Paul Strathern - Foucault - Philosophy in an Hour

When he was ten, young Paul-Michel saw the first refugees from the Spanish Civil War tramping through the streets of Poitiers. Three years later Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II, and the family drove back from their summer holiday at La Baule for the last time. By the time Foucault was fourteen, the Nazis had invaded France, the French army was retreating in disarray, and even Poitiers was in turmoil. With the unbending ineptitude of an operating-theatre martinet, Dr. Foucault supervised the setting up of emergency medical units in the town. In the background his wife painstakingly smoothed ruffled feathers and efficiently ensured that things got done. Now wearing glasses, but still in short pants, young Paul-Michel looked on in bewilderment. That summer his exam results plummeted.

Mother pulled strings to have him transferred to another school, whereupon the academic ugly duckling turned into a swan. This was to become something of a pattern. Foucault was to under-perform at important exams but then shine when he took them a second time. At the age of twenty, on his second attempt, Foucault gained a place at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This was the intellectual hothouse where the crème de la crème of France’s students were put through their paces. To be a ‘normalien’ marked one as a superior species for life. Normality has always been exceptional in France, and the superintellectual ‘normaliens’ were often a fairly odd lot. But even here Foucault soon stood out.

By now the Punch of the school playground had developed into a decidedly prickly character. During the previous year or so he had gradually become aware that he was homosexual. Such a thing was not only illegal at the time; in Poitiers it was unthinkable. Paul-Michel couldn’t even turn to his beloved mother for guidance and reassurance. And by this stage he had also fallen out heavily with Papa. The adolescent Paul-Michel refused to follow in the family tradition and become a doctor. He just wasn’t interested in medicine, and that was that. He would stamp upstairs to his room, slam the door, and bury his head in yet another volume of history. By the time he took the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure for the second time, there was no doubting that here was an intellectual thoroughbred. (He finished fourth in the entire country). But there was also no doubting that he had the unpredictable temperament of a thoroughbred.

In Paris he took to calling himself plain Michel (dropping Paul, his father’s name). Michel Foucault’s first years at the ENS were to be a litany of incidents. On one occasion he slashed his chest with a razor; on another he had to be restrained while chasing a student with a dagger; and on another he nearly succeeded in committing suicide by taking an overdose of pills. He drank heavily and occasionally experimented with drugs (very much a minority pursuit in those far-off days). Sometimes he would disappear for nights on end, afterwards slumping back hollow-eyed and haggard into his dormitory with depression. Few guessed the truth. He was tortured with guilt over what had occurred on his lonely sexual expeditions.

Foucault was unable to live with himself, and none of the students in his dormitory wished to live with him. They looked upon him as mad and dangerous, qualities that only seemed to be exacerbated by his evident brilliance. Fiercely aggressive in intellectual argument, he was not above resorting to violence. His fellow students shunned his company, and he began developing psychosomatic illnesses. Long bouts in a solitary bed in the sanatorium spared him from the communal existence of his dormitory, and here he read voluminously, even by ENS standards.

Foucault’s somewhat haphazard enthusiasm for history now found cohesion. He began reading the nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel, whose philosophy insisted on the coherence and meaning of history. The purpose of history was its long progress toward the ultimate reality of reason and self-consciousness. According to Hegel, ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational.’ Below the surface of events, history had its hidden structure. ‘In history we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, on the other hand, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or even the future, but with what is , both now and eternally – that is, with reason.’ History and philosophy became one, a unity that had immediate relevance to the present.

From Hegel, Foucault progressed to the twentieth-century German philosopher Heidegger, who saw the human predicament as determined by deeper elements than mere reason. ‘My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger,’ Foucault would later write. The excitement of first encountering Heidegger’s thought is best conveyed by his student Hannah Arendt: ‘Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say.’ The past was alive in the present, and how we understood the past showed how we could understand the present. History was not recording the truth of the past but revealing the truth of the present. Such was the drift of Foucault’s thought.

At the time, Heidegger’s philosophy was a matter of deep debate in the cafés of Left Bank Paris. Postwar disillusionment and a despair with traditional values had led to a widespread enthusiasm for the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had himself been heavily influenced by Heidegger. Sartre’s existentialism was highly subjective and believed in ‘existence before essence’. There was no such thing as an essential humanity or subjectivity. This essence we ourselves created by the manner in which we existed, made our choices, and acted in the world. Our subjectivity was likewise no constant element, open to static and limiting definition. It was continually being created, constantly evolving as a result of the life we led.

Foucault was to absorb many ideas from Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet equally significant were the ideas he rejected. In an important way he formed himself in reaction to these philosophers, especially Sartre. As a personality and a thinker, Sartre dominated the Parisian intellectual scene and would remain a constant presence almost throughout Foucault’s life: an example and a goad to his aspirations. Sartre’s ideas would perform a similar role. Foucault was temperamentally averse to remaining in anyone’s shadow for long. He not only had ambition but also sufficient contrariness to strike out on his own – even though his reactive impulse often outran his ideas. There would be no father figures for Foucault; one had been enough.

The young man was maturing at an exceptional rate, both academically and personally. His increasing intellectual assurance was matched by his emotional self-understanding. He was learning to accept his homosexuality, and the violence in his character was subsumed by occasional sado-masochistic role-playing.

By now Foucault’s intellectual abilities were beginning to attract the attention of leading figures attached to the ENS, who would discuss their ideas with him. Foucault’s former examiner Georges Canguilhem was developing an entirely new structural history of science. In his view, science did not progress by some gradual and inevitable evolution. The history of science involved a number of distinct discontinuities, where knowledge would take an unprecedented step forward into some new realm. (Einstein’s relativity is perhaps the best-known example in this century). Canguilhem was unusual in having qualifications in both philosophy and medicine. This enabled him to ask, with some acumen, ‘What is psychology?’ Ironically he attacked psychology on the very ground that it saw as its function and strength: knowledge of self. What was the basis of psychological knowledge? What precisely was it doing, or trying to do? Such questions were of particular interest to Foucault, whose earlier erratic behaviour had brought him into firsthand contact with institutional psychiatry. He had been temperamentally averse to the role of patient, and disillusioned with the psychology behind the treatment offered him. This had prompted him to ‘forget the whole thing the moment my shrink went on holiday’. Now here was Canguilhem articulating what he had instinctively felt was wrong with psychology – its lack of self-knowledge about what it was and what it was doing.