Philosophy 437 Lecture Notes

I. Modernism - the view that reason assures ever-increasing progress in developing an objective account of reality

A. Presumably, human life benefits from this progress.

II. From the Preface of Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences:

"This passage [in Borges] quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i.) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very find camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.' In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the start impossibility of thinking that."

A. While most people would regard this classification of animals to be ludicrous, Foucault views it as an opportunity to recognize the limitations of our own classificatory system, by which we would not think of this alternative.

        1. While most people merely presume that their own presently accepted classification scheme represents an objective reality, there really are numerous alternative classification schemes.

        2. A particular classification scheme really is a cultural code of interpretation, what Foucault usually calls "a discursive formation"—that is, a set of deep rules for ordering that is embedded in our language.

B. The resurrection (deconstruction) of a discursive formation is a task of "archeological" reconstruction, where one studies historically the remains of the past to find out how a culture came to develop a particular system of classification.

        1. People are generally unaware of the ways cultural power molds their systems of thought and behavior, hence the need for archeology.

C. Foucault is particularly concerned with classification developed in the human (social/behavioral) sciences to arrive at a concept of human nature.

        1. He turns upside down the usual notion that human sciences represent progress in dealing with human beings. For example, we might presume that our sophisticated judicial system has achieved progress by eliminating the execution of criminals for minor crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, compared with past times. But Foucault might argue that the concepts of crime, criminals, prisoners, and justice developed through the human sciences produces social circumstances worse than those earlier executions for minor crimes.

        2. The ways by which the human sciences have defined human nature are too limiting conceptually and too stifling for human potentialities—all the while proceeding as if they were describing an objective reality.

D. Foucault identifies knowledge with power (not in the benign Baconian sense of enabling greater control over the natural world) in the harmful sense that defining human nature turns into control over human beings and human possibilities.

        1. He offers studies of prisoners, mental patients, and medical patients in support of this position.

        2. He exhibits a severe mistrust of knowledge and social institutions.

        3. He focuses upon critiques of past cultural developments rather than presenting any detailed plan or goal for what human beings should be in the future.

III. Foucault and Postmodernism

A. Rejection of Modernism

        1. He denies that rational knowledge produces objective accounts of reality

        2. He denies that rational knowledge represents progress in directing human life.

B. Deconstruction

        1. His archeologies are means of deconstructing the illusionary rational, objective accounts of the modernists.

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