inquery

Perspectivism vs Subjectivity

What’s the difference? I’ve often wondered.  The answer I found in Nietzsche’s “Will To Power” fragments.  I don’t have them with me at the moment; I’ll post them later.  For now, off the top of my head:

There’s no ego in perspectivism.

Subjectivity comes from cogito, and is passed through the physiological analysts.  Perspectivism exists without subjectivity, for it does not depend on a transcendental self, or a transcendental other.  The whole of perspectivism is oriented away from Kant - shunning Kant, and the inevitable dichotomy that comes from the assumption of a thing-in-itself.

Fair enough, but how does this relate to relativism?  Is it simply a synomym for Perspectivism, perhaps one adopted by the social sciences?  Tune in next week for the surprising conclusion!

Interpretations of the Relationship between Potency and Logos [Heidegger, Aquinas, Aristotle]

Aristotle begins The Metaphysics with the premise that all men desire to know.  Natural sciences sought knowledge of beings revealed as natural objects, but said nothing of the ontological grounding of what can be known of being.  Aristotle defines “first philosophy” as the study of the “first principles and causes” of being, and by book five posits that “first philosophy” is primarily concerned with substance – being spoken in the sense of the categories.

Aristotle reaches a second way of speaking being when he considers change.  When things change, matter persists through the change of form.  The change, including the original coming to presence of a thing, requires an efficient cause.  This seems tricky, for it presupposes both a causal relationship between things, such as billiard balls, but it also takes a second meaning when mediated by the activities of a reason-imbued actor.  Medicine can result in disease or health, so what brings about one result over another?

This is a good spot to begin discussing interpretations of Book Nine.  While Lesson One introduces the reader to a new aspect of being “as potency and actuality and activity”, Lesson Two is primarily concerned with potency and its division between the rational and irrational. 

Aristotle is first concerned with passive potency in the “strictest sense” of motion/force, but cautions that potency extends beyond the cases that involve reference to motion.  The passive sense of potency as a “being acted upon..the principle of its being passively moved by another inasmuch as it is other” is easily understood by the scientific model - the world is made of matter in causal relation.  In this sense all matter contains a passive potency, and conforms to causal relations.  Beings without reason carry only an irrational potency which resolves to a single designation, since “natural things act by reason of the forms present in them, and contrary forms cannot exist in the same subject.” 

But since potency is also found in beings with a rational soul, certain potencies will be rational while others are irrational.  Active potency relates to rational potency – a potential for contrary outcomes.  An individual who acts by science may be occupied with both contraries because “the conception of both contained in the soul is the same.” The doctor has an active potency, for he is able to direct medicine to the health of his patient, although the contrary of disease is also a possibility.  Active potency sets a stage for an understanding of purposive activity; the activity that originates with appetite or choice.  Active potency is an ontological potency, in that it is present in a being that has the capability to effect and persist through a change; it is the potency of becoming. 

The relation between potency and Logos, in this interpretation, is as such: Aquinas interprets Logos as Reason; as the faculty for choice and designation of outcome.  Reason is the product of a beings active potency.  The “rational animal” makes decisions that bring about a single outcome of contrary possibilities.  It is the activity of the human to see through the change/generation of matter to an actual form that corresponds with a Telos, the end cause of a thing.  For example, medicine can lead to disease or health, so it is a rational potency.  The physician seeks the Telos of health in his patient, and works to achieve that end.  Reason mediates activity towards the Telos.  Passive potency as motion is a necessary condition for an active potency of becoming, but the second sense cannot be reduced to the first, for they are oriented towards different realms. 

Heidegger interprets the title of Lesson Two as “The Division of Potency with Regard to Movement for the Purpose of Elucidating Its Essence,” and elucidate is exactly what he does,  writing close to forty pages of commentary for two page of Aristotle.  His commentary differs from that of Aquinas in both language and orientation.  He uses the Greek words for concepts he believes suffer semantic distortion in translation, and draws heavily from his own phenomenology of Dasein.  Intertextual references, both to Aristotle and his own writing, make for a very difficult read.

To properly understand Heideggers interpretation of Logos and Potency and the relationship that obtains between, we first must be aware of some of the nuances of Heidegger’s thought.

Heidegger seems to set out with the following belief: when Aristotle put forth the notion that “being is said in many ways,” he put it forth not as a manifold system but in the sense of a task1.  Heidegger, in response, takes up the task to investigate actuality and potentiality to uncover its realm and its relation to substance, the categories, and change.  This is an inquiry into the open-ended ontological realm of potency, activity and possibility.

With respect to being, Heidegger is not content to settle with the imposition of descriptive divisions, which he states are unjustified and arbitrary2.  In response to his concern, Heidegger provides an understanding of division not as dichotomy3, but as a manifold unfolding.  My understanding is that this unfolding is important in two ways: first, all ‘divisions’ are actually ‘relations’, in which one informs the other.  I take this to be similar to Aristotles notion of “privation.”   Secondly, the experience of any ‘division’ is actually a privileging or “revealing” of one of many aspects of a manifold logos which responds to the manifold realms of Being. 

With respect to force, Heidegger does not interpret it as either an active or passive.  Even with regard to the causal potency of force/motion, he writes “We have cause and effect simultaneously – the cause-effect relationship and, in its light, ‘force’.  Force is accordingly a derivative concept.4”  Heidegger believes that Aristotle was aware of the unity of force, and its “decisive essential moment” (that which Aquinas interprets as “transference”).  Heidegger calls this the “ambiguity of the Aristotelian formation of guiding meaning.”  Ambiguous, but nonetheless, a guide  - not a doctrine.

Elucidating the essential nature of force, Heidegger states that the division of force can be accomplished by following the division of the realms of being.  It is the approach that one takes to being that results in a particular discerning of force.  Aristotle does not merely want to say that potency “at times has an ontic meaning, and at other times an ontological meaning5” but rather that it belongs to the essence of Force-being.  Force-being is “the relation of the origin of the being-so-constituted and the origin of the producing-being.6  It is the implicating, reciprocal relation of being which is the essence of force, the origin for doing, and the insight into a possible site for a change.7

With respect to Logos, Heidegger rejects the Scholastic interpretation as “Reason,” with the claim that it is a simplifying and reductive.  Instead, Heidegger finds many interpretations: at the origin of Logos, Heidegger discerns “relation’”, which describes the back and forth of the other categories to the primary category, as it occurs as in the “gathering” of Logos8.  It is the gathering of the categories and causes which enables “discourse”,  another function of Logos that seems similar to the Scholastic interpretation of “Reason”.  In Chapter Two, Heidegger settles on  “Conversance” to bring together the manifold meanings; a primary hub in the semantic net of Logos9.  It is Heidegger’s nuanced interpretation of Logos as “Conversance” which informs his understanding of the structure of productive knowledge10 - that which enables activity and the potency to effect a change/produce. 

It has been an ontological, rather than systemic, understanding for both Logos and the divisions of force that Heidegger has developed.  Staying away from the imposition of external divisions, he divides potency into  “what is without discourse and what is directed by discourse.”  He does not find a correlation with the division of potency as ‘active/passive’.  In general, “directed by discourse” corresponds to “beings with soul11,” although it does not follow that every besouled being is necessarily a being with conversance12.

Heidegger is now prepared to look into the phenomenon of change.  Potency as Force-Being is the essential co-given in the basic phenomenon of change, “precisely  in the reciprocal relation between potency as producing, and potency of being-so-constituted.  Heidegger ecstatically calls it “The extraordinary relationship of force and conversance in capability.”13 

Capability is the orientation from which can be directed a producing, or activity: that which takes work and transforms.  The ‘gatheredness’ of producing springs forth out of the essence of Logos as “Gathering”, and it is from this perspective that the change is to be understood.  From capability, producing is directed at the contraries, since the origin of capability contains the contraries, of which one is the Eidos – or, in its finished form, the Telos: the essence and boundary of the work to be done within producing14.  As the contrary is co-given with the origin, it must be avoided in the striving.  The care which belongs to production unites precisely both in itself: holding to the right path and avoiding going off track and awry.15  And how does this correspond to potency in the sense of movement?  The movement of the soul consists in the striving, flight or pursuit.  The force for producing towards an Eidos presupposes that in general a force for producing is there; Being-capable-at-all of goes along with being-capable-in-the-right-way.16

Heidegger and Aquinas do not differ drastically in their interpretations, but the nuances speak volumes.  Aquinas seems to be doing more of a translation than interpretation.  His commentary seems to trace Aristotles thought, rather than challenge it, or to seek ambiguity.  If his prerogative was merely to explain and make assessible Aristotle to others, he met with incredible succeess; his work became a ground of scholarship that remains so today.  But it is also notable that Heidegger challenges with questions that yield a much richer ontological ambiguity, nuance, and elaboration of Aristotles thought.  Maintaining that the Scholastic interpretation of Logos as “reason,” “judgement” and “sense” does not capture the decisive meaning of Logos (as Conversance)17 Heidegger challenges the text with questions that yield a much richer ontological nuance and elaboration, shedding much light on the ontological aspects of Aristotles work as well as providing an insight into his own.

1 Heidegger 10
2 “A division may not be imposed externally onto what is to be divided” Heidegger 102
3 Heidegger 100
4 Heidegger 71
5 Heidegger 90
6 Heidegger 89
7 Heidegger 97
8 Heidegger 2
9 Logos is “the gathering, of those being related among themselves… discourse, the gathering laying open, unifyingmaking something known… discourse in the broad sense of the manifold making known and giving notice.” Heidegger 103
10 Gunter Zoller. “Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force” Review of Metaphysics, The. March, 1997. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3545/is_n3_v50/ai_n28685867
11 Heidegger 104
12 Heidegger 105-106
13 Heidegger 111
14 Heidegger 118
15 Heidegger 130
16 Heidegger 133
17 Heidegger 104

Living in Expression [Nietzsche]

The purpose of this paper is to disclose the relation between language and thought as present in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense.  I believe this to be an important aspect of Nietzsche’s work; despite his condemnation of the arrogant way language is used to speak authoritatively about the world, Nietzsche himself, as a philosopher, was essentially tied to the medium of his expression.

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense came after Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche outlined a distinction between “tragic knowledge” and “Socratic knowledge.”  Notable is the differing style in which each type of knowledge is expressed: for the former, knowledge is expressed poetically, and for the latter, scientifically.  But what enables this stylistic division of language?  Where do they originate, and where do they reconvene?  At what point did the metaphor - in which unlike objects are juxtaposed - become a function of knowledge?

It is in the unpublished writings of young Nietzsche that we discover metaphor as the origin of knowledge.  Present in every thought, Nietzsche claims the “fundamental human drive” is metaphor-formation - an idea that yields an unique understanding of language that applies equally to both Dionysian expression of ancient Greece and scientific expression of modernity.1

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense begins with a nihilistic streak, poking fun at those who claim to know.  At odds with the contemporary tropes of knowledge and truth, young Nietzsche goes on to criticize the pathology of scientism, reject the anthropomorphism of nature as true knowledge, and claim that being human is no less than having an active imagination.  By following this interesting work we are rewarded with a unique epistemological justification for pragmatic conceptions of truth, knowledge, and language.

Nietzsche posits that knowledge is a semantic truth derived from a relation to an environment.  Nietzsche characterizes the relation as a metaphor, which is an analogical inference.  Knowledge-formation is a process in which our senses are stimulated, and an image is inferred from the stimuli.  Images can be projected as sound, another inference.  At the hight of knowledge, a concept is formed in word; a reference to the image.

At the physiological level, pre-cognitive level, and cognitive level, it is by the analogical inference that our perception of the world is formed.  When considered seriously, this seems to suggest that Nietzsche is looking to reconcile mind/body duality from a phenomenological approach.  Further, it means we make metaphors at the most basic level, and each inference is inherently susceptible to fallibility.  What does this mean for language and science, both dependent on rigorous convention?  What does this mean to thought, expressed in consciousness and in speech as language?  Is thought limited to language?  Does the language limit thought?

My thesis: according to young Nietzsche, language limits thought only when universal judgments are made according to instrumental truths.  To be clear, I do not interpret Nietzsche to be saying “language conditions intuition,” or, “experience conforms to language.”  This paper is structured in four sections: The Origin of Language, Language as Metaphorical Convention, Thought as Metaphorical Expression, and a conclusion.

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Upon first read, Nietzsche seems to present contradictory empirical claims: there are no truths, but there are certain truths.  Nietzsche is famous for his polemical claims2, but in this case a second reading yields clarification: we can’t know the truth of things-in-themselves3 (metaphysical truths), but we can know the meaning of things in relation to us (instrumental truths).  With this, Nietzsche takes a skeptical stance towards metaphysics, and orients us towards the sphere in which he is concerned – the cultural sphere.

Nietzsche states that man “by preference and necessity, wishes to exist socially and with the herd.”4  By resolving to the basic preference for a “peace treaty” in regard to the “war of each against all,” men agree to basic (unwritten) social rules.  The first of these rules is the “binding designation for things,” which enables individuals to share reference of objects in language.  With the binding designation of things in language, the “first laws of truth” are set.5  The “truth” of language is socially upheld for its consequence: the ability to communicate in speech.  Language, in the directed, conventional form of linguistic expression, is an instrumental truth.

Instrumental truths are semantic truths; we adhere to them because they carry a pragmatic meaning in regard to our safety and future.  The semantics of instrumental truth is reducible to one: life-preservation.  The whole of culture can therefore be expressed as an emergence of life-preserving truths, and language, as an integral part of culture, is no different.  The anthropomorphic nature of language enables us to speak nature in how it relates to us - to carve a simpler, safer human world out of a complex natural world.  For example, when we say “The rock is hard,” we are not describing the rock, but expressing our sensation of grasping a rock. But this brings about a problem for language: since no one thing can be defined by itself, or by its essence, it must therefore be defined in terms of another; by way of metaphor.6  In this way “we believe we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”7  Indeed, there is no “real” expression for knowing apart from metaphor8.

LANGUAGE AS METAPHORICAL CONVENTION

“And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves?  Are they products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth?  Are designations congruent with things?  Is language the adequate expression of all realities?”9

Nietzsche makes extensive use of the concept of a metaphor in his epistemological formulations. Every formulation of knowledge happens by way of analogical inference.  From stimuli to image to sound to word to concept, each transference is inferred by a different medium.  Just as we anthropomorphize nature, every level of inference privatizes knowledge according to its medium, and in the process of privation, something, in the very least, is distorted.

In “The Philosopher,” Nietzsche makes a distinction between two types of inference: conscious and unconscious.10 Unconscious inferences are “a process of passing from image to image” which occurs prior to concepts, “in perceptions and according to intuition.” 11  It is at the pre-cognitive level of perceptions that the first two metaphorical inference happens, from stimuli to image, and then from image to sound.  Conscious inference happens in the realm of linguistic language and therefore conforms to the social/instrumental truth of language.  In language, words invite us to the generic conception, as it is the generic metaphorical conventions from which language arose, and we respond automatically.  As words refer to a knowledge known by metaphor, to speak a “linguistic truth” is to speak according to socially prevalent metaphor.

While originally it was language that birthed concepts from words, Nietzsche claims that this labor was “taken over in later ages by science.”12  He elaborates with the metaphor “Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.”13

Referring to our “Alexandrian period,” it is the Socratic knowledge drive which continually seeks a privation of knowledge: when “man is the measure of all things” the “impulse to be true, transferred onto nature, gives rise to the belief that nature must be true towards us.  The knowledge drive depends upon this transference14.   But as we’ve already stated, transference is privatizing and distorting; it says nothing but meaning in relation to the medium.  Therefore science cannot pass judgment on ideal truth, for it only knows instrumental, descriptive truths at the expense of creative, synthetic, emergent truths.

THOUGHT AS METAPHORICAL EXPRESSION

For the context of this paper I’d like to refer to two modes of thought: directed thought, and linguistic thought.  Upon introspection, thought is usually accompanied by language.  But thought is also accompanied with other phenomena: desire, mental states, moods, ect.  When we act according to direct thought, we act not according to introspection, but according to intention.  In the mode of directed thought we are driven by the meaning of our action, not by the linguistic content.  Similarly, a baby does not require words in order to feed, and Cezanne did not require words in order to paint his experiences, yet both require certain knowledge, and both see a transfer of their intention to the world.

The word “leaf” itself says relatively nothing about a particular leaf, but it acts as a reference for the meanings I attribute to leafness: I know that some leaves are edible, and most are found on trees. But should I forget the word, I would not forget the meaning I attribute towards a leaf.  Without the word I would still retain the unconscious analogical inference (instrumental truth) but I would not retain the conscious analogical inference (descriptive, scientific truth).  Thought is an expression of the semantic inferences we have made intuitively.

It is my interpretation that since the knowledge drive is oriented towards a descriptive, scientific, objective knowledge of nature, it makes sense that those who pursue the knowledge drive would also seek objective reason over their own intuition, belief, and action.  This brings up images of Socrates, who would engage men in argument and lead them to unfamiliar territory, not suited for their language, leaving them in a state of aporia, to which Socrates would impose his own “rational” brand of truth.15  The “language of objectivity” that one imposes on his own thought is nothing but the forcing of one’s intuition, beliefs, and action to conform to so-called “rational knowledge.”

The rational sciences were built from linguistic metaphorical inferences, and the continued development of the rational sciences depends on the continued convention of language.  Firm conceptual foundations are necessary for a sustained belief in the validity of concepts originating from the “knowledge drive.”  But valid as “instrumental truth” is much different than valid as “universal truth.”  Nietzsche was convinced that when we take “instrumental truths” as “universal truths,” we are condemned to suffer a limited and inherently distorted inference of the world.  In this sense, the totalizing force of Socratism limits the creativity of our thought, for it forces us to think according to the worn, expressionless maxims of Socratic knowledge.

CONCLUSION

Nietzsche makes the strong claim that it is by unconscious inference that both the contemplative artist and philosopher work.16  The kind of “picture thinking” from which unconscious inference begins is not strictly logical, but adequate as the philosopher tries to replace his picture thinking with conceptual thinking.  For the philosopher to evade the “net of language”17 he must work opposite to the objective sciences: whereas the sciences force thought to conform to its language, the philosopher must create or form language to his thought.
Interestingly, a mature Nietzsche chides his younger self in “Attempt at Self Criticism” (added to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy) for exactly missing that point.  He laments: “How I regret now that in those days I still lacked the courage (or immodesty?) to permit myself in every way an individual language of my own for such individual views and hazards…”18

To uncritically accept conceptual convention is to indeed subject thought to the “husk” of Socratic knowledge.  The fundamental character of language is far more clearly revealed by the artist’s creative use, or for that matter, the sophists: language is rhetoric.  It is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,” constantly performing conversions and never a neutral medium.

According to Breazeale, Nietzsche “wished to expose the unsuspected role which language has played in forming our thought and our conception of reality in order to try to escape its transcendental distortions.”19  This I believe to be true, but I am equally convinced that young Nietzsche sought to reclaim the origin of language as creative metaphor-formation and to alert others to do the same.

In concepts and words men construct their “second nature,” and it will be either according to the imposing “knowledge drive” of Socratism or the fundamental creative drive of “metaphor-formation.” Nietzsche is clear that he wishes for a vibrant, artfully constructed world that can stand in testimony to the fundamental human power of creative metaphor-formation; as he propounds: “our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating.”20

FOOTNOTES

1.  Dionysian refers to the “tragic culture” of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC; the “scientific world” is referencing the “disciplined, theoretically grounded inquiry into the true nature of things.” Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth XXV, XXVI
2. “God is dead” is arguably his most famous.
3.  “Things-in-themselves” are “incomprehensible to the creator of language” and “not in the least worth striving for.” “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 82
4.  “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 81
5.  Ibid. 80
6.  According to Breazeale, Nietzsche concluded that “bridging the gap between subject and object bears a closer resemblance to the process of metaphor formation than to any kind of “picturing” or “mirroring.” Philosophy and Truth xxix
7.  “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 83
8.  “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 50
9.  “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 81
10. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 41
11. Ibid. 41
12. Ibid. 41
13. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 88
14. Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth 58
15. While Nietzsche is quick to pounce on Socrates for the privileging of reason over intuition, Socrates made extensive use of sophisticated metaphors in order to propound his metaphysical and epistemological arguments and beckon the intuition of others. I’m unsure how Nietzsche responds to that side of Socrates. It might be worth some research.
16. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 41
17. The “net of language” refers to the limitations and trite quality inherent in conventional language.
18. “Attempt at Self-Criticism” Birth of Tragedy 24
19. Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth xxxi n26
20. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 33

Categories Of All Known Animals

1. Those that belong to the Emperor;
2. Embalmed ones;
3. Those that are trained;
4. Suckling pigs;
5. Mermaids;
6. Fabulous ones;
7. Stray dogs;
8. Those that are included in this classification;
9. Those that tremble as if they were mad;
10. Innumerable ones;
11. Those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush;
12. Those that have just broken the flower vase;
13. Those that from a distance resemble flies.

from the 1668 Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, as per Jorge Luis Borges

Bathroom Preacher

A conversation started in the downstairs Concordia men’s room between myself and a neatly dressed man.  We were washing out hands, and he commented on the weather.  We had a few laughs, and then as I was about to leave, he leaned in, although he was about to tell me a secret:

“Everything you are learning here, you already know.”

Myself, having an interest in a similar position held by Plato, as well as the rationalist tradition in general, we this opportunity to inquire further.  We took our conversation outside, where he began in earnest to speak his mind, while I listened attentively.  He was speaking about movement, the topic of an essay (in regard to Aristotle’s metaphysics) that I am currently writing, so I thought that I ought to pay attention.

From my understanding he was speaking pantheist metaphysics, but well articulated, with warmth and generosity.  I was curious if he was a Sufi (there is a small community in Montreal) but he didn’t appear to be, or mention that he was.   I couldn’t stay much longer, so I wished him well and started my retreat.  Before I left, he handed me a present.  It was a nice printout, with the following text:

Look to observe and venture to engage. 

Whenever you look, look for love and only enjoy your eye sight for what you see.  To observe is to overcome your fears so that you cannot be afraid.  How can you be afraid of what you thought you feared when you observe?  To venture is to know and investigate the future before your engagement.  For when you engage into anything the only reason should be to enjoy and love.  For to love is war: the war to choose what is right, and the war to choose what is wrong.  To be alright is to Look, Observe, Venture, Engage.

So yeah, better than the usual washroom rhetoric.

Politic / Police [Foucault]

I’d like to take this opportunity to write about the expanding role of the police in relation to the emergence of the modern state.  I think it’s interesting that ‘police’ and ‘politics’ share a common root, “polis.”  I suppose this isn’t surprising, since they both pertain to the administration of a city.  But apparently, and perhaps surprising, the institution of the police, as we now know it, is quite new.  Traditionally the functions of the police were carried out in an informal fashion by the community, in order to preserve order and trade deals.   According to Louis Turquet de Mayerne, the overarching task was to foster civil respect and public morality. (Power 411)

This began to change around the 18th century, when the police saw an expansion of their function to include the domain of health.  In this exercise I’ll show why the inclusion of health into the activities of the police signifies the emergence of a governmentality that acts according to a biopolitics.

The idea of health is tricky, for the word itself seems ambiguous.  It can perhaps be described in the negative: health is the absence of disease.  This still does not offer much by way of definition.  It is perhaps more useful to think of health as a process by which one becomes healthier.  And perhaps such an increase in health can be understood as an increase in capability.  Accordingly, when the police took over the function of health, it took on a role in which it was to administer the lives of individuals, to direct them towards health for the productive purpose of the state.

But what is the purpose of the state?  I’ll begin with the traditional and general idea of “reason of state,” which is the aim of government is to strengthen the state itself.  This idea developed during the 16 and 17 centuries as a way of theorizing government.  Under this rationale, individuals were pertinent to the state insofar as they could affect the strength of the state.  Since most could offer very little, many suffered political marginalism.  Although individuals were marginalized politically, it was still in the interest of the state to administer individuals as significantly useful to the state, and in this manner, the police saw to the marginal integration of individuals in the state’s utility.  “When people spoke about police at this moment, they spoke about the specific techniques by which a government in the framework of the state was able to govern people as individuals significantly useful for the world.” (Power 410)

At that particular moment, the police was presented as an administration heading the state together with the judiciary, the army, and the revenue collectors, insofar as these were the fields in which individuals and the police met.  But the police as a state apparatus was also informally linked to justice, finance, and the army.  In essence, the police existed as a technique of the state to administer the state.  The way such administration took place was according to the political rationality of the time, one of “reason of state”.

In the essay The Political Technology of Individuals, Foucault writes of a kind of manual for the students of a disciplinized police, Polizeiwissenschaft, written by von Justi, with the title Elements of Police.  In this book, the purpose of the police is characterized as “taking care of individuals living in society,” (Power 414) and present a permanent and positive intervention in the behavior of individuals.  (Power 415)  This paternal approach to the population for the strength of the state seems ethically problematic, for it discounts the individual vis-à-vis the state, but at least it was overtly and candidly understood as such.  Further, it remained a technology that operated on individuals, although von Justi also introduced the notion of speaking of individuals as a population.  The shift to a state apparatus that functions of individuals as a population was to come with a liberal governmentality introduced in the 18th century.

In “The politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century” Foucault claims that during the eighteenth century the police was reinvented to serve not only its traditional role of maintaining law and order and for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but also the new functions of assuring urban supplies, hygiene, health and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce.  (Power 334)  The formal associated of three crucial functions – order, enrichment and health - was assured though an ensemble of multiple regulations and institutions under the generic name ‘police’.  The police did not exclusively signify the institution of police in the contemporary sense, but rather an “ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health in general” (Power/Knowledge  170).  The significance is the police became more than a limiting apparatus, but one of production.

This period can be characterized as one of transition, in which the idea of political economics was working its way into notions of governance.  Stats were a way of surveying the state, in the broad sense of a population within a territory.  It was at the point when sickness among the poor was identified “in its economic specificity” that the health and the well-being of populations came to figure as a “political objective which the ‘police’ of the social body must ensure along with those of economic regulation and the needs of order.” (Power/Knowledge 170)  The police therefore became concerned with man’s relationships to property, “what they produce, what is exchanged in the market…how they live, the diseases and accidents that can befall them… In a word, what the police see to is a live, active and productive man.”  (Power 412)

The basis for the transformation was not only one concerned with the preservations and conservation of the ‘labor force,’ but one that was becoming increasingly interested in surveying, analyzing, and controlling the numerical variables of a population along a territory encompassed by the state.  Von Justi’s articulation of the population and environment as a “perpetual living interrelation” was one to be managed by the state.  “The true object of the police becomes, at the end of the eighteenth century, the population; or, in other words, the state has essentially to take care of men as a population.” (Power 416)  In this sense, the “project of a technology of population” was becoming understood as (what Foucault refers to as) biopolitics.

Origin and Destination [Foucault]

I’ve often wondered what separated certain great thinkers from the academic disciplines of which they came.  I’m thinking specifically of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Heidegger, although I suppose there are many more.  I’m curious over what causes a break from tradition, and how a new framework for philosophy comes to be.  It seems an incredible feat – and unfortunate, for such accomplishments rarely seem acknowledged during ones time.  Nonetheless, they create new space in which future philosophers can operate.  Foucault seems to provide some clarification to this end, for he posits a second pole of philosophical origins.

This second pole is not in competition with the first – which Foucault calls a “formal ontology of truth”- but a pole that is firmly situated in an ever-changing present.  This second pole contains a different origin for philosophy – an origin that arises from the question of “what are we today.”  The line of inquiry seems to be directed to a particular situation of the self vis-a-vis an indecipherable other, however that might manifest during ones era.  What I mean, is that the ‘other’ seems to represent a particular problem that escapes the philosophy originating from the “formal ontology of truth”.  For Foucault, it seems the problem was ‘modernity’: what does it mean?  What does it represent?  How can it be understood?  How is it affecting us?

The imperative for the philosopher of the second pole seems to be to be how to comprehend the new phenomena; either how it can be situated into a traditional framework, or, if this isn’t possible, then to develop new ways of thinking or theorizing the new phenomenon.  In this respect, I find that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault are similar, for they all go back through history in order to rediscover certain qualities that were missing from their contemporary culture, culled, as it were.   Nietzsche returned to Dionysius in order to discover the will to power.  Heidegger returned to the Presocratics in order to question being.  Either way, the undertaking for any philosopher seems to present at the same time something unique and something similar: unique in that it tasks each philosopher with an uncut path, and similar in the sense that the motivation seems to be a return to the question of authenticity: or rather, to find out “what we are in our actuality.”

I like that Foucault introduces this notion of ‘actuality,’ for it begs the question of potentiality.  What gives rise to a particular actuality?  What were the particular conditions that enabled the emergence of the  ‘mode of thought’ that characterizes the present?  A cause-effect explanation can be provided historically, as Foucault demonstrates in Society Must Be Defended, but this explanation actually explains very little, as it is limited to interpreting the past by way of the present.  This also makes it perfect for appropriation for political aims – the past can be imagined in a way that justifies a present orientation.

From what I understand, the value of history - examined through a philosophy that developes from the “second-pole” - is that it serves for an investigation of limits.  If we pay close attention to when a particular sphere is delimited, we also find the relations of power between those limits.  The power relation itself is a kind of struggle which plays out between limits.  The limits are not to be confused with the limits of the law – Foucault makes it clear that he is not concerned with juridical law; in relation to power they serve merely as tactics.  From what I understand, it seems useful to think of these limits as tactics that operate on/in grey areas.  They limit out a good and bad, making certain spheres zones of reduced complexity, perfect for enabling an automatic productivity or efficiency that benefits the state.

What are the limits?  Where did they come from?  The limits are not explicitly found in historical struggle, for at that point the limits had not been set – the struggle was the process of limits being set.  Foucault seems to say that limits were set when struggle seized; at that point the limits become codified into society.  But even as a codification the relationship between those limits continues to persists as a struggle.  Perhaps it is helpful to think of it as a gray area.  I think maybe an example of this is the relationship between a liberal tradition and a republican tradition.  Whereas the liberal tradition can be understood as privileging of individuality, the Republican tradition privileges community.  Modern democratic nation-states seem to operate within a grey area, where political decisions are made based on the outcome of a struggle between the two traditions.

Limits therefore are codified into society by a process of subjectivation.  Subjectivation arises through an imposition of power relations.  A free individual experiences an imposition, and reacts either with struggle or becomes subjugated under the power relation.   Limits are imposed and upheld according to various ‘technologies’.  There exist direct technologies such as the police, as well as indirect technologies such as the ‘social norms’ used to marginalized ‘undesirable’ traits.  It is “bad” to be a “deviant,” “pervert,” “criminal.”  Identities are therefore constituted directly by “certain ethical techniques of the self” as well as are indirectly constituted “through the exclusion of some others.” (Power 404)

“Who we are in actuality” is therefore determined by the limits in which we operate.  If I accept the limits of the insane, and I fall within those limits, I am, in actuality, insane.  The incredible problem of this situation is that these limits were imposed on an individual not out of concern for himself but out of concern for the state.  Further, the individual exists in multitude, much more than within the statistic of ‘mad’.

This provides new insight into what we are ‘in our actuality’, for our ‘actuality’ is found within the limits of our operation.   That is to say, we may not have necessarily accepted these limits, but operate nonetheless within them.   Our limits of actuality delimit our position in relation to a [society/history/state/nation/political economy.]  Perhaps in some sense we can only fulfill our potential when we respond or react to the imposition of limits “with the full force of our being”.

The philosophers who seek an understanding of their own actuality are therefore forced to invent, or imagine, new ways to determine these ambiguous struggles, codified into the workings of society itself.  This prerogative perhaps is best found in the “critical theory” tradition of the Frankfurt school.  The problem is recognizing the significance of the work, since “the contemporary lacks the perspective needed for seeking the work’s significance, and lacks it necessarily since the perspective and its distance are not yet in place.”  (Gadamer, Truth and Method, Sheed & Ward, p. 265)  Such work cannot be read in a historical light.

The critical approach, and its second-pole origin, leads Foucault to inquire into how relationships of power manufacture subjects.

Beyond simply - or reductively - metaphysical beings, individuals exist in actuality under multiple systems of power.  These systems work to manufacture individuals as subjects, citizens, members of a family, of a nation, even as statistics in a political economy.   Individuals become constituted in multitude.   I wouldn’t find it surprising if certain characteristics became directly in conflict with others; perhaps research in this area could prove lucrative.

Foucault claims that power relations have been progressively governmentalized under the auspices of state institutions, and that the rational that informs this process is one that derives from a liberal tradition.  (Power 345)  I think this is interesting for the liberal tradition is one that functions with the condition of individual freedom.  In this sense, power relations that derive from the state are conditional on the freedom of the individual.  Foucault explains this as such:

“There is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually exclusive facts, but a much more complicated interplay….  Freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power…   The power relationship and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be separated…  At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.” (Power 342)

Foucault claimed that the “’agonism’ between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is an increasingly political task”.  (Power 343) This relationship may not be good; but it seems to works – in that, it produces.  Power is exercised over a field in which free individuals exist.  The power delimits the options available.  The individuals ‘let’ themselves be subjugated insofar as they are free to oppose or reject such limits.  When Foucault says this happens as “individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available” (Power 343) he is speaking of limits.  Individuals become manufactured by way of accepting the available behavior limits, designed by a government whose rationality is based on achieving a productive and efficient state. 
Those who are less capable or inclined to produce face certain ‘technologies’, and at some level, if they are not able to adequately able to contribute to the state, they become marginalized.

As complex power systems emerge through economic, political, and social differentiation, they impose normative limits on the respective fields of the individual.  If the individual works within the imposition, then individual then becomes subjectivated accordingly.  According to Foucault, this function of the modern state was developed with a “very sophisticated structure in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.”  (Power 334)

As more of the life of an individual becomes systematized within specific patterns (set by specific limiting norms), the more I think we can expect a certain type of individual freedom to erode.  This may not be a constraint on freedom in an overt sense, but perhaps a constraint on a freedom nonetheless.  What I wonder, is when patterns become too complex, could they overlap?  Will individuals be caught inside and outside of limits through no action of their own?  And further, how will one respond when ones identity becomes found in transgression?

I suppose the question we are to ask ourselves is how are we to have an active hand in shaping our own future, instead of merely having it actualized by systems in which individually we play an insignificant role.  “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.  We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures”.  (Power 366)

Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom [Foucault]

In my adolescence, I had a dislike for popular culture.  The ideals represented in its imagery did not correspond to my experience, and I felt insulted that my experience was expected to be something so altogether difference.  I developed a cynicism towards society, and was hard pressed to find its merit.  Perhaps it simply evaded me while I grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver.  If someone had told me “society must be defended,” I would have laughed in their face.  “What society?” would have been my reply.

I had a good friend who was going through some hard times.  He was bright and nice but had a messed-up family.  They were old hippies and religious freaks, but I got along with them.  At one point, the father confronted my friend alone in his room late at night with a shotgun, and threatened to kill him and the rest of his family.  His father was high and had a history of drug abuse and violence.  My friend called the cops the next day, and the cops took his father to a psyche ward.  I remember thinking that it was really messed-up that the cops let my friend’s dad return home a few days later.  I remember thinking that maybe they had to send him home.  Maybe jail was full with fathers who had actually killed their families. Maybe they didn’t know what else to do.  Above all I came to the conclusion that they simply did not care.  My friend’s family existed in statistics, and as statistics the family was categorized as a bunch of losers, hardly worth much to anyone.

Around this time my friend become quite depressed, to the point he was attempting suicide.  Although he had achieved good grades, he rarely showed up at school.  I remember thinking it was incredible how out-of-touch the counselors in the high-school were in regards to the complex situation in which my friend lived.  It was apparent that the counselors were not there for him, they were there for the students who still had a chance to get by under “the norm.”

During this time I became quite detached; I could not understand how both government and society could exist, yet at the same time so obviously not exist in a meaningful way to my friend.  There was a disparity between society, government, and our selves as individuals, and I was feeling it for the first time.

Looking back at that moment I suppose I was surprised that there could be such absence.  What about the protection of the state?  I was confused.  From the perspective of that disparity, nothing else made much sense.  If you don’t exist for the state, then in a certain way, you don’t exist.  I started to gather what it meant to “fall through the cracks of society”.  It was to be outside of a social system.  I also began to understand that social systems where in place to produce.

Society, at our level, existed primarily within the institution of the school, perhaps at the level of police.  Culture was minimal, long having been paved over with mini-malls.  Relationships were largely found within systems, and seemed to work towards the norms of the state.  I came to the conclusion that my friend had to find something meaningful he could relate to, something that would bring him in to some kind of system, so I helped him get a job.  With the job, he met new people, found new relationships, and seemed happier.  For me, though, I was altogether unimpressed.  Something about society was messed up.  Or maybe it was just me, since I didn’t see anyone else raising concern.

Of course, a long time has since passed, and I’m not the same now as I was then.   I recognize now that it was my experience that led to a cynicism towards society, but luckily that cynicism at some point became criticism.  Being critical forced me to defend my critiques, and this helped develop an interest in subjectivity, culture and government.  Appropriately, I spent some time traveling, and then enrolled at Concordia for Political Science.

My interest in government, should I consider a career, would be public policy, for this I believe to be level in which government and society meet.  This point, for me, is one that I would like to work close to, for I believe that at that point there exists a disparity.  Whereas when I was that teenager, this disparity seemed to represent an absence of the state, and I perceived it as something that needed to be filled; government needed better policy, better institutions, based on better theory.  Public policy needs to be woven into Society, so that it can have more control in the forming and directing of individuals.  Perhaps this could offer a way to integrate the ‘less desirable’ into society into a meaningful way.

Over the last few years I have changed my position many times on what role I think the government should have in peoples lives.  I’ve been privileged to learn new ways of thinking and theorizing politics.  But none has come so close as helping me understand my own personal experiences with politics, governance and subjectivity. Foucault presents a framework to complex problems that previously only seemed renderable in trite or singular ways.

I now consider what I encountered as a ‘disparity’ between what I perceived as society or government and individuals, was simply a grey area beyond the norms of control; the limits of these norms, and the transgressions thereof, seems intricately linked to some notion of freedom.  The disparity is not good or bad, but a condition of possibility; an open grid, if you will.  Perhaps it is only at the fringe where one can operate in full freedom.  Of course, how that freedom is exercised may differ: my friend eventually committed suicide, while I’ve become interested in critical theory and phenomenology.

Freedom therefore doesn’t necessarily seem to be an inherently ‘good’ thing.  It seems to be a complex thing.  Systems offer areas of reduced complexity while increasing productivity.  In this way, the sphere is also of reduced freedom, for the tradeoff is the norms of the system.  Power, as the shaper of the norms, can’t be analyzed from within a system, for at that point, it has already done its job.  I think this is why Foucault seeks to analyze power relations in society from the point of resistance against different forms of power, for it is at that point where freedom and power clash.  (Power 329)

A concern of the self is therefore a concern for the self in relation to the systems in which it operates.  A concern might lead one to want to have a better understanding of the system, to understand what forces are acting on the self.  To gain that understanding, one must look to the fringe, where the struggle takes place.  This determined orientation is an example of the exercise of freedom, for such action is not required or prescribed by any force of power; it derives solely from a care of the self.  Further, perhaps it is only at the limits of a system, under the auspice of our full freedom, where we can fully call our selves our own.