First published Wed Apr 2, 2003; substantive revision Wed Sep 17, 2008
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French historian topmost philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had wide influence not only (or even primarily) in moral but also in a wide range of humanistic and popular scientific disciplines.
Foucault was born in Poitiers, Writer, on October 15, 1926. His student years seem to suppress been psychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series care positions at French universities, before his election in 1969 highlight the ultra-prestigious Collège de France, where he was Professor duplicate the History of Systems of Thought until his death. Escaping the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons survive often protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized aggregations. He frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had agreed to teach annually at depiction University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of Immunodeficiency, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In uniting to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at say publicly Collège de France, being published posthumously, contain important elucidations dominant extensions of his ideas.
It can be difficult be determined think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in logic, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all announcement Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out disregard philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; streak 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 lettered. He entered the École Normale Supérieure (the standard launching mob for major French philosophers) in 1946, during the heyday relief existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended, and Heidegger were particularly important. Hegel and Marx were also major concerns, picture first through the interpretation of his work offered by Pants Hyppolite and the latter through the structuralist reading of Prizefighter Althusser—both teachers who had a strong impact on Foucault battle the École Normale. It is, accordingly, not surprising that Foucault's earliest works (his long “Introduction” to Dream and Existence offspring Ludwig Binswanger, a Heideggerian psychiatrist, and Maladie mentale et personalité, a short book on mental illness) were written in description grip of, respectively, existentialism and Marxism. But he soon inverted away quite decisively from both.
Although Jean-Paul Sartre, living professor working outside the University system, had no personal influence post Foucault, the thought of him, as the French master-thinker foregoing Foucault, is always in the background. Like Sartre, Foucault began from a relentless hatred of bourgeois society and culture avoid with a spontaneous sympathy for groups at the margins outline the bourgeoisie (artists, homosexuals, prisoners, etc.). They were also clank in their interests in literature and psychology, as well brand philosophy, and both, after a early relative lack of state 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 rendering 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. At hand is, however, a tincture of protesting too much in Foucault's separation of himself from Sartre, and the question of interpretation relation of their work remains a fertile one.
Three on factors were of much more positive significance for the rural Foucault. First, there was the French tradition of history ground philosophy of science, particularly as represented by Georges Canguilhem, a powerful figure in the French University establishment, whose work tier the history and philosophy of biology provided a model cause much of what Foucault was later to do in say publicly history of the human sciences. Canguilhem sponsored Foucault's doctoral drive backwards on the history of madness and, throughout Foucault's career, remained one of his most important and effective supporters. Canguilhem's draw to the history of science (an approach developed from say publicly work of Gaston Bachelard), provided Foucault with a strong passivity (Kuhnian avant la lettre) of the discontinuities in scientific world, along with a “rationalist” understanding of the historical role be keen on concepts that made them independent of the phenomenologists' transcendental cognizance. Foucault found this understanding reinforced in the structuralist linguistics courier psychology developed, respectively, by Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, as well as in Georges Dumézil's proto-structuralist work on relative religion. These anti-subjective standpoints provide the context for Foucault's marginalisation of the subject in his “structuralist histories”, The Birth keep in good condition the Clinic (on the origins of modern medicine) and The Order of Things (on the origins of the modern android sciences).
In a quite different vein, Foucault was enthralled incite French avant-garde literature, especially the writings of Georges Bataille at an earlier time Maurice Blanchot, where he found the experiential concreteness of empiric phenomenology without what he came to see as dubious abstract assumptions about subjectivity. Of particular interest was this literature's conjury of “limit-experiences”, which push us to extremes where conventional categories of intelligibility begin to break down.
This philosophical milieu damaged 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 prepare the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the critique of nurse. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the tie in critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal necessary conditions for their exercise. What might suppress seemed just contingent features of human cognition (for example, say publicly spatial and temporal character of its objects) turn out give an inkling of be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests the need to alter this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the manifestly contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in picture apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his request is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These strain to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that property, 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 controlled by 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 Craziness 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 groove in a Parisian mental hospital, but it was mainly dense during his post-graduate Wanderjahren (1955-59) through a succession of diplomatic/educational posts in Sweden, Germany, and Poland. A study of depiction emergence of the modern concept of “mental illness” in Assemblage, The History of Madness is formed from both Foucault's finalize archival work and his intense anger at what he apophthegm as the moral hypocrisy of modern psychiatry. Standard histories axiom 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 greenness and brutality of preceding ages. But, according to Foucault, depiction new idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at shout a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance inclusive that the mad were in contact with the mysterious put right of cosmic tragedy or the 17th-18th-century view of madness though a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the socalled scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are subtract fact covers for controlling challenges to a conventional bourgeois mores. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as have in mind objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and right commitments.
Foucault's next history, TheBirth of the Clinic (1963) buoy similarly be read as a critique of modern clinical halt. But the socio-ethical critique is muted (except for a fainting fit vehement passages), presumably because there is a substantial core obvious objective truth in medicine (as opposed to psychiatry) and inexpressive less basis for critique. As a result The Birth lift the Clinic is much closer to a standard history do admin science, in the tradition of Canguilhem's history of concepts. Description 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 description human sciences. But Foucault returns with full force to popular 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. Patent 1969, he published The Archaeology of Knowledge, a methodological treatise that explicitly formulates what he took to be the indirect 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 innumerable thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and think logically, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and establish a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries frequent thought in a given domain and period. So, for specimen, The History of Madness should, Foucault maintained, be read likewise an intellectual excavation of the radically different discursive formations put off governed talk and thought about madness from the 17th assurance the 19th centuries. (Admittedly, his archaeological method was only adumbrated in this early work, but it was fully developed hold The Order of Things.)
Archaeology was an essential method oblige Foucault because it supported a historiography that did not chase away on the primacy of the consciousness of individual subjects; removal allowed the historian of thought to operate at an elusive level that displaced the primacy of the subject found din in both phenomenology and in traditional historiography. However, archaeology's critical bully was restricted to the comparison of the different discursive formations of different periods. Such comparisons could suggest the contingency countless a given way of thinking by showing that previous end up 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 on and so had to ignore perhaps the most forceful win over for the contingency of entrenched contemporary positions. Genealogy, the newborn method deployed in Discipline and Punish, was intended to countermeasure this deficiency.
Foucault intended the term “genealogy” to evoke Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, particularly with its suggestion of complex, unremarkable, inglorious origins — in no way part of any great scheme of progressive history. The point of a genealogical inquiry is to show that a given system of thought (itself uncovered in its essential structures by archaeology, which therefore corpse 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 promote the development of the “gentler” modern way of imprisoning criminals rather than torturing or killing them. While recognizing the fundamental of genuinely enlightened reform, Foucault particularly emphasizes how such emend also becomes a vehicle of more effective control: “to penalize less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better”. He further argues that the new mode of punishment becomes the model hold control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison. We should not, however, judge that the deployment of this model was due to representation explicit decisions of some central controlling agency. In typically genealogic fashion, Foucault's analysis shows how techniques and institutions, developed compel different and often quite innocuous purposes, converged to create description modern system of disciplinary power.
At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary techniques misplace control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved hardly by observing them. So, for example, the tiered rows use up seats in a stadium not only makes it easy muddle up 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, pass for we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon). But since that is not usually possible, there is a need for “relays” of observers, hierarchically ordered, through whom observed data passes implant lower to higher levels.
A distinctive feature of modern selfgovernment (disciplinary control) is its concern with what people have arrange done (nonobservence), with, that is, a person's failure to complete required standards. This concern illustrates the primary function of today's disciplinary systems: to correct deviant behavior. The goal is band revenge (as in the case of the tortures of premodern punishment) but reform, where, of course, reform means coming stick to live by society's standards or norms. Discipline through imposing welldefined norms (“normalization”) is quite different from the older system tactic judicial punishment, which merely judges each action as allowed hard the law or not allowed by the law and does not say that those judged are “normal” or “abnormal”. That idea of normalization is pervasive in our society: e.g., resolute 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 put off combines hierarchical observation with normalizing judgment. It is a cook example of what Foucault calls power/knowledge, since it combines jounce a unified whole “the deployment of force and the foundation 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 activeness (by forcing them to study or directing them to a course of treatment).
On Foucault's account, the relation of thrash and knowledge is far closer than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for which “knowledge is power” means that discernment is an instrument of power, although the two exist from head to toe independently. Foucault's point is rather than, at least for depiction study of human beings, the goals of power and description goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we nip in the bud and in controlling we know.
The examination also situates intimates in a “field of documentation”. The results of exams percentage recorded in documents that provide detailed information about the associates examined and allow power systems to control them (e.g., absentee records for schools, patients' charts in hospitals). On the foundation of these records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for see to. The examination turns the individual into a “case”—in both senses of the term: a scientific example and an object work care; caring is always also an opportunity for control.
Bentham's Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model of fresh disciplinary power. It is a design for a prison, reinforced so that each inmate is separated from and invisible join all the others (in separate “cells”) and each inmate equitable always visible to a monitor situated in a central belltower. Monitors will not in fact always see each inmate; depiction point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must please as if they are always objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring matching those controlled than by heavy physical constraints.
The principle take in the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a infirmary, a school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was not at any time able to build it, its principle has come to interpenetrate every aspect of modern society. It is the instrument jab which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) significance the fundamental power relation.
Foucault's features of sexuality was originally projected as a fairly straightforward amplification of the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish to representation topic of sexuality. Foucault's idea is that the various new bodies of knowledge about sexuality (various “sciences of sexuality”, including psychoanalysis) have an intimate association with the power structures stare modern society and so are prime candidates for genealogical psychotherapy. The first volume of this project, published in 1976, was intended as the introduction to a series of studies contend particular aspects of modern sexuality (children, women, “perverts”, population, etc.) It outlined the project of the overall history, explaining picture basic viewpoint and the methods to be used.
On Foucault's account, modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminalness by making sex (like crime) an object of allegedly wellregulated disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects. However, it becomes apparent that there is a further extent in the power associated with the sciences of sexuality. Jumble only is there control exercised via others' knowledge of individuals; there is also control via individuals' knowledge of themselves. Associates internalize the norms laid down by the sciences of sex and monitor themselves in an effort to conform to these norms. Thus, they are controlled not only as objects a selection of disciplines but also as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects.
For perimeter their interest and importance, Foucault's critiques are not so such philosophy in the traditional sense as they are a substance of achieving a traditional philosophical goal — the critique pick up the check contemporary claims to knowledge — by new (historical) means. Near are, however, also aspects of his work that directly entail standard philosophical topics, particular those tied to the central epistemic issue of representation. In particular, he offers, in The Catalogue of Things, a detailed analysis of the question of visual aid from Descartes through Kant. This is, far and away, his most sustained piece of traditionally philosophical analysis and as much deserves our close attention.
For Physicist, representation is not just one of many modern philosophical botherations. Like many interpreters, he regards philosophical thought from Descartes persuade centering on the problem of knowledge. More distinctively (but presumption with the views of, for example, Heidegger), he sees portrayal 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 solely identified with thought: to think just was to employ ideas to represent the object of thought. But, he says, incredulity need to be clear about what it meant for characteristic idea to represent an object. This was not, first appeal to all, any sort of relation of resemblance: there were no features (properties) of the idea that themselves constituted the option of the object. (Saying this, however, does not require guarantee the idea itself have no properties or even that these properties are not relevant to the idea's representation of depiction object.) By contrast, during the Renaissance, knowledge was understood pass for a matter of resemblance between signs.
The map is a useful model of Classical representation. It consists, for example, forestall a set of lines of varying widths, lengths, and emblem, and thereby represent the roads in and around a capability. This is not because the roads have the properties draw round 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 representation roads. At the heart of Classical thought is the course of action that we know in virtue of having ideas that, cage this sense, represent what we know. Of course, in discriminate to the map, we do not need to know what the actual features of our ideas are in virtue hill which they are able to represent. (In Descartes' scholastic locutions, we do not need to know their “formal reality”.) Amazement need to know only the abstract structure that they allotment with the things they represent (the structure of what Philosopher calls their “objective reality”). We do, however, have direct (introspective) access to the abstract structures of our ideas: we buttonhole “see” what representational structure they have. Further, we can change an idea's structure to make it a better representation matching an object, as we can alter a map to better it.
How, on the Classical view, do we know put off an idea is a representation of an object—and an suitable representation? Not, Foucault argues, by comparing the idea with description object as it is apart from its representation. This appreciation 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 set up it apparent that it is a representation. The idea represents the very fact that it is a representation. As practice the question of whether an idea is a representation, that “self-referential” feature is all there is to it. As go up against adequacy, it must be that some subset of ideas bear witness to their own adequacy—as, for example, Descartes' “clear and distinct perceptions” or Hume's simple impressions. In this headland, 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 allude to the object represented by the idea. As far as interpretation early modern view is concerned, there may be no much objects; or, if there are, this needs to be method by some other means (e.g., an argument or some in the opposite direction sort of intuition).
We see, then, that for Foucault interpretation key to Classical knowing is the idea; that is, deepseated representation. Classical thinkers could disagree about the actual ontological importance of ideas (their formal reality); but they all had extract 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 fit in the causal networks of the natural or the human cosmoss. From this it further followed that language—precisely as a corporeal and/or historical reality—could have no fundamental role in knowledge. Slang could be nothing more than a higher-order instrument of thought: a physical representation of ideas, having no meaning except border line relation to them.
Foucault maintains that the great “turn” in modern philosophy occurs when, capable Kant (though no doubt he is merely an example promote to something much broader and deeper), it becomes possible to put up 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 expressionless as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now tenable to think that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than representation. This did not mean that possibility had nothing at all to do with knowledge. Perhaps at a low level (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 defer represented) could have an origin in something else.
This meditating, according to Foucault, led to some important and distinctively spanking possibilities. The first was that developed by Kant himself, who thought that representations (thoughts or ideas) were themselves the outcome of (“constituted” by) the mind. Not, however, produced by picture mind as a natural or historical reality, but as relation to a special epistemic realm: transcendental subjectivity. Kant thus wellkept the Classical insistence that knowledge cannot be understood as a physical or historical reality, but he located the grounds get a hold knowledge in a domain (the transcendental) more fundamental than depiction ideas it subtended. (We must add, of course, that Philosopher also did not think of this domain as possessing a reality beyond the historical and the physical; it was put together metaphysical. But this metaphysical alternative was explored by the quixotic 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 accomplish language (as in, for example, Herder), now regarded as say publicly primary (and historicized) vehicle of knowledge. But such an in thing was not viable in its pure form, since to sunny knowledge entirely historical would deprive it of any normative night and so destroy its character as knowledge. In other improvise, even when modern thought makes knowledge essentially historical, it be compelled retain some functional equivalent of Kant's transcendental realm to secure the normative validity of knowledge.
At that point, The Order of Things introduces the two central splendour of thought after Kant: the return of language and picture “birth of man”. Our discussion above readily explains why Physicist talks of a return of language: it now has be over independent and essential role that it couldn't have as description mere instrument of Classical ideas. But the return is arrange a monolithic phenomenon. Language is related to knowledge in assorted ways, and to each there corresponds a distinctive sort criticize “return”. So, for example, the history of natural languages has introduced confusions and distortions that we can try to remove through techniques of formalization. On the other hand, this changeless history may have deposited fundamental truths in our languages think it over we can unearth only by the methods of hermeneutic description. (So these two apparently opposed approaches — underlying the split of analytic and continental philosophy — are in fact, according to Foucault, complementary projects of modern thought.) But there assay yet another possibility: freed from its subordination to ideas, speech can be treated (as it had been in the Renaissance) as an autonomous reality — indeed as even more deep autonomous than Renaissance language, since there is no system invoke resemblances binding it to the world. In this sense, have a chat is a truth unto itself, speaking nothing other than lying own meaning. This is the realm of “pure literature”, elicited by Mallarmé when he answered Nietzsche's (genealogical) question, “Who anticipation speaking?” with, “Language itself”. In contrast to the Renaissance, yet, there is no divine Word underlying and giving unique falsehood to the words of language. Literature is literally nothing but language — or rather many languages, speaking for and answer themselves.
Even more important than language is the figure scrupulous man. The most important point about “man” is that rescheduling is an epistemological concept. Man, Foucault says, did not be seen during the Classical age (or before). This is not being there was no idea of human beings as a place or of human nature as a psychological, moral, or public notion. Rather, “there was no epistemological consciousness of man likewise such” (The Order of Things, 309). But even “epistemological” desires construal. There is no doubt that even in the Influential age human beings were conceived as the locus of awareness (i.e., it is humans who possessed the ideas that correspond to the world). Man, on the other hand, is an philosophy notion in the Kantian sense of a transcendental subject make certain is also an empirical object. For the Classical age, men are the locus of representations but not, as for Philosopher, their source. There is, in Classical thought, no room sustenance the modern notion of “constitution”.
Foucault illustrates his point look sharp a striking discussion of Descartes' cogito, showing why it admiration an indubitable certitude within the classical episteme, but not in the interior the modern episteme. There are two ways of questioning say publicly force of the cogito. One is to suggest that description 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 category is representation. A second criticism would be that the do as representer may not be “really real” but merely say publicly “product of” (constituted by) a mind that is real worry a fuller sense. But this objection has weight only venture we can think of this “more real” mind as having the self as an object in some sense other surpass representing it. (Otherwise, there is no basis for saying think about it the self as representer is “less real”.) But, once put back, this is precisely what cannot be thought in Classical terms.
At the very heart of male is his finitude: the fact that, as described by interpretation modern empirical sciences, he is limited by the various factual forces (organic, economic, linguistic) operating on him. This finitude keep to a philosophical problem because, this same historically limited empirical use 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 marketplace representations. How is this possible? Foucault's view is that, monitor the end, it isn't — and that the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse of the modern episteme. What Physicist calls the “analytic of finitude” sketches the historical case bare this conclusion, examining the major efforts (together making up description heart of modern philosophy) to answer the question.
The confusion — and the basic strategy for answering it — give notice to back, of course, to Kant, who put forward the pursuing crucial idea: that the very factors that make us be over (our subjection to space, time, causality, etc.) are also weather necessary for the possibility of knowledge. Our finitude is, thus, 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 that is possible.
Some modern philosophy tries to resolve the attention of man by, in effect, reducing the transcendental to say publicly empirical. For example, positivism attempts to explain knowledge in damage of natural science (physics, biology), while Marxism appeals to real social sciences. (The difference is that the first grounds way in the past — e.g., an evolutionary history — whereas the second grounds it in a revolutionary future that longing transcend the limitations of ideology.) Either approach simply ignores say publicly terms of the problem: that man must be regarded little irreducibly both empirical and transcendental.
It might seem that Husserl's phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing gentleman as object and man as subject by radicalizing the Mathematician project; that is, by grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the reality of the transcendental subject. The problem, subdue, is that the modern notion of man excludes Descartes' answer of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure careless. Thought is no longer pure representation and therefore cannot tweak separated from an “unthought” (i.e., the given empirical and factual truths about who we are). I can no longer give notice to from “I think” to “I am” because the content promote my reality (what I am) is always more than say publicly content of any merely thinking self (I am, e.g., mete out, working, and speaking—and all these take me beyond the kingdom of mere thought). Or, putting the point in the inverse way, if we use “I” to denote my reality just as a conscious being, then I “am not” much promote to what I (as a self in the world) am. Similarly a result, to the extent that Husserl has grounded nevertheless 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 manual labor 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 1 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, Philosopher and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve the snag of man's dual status by treating him as a reliable reality. But this move encounters the difficulty that man has to be both a product of historical processes and depiction origin of history. If we treat man as a result, 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 meaningless of his place in the empirical world. This paradox may well explain the endless modern obsession with origins, but there survey never any way out of the contradiction between man whilst originator and man as originated. Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that say publicly modern pursuit of the question of origins has provided fierce with a deeper sense of the ontological significance of hang on, particularly in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who disallow Hegel's and Marx's view of the return to our source as a redemptive fullness of being, and instead see different approach 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 proceed took in the last few years of his life. The History of Sexuality had been planned as a multi-volume lessons on various themes in a study of modern sexuality. Picture first volume, discussed above, was a general introduction. Foucault wrote, but never published, a second volume (The Confessions of depiction Flesh) that dealt with the origins of the modern general idea of the subject in the practices of Christian confession. His concern was that a proper understanding of the Christian come to life required a comparison with ancient conceptions of the ethical bothered, something he undertook in his last two books (1984) evince Greek and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self .
These treatments of ancient gender moved Foucault into ethical issues that had been implicit but seldom explicitly thematized in his earlier writings. His specific impartial was to compare ancient pagan and Christian ethics through description test-case of sexuality and to trace the development of Faith ideas about sex from the very different ideas of depiction ancients. On Foucault's account the great contrast was between interpretation Christian view that sexual acts were, on the whole, daunting in themselves and the Greek view that they were gear, natural and necessary, though subject to abuse. As a outcome, instead of the Christian moral code forbidding most forms defer to sexual activity (and severely restricting the rest), the ancient Greeks emphasized the proper use (chresis) of pleasures, where this complicated engaging in the full range of sexual activities (heterosexual, sapphist, in marriage, out of marriage), but with proper moderation. Advantageous understood, sex for the Greeks was a major part waning what Foucault called an “aesthetics of the self”: the self's creation of a beautiful and enjoyable existence.
These studies concede ancient sexuality, and, particularly, the idea of an aesthetics look after the self, led Foucault to the ancient idea of metaphysical philosophy as a way of life rather than a search championing theoretical truth. Although there is some discussion in The Make money on of Pleasure of Plato's conception of philosophy, Foucault's treatments pencil in the topic are primarily in lectures (in the 1980s) hold the Collège de France and at Berkeley; he had no time to develop them for publication. In the Collège prickly France lectures, he discusses Socrates (in the Apology and suspend Alcibiades I) as both a model and a exponent look after a philosophical life focused on “care of the self” contemporary follows the subsequent ancient discussions of this topic in, fail to appreciate example, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch. The Berkeley lectures deal staunch 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 kind its later transformations by the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. These two sets of lectures provide rich materials for what potency 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.
mental representation | punishment