I like Foucault because he makes a case for the those abused by the system, and he doesn't like the assumption that things are right and normal and we should just all behave and do our part while those in power punish non compliance without genuine moral authority, or rather, with moral authority that is entangled with the interests of system. He speaks up for the ones who get forgotten in the histories we tell and the great deeds that are done, as in those tales of cowboys and indians: told by cowboys! For years I thought American indians were just evil, as I did homosexuality and other things I assimilated. As for me, I take a keen interest in what keeps people bonded in society and how this establishes norms that make us toe the line by being the line. After all, it wasn't just the men who kept women out of politics and under the thumb of husbands--it was women who believed this. It is called a self fulfilling prophesy when dominance is achieved by the desire of the dominated. Blacks in the antebellum south in the US mostly believed they were in fact inferior. What I like about Foucault is he saw power in complacency. He was right about this.Immanuel Can
Ah, but we are not computers. If we were, then the input "public concepts" would be processed by each in exactly the same way, and with the same results. Nor, contrary to Foucault, are we "ventriloquized by history" For if we were, then "history" would be only one thing, and the "hand up our backs" would induce us to the same utterances. We must understand Foucault to be hyperbolical there, trying to tell us we are less original than we think: but if we take him to mean that there is no particular person, no individual identity involved in the processing of a concept, then he's not telling the truth.
Foucault wanted to put everybody in "classes," and make them victims of groupthink. He wanted to do this so as to "debunk" their power-authority structures. (His personal reasons for wanting this are quite transparent and well-known.) But this is only a semi-credible idea at best -- not dead wrong for everything, but only partly right -- because "classes" are themselves different, and process things differently. Even Foucault said they did. Otherwise, what was the evil of "group" or "class"? What was there to "debunk"?
But as to the being ventriloquized by history, Foucault was a disciple of Heidegger, and this latter's Being and Time defended a concept of the self as an historical dasein. No way around it: why do my sentences rise on a question, possess subject then object structure; why is it that I wave my arms a certain why to make a point, and so on, and so on? I learned these during infancy. I learned it all, the culture, the food, the manner of speaking, the humor. what goes untouched here? As I type, is there truly freedom from the ready to hand utility delivered to my fingers from an age old typing class? Or am I not simply engaged, the doing, without interruption, obeying, if you wil. These ideas in my head are gatherings of language born out of the ages. They have certain possibilities that are employed in speech, and with all my novelty of restructuring them, I am bound to their possibilities which I recollect and produce more often than not, robotically (as it should be! After all, to second guess all we do and declare our freedom from it makes living and breathing impossible. I have my thoughts on this if you would like to go into it).
Sorry for all that. I like Foucault.
I do have an idea as to how to go beyond this and achieve true freedom, but that is for another time. It is Kierkegaard's Repetition and Husserl's epoche and others that saves the day.
Power group? I get the idea, I think. But it is certainly the resistance we receive from the world that makes novelty possible, that is, that redefines the problem solving events science takes on and creates new possibilities for truth or disclosure. So there we are, in every moment of our lives, deploying recalled bundled ideas to solve iisues of our engagement.But the inter-sectionalists have taken us even one step farther: in dividing up the groups into subgroups, they've created an infinite number of potential collocations of criteria -- with the net result that the individual is back with a vengeance, not this time as a mere member of a "class" or "power group," but as the unique intersection of diverse criteria.
Moreover, when we think about the phenomenal, we must remember that when a concept is processed, no matter how "public" or "historical" that concept may have been in origin, the stimulus for it comes from somewhere outside the individual and the class. It comes from what we might call "the real world," or Kant might have wanted to call "the numinous." But it doesn't come from ME, and it doesn't come from US.
. Our lives are "normal science" just walking down the street, relying on those repeated confirmations of the theories we solved long ago: put this foot forward, watch the balance, and so on. Language is like this, too. Pronunciation used to be a challenge, when we were 2 or so. the world that stands before us is a network of problems solved and confirmation of the results in every moment. Normal science is when it works.They usually work, almost always
But now, the point you are making, I think, is that because the world puts resistance before our understanding, anomalies rise up. Clearly. And this is where a scientist plies her trade, but the resources she has are entirely recalled. So I agree, real novel thinking is there. And I also agree that in our normal lives, questions arise. Questioning is the piety of thought, says Heidegger. This also has great possibilities for discussion.
Pushes against one's will: But in this pushing, how does analysis reveal what is outside the interpretative possibilities. I get on the subway, the door doesn't open, the world pushes against my will, now, where is the authentic departure from your resources that would come into play? You examine the door, pull hard, jiggle, find an authority: these are routines established, always already there when you engage subways. Where is the original authorship of these actions. (Caputo's book is, well, all about this!)One short definition of reality is, "That which pushes back against my will." That's not a bad little definition, in some ways.
Now, finally, in the interpretive event there's not just "the interpretation," standing all alone, outside of all facts. There's the inducement-to-interpret (the facts, events or stimuli from "the world"), the interpreter (the individual person, unique as he or she is), and the interpretation (his or her attempt to recode the experience in language, understand it, and to render it "public" again).
By truth I mean true propositions. Snow is white, my back aches, e.g.s. Why are these true? What makes them so? Dewey says language was formed out of problem solving events and the words, the sentences simply emerged to communicate and communication had no real correspondence with the world as an empirical scientist would assume. Truth is a social phenomenon and makes no references outside the pragmatic containment of meaningful exchange of ideas. It is a coherence idea, not a correspondence one: truth is agreement with other truths, and the outside resistance is no more than resistance, no metaphysical presences.It depends what you mean by "truth." Is truth a mere product of the interpretation? Or is truth an approximation to the reality of the stimulus that forms the inducement-to-interpret? The first alternative is implausible, it seems to me.
That is the question! I am going to start reading more Husserl. Also, Immanuel Levinas. Do the epoche: the tree there in front of you. Husserl says if you practice dismissing from your thoughts all that would make a knowledge claim on this except the ideas that make the tree a tree (things are constituted by ideas), then you enter into the magical world of phenomenology, though he would use magical. Some say thta when you do something like this, there actually IS something magical going on. The world takes on a transcendental presence. I think like this.I'd be interested in seeing how it would be done, though.
Right, I think. they pressent themselves as events, that is, in time. and the hammering is, with every successful blow, a confirmation of the utility of hammering. It works. One can laugh, or some other mood can step in when something is amiss, but as far as the hammering goes, it is a model of our being in the world. this kind of thing underlies all language. It reminds me a a cow's life: cow's don't have language, but they do "think" in the hammer using way: no more grass here,move on. We have this at the core of our understanding, this utility sense of things. Language is not qualitatively different, one could argue. Anyway, Newton and the rest take up the world in a certain way, as do we all. when Newton wasn't thinking physics, he was tying his shoes or assessing his finances. Physics is one of many "regions" of problem solving, and the one is ignored while another rises to "proximity". It doesn't change the way interpretation has bearing on the world.Why, when the head flies off the hammer, does one person laugh, another curse, and a third just pick up a new hammer and go on? Why does Newton see gravity in the apple, but Joe Lunchbucket does not, and neither does Parmenides? Anomalies are recognized by individuals. By others, they are not even noted.
They do not "present themselves" as anomalies. They only are self-presented as events. They are interpreted as anomalies, or as indicative of something, only by those who are in the frame of mind to do it.