The readings for last week (sorry my post is a little late!) revolve around the central theme of “the invention of man.” Foucault discusses that philosophy is entangled with psychology and other human sciences, as the former marked a domain, which the “human sciences did not inherit…” , but re-established and confirmed in scientific terms. At the same time, human sciences are also defined by philosophy as sciences of finitude, or, in other words, philosophy confirms the truth of the human sciences. According to Foucault, psychology came to dominate the human sciences, because these all “became, in one way or another, sciences of the psyche.”
He also discusses that psychology is part of a larger episteme, or “worldview” structuring knowledge. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious is split into two separate interpretations, hermeneutic and “scientistic”. Psychoanalysis is linked to hermeneutics, as it approaches madness the same way hermeneutics approach literature, as texts “do not say what they say.” There are general laws of signification and interpretation. These are the normative aspects of psychology. However, we can never arrive to a definitive interpretation, a primary text.
In “Man and his doubles” Foucault defines the separation between being and representation. “It is no longer their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the external relation they establish with the human being.” The subject ‘s position with respect to knowledge is described as ambiguous, because we are objects of knowledge but also knowing subjects. We are speaking beings, but constrained by those things that are greater and older than us. We are constrained by our language, economy, and especially the body, for it is the mark of our limitations.
Finitude is the search for conditions that make all finite forms possible. The concept of “the same” is finitude’s own repetition. What is reflected empirically as a content is repeated on the transcendental level as a condition.
He then distinguishes two types of analysis , the transcendental dialectic, concerned with the social/historical/economic conditions that human knowledge depends on, and a transcendental aesthetic, concerned with the organic/physiological/neurological essence of thought. Both aspire to a truth that belongs to their discourse. This discourse is however ambiguous because it derives conditions from the objects it conditions. The solution to such ambiguity is a discourse that closes such gap, the “le vecu”(lived experience).
He talks about anthropological slumber, or the philosophical inertia caused by a dogmatism based on empirical knowledge.
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