Foucault on man

Another discarded fragment.

Perhaps the best-known of the postmodern theories of the self is that of Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, “man” is an invention of the recent past, of the modern world. Contrary to popular opinion, “man” has not been the subject of investigation since the time of the Greeks. Rather, human nature is a construct of the eighteenth century, which achieved the “anthropologization” of science and of reality. This period of the human is over, and Foucault is happy to talk about the “death of man” – that is, the death of the modern man, the controlling, self-present, transcendental self of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, which is assumed by modern nation-states.

The subject is not, Foucault argues, self-constituting and creative, as Kant and the German idealist tradition suggested but rather is constituted by the various operations of power that impinge on him. The universal surveillance of the modern nation state – symbolized for Foucault by Jeremy Bentham’s carceral society of the panopticon – render the subject passive and docile. Power exerted on us makes us what we are, subjects subjected to power.

Foucault also discerns an inherent contradiction in dualism of modern humanism. “Modernity,” he writes, comes into its own by “the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man.” Man is an object of knowledge, but also is the originator of all knowledge and the organizer of the reality of which he is a part. For Kant, man has godlike powers of intellect to organize the unified world of human experience, yet, paradoxically, these godlike powers arise from the limitations and conditions of human knowledge, the finitude of humanity. Kantian man is a king who becomes sovereign precisely in being enslaved: “the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the possibility of knowing,” Foucault claims.

Put differently, the dualism of the modern concept of man is one between a transcendent, universal and unconditioned something – the transcendental ego, reason, the soul –, which not only transcends the body but the individual person; and on the other hand an empirical, desiring, passionate, embodied person that the transcendental ego determines and controls. Alongside this ontological dualism is an epistemological dualism between the subject, defined as the knowing transcendental subject, and the object that it seeks to know.

Modern sciences of humanity, whether historical or sociological, are, for Foucault, efforts to provide some safe haven for the fragile empirical self. Marx began to decenter the self by tying the human subject and human consciousness to economic and social forces. The mind was not somehow above and beyond the social circumstances of the person, but was fundamentally shaped by those circumstances. But Marxism also “gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to a search for total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization.” Thus, modernity attempts to “anthropologize Marx,” that is, to “make of him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism.”