Foucault: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007466207
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Foucault in just one hour.

Foucault’s Life and Works

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, at Poitiers, 250 miles south of Paris. His family were well-to-do bourgeois in a town that has remained a byword for French provincialism. His father was a surgeon, taught at the local medical school, and ran a prosperous practice. His mother was a strong-minded woman who managed her husband’s finances, helped administer his practice, and daringly drove an automobile.

Besides their town house in Poitiers, the family owned a small manor house in the country. During Paul-Michel’s childhood they also built a seaside villa on the Atlantic coast at La Baule. This was large enough for a family of five and servants. Here the family spent their summer holidays amidst the pine trees overlooking a long curve of sandy beach. Father was kindly but stern, mother was efficient but concerned. For Paul-Michel, life at home with his older sister and younger brother was the epitome of normality. Such was the standard background of so many intransigent French intellectuals who have revolted against all forms of authority and bourgeois behaviour. (Although he would strive to rebel against so much else, Foucault would not be able to avoid conforming to this Gallic stereotype, which had held sway from Voltaire to Sartre).

At school young Paul-Michel was weedy and shortsighted. As a result his schoolmates soon corrupted his name to Polchinelle (the French equivalent of the hunchbacked figure of fun we know as Punch). Freudians will be intrigued to know that he dreamed of becoming a goldfish. Such fishy ambitions were reflected in his academic performance. Although evidently bright, he never excelled. Even at his favourite subject, history, he only finished second.

World events impinged little on sleepy Poitiers or Foucault family life. The seaside villa was built during the early years of the depression; Hitler’s posturings on the newsreels were dismissed with sophisticated ridicule in the press; and the blandly debonair records of Maurice Chevalier spun on the phonograph.

When he was ten, young Paul-Michel saw the first refugees from the Spanish Civil War tramping through the streets of Poitiers. Three years later Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II, and the family drove back from their summer holiday at La Baule for the last time. By the time Foucault was fourteen, the Nazis had invaded France, the French army was retreating in disarray, and even Poitiers was in turmoil. With the unbending ineptitude of an operating-theatre martinet, Dr. Foucault supervised the setting up of emergency medical units in the town. In the background his wife painstakingly smoothed ruffled feathers and efficiently ensured that things got done. Now wearing glasses, but still in short pants, young Paul-Michel looked on in bewilderment. That summer his exam results plummeted.

Mother pulled strings to have him transferred to another school, whereupon the academic ugly duckling turned into a swan. This was to become something of a pattern. Foucault was to under-perform at important exams but then shine when he took them a second time. At the age of twenty, on his second attempt, Foucault gained a place at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This was the intellectual hothouse where the crème de la crème of France’s students were put through their paces. To be a ‘normalien’ marked one as a superior species for life. Normality has always been exceptional in France, and the superintellectual ‘normaliens’ were often a fairly odd lot. But even here Foucault soon stood out.

By now the Punch of the school playground had developed into a decidedly prickly character. During the previous year or so he had gradually become aware that he was homosexual. Such a thing was not only illegal at the time; in Poitiers it was unthinkable. Paul-Michel couldn’t even turn to his beloved mother for guidance and reassurance. And by this stage he had also fallen out heavily with Papa. The adolescent Paul-Michel refused to follow in the family tradition and become a doctor. He just wasn’t interested in medicine, and that was that. He would stamp upstairs to his room, slam the door, and bury his head in yet another volume of history. By the time he took the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure for the second time, there was no doubting that here was an intellectual thoroughbred. (He finished fourth in the entire country). But there was also no doubting that he had the unpredictable temperament of a thoroughbred.

In Paris he took to calling himself plain Michel (dropping Paul, his father’s name). Michel Foucault’s first years at the ENS were to be a litany of incidents. On one occasion he slashed his chest with a razor; on another he had to be restrained while chasing a student with a dagger; and on another he nearly succeeded in committing suicide by taking an overdose of pills. He drank heavily and occasionally experimented with drugs (very much a minority pursuit in those far-off days). Sometimes he would disappear for nights on end, afterwards slumping back hollow-eyed and haggard into his dormitory with depression. Few guessed the truth. He was tortured with guilt over what had occurred on his lonely sexual expeditions.

Foucault was unable to live with himself, and none of the students in his dormitory wished to live with him. They looked upon him as mad and dangerous, qualities that only seemed to be exacerbated by his evident brilliance. Fiercely aggressive in intellectual argument, he was not above resorting to violence. His fellow students shunned his company, and he began developing psychosomatic illnesses. Long bouts in a solitary bed in the sanatorium spared him from the communal existence of his dormitory, and here he read voluminously, even by ENS standards.

Foucault’s somewhat haphazard enthusiasm for history now found cohesion. He began reading the nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel, whose philosophy insisted on the coherence and meaning of history. The purpose of history was its long progress toward the ultimate reality of reason and self-consciousness. According to Hegel, ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational.’ Below the surface of events, history had its hidden structure. ‘In history we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, on the other hand, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or even the future, but with what is, both now and eternally – that is, with reason.’ History and philosophy became one, a unity that had immediate relevance to the present.

From Hegel, Foucault progressed to the twentieth-century German philosopher Heidegger, who saw the human predicament as determined by deeper elements than mere reason. ‘My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger,’ Foucault would later write. The excitement of first encountering Heidegger’s thought is best conveyed by his student Hannah Arendt: ‘Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say.’ The past was alive in the present, and how we understood the past showed how we could understand the present. History was not recording the truth of the past but revealing the truth of the present. Such was the drift of Foucault’s thought.

At the time, Heidegger’s philosophy was a matter of deep debate in the cafés of Left Bank Paris. Postwar disillusionment and a despair with traditional values had led to a widespread enthusiasm for the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had himself been heavily influenced by Heidegger. Sartre’s existentialism was highly subjective and believed in ‘existence before essence’. There was no such thing as an essential humanity or subjectivity. This essence we ourselves created by the manner in which we existed, made our choices, and acted in the world. Our subjectivity was likewise no constant element, open to static and limiting definition. It was continually being created, constantly evolving as a result of the life we led.

Foucault was to absorb many ideas from Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet equally significant were the ideas he rejected. In an important way he formed himself in reaction to these philosophers, especially Sartre. As a personality and a thinker, Sartre dominated the Parisian intellectual scene and would remain a constant presence almost throughout Foucault’s life: an example and a goad to his aspirations. Sartre’s ideas would perform a similar role. Foucault was temperamentally averse to remaining in anyone’s shadow for long. He not only had ambition but also sufficient contrariness to strike out on his own – even though his reactive impulse often outran his ideas. There would be no father figures for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foucault’s Life and Works
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher