Gutting (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (3)

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

 

3. Bachelard and Canguilhem

In an essay on Canguilhem, Foucault proposes a fundamental division within post-World War II French philosophy between a "philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject" and a "philosophy of knowledge [savoir], of rationality, and of the concept."

The former he associates with the existential phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the latter with the history and philosophy of science of Cavailles, Koyré, and especially Bachelard and Canguilhem. Foucault notes that this division can be traced back well into the nineteenth century, beginning with the opposition between Maine de Biran and Comte and continuing in the differences separating Lachelier and Couturat as well as Bergson and Poincaré.

In the twentieth century, the division is reflected in the two different ways French thinkers appropriated the thought of Husserl after his Paris lectures in 1929. On the one hand, there was Sartre's existential reading (in The Transcendence of the Ego); on the other, there was Cavailles's "formal" reading in Méthode Axiomatique and La Formation de la Théorie des Ensembles. Whereas Sartre moves Husserl's thought forward to the concerns of Heidegger's Being and Time, Cavailles brings it back to its origins in the philosophy of mathematics.

After World War II, the philosophy of the subject was inextricably tied to phenomenology in the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. However, the philosophy of the concept was developed by Bachelard and Canguilhem in essential independence of Husserl's work. According to Foucault, "these two forms of thought have constituted in France two frameworks that have remained, at least for a time, quite profoundly heterogeneous.

Philosophy of Experience, Meaning, and the Subject	Philosophy of Knowledge [savoir], Rationality, and the Concept
the existential phenomenology (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty)	the history and philosophy of science (Cavailles, Koyré, and especially Bachelard and Canguilhem)
Maine de Biran, Lachelier, Bergson	Comte,  Couturat, Poincaré
Sartre's existential reading of Husserl	Cavailles's formal reading of Husserl

From 1945 to the late 1950s, existential philosophy, along with Marxism as a social and political outlook, dominated French thought. During this period, the central concern (which culminated in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason) was to develop a synthesis of existential phenomenology and Marxism. However, according to Foucault, by the end of the 1950s, existential phenomenology began to founder on^[각주:1] the problems of language and the unconscious, and structuralism presented itself as a superior alternative.

"It was clear that phenomenology was no match for structural analysis in accounting for the effects of meaning that could be produced by a structure of the linguistic type, in which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to confer meaning." Furthermore, "the unconscious could not feature in any discussion of a phenomenological kind... the phenomenological subject was disqualified by psychoanalysis, as it had been by linguistic theory." As a result, the efforts of the 1940s and 1950s to unite Marxism and phenomenology were replaced by efforts to connect Marxism with various forms of structuralism (particularly, Lacan's structuralist Freudianism). "With phenomenology disqualified... there was simply a succession of fiancées, each flirting with Marxism in turn" in the effort to produce a "Freudian-structuralist-Marxism." This remained the dominant theme of French thought until the end of the 1960s.

"There were also people who did not follow this movement. I am thinking of those who were interested in the history of science... Particularly around Canguilhem, an extremely influential figure in the French University—the young French University. Many of his students were neither Marxists, nor Freudians, nor structuralists. And here I am speaking of myself."

This is not to say that Foucault did not try to come to grips with Marxist, Freudian, and structuralist thought; these were some of his major concerns. But it is essential to realize that his reaction to these dominant movements is based on a fundamental orientation toward the history of science that is strongly influenced by Canguilhem (and, through him, Bachelard).

The centrality of this influence is particularly apparent in light of Foucault's specification of the Bachelard-Canguilhem "network" as the primary French locus of the historical critique of reason that he sees as the main concern of his own work. He notes that in Germany this critique has been carried out in the context of "a historical and political reflection on society" from "the post-Hegelians to the Frankfurt School and Lukács, by way of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Max Weber." But "in France, it is the history of science which has above all been the basis for raising the philosophical question of what enlightenment is." Specifically, "the work of Koyré, Bachelard, Cavaillès, and Canguilhem" poses questions "to a rationality that claims to be universal even while it develops in a contingent manner."

In this way, it examines "a reason whose structural autonomy carried with it the history of dogmatisms and despotisms^[각주:2]—a reason that, as a result, produces emancipation only on the condition that it succeeds in freeing itself from itself." As we saw in the Introduction, this is equally a characterization of Foucault's own approach to the history of reason

Canguilhem, especially through his "history of concepts" and his concern with the status of norms in science and its history, was the most immediate and the strongest influence on Foucault's historical work. But Bachelard's philosophical view of science and, especially, of scientific change was also a major presence in Foucault's intellectual environment.

 

3.1 Bachelard's  Philosophy of Science

 

1. 실패하다, 좌초하다. [본문으로]
2. 폭정 [본문으로]