Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a
French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and
post-structuralist movements. He has had wide influence not only (or even
primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social
scientific disciplines.
Foucault was born in Poitiers,
France, on October 15, 1926. His student years seem to have been
psychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became
academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series of positions
at French universities, before his election in 1969 to the ultra-prestigious
Collège de France, where he was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought until
his death. From the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a
founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons and often
protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups. He frequently
lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had
agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early
victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In addition to works
published during his lifetime, his lectures at the Collège de France, being
published posthumously, contain important elucidations and extensions of his
ideas.
It can be difficult to think of
Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its
history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical
and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless,
almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in
either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional
critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement
with the thought of traditional philosophers. This article will present him as
a philosopher in these two dimensions.
Let us begin, however, with a
sketch of the philosophical environment in which Foucault was educated. He
entered the École Normale Supérieure (the standard launching pad for major
French philosophers) in 1946, during the heyday of existential phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended, and Heidegger were particularly
important. Hegel and Marx were also major concerns, the first through the
interpretation of his work offered by Jean Hyppolite and the latter through the
structuralist reading of Louis Althusser—both teachers who had a strong impact
on Foucault at the École Normale. It is, accordingly, not surprising that
Foucault's earliest works (his long “Introduction” to Dream and Existence
by Ludwig Binswanger, a Heideggerian psychiatrist, and Maladie mentale et
personalité, a short book on mental illness) were written in the grip of,
respectively, existentialism and Marxism. But he soon turned away quite
decisively from both.
Although Jean-Paul Sartre, living
and working outside the University system, had no personal influence on
Foucault, the thought of him, as the French master-thinker preceding Foucault,
is always in the background. Like Sartre, Foucault began from a relentless
hatred of bourgeois society and culture and with a spontaneous sympathy for
groups at the margins of the bourgeoisie (artists, homosexuals, prisoners,
etc.). They were also similar in their interests in literature and psychology,
as well as philosophy, and both, after a early relative lack of political
interest, became strong activists. But in the end Foucault seemed to insist on
defining himself in contradiction to Sartre. Philosophically, he rejected what
he saw as Sartre's centralization of the subject (which he mocked as
“transcendental narcissism”). Personally and politically, he rejected Sartre's
role as what Foucault called the “universal intellectual”, judging a society in
terms of transcendent principles. There is, however, a tincture of protesting
too much in Foucault's separation of himself from Sartre, and the question of
the relation of their work remains a fertile one.
Three other factors were of much
more positive significance for the young Foucault. First, there was the French
tradition of history and philosophy of science, particularly as represented by
Georges Canguilhem, a powerful figure in the French University establishment,
whose work in the history and philosophy of biology provided a model for much
of what Foucault was later to do in the history of the human sciences.
Canguilhem sponsored Foucault's doctoral thesis on the history of madness and,
throughout Foucault's career, remained one of his most important and effective
supporters. Canguilhem's approach to the history of science (an approach
developed from the work of Gaston Bachelard), provided Foucault with a strong
sense (Kuhnian avant la lettre) of the discontinuities in scientific
history, along with a “rationalist” understanding of the historical role of
concepts that made them independent of the phenomenologists' transcendental
consciousness. Foucault found this understanding reinforced in the
structuralist linguistics and psychology developed, respectively, by Ferdinand
de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, as well as in Georges Dumézil's
proto-structuralist work on comparative religion. These anti-subjective
standpoints provide the context for Foucault's marginalization of the subject
in his “structuralist histories”, The Birth of the Clinic (on the
origins of modern medicine) and The Order of Things (on the origins of
the modern human sciences).
In a quite different vein,
Foucault was enthralled by French avant-garde literature, especially the
writings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, where he found the
experiential concreteness of existential phenomenology without what he came to
see as dubious philosophical assumptions about subjectivity. Of particular
interest was this literature's evocation of “limit-experiences”, which push us
to extremes where conventional categories of intelligibility begin to beak
down.
This philosophical milieu provided
materials for the critique of subjectivity and the corresponding
“archaeological” and “genealogical” methods of writing history that inform
Foucault's projects of historical critique, to which we now turn.
Since its beginnings with
Socrates, philosophy has typically involved the project of questioning the
accepted knowledge of the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant
developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the critique of
knowledge. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the
same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal
necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent
features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal character of
its objects) turn out to be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests the
need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the apparently
contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the apparently
necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his questioning is the modern
human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These purport to offer
universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions
of ethical and political commitments of a particular society. Foucault's
“critical philosophy” undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are just
the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically
grounded truths.
The most striking example of this
mode of Foucault's thought is his first major work, The History of Madness
in the Classical Age (1961). This book originated in Foucault's academic
study of psychology (a licence de psychologie in 1949 and a diplome
de psycho-pathologie in 1952) and his work in a Parisian mental hospital,
but it was mainly written during his post-graduate Wanderjahren
(1955-59) through a succession of diplomatic/educational posts in Sweden,
Germany, and Poland. A study of the emergence of the modern concept of “mental
illness” in Europe, The History of Madness is formed from both
Foucault's extensive archival work and his intense anger at what he saw as the
moral hypocrisy of modern psychiatry. Standard histories saw the nineteenth-century
medical treatment of madness (developed from the reforms of Pinel in France and
the Tuke brothers in England) as an enlightened liberation of the mad from the
ignorance and brutality of preceding ages. But, according to Foucault, the new
idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical
treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the
Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of
cosmic tragedy or the 17th-18th-century view of madness
as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific
neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for
controlling challenges to a conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault
argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific
discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently
questionable social and ethical commitments.
Foucault's next history, The
Birth of the Clinic (1963) can similarly be read as a critique of
modern clinical medicine. But the socio-ethical critique is muted (except for a
few vehement passages), presumably because there is a substantial core of
objective truth in medicine (as opposed to psychiatry) and so less basis for
critique. As a result The Birth of the Clinic is much closer to a
standard history of science, in the tradition of Canguilhem's history of
concepts. The same is true of The Order of Things, which was
controversial much more for its philosophical attacks on phenomenology (and
Marxism) than for its complex and nuanced critique of the human sciences. But
Foucault returns with full force to social critique in Discipline and
Punish.
Discipline and Punish marks the transition to what commentators
generally characterize as Foucault's “genealogical” period, in contrast to the
preceding “archaeological” period. In 1969, he published The Archaeology of
Knowledge, a methodological treatise that explicitly formulates what he
took to be the implicit historical approach (“archaeology”) he deployed in The
History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of
Things. The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of
thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's
terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that
operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of
conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given
domain and period. So, for example, The History of Madness should,
Foucault maintained, be read as an intellectual excavation of the radically
different discursive formations that governed talk and thought about madness
from the 17th through the 19th centuries. (Admittedly,
his archaeological method was only adumbrated in this early work, but it was
fully developed in The Order of Things.)
Archaeology was an essential
method for Foucault because it supported a historiography that did not rest on
the primacy of the consciousness of individual subjects; it allowed the
historian of thought to operate at an unconscious level that displaced the
primacy of the subject found in both phenomenology and in traditional
historiography. However, archaeology's critical force was restricted to the
comparison of the different discursive formations of different periods. Such
comparisons could suggest the contingency of a given way of thinking by showing
that previous ages had thought very differently (and, apparently, with as much
effectiveness). But mere archaeological analysis could say nothing about the
causes of the transition from one way of thinking to another and so had to
ignore perhaps the most forceful case for the contingency of entrenched
contemporary positions. Genealogy, the new method deployed in Discipline
and Punish, was intended to remedy this deficiency.
Foucault intended the term
“genealogy” to evoke Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, particularly with its
suggestion of complex, mundane, inglorious origins — in no way part of any
grand scheme of progressive history. The point of a genealogical analysis is to
show that a given system of thought (itself uncovered in its essential
structures by archaeology, which therefore remains part of Foucault's historiography)
was the result of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally
inevitable trends.
Discipline and Punish (1975)is a genealogical study of the
development of the “gentler” modern way of imprisoning criminals rather than
torturing or killing them. While recognizing the element of genuinely
enlightened reform, Foucault particularly emphasizes how such reform also
becomes a vehicle of more effective control: “to punish less, perhaps; but
certainly to punish better”. He further argues that the new mode of punishment
becomes the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals,
and schools modeled on the modern prison. We should not, however, think that
the deployment of this model was due to the explicit decisions of some central
controlling agency. In typically genealogical fashion, Foucault's analysis
shows how techniques and institutions, developed for different and often quite
innocuous purposes, converged to create the modern system of disciplinary
power.
At the core of Foucault's picture
of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary techniques of control:
hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great
extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them.
So, for example, the tiered rows of seats in a stadium not only makes it easy
for spectators to see but also for guards or security cameras to scan the
audience. A perfect system of observation would allow one “guard” to see
everything (a situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's
Panopticon). But since this is not usually possible, there is a need for
“relays” of observers, hierarchically ordered, through whom observed data
passes from lower to higher levels.
A distinctive feature of modern
power (disciplinary control) is its concern with what people have not done
(nonobservence), with, that is, a person's failure to reach required standards.
This concern illustrates the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to
correct deviant behavior. The goal is not revenge (as in the case of the
tortures of premodern punishment) but reform, where, of course, reform means
coming to live by society's standards or norms. Discipline through imposing
precise norms (“normalization”) is quite different from the older system of
judicial punishment, which merely judges each action as allowed by the law or
not allowed by the law and does not say that those judged are “normal” or
“abnormal”. This idea of normalization is pervasive in our society: e.g.,
national standards for educational programs, for medical practice, for
industrial processes and products.
The examination (for example, of
students in schools, of patients in hospitals) is a method of control that
combines hierarchical observation with normalizing judgment. It is a prime
example of what Foucault calls power/knowledge, since it combines into a
unified whole “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth” (184).
It both elicits the truth about those who undergo the examination (tells what
they know or what is the state of their health) and controls their behavior (by
forcing them to study or directing them to a course of treatment).
On Foucault's account, the
relation of power and knowledge is far closer than in the familiar Baconian
engineering model, for which “knowledge is power” means that knowledge is an
instrument of power, although the two exist quite independently. Foucault's
point is rather than, at least for the study of human beings, the goals of
power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and
in controlling we know.
The examination also situates
individuals in a “field of documentation”. The results of exams are recorded in
documents that provide detailed information about the individuals examined and
allow power systems to control them (e.g., absentee records for schools,
patients' charts in hospitals). On the basis of these records, those in control
can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge.
The examination turns the individual into a “case”—in both senses of the term:
a scientific example and an object of care; caring is always also an
opportunity for control.
Bentham's Panopticon is, for
Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a
design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible
to all the others (in separate “cells”) and each inmate is always visible to a
monitor situated in a central tower. Monitors will not in fact always see each
inmate; the point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never
know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always
objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal
monitoring of those controlled than by heavy physical constraints.
The principle of the Panopticon
can be applied not only to prisons but to any system of disciplinary power (a
factory, a hospital, a school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was
never able to build it, its principle has come to pervade every aspect of
modern society. It is the instrument through which modern discipline has
replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power
relation.
Foucault's history of sexuality
was originally projected as a fairly straightforward extension of the
genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish to the topic of
sexuality. Foucault's idea is that the various modern bodies of knowledge about
sexuality (various “sciences of sexuality”, including psychoanalysis) have an
intimate association with the power structures of modern society and so are
prime candidates for genealogical analysis. The first volume of this project,
published in 1976, was intended as the introduction to a series of studies on
particular aspects of modern sexuality (children, women, “perverts”,
population, etc.) It outlined the project of the overall history, explaining
the basic viewpoint and the methods to be used.
On Foucault's account, modern
control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex
(like crime) an object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which
simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects. However, it
becomes apparent that there is a further dimension in the power associated with
the sciences of sexuality. Not only is there control exercised via others'
knowledge of individuals; there is also control via individuals' knowledge of
themselves. Individuals internalize the norms laid down by the sciences of
sexuality and monitor themselves in an effort to conform to these norms. Thus,
they are controlled not only as objects of disciplines but also as
self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects.
For all their interest and
importance, Foucault's critiques are not so much philosophy in the traditional
sense as they are a matter of achieving a traditional philosophical goal — the
critique of contemporary claims to knowledge — by new (historical) means. There
are, however, also aspects of his work that directly engage standard
philosophical topics, particular those tied to the central epistemological
issue of representation. In particular, he offers, in The Order of Things,
a detailed analysis of the question of representation from Descartes through
Kant. This is, far and away, his most sustained piece of traditionally
philosophical analysis and as such deserves our close attention.
For Foucault, representation is
not just one of many modern philosophical problems. Like many interpreters, he
regards philosophical thought from Descartes on centering on the problem of
knowledge. More distinctively (but consistent with the views of, for example,
Heidegger), he sees representation as at the heart of the question of
knowledge.
Foucault argues that from
Descartes up to Kant (during what the French call the Classical Age),
representation was simply identified with thought: to think just was to employ
ideas to represent the object of thought. But, he says, we need to be clear
about what it meant for an idea to represent an object. This was not, first of
all, any sort of relation of resemblance: there were no features (properties)
of the idea that themselves constituted the representation of the object.
(Saying this, however, does not require that the idea itself have no properties
or even that these properties are not relevant to the idea's representation of
the object.) By contrast, during the Renaissance, knowledge was understood as a
matter of resemblance between signs.
The map is a useful model of
Classical representation. It consists, for example, of a set of lines of
varying widths, lengths, and colors, and thereby represent the roads in and
around a city. This is not because the roads have the properties of the map
(the widths, lengths, and colors of the lines) but because the abstract
structure given in the map (the relations among the lines) duplicate the
abstract structure of the roads. At the heart of Classical thought is the principle
that we know in virtue of having ideas that, in this sense, represent what we
know. Of course, in contrast to the map, we do not need to know what the actual
features of our ideas are in virtue of which they are able to represent. (In
Descartes' scholastic terminology, we do not need to know their “formal
reality”.) We need to know only the abstract structure that they share with the
things they represent (the structure of what Descartes calls their “objective
reality”). We do, however, have direct (introspective) access to the abstract
structures of our ideas: we can “see” what representational structure they
have. Further, we can alter an idea's structure to make it a better
representation of an object, as we can alter a map to improve it.
How, on the Classical view, do we
know that an idea is a representation of an object—and an adequate
representation? Not, Foucault argues, by comparing the idea with the object as
it is apart from its representation. This is impossible, since it would require
knowing the object without a representation (when, for Classical thought, to
know is to represent). The only possibility is that the idea itself
must make it apparent that it is a representation. The idea represents the very
fact that it is a representation. As to the question of whether an idea is a
representation, this “self-referential” feature is all there is to it. As to
adequacy, it must be that some subset of ideas likewise bear witness to their
own adequacy—as, for example, Descartes' “clear and distinct perceptions” or
Hume's simple impressions. In this sense, early modern philosophy must always
be based on “intuition” (intellectual or sensory). Note, however, that an
“intuition” of an idea's adequacy does not, of itself, establish the
independent existence of the object represented by the idea. As far as the
early modern view is concerned, there may be no such objects; or, if there are,
this needs to be established by some other means (e.g., an argument or some
other sort of intuition).
We see, then, that for Foucault
the key to Classical knowing is the idea; that is, mental representation.
Classical thinkers could disagree about the actual ontological status of ideas
(their formal reality); but they all had to agree that as representations
(epistemically, if not ontologically) they were “non-physical” and
“non-historical”; that is, precisely as representing their objects, they could
not be conceived as having any role in the causal networks of the natural or
the human worlds. From this it further followed that language—precisely as a
physical and/or historical reality—could have no fundamental role in knowledge.
Language could be nothing more than a higher-order instrument of thought: a
physical representation of ideas, having no meaning except in relation to them.
Foucault maintains that the great
“turn” in modern philosophy occurs when, with Kant (though no doubt he is
merely an example of something much broader and deeper), it becomes possible to
raise the question of whether ideas do in fact represent their objects and, if
so, how (in virtue of what) they do so. In other words, ideas are no longer
taken as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now possible to think
that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than representation.
This did not mean that representation had nothing at all to do with knowledge.
Perhaps some (or even all) knowledge still essentially involved ideas'
representing objects. But, Foucault insists, the thought that was only now
(with Kant) possible was that representation itself (and the ideas that
represented) could have an origin in something else.
This thought, according to
Foucault, led to some important and distinctively modern possibilities. The
first was that developed by Kant himself, who thought that representations
(thoughts or ideas) were themselves the product of (“constituted” by) the mind.
Not, however, produced by the mind as a natural or historical reality, but as
belonging to a special epistemic realm: transcendental subjectivity. Kant thus
maintained the Classical insistence that knowledge cannot be understood as a
physical or historical reality, but he located the grounds of knowledge in a
domain (the transcendental) more fundamental than the ideas it subtended. (We
must add, of course, that Kant also did not think of this domain as possessing
a reality beyond the historical and the physical; it was not metaphysical. But
this metaphysical alternative was explored by the idealistic metaphysics that
followed Kant) Another—and in some ways more typically modern—view was that
ideas were themselves historical realities. This could be most plausibly
developed by making ideas essentially tied to language (as in, for example,
Herder), now regarded as the primary (and historicized) vehicle of knowledge.
But such an approach was not viable in its pure form, since to make knowledge
entirely historical would deprive it of any normative character and so destroy
its character as knowledge. In other words, even when modern thought makes
knowledge essentially historical, it must retain some functional equivalent of
Kant's transcendental realm to guarantee the normative validity of knowledge.
At this point, The Order of
Things introduces the two central features of thought after Kant: the
return of language and the “birth of man”. Our discussion above readily
explains why Foucault talks of a return of language: it now has an independent
and essential role that it couldn't have as the mere instrument of Classical
ideas. But the return is not a monolithic phenomenon. Language is related to
knowledge in diverse ways, and to each there corresponds a distinctive sort of
“return”. So, for example, the history of natural languages has introduced
confusions and distortions that we can try to eliminate through techniques of
formalization. On the other hand, this same history may have deposited
fundamental truths in our languages that we can unearth only by the methods of
hermeneutic interpretation. (So these two apparently opposed approaches —
underlying the division of analytic and continental philosophy — are in fact,
according to Foucault, complementary projects of modern thought.) But there is
yet another possibility: freed from its subordination to ideas, language can be
treated (as it had been in the Renaissance) as an autonomous reality — indeed
as even more deeply autonomous than Renaissance language, since there is no
system of resemblances binding it to the world. In this sense, language is a
truth unto itself, speaking nothing other than its own meaning. This is the
realm of “pure literature”, evoked by Mallarmé when he answered Nietzsche's
(genealogical) question, “Who is speaking?” with, “Language itself”. In
contrast to the Renaissance, however, there is no divine Word underlying and
giving unique truth to the words of language. Literature is literally nothing
but language — or rather many languages, speaking for and of themselves.
Even more important than language
is the figure of man. The most important point about “man” is that it is an
epistemological concept. Man, Foucault says, did not exist during the Classical
age (or before). This is not because there was no idea of human beings as a
species or of human nature as a psychological, moral, or political notion.
Rather, “there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such” (The
Order of Things, 309). But even “epistemological” needs construal. There
is no doubt that even in the Classical age human beings were conceived as the
locus of knowledge (i.e., it is humans who possessed the ideas that represented
the world). Man, on the other hand, is an epistemological notion in the Kantian
sense of a transcendental subject that is also an empirical object. For the
Classical age, men are the locus of representations but not, as for Kant, their
source. There is, in Classical thought, no room for the modern notion of
“constitution”.
Foucault illustrates his point
through a striking discussion of Descartes' cogito, showing why it is an
indubitable certitude within the classical episteme, but not within the modern
episteme. There are two ways of questioning the force of the cogito. One is to
suggest that the subject (the thinking self, the I) that Descartes concludes
exists is something more than just the act of representing objects; so we can't
go from representation to a thinker. But for the Classical Age this makes no
sense, since thinking is representation. A second criticism would be that the
self as representer may not be “really real” but merely the “product of”
(constituted by) a mind that is real in a fuller sense. But this objection has
weight only if we can think of this “more real” mind as having the self as an
object in some sense other than representing it. (Otherwise, there is no basis
for saying that the self as representer is “less real”.) But, once again, this
is precisely what cannot be thought in Classical terms.
At the very heart of man is his
finitude: the fact that, as described by the modern empirical sciences, he is
limited by the various historical forces (organic, economic, linguistic)
operating on him. This finitude is a philosophical problem because, this same
historically limited empirical being must also somehow be the source of the
representations whereby we know the empirical world, including ourselves as
empirical beings. I (my consciousness) must, as Kant put it, be both an
empirical object of representation and the transcendental source of
representations. How is this possible? Foucault's view is that, in the end, it
isn't — and that the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse
of the modern episteme. What Foucault calls the “analytic of finitude” sketches
the historical case for this conclusion, examining the major efforts (together
making up the heart of modern philosophy) to answer the question.
The question — and the basic
strategy for answering it — go back, of course, to Kant, who put forward the
following crucial idea: that the very factors that make us finite (our subjection
to space, time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary for the
possibility of knowledge. Our finitude is, therefore, simultaneously founded
and founding (positive and fundamental, as Foucault puts it). The project of
modern (Kantian and post-Kantian) philosophy — the analytic of finitude — is to
show how this is possible.
Some modern philosophy tries to
resolve the problem of man by, in effect, reducing the transcendental to the
empirical. For example, positivism attempts to explain knowledge in terms of
natural science (physics, biology), while Marxism appeals to historical social
sciences. (The difference is that the first grounds knowledge in the past —
e.g., an evolutionary history — whereas the second grounds it in a
revolutionary future that will transcend the limitations of ideology.) Either
approach simply ignores the terms of the problem: that man must be regarded as
irreducibly both empirical and transcendental.
It might seem that Husserl's
phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing man as object
and man as subject by radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding
our knowledge of empirical truths in the reality of the transcendental subject.
The problem, however, is that the modern notion of man excludes Descartes' idea
of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure consciousness. Thought is
no longer pure representation and therefore cannot be separated from an
“unthought” (i.e., the given empirical and historical truths about who we are).
I can no longer go from “I think” to “I am” because the content of my reality
(what I am) is always more than the content of any merely thinking self (I am,
e.g., living, working, and speaking—and all these take me beyond the realm of
mere thought). Or, putting the point in the reverse way, if we use “I” to
denote my reality simply as a conscious being, then I “am not” much of what I
(as a self in the world) am. As a result, to the extent that Husserl has
grounded everything in the transcendental subject, this is not the subject
(cogito) of Descartes but the modern cogito, which includes the (empirical)
unthought that is part of man's reality. Phenomenology, like all modern
thought, must accept the unthought as the ineliminable “other” of man. Nor are
the existential phenomenologists (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) able to solve the
problem. Unlike Husserl, they avoid positing a transcendental ego and instead
focus on the concrete reality of man-in-the world. But this, Foucault claims,
is just a more subtle way of reducing the transcendental to the empirical.
Finally, some philosophers (Hegel
and Marx in one way, Nietzsche and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve
the problem of man's dual status by treating him as a historical reality. But
this move encounters the difficulty that man has to be both a product of
historical processes and the origin of history. If we treat man as a product,
we find ourselves reducing his reality to something non-human (this is what
Foucault calls the “retreat” from man's origin). But if we insist on a “return”
to man as his own proper origin, then we can no longer make sense of his place
in the empirical world. This paradox may explain the endless modern obsession
with origins, but there is never any way out of the contradiction between man
as originator and man as originated. Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that the
modern pursuit of the question of origins has provided us with a deeper sense
of the ontological significance of time, particularly in the thought of
Nietzsche and Heidegger, who reject Hegel's and Marx's view of the return to
our origin as a redemptive fullness of being, and instead see it as a
confrontation with the nothingness of our existence.
Foucault's final engagement with
traditional philosophy arises from the rather surprising turn toward the
ancient world he took in the last few years of his life. The History of
Sexuality had been planned as a multi-volume work on various themes in a
study of modern sexuality. The first volume, discussed above, was a general
introduction. Foucault wrote, but never published, a second volume (The
Confessions of the Flesh) that dealt with the origins of the modern notion
of the subject in the practices of Christian confession. His concern was that a
proper understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with
ancient conceptions of the ethical self, something he undertook in his last two
books (1984) on Greek and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The
Care of the Self .
These treatments of ancient
sexuality moved Foucault into ethical issues that had been implicit but seldom
explicitly thematized in his earlier writings. His specific goal was to compare
ancient pagan and Christian ethics through the test-case of sexuality and to
trace the development of Christian ideas about sex from the very different
ideas of the ancients. On Foucault's account the great contrast was between the
Christian view that sexual acts were, on the whole, evil in themselves and the
Greek view that they were goods, natural and necessary, though subject to
abuse. As a result, instead of the Christian moral code forbidding most forms
of sexual activity (and severely restricting the rest), the ancient Greeks
emphasized the proper use (chresis) of pleasures, where this involved
engaging in the full range of sexual activities (heterosexual, homosexual, in
marriage, out of marriage), but with proper moderation. So understood, sex for
the Greeks was a major part of what Foucault called an “aesthetics of the
self”: the self's creation of a beautiful and enjoyable existence.
These studies of ancient
sexuality, and, particularly, the idea of an aesthetics of the self, led
Foucault to the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life rather than a
search for theoretical truth. Although there is some discussion in The Use
of Pleasure of Plato's conception of philosophy, Foucault's treatments of
the topic are primarily in lectures (in the 1980s) at the Collège de France and
at Berkeley; he had no time to develop them for publication. In the Collège de
France lectures, he discusses Socrates (in the Apology and in Alcibiades
I) as both a model and a exponent of a philosophical life focused on “care
of the self” and follows the subsequent ancient discussions of this topic in,
for example, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch. The Berkeley lectures deal with
the ancient ideal of “truthful speaking” (parrhesia), regarded as a
central political and moral virtue. Here Foucault discusses earlier
formulations of the notion, in Euripides and Socrates, as well as its later
transformations by the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. These two sets of
lectures provide rich materials for what might well have been the most fruitful
of all Foucault's engagements with traditional philosophy. But his early death
in 1984 prevented him from completing the project.