Some years ago, I shared a class with a first-year philosophy student whose paper was handed back by the professor with the following comment:
"You may be the smartest student in the school — or perhaps the biggest bullshit artist. Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart."
One might say the same of Foucault. Though unquestionably brilliant, he was a complicated individual: equal parts scholar, madman, prophet, and gadfly.
While his body of work is beyond my powers to do justice to, I'll share a few broad insights that have helped me approach his work with more appreciation and clarity.
To distinguish between his competing aspects takes no small amount of time. My only hope is to convince you it’s a worthy investment.
Biographical Context
To understand Foucault, we need to understand two men who came before him: Hegel and Nietzsche.
Of the former, he said:
...to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. [1]
Hegelian philosophy (outside our scope here) had formed the ground on which Foucault first stood and viewed the world. The challenge was that this influence left him unsure of his own authentic originality.
This was a significant problem to Foucault, as the golden thread that unified his own work was his study of influence and power. He was possessed by a conviction that these forces shaped people to be other than they would be of their own accord.
At heart, he wanted his readers to understand how insidious this all was. He sought to teach them how to open their eyes to the influence of these dynamics on their identity, thoughts, and relationships.
In this sense, he was a father of modern social justice. It wasn't enough to him that you wept over abuses of privilege and power; you had to consider that the mere existence of asymmetric privilege and power relationships inevitably led to abuse.
Foucault saw potential dangers around every corner, the worst of which was the unexamined life. He preached constant, systematic vigilance.
His advice to his students:
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought our accepted practices rest. [2]
Another person once wrote that, "if you can't be free, be as free as you can." That could very well have been Foucault's mantra as applied to intellectual independence.
It could have also have belonged to Nietzsche, who I see as somewhat of his historical alter-ego. Just consider how Foucault describes their first encounter of minds:
Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that here was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion, and I then broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France. I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that. [3]
And so it was that Foucault followed Nietzsche down the rabbit-hole. In both cases, their conclusions were contrarian, nuanced, and complicated. But, be that as it may, both had keen awareness of some very deep, very real human problems.
Let's look at those problems, as described in four of Foucault’s most popular books:
(To declare my bias, my textual analysis is highly informed by my read on Foucault as a person. I see that narrative everywhere in the text. I can't help it. As such, I'd recommend you read others insights to balance mine.)
Book #1: Madness & Civilization
This was both his first book and his most personal. Ostensibly a history of the treatment of madness in mid-to-late European history, deeper down it's also a study of the rationality of madness (as opposed to the irrationality of institutional reason).
In a fitting line, GK Chesterton once said that, "A madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything but his reason."
Foucault saw madness as something distinct from true mental illness. In his way of thinking, the latter occurred once reason had been "diseased"; whereas madness was the result of reason being "dazzled".
You might say that madmen, in his view, were sometimes enlightened souls who had finally seen through the veneer of man's social constructs, just as the escapee from Plato's cave had finally seen the true light of the sun and was dazzled by it.
There's a bit of existentialism about all that. The madman, realizing that men are living constructed lives, now bears the debilitating weight of deciding what a man should be. If he is to return to live among society, to what degree can he still play by its rules? Can he even make himself see things as he once did? Ought he?
Foucault described this man as "a prisoner in the midst of the most free and the most open of roads, chained solidly to an infinite crossroads."
(For context, see: What is the meaning of existential angst?)
Book #2: The Order of Things
The primary topic of this outing was "an archaeology of the human sciences". In it, he hypothesized that in each era of scientific development certain conditions existed that framed, allowed, and encouraged certain discoveries to take place. He called this set of conditions an “episteme”.
It was similar to Kuhn’s concept of a scientific paradigm, except broader. While a paradigm represented a collection of known fundamentals and principles, an episteme was more like the structural and unspoken cultural framework that surrounded that paradigm.
While debate rages as to the legitimacy of epistemes as an historical hermeneutic, they remain an interesting thought experiment and they help to bond several of Foucault’s other ideas more neatly.
Book #3: Discipline and Punish
This takes us back to the core idea of power. He traces the modern history of punishment as it shifted from external shows of retributive justice (like public executions) to the present-day penal system.
The book is complicated and has a “big brother” vibe. Foucault seemed to regret some of the excesses in tone in later years. But it did introduce some searching questions:
- Did prisons accomplish a meaningful purpose?
- Were they centered on justice or the exercise of power?
- Did they improve society or just perpetuate incarceration?
While some of his specifics have been debated and debunked, those questions are still very much present in modern inquiry.
Book #4: The History of Sexuality
This was his final work, which he died before completing. It was highly personal, not just on account of his own sexuality, but because it centered on a subject that he saw connected to truth and identity at the deepest levels.
Bearing in mind his over-arching thesis that power often influences what a person's normal behavior would otherwise be, this was his quest to review the historical record to seek insights on how the concept of individual sexual expression had changed over time as various powers held influence over it.
His first observation was that the then-modern theory of Victorian prudishness wasn't quite right. He found the opposite: that a bourgeoisie class had developed who spent a great deal of their free time thinking and asking about sexuality in a raw way.
Having reviewed their confessions, and having traced back the history of sexuality as far as Greco-Roman times, he reached the ultimate conclusion that sex shouldn't be seen just in terms of "sensation and pleasure" or "law and interdiction", but also in terms of "the true and false".
He suggested that, given sufficient freedom in both the legal and cultural sense, people would figure out who they truly were, and that said freedom was good.
Summary
At the heart of it all, he simply demanded that his readers and students not allow ignorance to poison them, but rather vigorously pursue enlightened resistance:
"I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them. And if I do not say what ought to be done, it is not because I believe there is nothing to be done. Quite on the contrary, I think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or escape them.” [4]
In specifics, he was a study of contrasts and contradictions — an original thinker who lived in the shadows of great men; a scholar known for breadth of research who many accused of insufficient depth and balance.
But though he may have been an iconoclast and likely a bit mad, he was indisputably an optimist and a humanist.
His theories may have had their holes, but from those holes poured forth hope.
Footnotes:
1. Discourse on Language, Inaugural Lecture at the College de France, 1970-1971. tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith
2. “Practicing criticism, or, is it really important to think?”,interview by Didier Eribon, May 30-31, 1981, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kriztman (1988), p. 155
3. Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)
4. Dits et Écrits 1954–1988 (1976) Vol. II, 1976–1988 edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, p. 911-912
