Georges Canguilhem – The Postmodern Peripatetic

Michel Foucault (1926-84) played a very great role in developing approaches to subjectivity as something that is constituted, rather than pre-existing or only one-sidedly constitutive. Despite some nontrivial issues with things he said at different times, this seems like a major contribution. In his later work, he also emphasized that people actively participate in the constitution of their own subjectivity. Foucault was not only a brilliant theorist, but often expressed his ideas in beautiful, sparkling prose.

I see his focus on the constitution of subjectivity itself as an invaluable and necessary complement to the notion of a constituting subjectivity, as exemplified by, e.g., Kantian synthesis.

Much of Foucault’s work tended to fit the common trope of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” — pointing out how liberal reforms actually implemented more efficient strategies of social control, and so on. Unlike most of the people who use this phrase, I think this sort of “suspicion” of usual assumptions can play an invaluable critical role. However, I agree it can also be taken too far.

For example, received truths may turn out to be mere prejudice, and the notion of truth itself may turn out to have been naively hypostasized in many instances. But it is going too far to say — as Foucault did on several occasions — that truth and knowledge as such are inevitably caught up in strategies of domination, or — as Nietzsche and Foucault both did — that there really is no Platonic truth. In matters like this, we need an Aristotelian mean that avoids both naivete and cynicism.

I always preferred to pay more attention to Foucault’s practical multiplication of articulable differences, distinctions, and discontinuities in his historiography than to his negative rhetoric about truth and knowledge in general. During his earlier “archaeological” period, which greatly impressed me in my youth, this multiplication of articulable differences was the positive side of his questioning of too-easy unities, identities, and continuities in history.

In his later work, he developed a distinctive theory of power in society, treating it as distributed everywhere at a micro level, rather than emanating from a central authority. On a practical level, this seems to me to contain valuable lessons, although it also seems to play on an ambiguity between power as capability and power as domination. (It is easy to see that power as capability is ubiquitous, and illuminating to think of how what are really modes of control may be actualized at a micro level. But capabilities and modes of control, while they are both distributed, are two different things that cannot be just identified or assumed to have the same distribution.)

He also pointed out how control can be effectuated through the very formation and self-formation of people and things, without the overt involvement of any sort of repression or repressive apparatus. This seems like another important insight.

Foucault was much influenced by the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem’s investigations of the concept of normality in biology and medicine, which highlighted the importance of pathology for an understanding of normality. (It also appears that within the French context, the term “normativity” has strong connotations of mere empirical “normality” and conformity, in sharp contrast to its value-oriented significance in analytic philosophy and my own usage.) Foucault himself had a sort of fascination with what sociologists call deviance, and a bit of a morbid streak that I never liked.

The discursive regularities he analyzed in his earlier work represent a kind of empirical “normality” rather than an ethical normativity. Again, these are two entirely different concepts.

In Aristotelian terms, discursive regularities fall under the domain of “art” or technique, rather than that of ethos. Technique is the canonical example of an Aristotelian means or efficient cause (not to be confused with later notions of impulse, or a scholastic act of creation). As efficient causes, Foucaultian discursive regularities operate under the mode of actuality. (Ethical normativity, by contrast, involves derived ends considered under the mode of potentiality.)

Foucault’s “archaeological” method can be seen as a specialized historiographical application of what I have been calling Aristotelian semantics, concerned with fine distinctions in the ways things actually said might be meant, as well as of Aristotelian dialectic, concerned with making the practical consequences of those distinctions explicit. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet; Archaeology of Knowledge; Ricoeur on Foucault; Genealogy; Immediacy, Presence.)

In the old days, my favorite text of Foucault was the beginning of the Archaeology of Knowledge (online here), revised from his “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”, published summer 1968 (o pregnant time!) in Cahiers pour L’Analyse, the original of which is separately translated in Essential Works vol. 1. There is a nice summary of the original and its historical context here.

At this time, Foucault and Althusser were both working toward what has been called a rationalist philosophy of the Concept related to the work of Jean Cavaillés and Georges Canguilhem, in contrast to then popular existential/phenomenological philosophies of the Subject. (See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillés to Deleuze.)

The Epistemological Circle that Foucault was responding to was a group of Althusser’s students interested in the philosophy and history of science, as well as structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, who had asked Foucault a series of methodological questions. Althusser was something like the dean of France’s most prestigious university. He had actually written his dissertation (which I have still not seen) on the Concept in Hegel. By this time he was in high anti-Hegelian mode, as was Foucault.

Foucault himself acknowledged considerable debt to his Hegelian mentor Jean Hyppolite, who translated the Phenomenology to French. Hyppolite read Hegel as focused more on discourse than on subjectivity. His 1952 Language and Existence, referred to by Foucault as “one of the great books of our time”, argued strongly for the importance of language in Hegel. (It was also very favorably reviewed by the young Deleuze.) Foucault had written a thesis on “The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” under Hyppolite in 1949.

There is more good historical background in James Muldoon, “Foucault’s Forgotten Hegelianism”. While I don’t endorse, e.g., Muldoon’s remarks on Hegel and free will, his suggestion that an identification with certain specifics of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel — particularly the attribution of a strong “totalizing” impulse — contributed significantly to the anti-Hegelian turn of Foucault and others is quite interesting.

Though I don’t recall this from his translated works, Hyppolite apparently both saw a strong element of totalization in Hegel and strongly rejected it, while continuing to identify as a Hegelian. (Previously, in absence of more specific evidence I had surmised it was mainly a reaction against Alexandre Kojève’s reading that drove the French anti-Hegelian turn. Muldoon also says Hyppolite’s reading was initially welcomed as a contrast to Jean Wahl’s more phenomenologically oriented 1929 book on the unhappy consciousness, which apparently also contributed to French perceptions of Hegel as subject-centered.)

In any case, the Hegel whom Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and others famously rejected in the 1960s was identified as the proponent of a totalizing historical teleology of the Subject. Each of the three components of this was independently strongly rejected — the subject-centeredness, the historical teleology, and the totalization. I still agree today that these are all serious errors that should be rejected.

However, Hegel read in a broadly Brandomian way is utterly untouched by this criticism. There is no historical teleology at all in what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy (so a fortiori not a totalizing one), and there is no subject-centeredness in the analysis of conceptual content. Subjectivity is never invoked as an unexplained explainer. Brandom’s exposition of the Hegelian critique of Mastery offers us a Hegel utterly opposed to the kind of totalization attributed to him by Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze.

Foucault presented a long list of forms of discontinuity that should be attended to in the history of ideas. Each of these could be analyzed in Brandomian/Hegelian terms as a determinate negation.

I agree with Foucault that it is very important not to take the simple continuity of a tradition for granted. In principle, such things need to be shown. However, I still think defeasible assertions about “traditions” and other such unities that should be questioned can play a useful role in historical discussion. (See also Ricoeur on Foucault; Structuralism; Structure, Potentiality; Difference; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Historiography; Genealogy.)