essential and universal (transcendental) truths that mark the limits of human experience and thought. On Foucault’s reading, Baudelaire’s modernity is an attitude that finds something ‘eternally’ valuable in the present moment, while, at the same time, striving to transform it ‘not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is’. ‘Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it’ (EW III, 311). Here we should think of the tender exactness of, say, Courbet’s rendering of a mundane moment, which simultaneously preserves and transforms it. Moreover, this modern project of transformation applies above all to the self:
to be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration … Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself.
(EW III, 311)
Foucault clearly does not accept all the details of Baudelaire’s picture of modernity; for example his understanding of self-transformation in terms of the dandy’s anti-natural elegance, or his claim that the modern project cannot be carried out politically or socially but only aesthetically. But Foucault does accept a general ‘ethos’ of modernity, which, he says, consists not in any set of doctrines but in a critical attitude or orientation towards our historical era. Further, this orientation is, like Baudelaire’s, towards a transformation of the present self.
Now we can return to Foucault’s relation to Kant�
�s philosophical project. He accepts the general Enlightenment goal of critique but reverses its polarity:
Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing [savoir] what limits knowledge [connaissance] must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?
(EW III, 315)
This key passage formulates Foucault’s final conception of his enterprise as one of philosophical critique. In Kant’s terminology, it is critical (examining assumptions regarding the scope and limits of our knowledge), but it is not, like Kant’s own project, transcendental. It does not, that is, claim to discover necessary conditions for knowing that determine categories in terms of which we must experience and think about the world and ourselves. Rather, Foucault’s critique examines claims of necessity with a view to undermining them by showing that they are merely historical contingencies. Referring to his earlier methodological discussions, he says that his project is ‘not transcendental’ but ‘genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method’. Its method is ‘archaeological – and not transcendental – in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge [connaissance] or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events’ (EW III, 315). Similarly, Foucault’s project is genealogical because it is not designed to discover ‘what is impossible for us to do or to know’, but to uncover ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (EW III, 315–16).
So in the Kantian terms that define the modern idea of philosophy, Foucault is a philosopher to the extent that he shares the general critical orientation of the philosophical project. But he does not share the interest of Kant – and of most other modern philosophers – in finding a distinctive realm of philosophical truth that delimits necessary conditions on thought, experience, and action. He is not, for example, interested in phenomenological intuitions of essences, or in the necessary and sufficient conditions sought by linguistic analysis. His interest is rather in the uncovering of possibilities that intuition and analysis might well claim do not exist. There is no reason that Foucault need deny that the phenomenological or linguistic analysis might reveal genuinely necessary, universal truths. But his philosophical project is directed not towards such truths but towards contingencies masked as necessities. In addition, the methods he uses – archaeology and genealogy – are, as we have seen, methods of historical investigation, not of a priori philosophical analysis. In Kantian terms, he is a philosopher only in his generic commitment to critique, not in his specific understanding of, nor in his methods of carrying out, his critical project.
We might, therefore, be inclined to conclude that Foucault is not a philosopher in any substantive sense – except for the fact that philosophy after Kant has itself involved a continuing critique of its own project. In most cases – from German idealism through analytic philosophy – the enterprise has remained broadly Kantian. Foucault, like Nietzsche, pushes this critique to an extreme, since he rejects the ideal of philosophy as a body of autonomous truths. But if this critical direction continues and eventually triumphs, then Foucault may well be hailed as a founder of a new mode of philosophy. It would surely not displease Foucault to think that the answer to the question ‘is X a philosopher?’ will depend on the future history of philosophy.
Regardless of how we decide to classify him, there is no doubt that Foucault emerged from a philosophical context and that his writings often impinge on philosophical issues. He formulated succinctly the philosophical context: ‘I belong to that generation who as students had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism’ (RR, interview, 174). We have already seen Foucault’s early disillusion with Marxism. The ties to phenomenology and existentialism were more enduring, but quite complex. Foucault had studied with Merleau-Ponty, who, along with Sartre, was the leading figure in the appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology by the French existentialists, and with Jean Hyppolite, the author of a major existentialist interpretation of Hegel. Heidegger’s Being and Time was also very important for the young Foucault, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, was also especially interested in the Heideggerian existential psychiatry (Daseinanalysis) of Ludwig Binswanger.
Whatever the exact nature of Foucault’s early commitment to existential phenomenology, there is no doubt that he rather soon decided that the subjective standpoint of phenomenological description was not adequate. But his path away from existential phenomenology is not entirely clear. In general, phenomenology declined in the 1960s in the wake of the spectacular rise of what was called ‘structuralism’, a set of diversely developed theoretical standpoints, all of which explained human phenomena in terms of underlying unconscious structures rather than the lived experience described by phenomenology. There were, for example, Saussure’s linguistics, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, the literary criticism of Roland Barthes, the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Georges Dumézil’s comparative studies of the structures of ancient religions. Foucault always denied that he was a structuralist and ridiculed his assimilation to the movement by the middle-brow intellectual media. (He had described his approach as ‘structural’ at various points in The Birth of the Clinic but pointedly eliminated the word in later printings.) Since structuralism was an avowedly non-historical (synchronic rather than diachronic) approach, there was point to Foucault’s protest. But there are obvious affinities between structuralist theories and Foucault’s archaeology (he particularly emphasizes the significance for him of Dumézil’s work); and he cites the inadequacy of phenomenology’s accounts of language and the unconscious, in comparison to structuralist accounts, as a good reason for its decline.
But there were also more distinctive features of Foucault’s thinking that turned him away from phenomenology. For example, he emphasized the importance of avant-garde literature’s decentring of the author and the psychological subject, and said that his reading of Nietzsche (around 1953, inspired by Bataille and Blanchot, well before Nietzsche became fashionable in France) played an important role in his break with subject-centred philosophy (interview, ‘Structuralism and Poststructuralism’, EW II, 439). However, the most important factor was Foucault’s association with French history and philosophy of science, particularly as practised by Georges Canguilhem, who was the official director of Foucault’s thesis on the history of madness.
On Foucault’s own account, Canguilhem (along with his predecessor at the Sorbonne, Gaston Bachelard) represented a clear alternative to phenomenology, one that emphasized the logic of concepts rather than lived experience as the driving force in human thought. Canguilhem’s students – among whom Foucault explicitly placed himself – rejected phenomenology’s ‘philosophy of experience’ in favour of Canguilhem’s ‘philosophy of the concept’. Canguilhem’s histories of concepts were important models for Foucault’s archaeologies of the 1960s. Years later, in an essay on Canguilhem (‘Life: Experience and Science’, EW II, 465–78), Foucault sketched a biological conception of experience designed to replace the subject-centred phenomenological vécu (lived experience).
9. Gaston Bachelard
But, at least for Foucault, the tradition of Bachelard and Canguilhem provided more a methodological alternative to phenomenology than a philosophical critique of it. For such a critique we must turn to Foucault’s study of modern thought in The Order of Things. The ultimate purpose of this book was to understand the archaeological framework (episteme) underlying the modern social sciences, but, since Foucault thinks this framework is dominated by the philosophical concept of ‘man’, particularly associated with Kant, his discussion includes a critical history of modern
philosophy.
From Descartes on, modern philosophy has been preoccupied with the question of whether our representations (experiences, ideas) accurately represent the world outside our minds. Descartes, for example, asked how we know that our ideas correspond to things that actually exist outside of us in space and time. Hume asked how we know that our experiences of regular associations of ideas (for example, the sun rising each new day) correspond to necessary connections in reality. Until Kant, no one had a plausible answer to these questions (though there were some persuasive suggestions, from Hume for example, that they needed no answer).
With Kant there occurred a decisive turn because he also reflected on the very possibility of representation, asking not just whether our representations are true to the world but how it is possible that we can represent anything at all (accurately or not). This was decisive because, he maintained, answering the new question provided a way of answering the old one. In particular, Kant argued that the very possibility of representing an object at all required, for example, that the object be represented as existing in space and time and as part of a network of causal laws. According to this kind of argument (which Kant called a ‘transcendental deduction’), the objects of our experience exist in space and time and are governed by necessary causal laws because otherwise they could not be objects of our experience. On the one hand, we are limited to knowing the world as we experience it (the phenomenal world), not the world as it is in itself (the noumenal world). On the other hand, this very limitation makes it possible for us to have objective knowledge of a world.