Michel Foucault

Christopher Watkin

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781629953489
• eBook ISBN: 9781629953496
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Watkin assesses one of the most significant thinkers of our time—influencing disciplines as diverse as history, literature, philosophy, art, feminism, gender studies, and science—against the light of Scripture.

PART 1

FOUCAULT’S THOUGHT

1

HISTORY AND TRUTH

I am going to tell you a story, after which I will invite you to reflect on what you make of it. It is a true story, and it takes place in Paris in 1797, fewer than ten years after the storming of the Bastille and the social upheaval that followed. Its hero is a physician and psychiatrist called Philippe Pinel, “physician of the infirmaries” at the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris, an institution whose diverse inmates include criminals, those with physical diseases, pensioners, and the mentally ill. The story begins when Pinel notices that members of the latter group are forced to sleep upright, restrained with iron cuffs and collars, on chains a little too short to permit them to lie down. During their waking hours they are treated as animals and periodically put on show to satisfy the curiosity of Parisian visitors.

The climax of the story (I am telling you the short version) is straightforward enough and told often enough in histories of medicine and psychiatry: in a moment of epochal humanitarian progress, Pinel frees the mad of the Bicêtre from their barbarous chains.¹ It is remembered as a revolutionary gesture, immortalized by Charles Louis Müller in a painting of 1849 that hangs today in the entrance hall of the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris.² In Pinel’s own words:

To detain maniacs in constant seclusion, and to load them with chains; to leave them defenseless, . . . to rule them with a rod of iron, as if to shorten the term of an existence considered miserable, is a system of superintendence more distinguished for its convenience than for its humanity or its success. Experience proves that acute mania, especially when periodical, may be frequently cured by measures of mildness and moderate coercion, conjoined to a proper attention to the state of the mind.³

So then, what do you think of Pinel’s reforms? Humanitarian? Undoubtedly. Ground-breaking? Certainly. Progress? Categorically. Pinel is almost universally hailed as a moral example, a liberator, and a humanitarian. The Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine trumpets him as one who “defied both the French public and the Revolutionary Government by unlocking the chains of his patients and prohibiting other barbaric methods” and who “introduced a raft of innovations, all designed to bring a semblance of gentleness and friendliness into their hitherto sordid lives.”⁴

I am now going to ask you some very silly questions, but I beg you to indulge me and take it seriously: why do you think Pinel’s reforms represent “progress”? Why do you think the former regime was “barbarous,” and why do you think that removing chains from the mad at the Hôpital Bicêtre should be considered a “liberation”? Once your indignation has subsided that these questions can even be raised, think how you would offer a reasoned answer. What do you need to believe about the nature of madness, about human beings, about historical progress, and about the purposes of restraint for your reaction to be as self-evident to you as it is? And, if I may stretch your patience a little further, if you had other assumptions, might you not take a very different view, with equally strident certainty? Might there be a bigger story to tell than one of straightforward progress from barbarity to humanity?

Enter Foucault—not to argue that the former regime of chains and bestial treatment was better than Pinel’s reforms, but precisely to tell this bigger story, a story that explains, not merely Pinel’s heroism, but why it is that we should think him a hero today at all, why the mad were ever incarcerated to begin with, and what we are taking for granted when we talk about ideas like “progress.” Foucault’s aim in retelling Pinel’s story—which he does in the course of History of Madness—is not to prove that progress or humanitarianism is meaningless, but to encourage an awareness of the nature and origin of the assumptions that stand behind the reasons we offer when forced to justify them, and to show that it could have been otherwise. Before we are in a position to appreciate what Foucault is doing with Pinel in particular, however, we need a sense of how he approaches history in general, and it is to that task that we now turn.

History: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche

If we had to sum up Foucault’s approach to history in the shortest possible formula, we could do worse than to say that he sides with Nietzsche, Bachelard, and Canguilhem against Hegel and Marx. In the rest of this chapter, I will try to explain the meaning of that condensed statement. The early nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) elaborated a philosophy of history that has transformed the way we think as much as any other philosophical system since Plato’s. For our purposes here, the key terms in Hegel’s understanding of history are “consciousness,” “progress,” and “totality.” Hegel sees history as the grand story of “mind” or “spirit” (Geist in German), gradually coming to a consciousness of its own freedom. By Geist he means something like independent human subjectivities united in relation to each other in a particular society. One implication of Hegel’s account, therefore, is that if we leave human consciousness out of the equation, we can never come to an adequate understanding of history. Consciousness is central to Hegel’s view of history.

In order to trace how Geist progressively comes to a realization of its own nature, Hegel tells a story that runs from the very first ancient civilizations to his own day. The story is one of inexorable progress, but that progress is not linear. It follows a three-stage process that has come to be called “dialectic”:

1. The stage of “understanding.” Two concepts are accepted as fixed and mutually exclusive. For example, “being” and “nonbeing”: something cannot both be and not be at the same time.
2. The stage of “dialectical reason.” The concepts are seen to harbor contradictions. For example, if “being” and “nonbeing” are absolute, how can anything ever come into being or cease to be?
3. The stage of “speculation” or “sublation.”⁵ The two categories from the stage of understanding are “sublated” or “passed over,” and a new, higher category embraces them and resolves the apparent contradiction uncovered at stage 2. For example, “becoming” embraces both “being” and “nonbeing,” and accounts for the seeming contradiction between those two lower categories.

So whereas linear progress advances in a straight line from A to B, dialectical progress advances from A and B to C. The three stages are sometimes labelled “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis,” but Hegel uses these terms only in his critique of Kant, never in relation to his own thinking. For our purposes in this book, the main point we need to take away from Hegel’s dialectical understanding of history is that historical progress, whatever its precise nature, is inexorable and inevitable: the dialectical movement rolls onward just as surely as objects fall downward, and the whole of world history is moving toward a particular goal, namely the self-realization of Geist.

So far, we have seen that Hegel’s account of history privileges consciousness and includes a notion of inexorable progress over time. A final aspect of his thinking that we need to be familiar with before we move on to Foucault is that no development is left outside the dialectical movement: everything that happens in history can be understood in terms of the grand story of Geist’s self-realization, with no remainder. Hegel’s philosophy seeks to account for the totality of human history, not for this or that isolated civilization or century.

Marx, for his part, adopts the basic scaffolding of Hegel’s philosophy of history—the idea that history is inevitably progressing toward a particular goal—but he gets rid of the idea of Geist in favor of a “dialectical materialism” that focuses not on human consciousness but on economic conditions. History can still be understood as progress toward an inevitable goal, but that goal is now understood as the proletarian revolution that, in time, will usher in the classless society.

Foucault’s understanding of history, to begin with, is a rejection of Hegel and Marx in the three key areas of consciousness, progress, and totality:

• For Foucault, human consciousness is not at the center of history. Traditional historiography gravitates to history’s big names like Galileo, Descartes, or Martin Luther King, seeing these august figures as the primary agents of historical development. Foucault dismisses this sort of history as “doxology,” an unwarranted genuflection at the altar of the “great men” of the past. He takes us to a level more fundamental than the sayings and actions of great men, a level he calls a “positive unconscious of knowledge” (OT, xi), which we shall explore at length below. In fact, great women and men play a rather peripheral role for Foucault, and the main historical actors are concepts, not people. The philosophical landscape of Foucault’s day was divided between the philosophers of consciousness (primarily Sartre and the existentialists), and the philosophers of the concept (Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem). Foucault sides squarely with the philosophers of the concept.
• Foucault rejects the idea that history should be understood in terms of inexorable, cumulative, and irreversible progress from one age to the next, and he rejects the idea that history is moving ever closer to a particular, predetermined goal. Dismissive of Hegel’s and Marx’s claims to have provided a convincing account of historical progress, he quipped that “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else” (OT, 285). In his systematic rejection of Hegel, Foucault substantially aligns himself with the approach to history taken by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—or at least with Foucault’s own reading of Nietzsche.⁶ Against the traditional way in which history seeks to explain continuities over time and seeks to account for how one thing led to another, Foucault’s Nietzsche rejects the “antiquarian history” that consists in establishing continuities from one event to the next, opposing it to his own “genealogy” or “effective history,” the purpose of which “is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation” as it labors to “make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us” (LCP, 162). Nietzsche’s genealogical method seeks to sniff out history’s false universals (such as “rationality”)—notions that are presented as eternal and natural, but which in fact are confined within particular cultures and often serve the interests of a given culture’s dominant groups (LCP, 158). Bachelard and Canguilhem, working on the history of science, similarly saw the ideas of Einstein not as a gradual progression from what had come before, but as an abrupt and dramatic rupture,⁷ and from such ruptures developed an understanding of history as a succession of epistemological breaks. History had always included discussion of ruptures and discontinuities, but for Nietzsche, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, they were placed for the first time at its center.
• Foucault’s histories do not assume that the stories they tell are the only possible ones or the ones that account for all historical details. As we shall see below, Foucault’s main aim is not to be comprehensive and total, but to tell stories that highlight certain features of society and, especially in his later writing, achieve certain political ends. Like Nietzsche, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, Foucault privileges difference over similarity, arguing that “the freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence” (LCP, 185). He does not think that any account of history can or should pretend to totality: no story can be the story of everything, and we must content ourselves to tell local and limited histories confined to particular aspects of particular historical ages. Furthermore, we must tell those stories, not in terms of ideas that remain unchanged from one age to the next (which he calls “anthropological universals,” EW2-AME, 461...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Foreword by Esther Lightcap Meek
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Foucault’s Thought
• Part 2: Introducing the Cruciform “Great Reversal”
• Appendix 1: Foucault’s Main Publications
• Appendix 2: Foucault’s Periodizations
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names