I can not understand why Foucault is taken seriously. In fact, I cannot understand how Sociology is taken seriously. In my uni course, the textbook tried to claim that childhood development is a myth. When I pointed out the decades of child development psychological studies and research, I was told "we aren't studying psychology, we are studying sociology."
Great! And yet there is an entire field that claims the direct opposite of what is being espoused and this is the best argument they could give me.
You are making a point that shares much with Foucault’s work: trying to understand why and how fields like psychology and sociology came to be crystallized into academic pigeonholes. Your frustration is what he studied.
If you want a deeper answer to your question read:
R. Rorty (1991) “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others)
Rorty makes the point that there are (at least) two ways to read Foucault: both interesting and also in tension.
3 different opinions amalgamated as 1 logical conclusion.
1 : your university course had a perspective another field of study contradicted (according to you and your teachers then)
2 : because of that one of those fields, the "new" one according to your learning process, can't be taken seriously
3 : consequently any author from that field can not be taken seriously
No, assuming your recall of the situation is correct it just means you had teachers who didn't care and relied on shitty textbooks, nothing deeper about entire fields.
I studied philosophy at a pretty prestigious institution, and he's not taken that seriously. He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space, where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology, and so on. But even there, he doesn't reach the level of Sartre, Heidegger, or (of course) Hegel.
Let alone Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (who generally all have specifically dedicated courses). I'm not a huge fan of Nietzsche, but he always has a point. When I read Sartre or Foucault, I'm just left scratching my head as to what they are talking about.
So what point does "Zarathustra" make, say, in comparison with "Discipline and Punish"? I think both authors have published a broad spectrum of works, ranging from "accessible, rational" to "confusing". Both are suitable for having catchy citations ripped out of their context.
"He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you." (Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse)
By most accounts he's the most cited academic of all time. I'm sure he's less relevant in pure philosophy than other humanities but he is definitely taken very seriously by many.
Funnily enough, iirc Foucault viewed a large part of his work as extending the style of investigation Neitzsche initiated in Genealogy of Morals.
I think Nietzsche is great. His prose is a breath of fresh air and he's arguably the greatest literary stylist among philosophers since the Greeks. Sartre was pretty good too, likely thanks to his ability as a novelist. Some later continental philosophers would have really benefited from reading his aphorism that good writers write to be understood.
> where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology
To be fair, these - and pretty much anything - have philosophical roots. And philosophy is omnivorous.
Of course, philosophy in the highest and most rarified sense deals with the first principles of its scope, but I’m not sure the distinction matters here.
Just like Marx, the words & concepts are not really about the words or the concepts. Instead they form a theology whose practice promises to give frustrated elites an alternate path to power.
I have a lot of issues with latter 20th cen continental (particularly french) philosophers, but of all of them Foucault is the last one anyone should have an issue with. While he's guilty of some of the pompous and needlessly intelligible stylistics this crew adopted, he at least has some pretty substantial ideas behind his work. Derrida and Lacan on the other hand....
As far as sociology goes, I think you probably realize claiming an entire field is bunk is dumb. In fact you are committing the very wrong you are apparently complying about (writing off the field of developmental psychology). I haven't heard of. a single beef between these two fields btw, must have been an odd textbook.
What's insubstantial about Lacan? There seems to be enough in there to give D&G, Zizek etc careers (as well as inspire a bunch of compelling media i.e. The Matrix)
Just to volunteer an example: An editorial by Assange that explicitly called out the panopticon was on my mind today.
The rise of "meta glasses" and reading ICE also wishes to employ them was what reminded me of this I believe.
Sociology (like philosophy, like math) is one of these subjects were a good teacher makes all the difference. I guess true of any subject. Many people come away from a subject thinking it's bunk or not relevant to them for all sorts of reasons. Teachers are not meant to be babysitters or proctors they are supposed to offer context and connect the dots.
The amount of bad teachers (it is a hard job) is quite staggering. Education is in large part a mess because we've tried to scale a system that was designed for the very few to the very many without the proper investment.
Biopower is the most famous one, but I actually think his greatest contribution was to make philosophers pay more attention to the ways in which epistemic systems and ways of organizing knowledge are connected to political power.
I actually think his phd thesis "the history of madness" is his best work. It encapsulates much of the subject matter that would occupy him (knowledge and power) in a domain that's easier to understand than some of his later arguments, and it predates his adoption of a more contorted literary style (or maybe the translation is just better, idk).
Ian Hacking also has a great text that extends Foucault's work "Historical Ontology" that picks up many of the chief ideas in a far more lucid manner for those of us who aren't fans of the later continental style (which if I'm being honest, was always a little too concerned with being obtuse just to sound intelligent)
Yeah, believe me, I'm not a fan of the misapplication and misunderstanding of much of this work. It's a bitter lesson in why making one's ideas clear in straightforward prose is so essential. I think Foucault at least, could be absolved from the notion that he intended any kind of said misapplication. Some other philosophers however, I think we're just straight up hacks that exploited the vogue of confusing language and weak metalingual philosophizing (Derrida, coughcough). If only we got students to read Wittgenstein first and save them from all the sophist language games.
I can not understand why Foucault is taken seriously. In fact, I cannot understand how Sociology is taken seriously. In my uni course, the textbook tried to claim that childhood development is a myth. When I pointed out the decades of child development psychological studies and research, I was told "we aren't studying psychology, we are studying sociology."
Great! And yet there is an entire field that claims the direct opposite of what is being espoused and this is the best argument they could give me.
You are making a point that shares much with Foucault’s work: trying to understand why and how fields like psychology and sociology came to be crystallized into academic pigeonholes. Your frustration is what he studied.
If you want a deeper answer to your question read:
R. Rorty (1991) “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others)
Rorty makes the point that there are (at least) two ways to read Foucault: both interesting and also in tension.
3 different opinions amalgamated as 1 logical conclusion.
1 : your university course had a perspective another field of study contradicted (according to you and your teachers then)
2 : because of that one of those fields, the "new" one according to your learning process, can't be taken seriously
3 : consequently any author from that field can not be taken seriously
No, assuming your recall of the situation is correct it just means you had teachers who didn't care and relied on shitty textbooks, nothing deeper about entire fields.
> why Foucault is taken seriously
I studied philosophy at a pretty prestigious institution, and he's not taken that seriously. He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space, where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology, and so on. But even there, he doesn't reach the level of Sartre, Heidegger, or (of course) Hegel.
Let alone Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (who generally all have specifically dedicated courses). I'm not a huge fan of Nietzsche, but he always has a point. When I read Sartre or Foucault, I'm just left scratching my head as to what they are talking about.
So what point does "Zarathustra" make, say, in comparison with "Discipline and Punish"? I think both authors have published a broad spectrum of works, ranging from "accessible, rational" to "confusing". Both are suitable for having catchy citations ripped out of their context.
"He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you." (Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse)
By most accounts he's the most cited academic of all time. I'm sure he's less relevant in pure philosophy than other humanities but he is definitely taken very seriously by many.
Funnily enough, iirc Foucault viewed a large part of his work as extending the style of investigation Neitzsche initiated in Genealogy of Morals.
I think Nietzsche is great. His prose is a breath of fresh air and he's arguably the greatest literary stylist among philosophers since the Greeks. Sartre was pretty good too, likely thanks to his ability as a novelist. Some later continental philosophers would have really benefited from reading his aphorism that good writers write to be understood.
David Macey (2000) Dictionary of Critical Theory; mentions Foucault a few times.
> He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space
And yet continental became the zeitgeist of virtually all contemporary popular culture and analytic is left as a stodgy academic dead end.
> where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology
To be fair, these - and pretty much anything - have philosophical roots. And philosophy is omnivorous.
Of course, philosophy in the highest and most rarified sense deals with the first principles of its scope, but I’m not sure the distinction matters here.
Foucault is taken seriously because his ideas are politically empowering
Just like Marx, the words & concepts are not really about the words or the concepts. Instead they form a theology whose practice promises to give frustrated elites an alternate path to power.
What was the textbook?
I have a lot of issues with latter 20th cen continental (particularly french) philosophers, but of all of them Foucault is the last one anyone should have an issue with. While he's guilty of some of the pompous and needlessly intelligible stylistics this crew adopted, he at least has some pretty substantial ideas behind his work. Derrida and Lacan on the other hand....
As far as sociology goes, I think you probably realize claiming an entire field is bunk is dumb. In fact you are committing the very wrong you are apparently complying about (writing off the field of developmental psychology). I haven't heard of. a single beef between these two fields btw, must have been an odd textbook.
What's insubstantial about Lacan? There seems to be enough in there to give D&G, Zizek etc careers (as well as inspire a bunch of compelling media i.e. The Matrix)
Asking open-mindedly and genuinely: what, for you, comes to mind as an especially useful and/or powerful idea uniquely articulated by foucault?
Just to volunteer an example: An editorial by Assange that explicitly called out the panopticon was on my mind today.
The rise of "meta glasses" and reading ICE also wishes to employ them was what reminded me of this I believe.
Sociology (like philosophy, like math) is one of these subjects were a good teacher makes all the difference. I guess true of any subject. Many people come away from a subject thinking it's bunk or not relevant to them for all sorts of reasons. Teachers are not meant to be babysitters or proctors they are supposed to offer context and connect the dots.
The amount of bad teachers (it is a hard job) is quite staggering. Education is in large part a mess because we've tried to scale a system that was designed for the very few to the very many without the proper investment.
Biopower is the most famous one, but I actually think his greatest contribution was to make philosophers pay more attention to the ways in which epistemic systems and ways of organizing knowledge are connected to political power.
I actually think his phd thesis "the history of madness" is his best work. It encapsulates much of the subject matter that would occupy him (knowledge and power) in a domain that's easier to understand than some of his later arguments, and it predates his adoption of a more contorted literary style (or maybe the translation is just better, idk).
Ian Hacking also has a great text that extends Foucault's work "Historical Ontology" that picks up many of the chief ideas in a far more lucid manner for those of us who aren't fans of the later continental style (which if I'm being honest, was always a little too concerned with being obtuse just to sound intelligent)
> the ways in which epistemic systems and ways of organizing knowledge are connected to political power
Right. Which was immediately weaponized but poorly and at the wrong target(s), which is why he is so reviled.
Yeah, believe me, I'm not a fan of the misapplication and misunderstanding of much of this work. It's a bitter lesson in why making one's ideas clear in straightforward prose is so essential. I think Foucault at least, could be absolved from the notion that he intended any kind of said misapplication. Some other philosophers however, I think we're just straight up hacks that exploited the vogue of confusing language and weak metalingual philosophizing (Derrida, cough cough). If only we got students to read Wittgenstein first and save them from all the sophist language games.
I was wondering where Wittgenstein fits into this. He's the only one that truly makes me think "are we taking crazy pills or is it just me?"
Fans of Nassim Taleb will know his disdain for Foucault.
Why is nassim taken seriously?
Because he is an erudite and writes insightful things such as Antifragile and Black Swan. And in addition these are fun reads.
He is loud and wrote some useful books.