Gutting (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (2)

Gutting, G. (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

2. Introduction

But his intellectual métier^[각주:1], through which he develops all his ideas about philosophy, literature, society, and politics, is the history of thought. With one exception, all his major books are histories of aspects of Western thought, and the exception (ΑΚ) is a methodological reflection οn this historical work. Foucault's choice of title for his chair at the College de France was entirely appropriate: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought.

Foucault was not, however, interested in the history of thought merely for its own sake. His historical work was guided by a "philosophical ethos" deriving from the Enlightenιnent values of human liberation and of autonomous human thought as an instrument of that liberation. Foucault's work is a search for truths that will make us free. But he develops this Enlightenment ideal in an essentially self-critical mode, exhibiting an acute awareness of how specific employments of reasons, even bodies of scientific knowledge, can themselves constrain and oppress human beings. 

To show how particular domains of knowledge have constrarined human freedom
To provide the intellectual resources for overcoming these constraints.

 

Kant and Foucault

① Kant thought that the limits of reason revealed by his critique derived from necessary a priori structures that defined the very possibility of οur knowledge- that is, formal structures with universal values. It is at this point that Foucault's project for a critique of rason differs from Kant's. Unlike Kant, he is not concerned with determining the a priori, necessary conditions governing the exercise of reason but with reflection on what seem to be such conditions to reveal the extent to which they in fact have a contingent historical origin. Through such reflection- carried out by histories of thought- he aims at showing how we can free ourselves from ("transgress") the constraints of these conditions. As a result, Foucault gives a new meaning to the project of a critique of reason.

Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon liιnits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgessing, it seems to me that the critical question today has been turned back into a ρositiνe one: in what is giνen to us as uniνersal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the fοrm of necessary liιnitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.

He gives up the traditional philosophical goal of grounding theoretical and practical knowledge in an understanding of the essential; universal structures of thought and reality and instead applies the philosopher's analytic and synthetic skills to the task of uncovering and, when possible, dissolving contingent, historical constraints on thought. He thus abandons the venerable but empty pretension that philosophy proνides a privileged access to fundamental truths. But, at the same time, he offers a more concrete and effective approach to the equally venerable goal of liberating the human spirit. [3]

② Foucaιιlt's project also differs from Kant's in its point of application. Kant was priιnarily concerned with the scientific knowledge of nature, mathematics and physics, his idea being that an understanding of the conditions of possibility of these paradigms of knowledge would reνeal the a priori structures of knowledge as such.

Foucault, by contrast, is concerned with the much more dubious disciplines ("the human sciences") that try to provide knowledge of human beings. This is because he sees these disciplines, rather than the natural sciences, as the primary source of contemporary constraints οn human freedom. We can, accordingly, characterize his fundamental intellectual project as a philosophical critique of the human sciences, carried οut by a history of thought in the serνice of human liberation.

...contemporary psychology and psychiatry regard themselves as scientifically objective disciplines that have discovered the true nature of madness as "mental illness." They further see themselves as employing their knowledge of mental illnesses fοr the purely humanitarian purpose of curing those who suffer from them.

 

The Archaeology of Knowledge 

① In his first majοr book, FD, Foucault traces the historical origins of psychology and psychiatry with a view to showing, first, that there is no privileged status to the mdern conception of madness as mental illness. Second, he tries to show that the mad are regarded as threats to the moral οrder of modern society and that their "medical" treatment has been more a matter of social control than of compassionate relief.

② In Foucault's second book, BC, he moves from "mental illness" to physical illness. Like psychiatry, modern medicine sees itself as based on a body of objective, scientific knowledge (e.g., that of pathological anatomy). Moreover, it thinks it has achieved this knowledge simply by, for the first time, looking at the human body and its diseases with a clear and unbiased empirical eye. Foucault, however, sets οut to show that modern medicine is no more a matter of pure observation that was, for example, the medicine of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In both cases, medical knowledge was based not on a pure experience, free of interpretation, but on a very specific way of perceiving bodies and diseases, structured by a grid of a priori conceptions.

③ FD and BC primarily dealt with knowledge of deviations (madness, illness) from "normal" human states. In OT (in many ways his major work), Foucault provided a comprehensive, thought often very schematic, account of the entire body of modern positive knowledge of human beings. Here his central claim is that all such knowledge is based on a particular conception of human beings (a conception he labels man). The distίnctive feature of man, in this sense, ίs to be both an object in the world and the knowing subject through whίch there exists a world of objects. Although modern thinkers tend to take this conception of ourselves as definitive of human realitγ once and fοr all, Foucault maintains that it is just one historical construal of it- and one that is presently passing away. [..] Foucault concludes that the age of thought dominated by this particular conception of hιιman reality is nearing its end and that, accordingly, we are in a position to break free of the constraints on our freedom that it imposes.

④ In the course of developing his critique of the human sciences, Foucault became increasingly sensitive to questions about the methods of historical analysis he was using. Specifically, he came to see himself as employing a distinctive method of analysis that he called archaeological. The use of archaeology as a methodological metaphor goes back at least to Merleau Ponty, and Foucault initially uses it in a very casual and vague way. By the time he wrote "Birth of the Clinic," he was sufficiently taken with it (though still not entirely clear about its meaning) to subtitle the book "An Archaeology of Medical Perception [regard]." In the book following OT- AK- Foucault offered an extended reflection on the archaeological method he had developed in his preceding studies. AK clearly marks the end of one major stage of Foucault's work.

 

The Genealogy of Power

⑤ After its publication in 1969, he remained relatively silent for six years. DP, published in 1975, resumes his critique of the human sciences but in a mode that places far more emphasis than his previous work on social and institutional mechanisms of power. Here, Foucault's primary concern is to show how bodies of knowledge, particularly the modern social sciences, are inextricably^[각주:2] interwoven with techniques of social control. They are not, he maintains, autonomous intellectual achievements applied, à la Bacon, as instruments of social power. Rather, their very constitution as knowledge depends essentially on (although it is not reducible to) mechanisms of power.

In DP, for example, Foucault details the essential dependence of criminology on the development of prisons in the nineteenth century, and he suggests similar ties between other social sciences and such controlling social structures as schools, military camps, and factories. 

⑥ Similarly, in the first volume of HS, he argues that the "sciences of sexuality" developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are integral parts of another aspect of modern society's control of its members. Roughly, the disciplinary techniques associated with "disciplines" such as criminology and pedagogy control by making men objects, whereas the sciences of sexuality make them self-monitoring subjects.

Foucault's new conception of the nature of power: He rejects the standard νiew that power is a purely negative, repressive social force that is challenged and overcome by the liberating light of truth. According to Foιιcault, power, althoth frequently destructive and always dangerous, is also a creative sοurce of positive values.

He further rejects the common picture of social and political power as flowing from a single dominant center (e.g., the ruling class, the monarchy). Instead, he sees a society as shot through with a multiplicity of power relations, interacting but mutually irreducible.

In order to analyze the development of bodies of knowledge out of systems of power, Foucault employs a new historical method that he calls genealogy. Genealogy does not replace archaeology, which is still needed to uncover the discursive rules that constitute bodies of knowledge. But genealogy goes beyond archaeology by explaining (through the connections with power) changes in the history of discourse that are merely described by archaeology.

archaeology	genealogy
uncovers the discursive rules that constitute bodies of knowledge	explains (through the connections with power) changes in the history of discourse that are merely described by archaeology

 

The Hermeneutics of the Subject

As Foucault researched and wrote the later volumes of his history of sexuality, his conception of the project broadened considerably. Instead of just looking at the emergence of the modern notion of the self as subject, he proposed to trace the Western concept of the self from the ancient Greeks onward. Moreover, he began to combine this historical project with the ethical one of constructing alternatives to modern moral codes. Two volumes on Greek and Roman views of sexual ethics ("The Use of Pleasure" and "The Care of the Self") appeared in 1984 just before his death. Another volume ("Les Aveux de la Chair"), centering on the Christian practice of confession, may appear posthumously.

1. 전문기술, 전문분야 [본문으로]
2. 불가분하게 [본문으로]