Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anything You’re Told – 2.3.3
2.3.3 The king’s new clothes – 20th century idealism dressed as history – Michel Foucault.
My initial reaction to the previous sentence was to write ‘Idealism has reasserted itself’. The fact that I wanted to make such a statement is an example of our tendency towards idealism, as if it has a force in itself. It is as if ideas and discourses drive us rather than our emotions. Thus idealism plays a role like some sort of immanent spectre influencing life’s activities. The truth-finders still have enormous sway even though many contemporary philosophers have abandoned any attempt at establishing the truth, by disguising themselves as anti-authoritarian radicals, as if by being anti the established, they somehow qualify as agents of the move away from absolutist styles of oppression. It is however I would suggest, just a different brand of oppression because its roots are firmly linked to idealism, a prime example being the very influential French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Foucault put together his archaeological approach to history as an alternative to the normal type of history that exhaustively examines the documents people leave behind in order to construct a once for all, correct interpretation of past events. Such an enterprise was impossible, believed Foucault, and so he put together what on the surface seemed a more realistic, empirical approach that treated the writings of the past as if they were merely objects; the debris left behind by people about whom we can know very little. His programme was heavily influenced by structuralist arguments that gave priority to systems such as language. From this point of view human thinking and activity is conditioned by biological, logical and linguistic patterns: Lévi-Strauss’s use of binary systems and Noam Chomsky’s conclusions on the deep structure of language are two influential examples. Thus the author is rather like the record or cd player in a hi-fi system, simply relaying the different pre-recorded messages according to a pre-determined format. This structuralist style of analysis that Foucault adapted demotes human creativity to the level of conformity and writes people out of their own history; more realistic? – how absurd.
This is how philosophers operate, even philosophers of the 20th century. They construct models to suit ideal processes taking too little heed of factual evidence. What is important to them is the model and its purity; the facts are made to fit the ideal-type, comparatively unmoderated by reality. Foucault revised his earlier fundamentalist enterprise reinvigorating history to a degree with people, but only as far as Nietzsche’s arguments would allow. The post-structuralist method that emerged saw knowledge as a piece of technology that was used by powerful groups to dominate others. However, Foucault was still, even after his conversion, very reticent to identify the actual people that wield intellectual and discursive power. We hear about the outcomes, the discourses such as La Mettrie’s Man Machine and Bentham’s panoptical model for creating order, but never really go behind such accounts to analyse the variables that are involved in the human practice of power or what I prefer to call social influence. It is all very nebulous and cloudy, merely suggestive of human activity and nothing more; he never fully locates people in their own lives.
As far as I can see this is because he was an idealist and therefore capable of being certain/uncertain! – absolutely convinced that the problem of meaning is insurmountable, and that, as a result, there cannot be any possibility of absolute truths in history. This is the logical absurdity of Foucault’s position because in his certainty that there are no truths he has discovered one – no meaning. For an idealist there is therefore only one possible alternative – the absolute uncertainty of ‘relativism’. Relativism, not to be confused with relative, is the idealist answer to the conclusion – ‘there is no absolute truth’. If the latter is accepted then all we are left with is opinion, multitudes of truths dependent on the numbers of people who can enunciate views, because there is no method of judging what is right or wrong in what they say. These are the stark, dichotomous alternatives that denote a non-realistic analysis: absolute truth or relativism. It’s a pity Foucault did not learn this other lesson from Nietzsche, that the gap between dichotomies such as ‘good and evil’ is not empty. Whilst Nietzsche’s analysis is itself idealist, it does point to the real experience of dichotomies such as right and wrong as being too simplistic. In the real world of ‘relative uncertainty’, there are always other ways of looking at things, other perspectives – it is never this or that.
On the surface Foucault’s analysis seems quite a plausible, integrating philosophy with elements of history, psychology, literary theory, economics etc. It would appear from this that in accepting the impossibility of finding the definitive meaning of historical documents he has gone beyond his philosophical forebears and their obsession with absolute truth to a more liberal, less dogmatic position. He has drawn our attention to a range of discursive objects (texts) that testify to the ways in which knowledge is defined in the battle for power and dominance. He has unmasked the Enlightenment fraud that science is liberating and beneficial. He has revealed uncertainty everywhere. Yet he does this by removing the people, by washing over their relatively autonomous existences and the meanings they gave to their lives, with a set of axioms built on an ideal that the meaning of what people in the past say to us cannot be understood. There is no attempt to compromise by suggesting that we can understand others sufficiently to do science for example. If we can’t understand all, then we understand nothing.
In ditching collective meaning Foucault abandons people. Meaning is a shared thing, like language it does not exist without figurations of people and cannot be ignored just because the model doesn’t cope. In abandoning any attempt to research collective meaning, Foucault makes the assumption that all meaning is individual as per Nietzsche, and that life is a battle to impose your meaning on others. This is essentially an intellectual exercise, the application of a truth-model to history that makes no sense in the reality focussed world of science. There is in Foucault little attempt to check the facts and modify the model accordingly – this is another idealistic enterprise that frees off the writer from the bonds of social accountability giving them maximum autonomy to exhaust their prejudices, disguised as skilled philosophical argument. As such it legitimates individual self-indulgence, excuses the shirking of responsibility and absolves people from personal guilt – it is postmodernism, ‘Je ne regrette rien’. Another form of authority based in idealism.
What we find therefore by the end of the 20th century is a recognition that uncertainty abounds coupled with a deep suspicion of certain types of authoritarian governance yet a continuing and profound belief in idealistic ways of seeing. So what is it that explains the still pervasive appeal of ideals such as uncertainty?