Michel Foucault

Subversions of the Subject

Philip Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000161625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This unique and original study analyzes Foucault's interaction with the history of ideas, undertaking a genealogy of the subject that subverts conventional philosophical history to develop a distinctly Foucauldian intellectual history. Through a detailed account of Foucault's work and its relation to the history of ideas, Philip Barker shows how that history can be usefully reconceptualised using Foucault's concepts of genealogy and archaeology. Locating the emergence of self-reflexive consciousness in twelfth century philosophy, and elaborating upon autobiography as a philosophical persona, Barker argues that this extremely productive approach can be used to analyze the relationship between the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the transparent subject.

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Contemporary issues in the history of ideas

Intellectual history and the history of philosophy

Nowadays the history of ideas is an unfashionable term. People who might have been working in this field twenty or thirty years ago now usually prefer to be called intellectual historians or historians of philosophy. In the book Philosophy in History the construction of these two different though related modes of thought is developed and the impression is given that the theoretical field is divided up; people then seem to come down on one side or the other and in either case, the history of ideas disappears.¹ The index to the work includes the finest intellectual historians and historians of philosophy of the day, and yet the name of Lovejoy disappears while Collingwood makes only a fleeting appearance. What is it about the history of ideas that makes it unfashionable? Why do people not want to be associated with the history of ideas any more? That same index includes the names of Rorty, Hegel, Skinner, Kant, Moore, even Alfred Hitchcock makes an appearance as well as Bachelard and Foucault, while Lovejoy and Collingwood have all but vanished. Does this matter? There are reasons for thinking that it does.

First, the history of ideas in its day saw the production of some very fine work. Fine work is still occasionally produced under this name, unfashionable as it is: for example, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order: An excursion into the history of ideas from Abelard to Leibniz by Francis Oakley.² Nevertheless it is apparent that the history of ideas now appears to be under pressure and we should want to know why a once flourishing concern in its heyday is in danger of imminent demise. Secondly, and perhaps of more interest, there seems to be something about the name ‘the history of ideas’ that leads many people to wish not to be associated with it. In fact a good deal of material currendy being published today arguably belongs to the category of the history of ideas, but is not described in this way by its authors. Works of this kind would be Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,³ Hayden White’s Metahistory,⁴ and Edward Said’s Orientalism.⁵ Then there is the influential journal History and Theory: Studies in the philosophy of history. Am I just being pedantic here? What would it matter if Rorty, Hayden White, Said and the whole editorial team of History and Theory did not want to call themselves historians of ideas?

But I want to suggest that the situation is more complex than this. I would argue that this refusal in part relates to the erasure of the place of Lovejoy and Collingwood in the history of intellectual history and/or the history of philosophy and has another rationale which cuts deeply into the programme itself. This is particularly apparent in the book Philosophy in History where there is an unresolved but constructive opposition between what might be broadly termed ‘idealist/anti-realist’ and ‘realist’ approaches to philosophy. It is unresolved because the assumptions of realism and idealism/anti-realism are not addressed. It is constructive in that it permits the work of practitioners of both approaches to attempt theoretical interchange without surrendering or having to defend their own theoretical integrity.

Philosophy in History begins (much as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ends) with a description of the ideal of intellectual history as conversations with dead philosophers. The ideal intellectual history would be one in which a resurrected philosopher of the past would find:

1. The description of their work intelligible and understand how certain questions of their day became transformed at a later date.
2. That the treatment of their work was sympathetically and accurately handled.
3. That philosophical debates are allowed to overlap and provide a sense of ‘a collaborative inquiry on a subject of common interest’.

‘We hope that intellectual history will weave a thick enough rope of overlapping desires so that we can read our way back through the centuries without ever having to ask “How could rational men and women have thought or done that?”’⁶

This work is then contrasted with the enquiry undertaken by historians of philosophy who are concerned with a different set of issues and arrive at them from different methodological practices. Historians of philosophy come to the historical project armed with definite problems and questions to be analysed that are determined by a special interest in philosophy. For example: ‘He [the historian of philosophy] needs to see Spinoza’s writings as organised around certain distinctively philosophical problems, and he needs to separate discussion of these problems from “the transient concerns of Spinoza’s day”.’⁷

On the one hand, we have intellectual historians who report conversations real and imagined between the dead and the dead, the dead and the living and even one hopes, now and again, the living and the living. The emphasis here is that intellectual history is to be found by analysing ideas and so on that are ultimately derivable from the individual consciousness of a discrete subject. I would take this to be an anti-realist/idealist position and these intellectual historians to be descendants of Collingwood. On the other hand, we have historians of philosophy who trace the problems of philosophy in the past and attempt to answer the great philosophical questions and in so doing obtain the truth of the past in them and of them. These problems are ultimately accorded a universal status and are therefore essentially unchanging. The objective of the programme is to find the (T)rue answers to them. I would take this to be a realist position and these historians of philosophy are descendants of Lovejoy.

In Philosophy in History examples of the perspective of both intellectual historians and historians of philosophy are to be found and the effect of the undefined opposition between realism and idealism (historians of philosophy and intellectual historians respectively) facilitates and structures a debate on the nature of, as the subtide to the work tells us, the ‘historiography of philosophy’. This opposition is both necessary and essential to the production of the work:

An opposition between intellectual historians and historians of philosophy seems to us as factitious as would an opposition between scientists and engineers, or librarians and scholars, or rough-hewers and shapers. It is an appearance created by the attempt to be sententious about ‘the nature of history’ or the ‘nature of philosophy’ or both, treating ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ as names of natural kinds – disciplines whose subject and purpose are familiar and uncontroversial. Such attempts produce red-faced snorrings about how a given book ‘isn’t what I call history’ or doesn’t count as ‘philosophy’. They take for granted that there is a well-known part of the world — the past — which is the domain of history, and another well-known part, usually thought of as a set of ‘timeless problems’, which are the domain of philosophy.⁸

I would not disagree that the division between what is legitimate philosophy and what is not is to a degree an arbitrary one. But intellectual historians, according to the sentiments expressed in the Introduction of Philosophy in History, treat this division as benign rather than the malignant one that it often is when confronted in everyday practice in the Academy. In fact in Philosophy in History there is no substantial debate about the nature of the ‘historiography of philosophy’ in terms of realism and idealism/anti-realism. In this way the work escapes any analysis of the preconditions of its own existence even though it is the opposition between intellectual history and history of philosophy that allows a series of familiar metaphors to come into play – realism/idealism, he/she, hard/soft, science/art, truth/fiction and so on — which structure the work.

Philosophy in History, in functioning through the realist-anti-realist/idealist division is already following a pattern to be found in the work of two early contributors to the history of ideas programme, Lovejoy and Collingwood. It is by returning to their work that we find a clear expression of the role, consequences and implications of the realism and idealism division that remains for today’s intellectual historians, historians of philosophy and historians of ideas.

The Great Chain of Being

Lovejoy suggests that the aim of his enterprise is to locate and in some sense interpret what he terms ‘unit ideas’, that is, ideas which have a structure analogous to that of the ‘elements’ in the theory of analytic chemistry. They are contrasted to ‘compound ideas’, a contrast that is derived from a parallel distinction in chemistry, and which suggests that ‘unit ideas’ are to be found behind compound ideas in ways which are not easily recognisable. As Lovejoy says: ‘just as chemical compounds differ in their sensible qualities from the elements composing them, so the elements of philosophical doctrines, in differing logical combinations, are not always readily recognisable’.⁹ The methodology of the history of ideas becomes the unfolding or revealing of unit ideas from behind compound ideas, and just as there are only a certain number of chemical elements, so there are only a certain number of unit ideas to be revealed.

Lovejoy offers us a number of ways to distinguish them from compound ideas. Unit ideas are variously referred to as elements, primary or primary persistent recurrent dynamic units,¹⁰ and include: unconscious mental habits and assumptions, a disposition to think in terms of certain categories or imagery, endemic assumptions, nominalistic motives, the flower in the crannied wall motive, and metaphysical pathos, philosophical semantics,¹¹ and so on and a ‘single specific proposition or “principle”’, the latter being what Lovejoy claims he is attempting to analyse in The Great Chain of Being.

His strongly drawn analogy between unit ideas and chemical elements at the very beginning of the methodological chapter signals from the outset that in some general sense he is committed to methodological positivism and epistemological realism. The aim of the history of ideas is to break up compound ideas, which are by their very nature unstable, and refine them into their constitutive elements. This view has two implications. First, that unit ideas are fundamentally unchanging, that philosophers from Plato to Lovejoy are considering issues that are constituted by the same unit ideas. Secondly, that the way to arrive at these unchanging unit ideas is to break up their compound form into smaller and smaller units, until finally a unit is reached that can be divided no more, and this is then accorded the status of a unit idea or element.

Two points need to be immediately noted. First, that there is a debate within the philosophy of science about the appropriateness of the realist/positivist conjunction, and without detailing this here, it is important to keep in mind the fact that at the immediate level of the analogy that Lovejoy wants to make, a number of controversial methodological issues are involved.¹² Second and more significantly, in making this analogy Lovejoy does not argue for its appropriateness, but merely asserts it, so that even if we ignore the debate about positivism/realism within the philosophy of science, we are given no reason why a model that ‘works’ for science will also work for the history of ideas. This is particularly important because positivism, as it appears in its scientific form, namely empiricism, depends upon the ability to test its theorising against observable experimentation, a procedure which is not available to the historian of ideas.

It is true that Lovejoy is not attempting to write an epistemological manual in the style of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but is trying to provide an account, both in theory and in the form of a case study, of the possibility of the history of ideas. Nevertheless this in itself implies a theory of history, a theory of the subject, a theory of meaning and an epistemology. This is particularly relevant when his theory of history, of the subject and meaning, all appear to be closely tied to the general methodological and epistemological considerations already outlined. Lovejoy argues that the world exists in a state of discontinuity and flux, and that the object of the history of ideas is to constitute a sense of stability, continuity and unity, but then a new problem emerges. The history of this discontinuous world would itself also exist in a state of discontinuity, unless the basic methodology of the history of ideas itself provides/produces unity, or continuity at the level of the study. This is to be the central feature of Lovejoy’s approach which is evident throughout the text:

In the whole series of creeds and movements going under the one name, and in each of them separately, it is needful to go behind the superficial appearance of the singleness and identity, to crack the shell which holds the mass together, if we are to see the real units, the effective working ideas, which in any given case are present.¹³

To the common logical or pseudo-logical or affective ingredients behind the surface-dissimilarities the historian of individual ideas will seek to penetrate.¹⁴

Lovejoy’s argument is one that involves a double movement: first, the breaking down of what is seen as a coherent unity into a number of smaller units, and secondly, analysing these units into those elements that can then be designated ‘unit ideas’. This also becomes the foundation of an interdisciplinary approach which again invokes the realist idea that there are only a finite number of ideas in the world and, whether they are to be found in the discipline of philosophy, anthropology or physics, they are fundamentally the same unit ideas:

It is inspired by the belief that there is a great deal more in common to more than one of these provinces than is usually recognised, that the same idea often appears, sometimes considerably disguised, in the most diverse regions of the intellectual world.¹⁵

It is concerned only ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Contemporary issues in the history of ideas
• 2 History and systems of thought
• 3 A diagram of the Middle Ages
• 4 Drawing the subject
• 5 Subversions of the subject
• Afterword
• Notes to the text
• Bibliography
• Name index
• General index
• Copyright acknowledgements