in reading Foucault

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
41

so in line with the prior post, I think that we should examine
our “American” values… in other words, what we hold as
purely American values are really just nothing more then
our cultural, local, habits… biases, prejudices, superstitions
pretending to be universal/transcendental…
they could be the values of a local subgroup like the
values presented by Hollywood or values presented by
our media which is 95% owned by 5 corporations…and their values seems to
be pretty monolithic… but they aren’t transcendental… biased, yes, prejudice, yes
but not universal…

so what we hold to be universal/transcendental, for example, the “superiority” of
capitalism is really just superstition, bias, prejudice of the local group pushing
that ism’s or ideology… in other words, the owners of the means of production
also own the media and it is in their best interest to promote and push the
ism of capitalism… not for us, but for them…as to allow them to hold
and maintain power, wealth…their promotion of capitalism has nothing to
do with our best interest, but with their best interest…

to understand that capitalism is a local, biased, prejudice also means
that what we understand as ism’s and ideologies, such as communism,
socialism, Catholicism, Hinduism, any ism, is also a local, historical,
biased, prejudiced, cultural system of the moment… formed by
forces within a cultural and state that is some solution to a local,
problem… in other words, our ism’s that seem to be universal/transcendental
really just began as an “ad hoc” solution to some local, historical, cultural problem…

Marx can pretend all he wants that communism is an universal/transcendental
solution to a problem but is is strictly based on local, conditions and is “ad hoc”
based on problem that Marx saw in his times, but not based on any type of
universal/transcendental rule or law…

the creation of ism’s and ideologies are simply “ad hoc” solutions to
local historical problems…

and once the problem that the ism was meant to solve goes away,
the solution, the ism has no more value…this is one reason why
catholicism seemed like a good solution because it was based
on local, historical problems but once those local, historical problems
went away, catholicism no longer had any value…thus we can explain
the loss of faith in religions and god in the 20th century…

the problems they solved were gone and new problems were created
which meant new solutions were needed… not the old solutions of
catholicism or Buddhism but the new solutions of capitalism and
communism…and they are nothing more then “Ad hoc” solutions
to our current modern problems…and once those problems
go away, our need for those “ad hoc” solutions go away…
thus capitalism will go away as will communism, once the
problems they were meant to solve go away…

Kropotkin

42

let us look at one aspect of Foucault… his sexuality…

he was a homosexual who also engaged in S& M…Sadism and Masochism…

if we understand the ism’s and ideologies of a time and place to be
none transcendental/universal… then that means how we feel and think
and more importantly engage with sex, is defined by the local, historical,
cultural aspects of the society/culture at hand… in other words, how I
think about sex, is defined by the rules and obligations given
by the society I live in…certain sexual practices are allowed,
certain sexual practices are not allowed and all of it based on
how the society/culture defines it…which has an historical,
economic, social and political aspect to it…

our sexual practices, are not based on transcendental/universal idea’s
of what is “Proper” sex is… because there isn’t a transcendental/universal
idea of sex and what it entails or engages with…

for example, depending on the time, place and culture involved,
Adultery was not only acceptable but was encouraged… but today,
we don’t condone or accept Adultery… given that at times, adultery
was acceptable and at other times it wasn’t acceptable, how can we
determine that Adultery, for or against, has some transcendental/universal law?

to return to Foucault, I would suspect that he felt his practice of sexual actions
an engagement with S & M, is not only acceptable but is in fact, a
philosophical research project…into the far reaches of how we understand
sex…

one way that we can understand philosophical matters is to push those
matters all the way to their conclusion…On ILP, we have engaged
in such a practice when we push the concepts of day to day life into
its extremes… like the very long thread about “Gay incest” that at one time,
was the rage of ILP… we sought to understand an idea by pushing that
idea to the very brink of what it means…
and this was Foucault idea in his engagement with S & M… push the
boundaries of what is acceptable in sexual practices within a society…

recall that all of our idea’s, ism’s and ideologies including matters of sex
are local, historical, based on that society time and place… not
based on what we would think of as transcendental/universal… but historical
based on the society at hand…

we have the Marquis de Sade who created the theory of such practices
as S & M… we can see that he could not have written his works
any earlier because of the local, historical, cultural bias that limited
such writings… De Sade was a product of his times… and he could
not have existed before his time…now days, his writing is boring
and badly written…but again, his writing face the local, historical,
time and place in which we exist… and it seems to be… not of much interest…

so we have passed beyond, way, way beyond de Sade… and that say much
about where we are today socially, culturally and historically…

which “proves” that matters like sex are really just locally, historically,
culturally, politically and philosophically based on how we understand
sex today…there is no transcendental/universal understanding of
sex or homosexuality or marriage or morality or ethics or anything else
we base our behavior or actions or theory upon…all of our understanding
of what it means to be human and human actions like sex are really just
“ad hoc” understanding of the “human condition”…

Kropotkin

43

in reading philosophy, one notices that all philosophers call
for change… that has been one of, if not the vocation of
philosophers since the beginning of time, since Socrates,
and the call to change has lasted until Marx, Nietzsche,
and of course, Foucault…

change, become something different…but the question then becomes,
change into what? what are we to become?
we know so little as we don’t even understand how change is done…
for example, scientific change wasn’t even a question until Kuhn
write his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” written in 1962…
within my lifetime…

we can follow this path of change in reading about the history of evolution,
from before Darwin to such writers as Gould…how evolution itself,
went from being slow, methodical, quiet, to Gould “Punctuated Equilibrium”
which said that there was “sudden” burst of evolution, that evolution
wasn’t as slow and methodical as Darwin painted it…

so, we are here, and how do we go to there? the question then ask,
well ok, where is here and then, where is there? Once again the question
has been asked, where exactly are we going? This question has been quite
frequently asked…for example, Marx wrote that the creation of the
“working state”, one where the workers own the means of production
and not the capitalist, at that point, according to Marx, was the last
day of history… and he was wrong…for Marxism and the workers
state are both just temporary moments in history and will pass on,
leading us to another state and another state and another state…

this thinking about the “last Man” is nonsense… because if there is one,
one thing we know about history, is that it changes, all the time… the question
has been how does it change? and what changes should we embrace and what changes
should we avoid? what is called for and Kuhn got the ball moving is this question
of change itself…

we have seen change in history… for example, the change in France from
the monarchy to the rise of the French Republic to the dictatorship of Napoleon…
so exactly how do we account for the change in France from 1789
to 1801?

recall that Napoleon wasn’t really on the scene until 1796…so we cannot
use him as a springboard to understanding the change in France during those
years…

we could use as possibilities for the change in France as one of several different
factors… the bad weather which caused several famines in France during those
years, the effects of the 1000 year old monarchy which no longer took notice
of, or cared about the vast majority of the population of France, the peasants…
the bewildering array of local and state wide taxes which dominated the peasant’s
life…the effects of the movement of the Enlightenment… where, however dimly,
that the peasant came to realize that they could become something else beside
just being peasants all their lives…the French revolution began as a movement,
not lead by anyone in particular… the beginning action was the storming of
the Bastille… which had no leader and was driven by decades, if not centuries
of “people living lives of quiet desperation” and finally having enough…

“we have been pushed almost to the brink of devastation and we will take no more”

seems to be the attitude of those who stormed the Bastille…all we have left is our lives
and that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone outside of us… “we have nothing left to live for”
might be the belief of the average person engaged in the storming of the Bastille…
whatever the cause or causes, it was enough to cause the death of the monarch
Louis 16, 4 years later…

but were the massive changes in France the changes they needed to make?

clearly the country as a whole agreed to some degree with the wholesale changes
made over the next decade till the return of the monarchy with Napoleon in 1801…

entire books have been written about the French revolution and its causes…
and I certainly won’t solve that issue in one post, but it does offer us a glimpse of
how change works and its nature…

so the question facing us today is this… what change should we engage
with and why that change? if the study of philosophy is to encourage change,
then what change should we engage in?

or should we stick with the Status quo? the amount of the undercurrent of
discontentment in the Status quo seems to preclude any possibility of
standing still… we can see this discontentment with the refusal of
people to go back to the sweat shops of retail and restaurants in which
businesses are engaged in being a poverty exploiters, not a job creators…
where I saw one ad that, as condition of working, required an degree
and several years of working, just to be offered 13 bucks an hour…
your basic starvation level paycheck…

the modern sentiment that one is “lucky” to have a job is no longer
true…why should I consider myself “lucky” to have a job that
doesn’t even pay the rent?
I would walk away from my job in a heartbeat given half a chance…
and I believe so would millions upon millions of people would do the same
if given half the chance… that isn’t a group that is happy and content with life as is…
if we are willing to walk away from jobs…

so right now, right here, change is required, demanded but what change
is deemed necessary… from what to what, becomes the question…

if we don’t have jobs, then what?
the solution seems to be on the easy side, pay people a living wage,
one in which people don’t need to dance on the edge of starvation…
pay at least $25 dollars an hour… but Kropotkin, business will go out of
business… at this point, I really don’t care… if all they do is engage in
exploiting people to hold jobs that won’t even pay the rent, then I am not
interested in keeping those businesses…

so the overall question lies in something more then just wages and benefits,
the question is really this, how are we going to treat people?
are we going to continue to dehumanize and diminish people in the name
of capitalism? are people an end or are they a means? using people to
becoming wealthy off the work of them is using people as an means,
offering them a living wage, enough for them to survive on, that is an
engagement with people as an end…

so, once again, I ask… what changes and why those changes and not
other changes?

Kropotkin

44

let us think about illness… let us follow Socrates when
he said that a philosopher is an doctor… an doctor of the soul…
let us take that seriously…during those years of philosophy,
the entire Greek philosophical time, one of the critical
points of philosophy driven by Socrates, was this conviction
that a philosophy was a doctor who by “diagnostics”
aim to “cure” a society of its illness… a philosopher was
a type of doctor…

let us use the idea today… we see the “body” of society…
in other words, let us take, as a body, the society, the state…

how do we know when the state/society is ill? as with any body,
including my own and yours, we know a body is ill when it has a fever,
a higher temperature then normal… so how can we know when the society/state
has a fever? a higher then normal temperature?

we look into history… we see that before the French revolution,
the body, the state/society/culture didn’t have a fever which we can
formulate as being actions out of normal… we see the storming of the
Bastille as being a high fever… and the entire French Revolution as
being a high temperature… which didn’t cool until the end of the
Napoleonic period, 1815 and later…we see that return to “normalcy”
as being a return to “good health” and in France as in Europe as a whole,
the temperature was normal until 1848… when a fever once again returned…

we see small spikes of a temperature rise in 1870 and then a
complete illness beginning in 1914… we see such things as wars
and other such events as an illness… the temperature rising causing
an adverse reaction… we can see the Holocaust as being another “illness”
events such as normalizing such events as being ill…
when an event such as the Holocaust seems normal, then is when
one is severally ill…so we can judge the events of the 1960’s as
being ill… when event unfold outside the normal course of events…
think of the street demonstrations and such events as gay rights and
women liberation and the civil rights movement as having an illness,
a high fever… now this isn’t to think of these events as being wrong or
bad or terrible, they aren’t but they exists outside of the normal course of events…
think of the stability of the 1950’s as a base line for being “healthy”… of course
there was the nascent civil right movement and the beginning of the women’s right
movement… but those are surely signs of an illness being formed… as a prelude
to an illness like when we feel short of energy as a prelude to an oncoming illness…

the illness of societies being demonstrated by actions and events outside the normal
course of day to day life…if this were true, then the entire 60’s was an time of
illness and high temperature…we then reduced the fever during the 1970’s
and killed the illness during the 1980’s… but at what cost? that is the problem,
if untreated, an illness will come back stronger and even more deadlier then before…
and we see this coming true…we can see that the actions of one of the worst presidents
in American history, Ronald Raygun, has cause, in part, the illness of today…

we can see the damage done by Raygun during the 1980’s infecting us today…
part of the “modern” illness comes from the full on attack upon the middle class
and working poor, the unions, the complete abandonment of the entire
black community to its fate… we see minorities suffering, even today, from the
wholesale attack upon the minorities communities… the motto, “Just say No” is
one such attack on the black community… tying the drug epidemic
to the blacks for example… to say “just say no” is an attempt to
hold the blacks responsible for the entire drug epidemic… and we
still are suffering, blacks and whites from this casting of blame…

so we come to today… we can see the new high temperature coming into
play during the rise of the racist GOP and their normalizing of bigotry,
prejudice, superstitions, bias, and an all out attack on the beliefs
of the enlightenment… no more do we hold to rational, logical,
behavior and thought…we hold to what we belief in as the “truth”
and this is an illness, an fever…for example, those who hold to the
“truth” that IQ45 won the 2020 election, that is an illness, an high fever…
and so we can see that half the country is sick with fever and illness,
because they have abandoned any attempt to hold to rational, logical,
thought…what they believe in is more important then any attempt to
think of an rational, logical solution…

or to put this another way, the need for emotionalism, to engage
in the Romanticism way of the heart is to engage in
irrationality and that irrationality is a sign of a high fever…

to hold in beliefs that make no attempt to be true or reasonable is to engage
in irrational thought… in other words, to engage in irrational conspiracy
theories that have no basis in fact, for example that the Jews have some
sort of space lazar that causes forest fires is a sign of an illness, of a high
fever…because there are no facts that support such a belief…

think about it this way, when ill, when having a high fever often
brings about in a person, beliefs or hallucinations that can only be explained
by the high fever or illness… and holding to such beliefs as IQ45 won 2020 or
that there is some “deep state” conspiracy theory, means one is in the grip
of a illness cause by a high fever which allow someone to hold such
hallucinations…

the philosopher as a doctor, in curing illness of the soul, should we
then administer new therapies that bring about the health of the
individual/society/state in question or should we simple wait for the fever to break
on its own as fevers quite often do?

this illness will eventual break, that much is clear, and the society/state
will return to its “normal” beliefs and activities of a illness free society/state…

think of the Obama years or the Clinton years… our temperature was normal
and we didn’t have spikes of high fever as we do today…

so the question becomes, how do we reduce the high fevers of trumpism
and the conspiracy nuts who are clearly in the throes of an illness?

Kropotkin

45

one of Foucault interest was about "the problem of the enlightenment’

which comes from Kant’s essay “What is enlightenment?”
in which Kant says this:

“Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-incurred tutelage,”
Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction
from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in
the lack of reason, but in the lack of resolution and courage to use it without
the direction from another. Sapere Aude! (dare to know!) Have the courage
to use your own reason! - that is the motto of the enlightenment."

part of the "problem of enlightenment is several concepts…
first, for how can we evaluate inherited concepts?
the inherited concepts being the ism’s, the ideologies,
the prejudices, biases and superstitions that we are raised with,
be it nationality, religion, race and indoctrinations that have…

so how do we “overcome” these indoctrinations? How do we acquire the
“attitude” and summon the “courage” to think for oneself?.. through what
style of reasoning-and through what art of living-might one escape
from one’s “self-incurred tutelage?”

and virtually every single major philosopher from Hegel to Marx to Schopenhauer
to Wittgenstein to Nietzsche to Heidegger has taken up this challenge…
what does it take to overcome our “education?”
and therein lies the modern problem of inherited concepts,
it is “education” but it is being educated in the
values/or ism’s of that society/state/culture…it isn’t our values,
we are “educated” into the holding the values and beliefs of
our society…we are educated into the biases, ism’s, superstitions,
prejudices of that society/state…real education begins once we
see those values, those indoctrinations for what they are, indoctrinations
into the values and beliefs of that society…

let us take an example from Foucault own life… his homosexuality…

the bias, prejudice of his country, France, in his time period, was
very anti-homosexual…he was born in 1926…and so to become who
he was, a homosexual, he had to overcome his inherited (education) prejudice
against homosexuals…that is the source of his own psychological confusion
that dominated the early part of his life… how does one ‘‘be’’ a homosexual
given the bias and prejudice against being homosexual in his country and
his inherited education? How does one become who the are, homosexual, given the
childhood indoctrinations/education against homosexuality?
and we face such indoctrinations/ education that forbid or prevent us from
becoming who we are… but the real problem lies in this question of
who are we really?

and that is where most people run into problems…
how do you become who you are, as Foucault became who he is,
a homosexual, when one doesn’t know who they are…
and we reach the Socrates portion of the programs…

we cannot know who we are, who we really are if we don’t engage
in the Socratic vision of “knowing thyself”… to find out who we are,
who we really are and not some “education” about who we are, is to
engage in true, honest self reflection…

because of our false education about what we are as human beings, we
have a hard time facing up to who we really are… we lack the courage to
engage in a honest reevaluation of what it means to be human, truly human…

until we overcome the biases, superstitions, prejudice taught to us,
as education, we cannot discover who we are…
or to return to Kant, this “self incurred tutelage” which is just a fancy
way of saying “being educated” in the values and beliefs of that society…

the second motto of Socrates is this: the unexamined life isn’t worth living"

and this one is truly ignored…how are we going to understand who we truly are
if we don’t engage in some examination of our life…we in America have been
indoctrinated/educated into holding the belief that America is the greatest
country on earth… but have you actually examined, worked out that belief?
have you attempted to overcome that indoctrination by an examination of
who you are… or to restate this problem, we have been taught, in
our “self incurred tutelage” that America is number one…have you overcome
or evaluated/examined the concept of America’s greatness?

but a question arises, is an self evaluation really needed or necessary for
us to overcome our “self-incurred tutelage” or childhood indoctrinations/
education? Must we really challenge these childhood indoctrinations?

if we are to become who we are, we must be prepared to examine all aspects
of our education/childhood indoctrinations…but let us say this… why is it important
that we overcome and become who we are?

the modern question that has perplexed our modern civilization is the question
of autonomy… what does it mean to become an autonomous person?
and one answer is to become aware of our childhood indoctrinations/education…
to overcome them is part of the path to becoming an autonomous person…
Part of Foucault path to becoming lies in his overcoming his childhood indoctrinations
against homosexuality… that is, in part, how he became an autonomous person…

the value in Foucault life is not necessarily in his books but in his life as he overcame
his childhood indoctrinations to become who he was, an homosexual… and to live
his life, sexually anyway, as an autonomous person…

his journey began when he began to “know thyself” and to
examine his life and his education… for “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”

do you have the courage or the will to “know thyself” and to examine,
truly examine all aspects of your beliefs, values, mission, and nature

to truly discover who you are… to seek that which hides within us…
the nature of who we truly are…

Kropotkin