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hello, everyone. i’m stephen west. this is philosophize this!
today’s episode is part two in a series on foucault. i hope you love the show today.
so, once upon a time, michel foucault found himself living in an age of almost unparalleled optimism about science. he was living in a world in the early to mid 20th century, not far removed from these huge leaps forward that we talked about in quantum mechanics, general relativity, many other things. and there were a lot of thinkers around this time that were extremely enthusiastic about science being the way that we’re finally going to figure things out for good. in fact, things looked so promising back then, there were even some scientists that were saying that it may be totally possible that every phenomenon that we observe, every cause and effect across the entire landscape of science may be reduceable to physics. this attitude’s also known as physical reductionism.
now, at first this can seem like kind of a weird claim for a scientist to make. but, when you consider the size and scope of the breakthroughs that happened during their lifetimes and when you look at science the way that they did, it actually makes total sense. i mean, after all, for example, we often wonder about the psychology of an individual and what led them to think some thought or make some choice. well, it’s not crazy to think that someone’s psychology and the decisions they make is massively influenced by their biology and the way that biology interfaces with the world around them. psychology, in a way, depends on biology. well, it’s not crazy to think that biology is massively influenced by a complex ecosystem of chemical reactions that are going on. biology depends on chemistry. it’s not crazy to think that chemistry is nothing more than the interactions between atoms and molecules that ultimately adhere to the laws of physics.
what some scientists were saying during this time is that, while we’re obviously nowhere near this point yet, it’s not crazy to say that at some point in the future we may have such a deep understanding of all these fields that complex things like thoughts and behaviors may be able to be predicted by science at the level of physics. there’s a feeling at the time that things like physics, mathematics, and cosmology are more pure in terms of being a science than something like psychology. and it’s not that psychology isn’t important. the point is, these three fields are the simplest forms of science. they seem to be the most foundational forms of science. and they require the least amount of conjecture or theory to justify the conclusions they arrive at than any other science.
this is why, once upon a time, foucault finds himself in a world where practically every person that came before him that sat down and wrote a history of science looked at that history primarily in terms of the advancements in those three fields: physics, mathematics, and cosmology. well, foucault sees this and immediately realizes that this may be creating a huge blind spot when it comes to our understanding of the history of science. what foucault wants to do is take a look at the very same history but instead look at it through the lens of three different fields, three neglected fields in the history of science to him: biology, linguistics, and economics. see, because foucault’s much less concerned with the history of mathematics or physics or even the specifics of what any particular scientist had to say. what he’s more concerned with are the underlying rules that exist in the background of all scientific inquiry that make conducting science even possible and the relationship between scientific knowledge and power structures in the world around us.
let me explain over the course of the next two episodes or so. the fancy way of putting it is that foucault would say that in our world there’s a dichotomy between discursive formations and non-discursive formations, a dichotomy between what others would later call the articulatable and the visible. the non-fancy way of putting this is that since the 1700s we’ve had on one hand the institutions that make up our societies -- hospitals, schools, prisons, social circles of many varieties, also known as non-discursive formations -- but then on the other hand we’ve always had the systems of language that we use to talk about these institutions, language that drastically changes the way we view the function of those institutions, or discursive formations. for example, in our modern world when we think of a school, the primary function of a school is educating the youth. when we think of a hospital, the primary function of a hospital is to provide care to the patients. when we think of a prison, the primary function, as we talked about last episode, is the reformation of the minds of the criminals.
in other words -- and this is a massive through line in foucault’s fifth book in 1966 titled the order of things: an archaeology of the sciences -- in other words, we live in a world where foucault says there is a clear dichotomy between seeing and saying, a dichotomy between seeing systems of representation, the visible, things like hospitals and schools, and then saying things about those systems, the articulatable, or the language we use that drastically affects the way that we see them. if there was a primary concern of this book that foucault would want to make sure is clear so that it sets up all the other primary concerns of this book, this would be it. discursive is just a fancy word for talking about discourse. discourse is also just a fancy word, but it’s complicated because it’s a fancy word that foucault uses in many different ways all throughout his work.
the meaning of the word seems to evolve for him over time. depending on where you’re reading it could mean anything from just the language that surrounds a topic to the assumptions in the way that people think and talk about a subject all the way down to a set of concepts that relate in some way to another set of concepts that allow us to make sense of things in a particular period of time. the reason it’s so weird right here is because foucault almost always uses the word “discourse” with the word “scientific” preceding it. and whenever he references scientific discourse, he’s usually talking about a large and complex network of meaning and baggage that gets smuggled in whenever scientists claim to have knowledge about the way that things are. see, living in a world where so many people around him are worshiping at the altar of science, foucault wants to shine a light on the limitations of science and show how the conclusions of science oftentimes have unintended consequences that hurt people.
regardless, though, foucault and his views on science are a perfect example of a structuralist and post-structuralist butting heads with those outdated, enlightenment-era assumptions about science and philosophy that we’ve talked about on previous episodes. the short version, i guess, is that people may have become a little too enamored with science and logic because of all the breakthroughs that happened in the early 20th century and because they were trying to get away from that long tradition of philosophy being unverifiable speculation.
see, because another thing we missed out on by going over the logical positivists so quickly is that it wasn’t just the logical positivists that were skeptical of the last couple hundred years of philosophy. there were many thinkers around the early 20th century that thought this entire period since the 17th century should be called “the metaphysical age,” the age when all kinds of thinkers decided to apply themselves to creating these massive, complicated metaphysical systems that tried to explain everything, a delusion that ran deep at the time with a lot of key players involved in the process. i mean, we had descartes whose system was critiqued by spinoza and hume, who then were eclipsed by the work of kant, who then had to concede to the system of hegel. the problem with looking at the history of philosophy this way is that it completely ignores the fact that it’s a direct mirror of all the mistakes people were making when looking at all of history during this time.
what i’m trying to say is, foucault’s problem with lumping everything in the last couple hundred years into something called “the metaphysical age” is a culmination of several problems we’ve already talked about on this show when it comes to assumptions made in the thinking of the early 20th century. remember the outdated way of looking at history where we hyper-focus on subjectivity and the actions of a few key players? what is history? “oh, well, history is when napoleon invades russia, uh, harun al-rashid captures this territory, bismarck signs this treaty.” but is this the totality of what history is? there are thousands of other angles you could view the history of the world from. and what happens when you do that? what new insights start to present themselves?