Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 2
Questions & Answers #6: "Foucault on Freedom & Truth"

1, In the first sentence, T. says, "Foucault disconcerts," 152. How so?

T. doesn't directly enough say so, but, F. (as other posties) believes that culture (including the activities of specialized discourse communities) is 100% the product of texts (linguistic forces). There can be no a priori values. F.'s historical analysis demonstrates how putatively disinterested "sciences" (the law, medicine) are motivated by power/domination. Thus F. defers to Nietzsche: without the possibility of getting in touch with any a priori value, all human acts appear to be operations of power (will-to-power). If this is truly the case, then history should have a disinterested, flat tone comparable to Darwin's "history" of which species won, which perished. However, most of the time F.'s tone is one of outrage. It is easy to initially misread him as Marx, so that the expose of, say legal history in England, seems to be an unconscionable and outrageous affront to truth and freedom. Yet theoretically "Foucault seems to repudiate both. The idea of a liberating truth is a profound [Romantic] illusion. There is no truth which can be espoused, defended, rescued against systems of power," i.e., systems defined exclusively as operations of power, 152. "And there is no escape from power into freedom, for such systems of power are co-extensive with human society. We can only step from one [system in]to another," 153.

2. T. alludes to the openings of Discipline & Punishment with its horrifying account of the execution of a regicide in 1757 in Paris. T. then says that our reaction to this account indicates Europe/Am. has undergone a paradigm shift in values since that time: "the whole background notion of order has disappeared for us" & been replaced by "Modern humanitarianism," 155. Even if T. lets you off the hook ("No once can claim to understand it fully"), try to contrast the two orders. What is authoritative in a late medieval, pre-Enlightenment outlook & what is authoritative in a contemporary American outlook?

T. provides the elements. "In traditional ethics, ordinary life is overshadowed by . . . higher activities," 155. Your subjective experience is not important as such. The life of Christ or a saint is authoritative & your life is valuable ("saved") in so far as it imitates the model. Unauthorized (i.e. individual) behavior or feelings are condemned as sinful. The Neoclassical age was one of wigs, brocade clothes, Mozart's music, & literature like Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." An expression of sincerity is embarrassingly inelegant. Romanticism claimed that "feelings are a key to the good life," 156. In Freudian outlook, feelings are condemned as ethical violations from the high view of the super-ego. If feelings are to be valued qua feelings, then the social outlook which condemned them because of their status as mere feelings, must be destroyed. It was. Romanticism won the day relocating authority subjectively: this experience/feeling/choice is valuable precisely because it is mine; it is my feeling, my choice. What was hidden because it was embarrassing & sinful is now proudly displayed as an accomplishment. Again, watch Oprah (& all the similar displays going back to Rousseau's Confessions with its nasty psychological & physical revelations). Order is produced by my emotional choices (e.g., in marriage).

3. On 158 T. says F. provides as an example of the shift from Neoclassical to Romantic values, the status of the law. In Neoclassical outlook the law was considered sovereign & the king, either as the personification of the law or its most important guardian, was sovereign. We know that this model was inverted by Rousseau's model of social contractualism & by Bentham's Utilitarianism; both of which define the law as the product of individual choice, where the choice (not the law) is sovereign or authoritative. This is too theoretical for F. How does F. characterize our contemporary notion of what replaced a Neoclassical concept of law?

• Our institutions are "not concerned with law but with normalization" to bring "about a certain [individual] result, defined as health," 158. "Criminals are more & more treated as 'cases' to be 'rehabilitated' & brought back to normal," 159.
• Whereas the old law was prohibitive (concerned with how an individual action may mar the prestige of the universal), today law is protective & productive (concerned with individuals acting on other individuals &, as above, seeking to produce a norm).
• The power of law is not wielded by a king or judge as a command; its power is disseminated as social regulation &/or engineering requirements (of the parts to assemble the whole which will produce the desired function).

  4. The Romantic model suggests that our feelings, which gives rise to our thoughts, originate from an unspecifiable (even if divine) process or source. On 160 T. paraphrases F.'s social structural theory of why we think the way we do. How does this work?

  "The objectifying & domination of inner nature comes about . . . through training [a new language] in an interiorization of certain disciplines. The disciplines of organized bodily movement [including clothes/fashion], of the employment of time, of ordered dispositions of living/working space; these are the paths by which objectification [i.e., value judgments] really takes place . . . & takes on the dimensions of a mass phenomenon," 160. "But the disciplines which build this new way of being are social; they are the disciplines of the barracks, the hospital, the school, the factory." Consequently, they can be subverted or at least nuanced by others in the system. Notice how thinly described F.'s behaviorism is: "These are the [behavioral] loci where forms of domination become entrenched through being interiorized." One wonders how that happens so mechanically in the face of subversive evidence from Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The narrow/technical answer is "his Nietzschean refusal of the notion of truth as having any meaning outside a given order of power," so that critical texts necessarily seek to modify terms within the language they cannot entirely escape. Thus Islam was a critique of Christianity, which was a critique of Judaism and paganism, and Romanticism is a critique of Neoclassicism. This point does not entirely answer my epistemological objection of how one can be so confident that the social/ theoretical program has exactly the predicted effect of causing a specific feeling in an agent? One way to get out of this enigma is to offer a second half to the question by conceding that one can know that feeling only by asking the agent who must then have recourse to the same theoretical model in order to articulate her feeling. If the same word/concept comes up from both sides, then you know . . . at least that both of you are operating in roughly the same social reality.
  

  5. T. says that "Central to the Romantic notion of liberation is the notion that the [homosexual, female, black, etc.] nature within us must [be allowed to] come to expression" such that it speaks primally in its own voice instead of reading a social script, 160. What is F.'s reaction to this?

  "F. aims to dismantle this whole conception, & show it to be through-going illusion," 161. We have been over the ground of why this is in the form of pragmatic epistemology: that 1) inarticulate & primal feelings become 2) articulated & conceptual by connecting with or fitting into linguistic forms taught to us by society. The supposition that #2 has already formed #1 on the level of instinct or biology violates the ontological order. Moreover, "F.'s ideas seems to be that the notion that we have [e.g., an essential] sexual nature is itself a product of those modes of knowledge designed to make us objects of control. Our acceptance that we have such a nature makes us an object of such control," 161. Notice the implication of victimization at the end. Controlled by whom? Since Kant, control by anyone, no matter how innocuous or benign, strikes a vital nerve.

  6. Can one totally escape social control? This is the Romantic illusion of, e.g., Thoreau: to be a thoroughly self-made man; not to be defined by anyone else. If everyone is involved in will-to-power projects, mine is as authentic & authoritative as anyone else's. This is the line of thinking that makes F. sound to me paranoid & priest haunted, always on guard against unintentionally falling prey to someone else's will-to-power project. But total individual freedom which exempts one from every social involvement, because it threaten to enslave one, is as undesirably sterile as it is impossible. How does T. make this point? See 165.

  • Where do the techniques of domination come from? They are not biologically instinctive. They are social programs.
  • There are myriad social programs & numerous interpretations of any specific complex institution. What authorizes F.'s interpretative model as privileged or the truth? "F reads the rise of humanitarianism exclusively in terms of the new technologies of control. The development of the new ethics of life is given no independent significance. This seems to me quite absurdly one-sided," 165.
  • The substitution sleight of hand, by which I mean that F. predictably subverts the self-understanding provided in the original model by invariably redescribing the event from his view, as domination. "It is a truism of the civic humanist tradition of political theory that free participatory institutions require some commonly accepted self-disciplines. The free citizen has the vertu to give willingly the contribution which otherwise the despot would coerce from him . . . . Without this, free institutions cannot exist. There is a tremendous difference between societies which find their cohesion through such common disciplines . . . and the . . . kinds of society which require chains of command based on unquestionable authority," 165. F. typically misreads the former in terms of the latter, claiming that the terms that define the former are both illusory & insidiously produced somewhere in the realm of the latter.
  • Novel reductionist model are often initially attractive because they promise to simply what is complex: "F.'s attraction is partly that of a terrible simplificateur," 166.
  • The new theory must conserve the self-understanding of the agents articulated in the earlier model. If it dismisses, out of hand, their experience as illusory, then it fails to comprehend the data. "Western history . . . has been animated by [a pervasive understanding of] civic humanism . . . . And that means a massive amount of what is specific to our civilization. Without this in one's conceptual armoury, Western history & societies become incomprehensible [i.e., capable only of substitutional accounts which redefine the self-understanding of the original agents], as they are for that reason to so many Russians (like Solzhenitsyn)," 166. YES. The great moral voice of the decade of the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn hated life in Vermont, preferring to move back to Russia.

  7. F. is a very big deal. Thus when T. says, "I think F.'s position is ultimately incoherent" (167), he knows that he will have to muster convincing evidence. What is it?

  • "The idea of power without a subject" misconstrues the pragmatic ontology: that a person has feelings/experience which are then articulated in socially invented structures. The concept of power is such a structure that cannot be convincingly read backward to the level of primal experience, except by reverting to the notion of a priori transcendentals.
  • Bureaucratic power & technique are not essential entities. They refer to relationships among individuals within the boundaries of some institution: "a relation alongside others - social, economic, familial, sexual, etc. - that people stand in with each other. . . . The power F. is interested in is internal to, intrinsic to these other relations," 167 bottom.
  • Substitutional fallacy: "aside from the particular conscious purpose which agents pursue in their given [paradigm] context, there is disconcernible a strategic logic of the context itself, but this cannot be attributed to anyone as their plan, as their conscious purpose. * * * Besides the strategies of individuals . . . there is a strategy of the context" (169), which has a life of its own & which threatens to vitiate the intentions of the individual. On p. 170-71 T. provides 3 examples of systems which produce unintended but recognizable & explicable global effects. He further says that "The undesigned systematicity [causal effect] has to be related to the purposeful action of agents in a way that we can understand," 171; and that this requirement is lacking in F.'s analysis, so that we are left with a brooding suspicion.

  8. "'Power' without 'freedom' or 'truth': can there really be" one (power) without the others? Are they not all concepts? Without regressing, to nominate Power as a reductive metaphysical cause, how can F. hope to make his project plausible?

  "'Power in the way F. sees it, closely linked to 'domination,' does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim," 174. As in Hobbesian/Newtonian mechanics, the status of adjective is dismissed as too subjective (e.g., the intention of an agent) & replaced by a study of empirical effects. Apparently power does not need an agent; "power needs targets. Something must be . . . imposed on someone, if there is to be domination. . . . Then there must be an element of fraud, illusion, false pretences involved in this," otherwise how is it domination? 174. However, domination implies that I have my own intentions, which it forces out or freezes into inactivity. "I am arguing that power, in his sense, does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation," 175-6. Additionally, "Mask, falsehood makes no sense without a corresponding notion of truth," 176. The target for power is not just a spatial metaphor indicating an agent, it implies the truth which it seeks to subvert.

  9. In human growth & development, the gestalt of a later stage offers a negative view of earlier stages. Thus the post-pubescent ego can look back with some smugness to smile at the unsuccessful attempts of the pre-pubescent ego to comprehend the experience of sex. Should the earlier outlook be absolutely condemned as a sham? T. says, "F. would have us believe so," 181. The next question is then against what background? Obviously, the current outlook must feel uneasy, knowing that its outlook is likely to be similarly seen through as illusory from the next stage.

• This is a way to smuggle in an absolute. From the Romantic view, any social context, any historically concrete language dominates the (infantile & illusory) state of perfect freedom. This is a watershed point defining East & West. Whereas Romantic Westerners feel the rub here, Asians feel relieved & grateful to be given a set of directions & a provisional role to play; to start (living) somewhere instead of eternally dreaming about it (in adolescence). "We have become certain things in Western civilization. Our humanitarianism, our notions of freedom . . . define a political identity we share," 181. We fight over measuring the ingredients in this recipe, "but they all count for us. * * * . . . We cannot shrug them off. They define humanity, politics, for us," 181. In comparison, F. offers us an angry, adolescent day-dream of identity as uncompromised. The outrage in his tone implies that we have been victimized by the conditions of actual life. F.'s vision is only temporarily plausible when we imaginatively take " an outsider's perspective," considering our life in the abstract, against a very fuzzy ideal. But we know, in fact, that "we have already become something. Questions of truth & freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project. In short, we have a history," 182. Part of F.'s project is to replace history (which is domination) by archeology - the quintessential outsider view.

On to #10: "Legitimation Crisis?"
Nov. 96