Why did Foucault exercise such great fascination for Indian intellectuals of my generation? France was nothing like England or the India the British constructed and bequeathed to Nehru & Co. Moreover, Indian Leftists could absorb Marxian economics directly from Socialists in the London of the 1880s while, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Indians like Chatto and M.N Roy were part of the Kremlin inner circle. The French Left, meanwhile, had chased its own tail. Leon Blum's Popular Front proved useless whereas in India, Congress moved inexorably to the Left under the leadership of Nehru, Bose, and many others.
The Americans always had a special relationship with France and the Paris of the Jazz Age. Their interest in existentialism was understandable more particularly in a Cold War context. But neither existentialism nor phenomenology has anything to offer India which had come to the conclusion long ago that Samsara was Nirvana, Sat and Chit coincided in the taste of Bliss. Moreover, Islam too endorsed this view. An'al Haq- Being is Truth though the latter may be a pathless land.
Why then did Indian intellectuals turn to a French misinterpretation of a German brand of philosophy which Indians had acquired directly from Lutheran Missionaries or at places like 'Benares on the Rhine'? One straw in the wind was the cretin Ranajit Guha. He had attended a KGB sponsored 'youth conference' in Paris just after the war and spent some time behind the Iron curtain. On his return, the Party finding him useless for Union organization, he had tried to get a PhD in History. But, at that time, to do economic history in Calcutta you actually had to learn Persian and do research in the archives. Writing high falutin' nonsense wouldn't get you a credential. Still, some foreigner published that nonsense and Guha emigrated on that basis. But even on a Lefty 'white tile rather than red brick' English campus, his nonsense couldn't get him a PhD. So he started sounding more and more like a proto-Naxal Foucault. Since it had become obvious, by about 1958, that Socialism meant begging Uncle Sam for food, Indian academics had no desire to join the Party and surrender half their pay check to it or to become subject to a 'revolutionary morality' which objected to your running off with your best friend's wife. Thus, to be safe on campus, you needed to pretend to be, not a 'useful idiot', but an utterly useless idiot writing illiterate gibberish. Citation cartels might enable you to escape to Amrika/Yurop where you qualified for intellectual affirmative action by reason of being a dark and drooling imbecile.
Gayatri Spivak and Homo Baba showed that even illiterate English Literature Professors could pretend to be Marxist ideologues. Edward Said enabled them to pose as victims of racist epistemic self-abuse of a horrendous sort. This was the way forward. Write nonsense and go teach retards to write yet more illiterate garbage. Say boo to the BJP at regular intervals. You are already brain dead so just ensure your body is fed and medicated.
The above may be considered unfair. Perhaps, Indians wanted to flesh out a notion of 'Insaniyat'- Humanitarian concern- so as to have something to replace their ancestral spiritual science.
What does Insaniyat actually mean? Is it simply the notion that God and Religion have no place in social discourse? Or is it itself a theology of some type whose Holy Book is the Constitution? Is there a 'Religion of Man' involving inviolable 'Sacred' Rights attaching to citizens but not cows? Does it involve worship of the Dynasty? More practically, does it enable entry into the Paradise of an Ivy League campus?
Since Foucault could supply no answers, it was to him imbecilic Indian intellectuals turned.
Consider the following from the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on that paranoid and perverted devourer of frog's legs.
At the very heart of man is his finitude: the fact that, as described by the modern empirical sciences, he is limited by the various historical forces (organic, economic, linguistic) operating on him.
Biology is an 'empirical science'. It has a Structural Causal Model of the human body and this has permitted many medical advances. But this Model has no concept of finitude or infinitude. Economics merely means management of production and distribution. It is ideographic. It is concerned not with what is finite but what is feasible. Linguistic forces don't matter at all. It isn't true that Language thinks you or that Chinese people think differently from French people because their language is very different. One may say a language is infinite because there is no limit to what can be said or expressed. But this is the opposite to the 'finitude' Foucault claims to have found.
This finitude is a philosophical problem because man as a historically limited empirical being must somehow also be the source of the representations whereby we know the empirical world, including ourselves as empirical beings.
We don't know the empirical world through 'representations'. I may have seen 'representations' of Paris and of Paradise. But I only have empirical experience of the former.
Terence Tao has the same bodily limitations as other people of his age and level of physical fitness. But nothing limits his ability to make new discoveries in mathematics. It is not the case that the day will come where no future progress in that subject is possible.
I (my consciousness) must, as Kant put it, be both an empirical object of representation and the transcendental source of representations.
But Kant's consciousness had and has no representation. That is why I can't check and find out what Kant really though about Fredrick the Great. A cheeky kid may be able to make a cartoon which other kids agree 'represents' the teacher angling his head so as to be able to sniff his own farts. What 'transcendental source' is involved in this? Why beat the kid and not that source?
How is this possible? Foucault’s view is that, in the end, it is not—and that the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse of the modern episteme.
But the modern episteme wasn't worthless shite the French force High School students to pass an exam in. It is sciencey stuff.
What Foucault calls the “analytic of finitude”
is gibberish. Mathematical analysis is useful. 'Non-standard' Analysis, featuring infinitesmals is useful for some purposes. Essentially, the notion here is that Leibniz's 'law of continuity' whereby what is true of the finite can also be usefully predicated of the infinite (provided no intensional fallacy arises), can give rise to a model theoretic 'transfer principle' whereby what is true in one model is true in another.
Foucault sounded a bit mathsy but wasn't really. This was a major failing of the French pedant.
sketches the historical case for this conclusion, examining the major efforts (together making up the heart of modern philosophy) to understand man as “empirico-transcendental.”
Gibberish! Man should be understood as peeps like wot me iz.
The question—and the basic strategy for answering it—go back, of course, to Kant, who
was proven to be wholly wrong about synthetic a priori judgments and the 'transcendental deduction' etc. Category theory was really taking off- Lawvere even recast Hegelian dialectic in mathematical terms- in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Foucault and Chomsky and other such shitheads did not bother with it.
put forward the following crucial idea: that the very factors that make us finite (our subjection to space, time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary for the possibility of empirical knowledge.
We can't be sure we really are subject to shit. Indeed, the universe may be a hologram. Whatever the conditions for empirical knowledge might be, they will only be revealed by STEM subject mavens. What's more, once they have a good enough Structural Causal Model, they will be able to invent 'Total Recall' type tech so that we can take holidays in which we have all the experiences of Scuba divers or Secret Agents or Astronauts.
Our finitude is, therefore, simultaneously founded and founding (positive and fundamental, as Foucault puts it).
But Foucault wanted the thing put up his own fundament while the Pope, wearing a gimp suit, and President Pompeeedoodoo, in a blonde wig, looked on laughing maniacally.
The project of modern (Kantian and post-Kantian) philosophy—the analytic of finitude—is to show how this is possible.
But that project is stooopid shit.
Some modern philosophy tries to resolve the problem of man by, in effect, reducing the transcendental to the empirical.
Meanwhile, the Maharishi made billions selling Transcendental Meditation. But, empirically speaking, he didn't get to sleep with Mia Farrow. Sad.
For example, naturalism attempts to explain knowledge in terms of natural science (physics, biology),
We don't want an explanation for knowledge. We just want the thing to be useful or, if not useful, then embodied in cool, shiny, tech with Bluetooth. I still don't know what Bluetooth is, but I won't buy shit which doesn't have it.
while Marxism appeals to historical social sciences.
It appeals to cretins.
(The difference is that the first grounds knowledge in the past—e.g., an evolutionary history—whereas the second grounds it in a revolutionary future that will transcend the limitations of ideology.)
In other words, the first is a Just So story and the other is a paranoid fantasy which features the Pope, in a gimp suit, shoving things up Foucault's fundament while the President of the Republic, got up as Marilyn Monroe, stands by laughing maniacally.
Either approach simply ignores the terms of the problem: that man must be regarded as irreducibly both empirical and transcendental.
Why stop there? Why not regard man as irreducibly a cat who is actually a dog?
It might seem that Husserl’s phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing man as object and as subject by radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the transcendental subject.
Husserl didn't achieve any fucking eidetic reduction . Turing did something approaching that using Brouwer's choice sequences. Husserl started off as a mathsy guy. But when Hermann Weyl, whose wife was a disciple of Husserl, turned his attention to that shite he moved in the direction of Brouwer.
The problem, however, is that, as Foucault sees it, the modern notion of man excludes Descartes’ idea of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure consciousness.
Nothing wrong with taking an ipse dixit approach such that the starting point is arbitrary, because it is your own. Think of it as a Gentzen type sequent calculus. All that matters is that you reason to some good purpose or, if not, get paid to do so.
Foucault’s key claim in the dense chapter 9, “Man and his doubles,” is that thought is no longer pure representation and therefore cannot be separated from an “unthought” (i.e., the given empirical and historical truths about who we are).
This wasn't Thought. It was shit. One can say that STEM subject stuff or alethic research in the Social Sciences is 'pure representation'- i.e. presents a 'positive', not 'normative', structural causal model- but one can also make farting noises or pretend to be a cat.
In other words, I can no longer go from “I think” to “I am” because the content of my reality (what I am) is always more than the content of any merely thinking self (I am, e.g., living, working, and speaking—and all these take me beyond the realm of mere thought).
But one can go from 'a living thing which exists is a thing which can do stuff' to 'I exist because I can think'. This removes the problem that what I am may be more than can be said because is epistemic or 'intensional'. Existence however is extensional. The Library Police can verify that I still exist and can arrest me for failing to return Longfellow's Hiawatha when I was a seven year old student at Highridge Primary School.
Or, conversely, if we use “I” to denote me simply as a conscious being, then I “am not” much of what I (as a self in the world) am.
This is irrelevant. It is relatively easy to verify if a person actually exists though this may be very difficult for a mentally ill person to do. John Nash was very brilliant but even his 'beautiful mind' could not work out that he was hearing the voices of people who did not exist.
As a result, to the extent that Husserl has grounded everything in the transcendental subject,
that extent was nil, zero, zilch, nada. I may claim to have founded everything in the farting subject, but this isn't really true.
this is not the subject (cogito) of Descartes but the modern cogito, which includes the empirical unthought.
Which one? The 'unthought known' or the 'unthought unknown'? The former poses no big problem while the latter can be wholly disregarded.
Foucault contends that phenomenology, like all modern thought, must accept the unthought as the ineliminable “other” of man.
Why? The 'unthought known' is not our alterity. It is our ipseity. We may term it 'background knowledge' or speak of 'embedded consciousness' but the thing is no big deal. It frequently happens that a person who is an expert in a particular field says 'I've always known that but didn't know I knew it till such and such person expressed it in such a succinct and memorable manner. Truly, this is a canon used in my subject which was never previously articulated.'
Nor are the existential phenomenologists (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) able to solve the problem.
Because there is no problem.
Foucault recognizes that they avoid positing a transcendental ego and instead focus on the concrete reality of man-in-the world.
Occam had a razor which was useful enough.
But this, Foucault claims, is just a more subtle way of reducing the transcendental to the empirical.
Only in the sense that it is a more vulgar way of reducing my farts to a proof of the Reimann hypothesis.
Foucault argues that some philosophers (Hegel and Marx in one way, Nietzsche and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve the problem of man’s dual status by treating him as a historical reality.
as opposed to a futuristic fantasy. But man only has a dual status in the sense that he has a triune status a vulgar method of reducing a particular fart I emitted in September of 1982 to a proof of the Reimann hypothesis.
But this move encounters the difficulty that man has to be both a product of historical processes and the origin of history.
But man's history may stretch back to the ape and, ultimately, to some overactive amoeba.
If we treat man as a product of history, we find ourselves reducing his reality to something external to him (this is what Foucault calls the “retreat” from man’s origin).
Which is why historicism is silly. But Popper patented that idea.
But if we insist on a “return” to man as his own proper origin,
most men were born out of their own anus after being buggered by the Pope while the President of the French Republic looked on laughing maniacally.
then we can no longer make sense of his place in the empirical world.
Is his place up Foucault's butt? No? Sad- for Foucault.
This paradox may explain the endless modern obsession with origins,
That obsession was settled once and for ally by 'Origin of the Species'. Nobody greatly cares if our ancestors went in for wipe-swopping with Neanderthals rather than Denisovans.
but there is never any way out of the contradiction between man as originator and man as originated.
But there is a way out of the chicken/egg dilemma. It turns out that the egg really did come first. Some non-chicken laid an egg of what became the progenitor of all modern chickens.
Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that the modern pursuit of the question of origins has provided us with a deeper sense of the ontological significance of time, particularly in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who reject Hegel’s and Marx’s view of the return to our origin as a redemptive fullness of being, and instead see it as a confrontation with the nothingness of our existence.
This may have been a pursuit for a few Continental pedagogues but it wasn't particularly modern. It was boring and stupid. I suppose that's the real reason non-STEM Indian intellectuals went in for it.
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