Michel Foucault is one of the most influential
thinkers of the past sixty years, and one
of the most controversial ones.
Arguably the most significant post-modern
philosopher, he is being quoted and referenced
by people from very different schools of thought,
who all rely on him as an authority.
Then again, there are those who claim that
his writings are just woo-woo, fancy rhetoric
disguised as philosophy but holding no real
substance, and blame him for inspiring the
gobbledygook which today passes as academic
papers.
In this video we are going to try to demystify
some of this confusion, and understand what
Foucault is saying.
And, no less important, go back to a moment
which to me is one of the foundational moments
of post-modernism, and see first of all what
is post-modernism, and then how and why it
was born.
Now, one thing that cannot be denied is that
Foucault is very hard to read and understand.
So the first thing we have to ask is: why
is that?
Well, first of all, there's this:
You know, I actually believe this story.
Foucault suffers from the same malady that
many 20th century French philosophers suffer
from, namely that they deem themselves to
also be poets.
Part of the problem is that in France, intellectuals
are treated like pop stars, so they have to
write pretty.
The reader might not understand a word of
what they are reading, but at least they are
enjoying it.
When I started writing, I also suffered from
this malady, because I wanted to show off
my writing skills.
In time I realized that I'm just clouding
my arguments with unnecessary fog, and learned
to separate the poetic parts from the philosophical
parts.
When I make a philosophical video, I will
occasionally start and end it with a song,
or maybe a couple of jokes, but when I make
the arguments I strive for the utmost clarity.
This is not the French way.
But Daniel Dennett, and Gad Saad, are going
further than just criticizing the language.
As we heard, they claim that the post-modernists,
including Foucault, are a fraud.
Here I disagree, and this video will rebuke
this notion.
Foucault's philosophy, I will attempt to show,
is substantive, and has a lot of merit.
Even in the parts where he gets too heavy
with the poetry, if I put some effort into
it, I eventually manage to figure out what
he is saying.
As for the other post-modernists, well…
we are not talking about them right now.
So why is Foucault so hard to read, even if
we get his meaning?
Well, because the stuff that he is discussing
is complicated.
Contrary to what some people may believe,
philosophy ain't easy.
What I will try to do in this video is to
simplify his thought and make it more digestible.
On the way, we will also see why it is so
complicated.
What we are going to do is focus on one book,
the first significant book that Foucault wrote,
namely Madness and Civilization, published
in 1961.
This book lays the groundwork for everything
that he wrote later, and it is also, as mentioned,
one of the starting points in post-modern
thought, at least in my eyes.
We are going to analyze the entire book, and
ask what merit it has for us.
At that time, the early 1960s, there was a
lot of criticism and protest around the treatment
of insane people.
There was a movement that claimed that it
was cruel to lock them up in insane asylums,
and demanded to set them free.
Foucault, in the preface of the book, says
that what he intends to do is to take a step
back.
He is not going to wade into this debate,
but rather ask how it even came about.
There was a time in which crazy people lived
freely, and their mad ramblings were regarded
as just another form of thinking.
Then, at some point, a distinction has been
made between reason and madness, a distinction
that became a total dichotomy in which they
could no longer converse with each other,
and the representatives of reason then decided
that mad people have no place in society.
The insane were locked up, and from then on
were seen as objects of scientific research,
not as people who can be part of any discussion.
What Foucault intends to do in this book is
to go back and see how this distinction was
formed, and what it can teach us about the
Age of Reason, and, deeper still, about what
we call reason.
Foucault begins the discussion by talking
about leprosy.
During the Middle Ages, leprosy was a serious
problem, and there were tens of thousands
of leprosariums all over Europe.
The lepers were banished from society, quarantined
in houses or living in a colony in some remote
place.
But they were not excommunicated from the
Church.
They were promised that since they were punished
in this world, they are going to be rewarded
and saved in the afterlife.
Thus, they served a purpose for the rest of
the community, as they were symbols of the
wrath of God, but also of his mercy.
In other words, they were physically removed
from the community, but spiritually they were
still given a place in it.
At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy began
to recede.
By the 17th century, there wasn't a single
leper left in Europe.
The places where they were banished to, where
they used to reside, remained desolate for
centuries.
The people of the time didn't know why leprosy
went away; they just knew that what they did
worked.
And this model, of physically banishing a
group of people from society, but still integrating
them in the spiritual order of that society,
will from then on be applied to other groups.
Foucault then switches to talking about the
representation of madness in the art of the
time.
In the first half of the 15th century, in
a world that was coming out of the black death,
there was an increased occupation with death
in Western art.
The inevitable death of man resides everywhere,
and the feeling is that the end of days is
nigh.
But then, towards the end of the century,
this transforms into something else: a constant
ridicule of madness.
Since the inevitability of death turns life
into vanity, madness and folly are seen as
the essential nature of life.
So by ridiculing folly, we are making fun
of life, and death is no longer so unbearable.
So now, at the end of the 15th century, wisdom
regards madness as representing the nature
of human existence.
This is manifested in art, but this manifestation
takes two different forms.
One in the plastic arts, and the other in
the written arts.
In plastic arts, the imagery created by gothic
art, including all of its monstrous creatures,
was still in use.
But these images no longer symbolized what
they did in the 12th century, and throughout
the gothic era.
In medieval thinking, animals were seen as
different in their nature from Man, and at
most they could serve as symbols of human
traits and values.
When gothic art presented hybrids of man and
beast, it was to symbolize what the moral
corruption of Man might lead to.
At the end of the 15th century, on the other
hand, the animal symbolizes the hidden nature
of Man under the veneer of humanity, and because
of that, the gothic hybrids are interpreted
differently.
Now, they are seen as what we really are,
the thing that we will revert to in the end
of days, if we are not saved by Christ.
They are figments of Man's imagination, but
the artists imagining them are having a vision
of something real, the fate that awaits the
sinners.
Thus, they become figures that should be studied,
since they teach us something about ourselves.
As an example, Foucault talks about The Temptation
of St. Anthony, a 1501 painting by Hieronymus
Bosch.
Previously, when art depicted saints being
put to the test, they were usually depicted
as resisting temptations of the flesh.
Here, St. Anthony has to deal with something
else: figments of his own imagination, which
surround him in his solitude.
One of them, sitting right in front of him,
is a humanoid creature with a pig's face.
This is a gryllos, which in gothic art served
as satire of certain types of humans.
But here the gryllos has an owl on its head,
a symbol of wisdom, but also of heresy.
He tempts St. Anthony to explore the dark
nature of Man, to explore the forbidden.
What is this forbidden knowledge that is hidden
behind the Gryllos' tempting smirk?
It is the knowledge of the end of days.
In the 14th century, the end of days was usually
depicted as the glorious triumph of God.
Now, it is depicted in apocalyptic terms,
in which everything descends into chaos.
It is this chaos, which already resides in
our imagination and dreams, which the artists
manage to externalize with the gothic monsters.
They give us some idea of what it will be
like.
But while the artist sees only glimpses of
this truth, and the wise man can only have
a partial idea of it, the mad man is already
living that reality in full.
The insane, believed the people of the time,
are living in that world of the imagination.
They already experience the end of days.
Thus, the insane are celebrated in the plastic
art of the time.
One common theme is the ship of fools.
Foucault points out that water, and the act
of sailing over the water, were always connected
to madness in Western art, because sailing
is an act of being adrift, of being between
worlds, just like the madman.
Now this world of the madmen is also seen
as a world of knowledge, which we can learn
from.
The ship of fools thus becomes an icon of
the time, and it actually existed not just
in art, but in reality as well.
Some madmen, instead of being kept within
the walls of the city, were sent on ships,
to live in their own world.
At the same time, literature and theatre gave
madness a different place.
The focus was more on folly, and madness was
just the most extreme version of folly.
In medieval times, folly was counted among
the bad traits.
Now, at the end of the 15th century, it was
seen as the root of all other bad traits.
But not just the bad traits.
It was the driving force of many things that
were seen as good as well.
Since the end of days is nigh, all the things
that men busy themselves with are folly, something
to be mocked.
While the painters depicted madness as the
deepest knowledge, the writers depicted the
pursuit of knowledge as folly and madness.
For them, there wasn't just one madness, but
many forms of madness, since madness is part
of everything humans do.
Their answer was comedy: by making fun of
the folly of humans, we can at least pass
our fleeting time in laughter, enjoying the
carnival of existence in which we are led
by fools.
These depictions of madness would be part
of 16th century literature and theatre, and
would continue into the beginning of the 17th
century.
Crazy people abound, they go crazy for all
sorts of reasons, and they stay crazy to the
end.
This is how it still is in the plays of Shakespeare,
for instance.
But during the 16th century, the apocalyptic
atmosphere that dominated the previous century
gradually dissipates, and in early 17th century,
madness begins to be treated differently.
It is now depicted as a form of delusion,
as the most extreme case of errors and misunderstandings.
And because of that, it can be defeated.
Once the entanglement is resolved, and the
delusion revealed, the madmen return to their
senses.
Reason and truth can overcome anything, even
madness.
We are on the cusp of the Age of Reason.
Before we step over into the Age of Reason,
though, let's do a short recap.
In the period between the late 15th century
and the early 17th, madness was given a place
of honor in Western culture.
Madness was regarded as containing knowledge,
knowledge about the true nature of the world
and about how to live life.
Thus, the voice of insanity was included in
the conversation, and mad people were treated
as people who had something of merit to say.
If they weren't dangerous, they could roam
freely.
All of this was about to change.
Foucault now takes us into what he calls the
Classical Age.
This age begins in the middle of the 17th
century, and ends towards the end of the 18th.
He focuses on France, but similar processes
happen in all advanced European countries.
The beginning of this age sees the sudden
imprisonment of a large number of people,
around one percent of the population.
In 1656, an institution called the General
Hospital is established in Paris.
This institution, although called a hospital,
is not about healthcare.
It is about confining all the unemployed people.
By 1676, the law decreed that such an institute
should exist in every city of the kingdom.
The question is: what happened to bring about
this new development?
Well, unemployment has been a problem which
European societies were dealing with for a
while now.
The economies were going through periods of
boom and bust, and whenever they were busted,
Panhandlers would fill the streets and become
a public nuisance.
A person who did not work for their living
was regarded as a sinner by the Church, and
the bums would periodically be banished from
the cities, but no overall solution was found.
Now, in the beginning of the Age of Reason,
the state took over from the Church as the
moral authority, and claimed that it could
use reason to devise a solution.
Instead of banishment, the unemployed were
taken off the streets and confined, away from
view.
At times when the economy was booming, they
would do menial jobs for very low pay, thus
providing a cheap working force.
When the economy was bust, the confinement
kept them off the streets and prevented civil
unrest.
If an individual showed capability and willingness
to become a productive citizen, they were
freed, but otherwise they were kept in the
houses of confinement.
The belief was that in this way, the state
could regulate the economy, and gradually
eradicate poverty.
This model existed for the next century and
a half, but it did not live up to the expectations.
Poverty was not eradicated, and the confinement
actually created economic problems.
And yet, the European countries remained faithful
to this policy.
How come?
Foucault answers: because it wasn't based
on reason, but on faith.
Idleness was regarded as the root of all evil,
as it is a rebellion against the decree imposed
on Man when he was banished from the Garden
of Eden, the decree that he should work all
of his days.
If we eradicate the sin of idleness, believed
the Classical Age, we will eradicate the root
of all other sins, and this will lead to a
more virtuous society.
The end of poverty was to come as the reward
for this righteousness, not as the outcome
of economic processes.
Allow me to break away from Foucault's discussion
for a moment, to discuss something that this
book shows us.
We are still living in the so-called Age of
Reason, and we believe that our society is
based on reason.
But actually, quite a bit of it is based on
unreason, and one of the manifestations of
it is the fact that in every period, the thought
of the time regards something as the root
of all evil, as the vice that all other vices
stem from.
There is never a good reason for this belief.
It is just regarded as self-evident, because
this is the conclusion that the overall paradigm
of the time leads to.
Later, when the paradigm shifts, future generations
look in dismay at that period, and wonder
how its contemporaries could not see the irrationality
of their beliefs and actions.
But they, too, are guilty of the same folly.
Let's look at our time.
In previous decades, I think one such folly
was the battle against weed smoking.
The belief was that weed is a gateway drug
to harder drugs, and harder drugs are the
reason for crime, the reason why, despite
all of our reforms, crime still exists.
So if we can just get people to stop smoking
weed, it will result in eradicating, or at
least drastically reducing, crime.
Based on this belief, weed smokers were given
penalties that already today, looking back,
seem completely insane.
And when future generations will look at our
time, I think what they will see as our folly
is the way that we regard mean tweets.
Crime rates are rising on the streets of London,
but the Police seem more occupied with hounding
people who say unpleasant things online.
The reason, I believe, is that they think
that hate is the root of all evil, the reason
for all the crimes, so if we manage to rid
the Internet of hate, it will prevent the
crimes from happening in the first place.
In the rationality of our time, it makes sense.
Back to Madness and Civilization.
Foucault points out that the unemployed, in
the Classical Age, took the place that once
was reserved for the lepers.
First geographically, as the houses of confinement
were often built in the places where lepers
once resided.
But also spiritually.
Like the lepers in their time, the unemployed
were physically separated from society, but
in spirit they were made part of the new moral
order.
By working, even though their work wasn't
worth much economically, they were helping
to defeat idleness, and thus taking part in
creating a more virtuous society.
This, says Foucault, is the historical moment
in which the state took upon itself the role
that previously belonged to religion: the
role of an authority that imposes morality
on the public.
Once this concept was established, other sorts
of people started to be confined as well.
The list he provides includes the debauched,
spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers,
men who "seek to undo themselves," and libertines.
And among them, constituting around 10% of
the imprisoned, are the insane.
For the first time, madness began to be seen
as a social and moral problem, and for the
first time, reason started to impose itself
on madness and try to force it to obey its
rules.
There are a lot of people today who believe
that the Enlightenment was a rebellion against
Christianity.
This is a misconception.
The important Enlightenment thinkers were
Christian, and the revolution was in the perception
of how reason relates to religion.
In the Middle Ages, human reason was generally
regarded as an earthly instrument that can
help us in everyday life, but cannot lead
us to absolute truth.
Only faith connects us to the truth.
For the renaissance thinkers and artists,
as we saw, the belief that reason can lead
to truth was part of the folly of man, something
to be laughed at.
This is why the insane were regarded as manifesting
some kind of knowledge, either by manifesting
the folly of Man or by being touched by divine
truth.
For the Enlightenment, reason was something
that God has given Man, so he can figure out
the divine order of the world.
This is the paradigm that persisted throughout
the Classical Age, and in this paradigm, there
was no place for unreason.
The people who were confined represented unreason,
an affront to the divine order, and that is
why they had to be kept out of sight.
And the insane, as the most extreme case of
unreason, were among them.
In this frame of mind, crazy people no longer
represented anything about humanity, as they
did in the previous age.
Now they were seen as animals, devoid of any
humanity.
While the other confined people had to work,
and were trained for certain jobs, the insane
were just locked up.
Foucault presents horrid testimonies regarding
the conditions that they were held in, stark
naked in below zero temperatures, in cells
infested with vermin, sometimes chained to
the wall.
The belief was that they do not suffer from
it, as they are as resilient as animals.
In this society that saw itself as operating
strictly by the laws of reason, any sign of
unreason was a scandal.
If some individual showed signs that they
might not fit within the norms, their family
itself would ask for them to be confined,
because the scandal might ruin the family's
name.
The people who were sent to the houses of
confinement were hidden away, out of sight
and out of mind, and were never spoken of.
With one exception.
Crazy people were actually taken out of the
houses of confinement every Sunday, and put
on display.
Crowds would gather to watch them, as you
would watch animals in the zoo.
Foucault asks: how can we explain this phenomenon,
that seems so contrary to the logic of the
time?
To answer that, we once again have to rely
on the model of the leper.
As we recall, the leper is physically removed,
but spiritually remains part of the order
of the community.
We mentioned that this model applies to the
unemployed who were confined, but this was
in relation to the order of the state.
The madmen, on the other hand, were presented
as part of the divine order.
First, they displayed the wrath of God, as
their madness was seen as the ultimate outcome
of their unreasonable behavior.
But, like the lepers, they also represented
God's mercy.
God loves all his children, even the most
wretched ones, as even the insane, who are
little more than animals, have a place in
heaven.
By being publicly displayed, the insane represent
God's wrath and mercy to the rest of us, and
so they play their part in creating a better
society.
We are beginning to see why Foucault is so
hard to understand.
Beyond his writing style, there is also the
fact that whenever he writes about a period,
he tries to take us into that period's frame
of mind.
We constantly have to try to free ourselves
from the way that we think, and try to think
in the way that 15th century people thought,
or 17th century people.
Every period has a structure of thought that
dominates it, and it shapes the way humans
perceive the world, the conclusions that they
draw, and the actions that they take.
In later books, Foucault would use the word
'episteme' to indicate this structure.
I usually use the word paradigm.
Putting yourself in the mind-frame of people
from another period is an almost impossible
task, but Foucault is trying to do so, and
tries to help us do the same.
Trying to follow his reasoning is therefore
a very strenuous task, as you always have
to remember the paradigm that you are in.
And Foucault is not making it any easier when
he starts to wax lyrical.
A lot of people give up and claim that he
makes no sense.
But in my opinion, at least, the effort does
pay off.
We said that madness is the ultimate outcome
of unreasonable behavior.
But remember that we are now in the Age of
Reason, in which it is not enough to just
say that this is God's punishment.
You have to also show it in scientific terms,
of cause and effect.
Before we see how the thought of the time
explained the causes of insanity, let's remind
ourselves that when we say "unreasonable behavior",
it should not be understood in the way we
understand this term today.
Today, we accept that being unreasonable is
part of our human nature.
In the Classical Age, human nature is perceived
as reasonable, and to be unreasonable is to
act against your nature.
Let's see where that leads to.
17th century medicine was still dominated
by the ancient idea that the body is stirred
by humors.
There are four humors, and they need to be
kept in equilibrium for the person to function
properly.
There was also a medicine of spirits, which
similarly thought that an equilibrium of spirits
is the thing that must be maintained in the
body.
In the beginning of the Classical Age, the
belief was that passion, which is born in
the soul, upsets the equilibrium of the body,
and this leads to the disintegration of the
mind and to madness.
So it is passion, if we allow it to rule us
and don't keep it under control, which eventually
leads to madness.
18th century medicine was dominated by a different
idea.
The essential thing was the nervous system,
and the belief was that the nerves have to
keep their elasticity.
If they are too tight, or too loose, the functionality
of the organism is impaired.
But here, it is not about the soul affecting
the body.
The soul and the body are seen as one unity.
If the nerves are too tight, then so is the
soul.
Passions are born from this unity, and are
mutual to body and to the soul.
Madness is seen as something that enters that
unity through the passions, and then takes
over the nervous system, until the nerves
lose their elasticity and the person loses
sanity.
Madness, in the 18th century, is perceived
as a state that has its own coherent logic.
This theory is based on our experience with
dreams, in which everything makes sense at
the time that we dream them.
The crazy person is someone who gets forever
stuck in this dream state, and cannot wake
up from it.
So actually, under the surface, we all have
madness within us.
It is another form of rationality, but rationality
that is disconnected from reality.
This state threatens to take over our mind,
if we allow it to enter it in our waking hours.
And it enters through passion, through sudden
shock to the nervous system.
Passion leads you to unreason, to thoughts
that are not rational.
Once your mind gets on that track, other delirious
ideas join the first ones.
If you don't snap out of it, these ideas will
eventually join together to form a coherent
rationality, which overwhelms the real world
that you perceive with your senses.
Finally, you lose contact with reality, and
get stuck in this alternative world, the world
of dreams, the world of insanity.
Once you are in this state, your mind is ruled
by delusions.
Your thought is still coherent, and would
make perfect sense if the delusions were real,
and that is why it is almost impossible to
break out of this state once you got into
it.
Sanity is ruled by rationality, so it is rationality
that has to defeat the insanity.
But since the state of madness is also ruled
by rationality, just rationality that is based
on delusions and false perceptions, the faculty
that is supposed to get you out of it is the
very faculty that keeps you in.
So, to avoid becoming insane, you need to
prevent this other world from taking over
your mind.
You must not give in to passion.
The 1667 play Andromaque, by Jean Racine,
serves Foucault as an artistic example.
The hero of this tragedy is Oreste, who is
passionately in love with Hermione.
She manipulates him to commit murder, and
then betrays him.
On the morning after the night of the murder,
when he realizes the situation, Oreste goes
on a monologue in which he says that the world
is going dark around him.
This is the second stage, the stage in which
passion has led you to lose connection with
reality.
He then sees rivers of blood, and other hellish
visions.
This is the third and final stage, in which
he is trapped in a dream world.
Then, Hermione reappears in his visions, as
the ruler of this nightmarish world, and she
will rule his madness from now on.
So this madness, symbolized by Hermione, was
part of him from the start.
When he gave in to his passion for her, he
allowed this madness to come to the surface
and take over his mind.
Foucault presents this as a transitional play.
It still has a hero who goes crazy, like the
renaissance plays that we mentioned earlier,
although the reason given for his insanity
already displays the Classical frame of mind.
From here on, there will be no insane heroes
in the tragedies of the Classical Age, because
it saw nothing heroic about insanity.
The Classical Age regarded everything in terms
of day and night.
Day represented reason and truth, and night
represented unreason and error, and there
was no twilight zone between them.
The tragic hero is the one who represents
truth, and fights against the evils of the
night.
He usually fails, and the next day exposes
the horrible things that happened during the
night.
The madman, in the Classical Age frame of
mind, is the opposite of the tragic hero.
For the madman, there is no night.
This is what distinguishes the sane from the
insane.
Sane people can tell the difference between
day and night, between truth and lie.
But the insane are trapped in an everlasting
day, in which they believe everything that
they see and cannot tell the difference.
And so, while 16th century madmen were seen
as people who could teach us something, and
were allowed to roam freely if they weren't
dangerous, in the Classical Age they were
seen as people who have nothing to give, and
were locked away in the houses of confinement.
These so-called hospitals, as mentioned, were
not meant to cure people, but the Classical
Age did try techniques to cure the insane.
Foucault lists many techniques, and we will
just mention some.
In the 17th century, one technique was to
drain out blood, and replace it with other
blood, often taken from an animal.
The belief was that the old blood contains
a bad mixture of humors, so replacing it with
clean blood will reintroduce the equilibrium
of humors and restore sanity.
Or sometimes the patients would eat soap,
to clean the blood.
In the 18th century, when the nervous system
was the focus, patients would eat iron, seen
as substance that can restore the elasticity
of the nerves.
Baths of hot or cold water were also used,
although there was a debate whether cold water
causes nerves to become tighter and hot water
looser, or the other way around.
Foucault points out that very little empirical
research was done to corroborate the efficacy
of these techniques.
The belief in their efficiency was ideological,
derived from the paradigm.
When Foucault talks about these types of medical
treatments, he points out that they seem nonsensical
to us, since we live in the Modern Age, and
our paradigm perceives madness as an illness
of the spirit, which has nothing to do with
the body.
But, of course, the 'us' that Foucault is
referring to, when talking to the readers
of his time, is not the 'us' that I am talking
to right now.
Since Foucault wrote this book, there has
been another paradigm shift, and today we
once again believe that equilibrium in the
body, especially in the hormonal system, affects
the soundness of the mind.
We are no longer in the Modern Age, and today
our understanding of this issue is actually
closer to that of the Classical Age.
Closer, but still very different.
So beware of projecting your frame of mind
on these descriptions.
We mentioned some of the medical treatments
that were tried on the body.
But, as we recall, we learned that body and
soul were seen as one unity.
So along with treating the body, there were
also medical treatments given to the soul.
The trick was to get inside the rationality
of the crazy person, become part of it, and
then try to lead them out of it.
Foucault provides several amusing cases, one
of them being of a man who thought he was
dead, and therefore would not eat.
As treatment, several people wore makeup and
clothes than made them look dead, entered
his room, and had a feast there, explaining
to him that the dead actually love to eat.
He then started eating, and this restored
the equilibrium to his body and cured his
madness.
Now, as we can see, there were changes happening
during what Foucault defines as the Classical
Age.
The switch from the focus on humors to the
focus on the nervous system, for instance.
So why don't these changes justify defining
more ages?
Because the overall paradigm remains the same.
Throughout the Classical Age, the paradigm
that believes that society should be based
on reason, and thus should confine anyone
who represents unreason, remains intact.
Changes within the paradigm happen all the
time, but not in the paradigm itself.
The Question is: what causes a paradigm to
change?
Well, at some point, the changes within the
paradigm suddenly open a new possibility,
a possibility to think outside of the paradigm.
And if someone detects that possibility, and
puts forth a new theory based on it, and if
then more people start to think in that different
way, eventually this can lead to a paradigm
shift.
Let's see how the paradigm of the Classical
Age collapsed.
In the middle of the 18th century, suddenly
there was a new fear.
Despite a century of confining those who represented
unreason, which was supposed to lead to a
society based on reason, and therefore a moral
society, it turned out that unreason was not
eradicated from society, and humans remained
as irrational and immoral as they always were.
Who is to blame?
Well, said the learned people, the fault was
in the air.
The air is corrupt, and is corrupting the
public.
Once again, we need to remind ourselves that
we are in a different time.
Air, in the Classical Age, was perceived differently
from how we perceive it.
It was part of the environment that God created
for Man.
It was only after the Classical paradigm collapsed,
and was replaced by the Modern paradigm, that
it became possible for Lavoisier and others
to imagine and then to understand air in the
way that we understand it today, as a combination
of gasses.
If this seems silly to you, remember that
these people did not know about viruses.
They could see that contagious diseases could
infect you even without touch, so it was perfectly
reasonable for them to believe that the contagion
is in the air.
So the air is corrupt.
Who corrupted it?
Well, the people that we confined.
We put all of those people together, each
with their own vice, and they morally corrupted
one another.
The moral corruption of the soul contaminated
their bodies, and this contamination was spread
in the air, making it impure.
And this air is the same air that we breathe,
so we are corrupted as well.
Suddenly, those confined people that for a
century were out of sight and out of mind,
became a threat to the social order.
All of those kinky passions and desires, all
those monsters of the irrational side of man,
which for a century were not spoken of in
dignified society, were now whispered of,
as the things that are going on behind the
walls of the houses of confinement.
The imagination was set free, and found a
literary expression in the works of one man.
The Marquise de Sade wrote about vile and
beastly sexual acts, that take place in hidden
spaces, in castles and dungeons.
The people of his time were horrified by Sade
and locked him up, but he was only writing
down what other people were whispering.
It is at this point in the book that Foucault
makes a declaration that shocked me when I
read it.
let's read it verbatim.
Understand what Foucault is saying here.
We are familiar today with BDSM, and know
that there are people who enjoy their sex
combined with pain, humiliation, domination
and torture.
Those people, says Foucault, were not always
part of humanity.
Sexual sadism was born at the end of the 18th
century.
Sade wasn't simply the first who dared to
put on paper what has always existed in the
dark.
He was describing a new phenomenon.
In the book, we have reached the late 18th
century, on the cusp of the Modern Age.
But as readers who are reading this passage,
what we are witnessing in the birth of post-modernism.
What Foucault is stating here does not belong
to Modern logic.
This is something that, when the book was
published in the 1960s, was new.
It's not a new idea to say that our sexuality,
or any other part of us for that matter, is
constructed by culture.
But what is new here is how randomly it occurs.
The narrative that Foucault is delineating
is that the enjoyment of torture and humiliation,
what we now call sadism, was always seen as
something that belongs to the demonic world.
In the 17th century, at the beginning of the
Age of Reason, this demonic world was banished
from Western culture and Western art.
But then, as whispers began about the things
that were going on in the houses of confinement,
the imagination of the public was titillated
by these thoughts of moral corruption, in
which torture and humiliation were blended
with sins of the flesh.
What the Classical Age tried to keep out of
sight, instead became entrenched in our collective
psyche, as something sexy.
Thus, by accident, without anyone intending
it, torture and sexuality were interlinked
in the Western mind, constructing new forms
of sexual pleasures.
And BDSM became a thing.
The first thing we should ask Foucault is:
how do you know that this is indeed what happened?
How do you know that sadism didn't exist before
that?
We shall leave this question for later, when
we discuss post-modernism.
We are not there yet.
Right now, we are inquiring how the Modern
Age came about.
So let's go back to the story.
As we saw, in the middle of the 18th century
there was much talk about how people who are
sent to the houses of confinement are being
morally corrupted there, and how their corruption
contaminates the air that we all breathe.
It was suddenly seen as cruelty to take people
who were merely prone to some vice of unreason,
like being too wasteful with their money,
and lock them up with insane people, who are
basically just animals, and whose proximity
might corrupt them.
While the beginning of the Classical Age regarded
madness as just the most extreme form of unreason,
towards the end of it, madness and unreason
started to be regarded as two different things.
And the more they talked about it, the more
they got hung up on the idea that madness,
rather than going away, is actually increasing
– that there are more crazy people than
ever before.
The question was: how is this possible?
Medicine had the answer.
As we recall, 18th century medicine believed
that what controls the body is the nervous
system.
But, as it was being discussed, a transformation
took place in the way that it regarded the
cause of madness.
In the 17th century, it was believed that
madness is the result of a single shock to
the system, a strong passion that rattles
it and puts it on the road to losing contact
with reality.
In the 18th century, gradually, the fault
was shifted to the durability of the body
to withstand these shocks.
If the body is too soft, any irritation to
the nervous system immediately affects all
of it.
Eventually, after much irritation, the soul
cannot take it, and it develops resistance
until it no longer feels the data from the
nerves.
And this is how the person loses contact with
reality, and becomes insane.
And so, towards the end of the 18th century,
insanity is no longer seen as a sickness of
both body and soul, but of the soul alone.
But what causes one to go insane in the first
place is how they took care of their body,
if they allowed it to go too soft.
What makes the body go soft?
Well, behavior that indulges too much in pleasures.
The more hedonistic you are, the more vulnerable
your body becomes to irritation of the nerves,
which leads to madness.
Which means that the fault for the alleged
proliferation of mad people is on the liberalism
of 18th century society.
In the past, it was said, people's lives were
a lot more regulated and disciplined, and
this kept their bodies strong.
But 18th century society gives them a lot
of free time, so they indulge in learning
too much, in reading novels, in going to theatres,
in sinking into idle thoughts, in sexual promiscuity,
in living a nightlife instead of by the light
of day, and in other indulgences that are
bad for their health.
This leads some of them to lose their minds.
This idea started to manifest itself in other
fields of thought, and because of it, Western
culture started to think in terms of progress.
In the Classical Age, the belief was that
human society is, essentially, as it always
has been.
But in the second half of the 18th century,
thinkers started to develop the idea that
it is actually changing through history, that
it is moving in a certain direction.
This progress could be described in positive
terms, but it could also be described in negative
terms, like the increase in the number of
insane people.
A new paradigm of thought started to emerge,
a paradigm based on this idea of historical
progress.
The Modern paradigm.
We discussed how, in the second half of the
18th century, madmen started to be distinguished
from the other inmates in the houses of confinement.
This led to them being held in separate areas.
At the same time, there was another change,
as the very logic behind the confinement started
to be questioned.
As we recall, confinement was supposed to
help the economy, but after more than a century,
it was deemed a failure.
Poverty was not eradicated, and the new thought
argued that poverty is actually not the result
of laziness of humans, but is an outcome of
the forces of the market, and can never be
eradicated.
Furthermore, it was argued that poor people
are actually essential for a good economy.
People who committed acts of unreason were
still being confined, but they were released
after a while, back into the workforce.
When the French Revolution came, confinement
was finally abolished.
The revolution declared that humans have a
right to be free, and you can't just confine
people who committed no crime.
Only two types of people remained in confinement.
One was actual criminals, and the other was
the insane.
The Constituent Assembly wasn't sure what
to do with insane people, what place should
they take in the new order.
In 1792, it was decided to move all of them
to Bicêtre, a prison near Paris, until a
decision is reached.
The age of confinement was over.
From now on, the family would take care of
those people who previously were locked up.
In the Classical Age, the state took these
people off the family's hands and effectively
disappeared them, so they would not tarnish
the family name.
The underlying idea was that it was not the
fault of the family if the person is no good,
because someone's personal history has no
effect on the question whether he would suddenly
give in to passion.
In the Modern Age, the family was seen as
responsible for bringing its members up right,
for preventing them from sinking into indulgences,
that might lead to corruption of their character
and their body.
And this structure dictated the way madmen
were treated as well.
In 1793, a physician named Philippe Pinel
was appointed to take care of the inmates
in Bicêtre.
He soon became fascinated with the insane
ward of the prison, and believed he can cure
the people locked in it.
Pinel changed the approach towards madness.
The insane were not to be kept in chains and
treated like animals, but invited to join
the social order of the sane.
They were allowed to walk freely within the
walls of the ward, but were made responsible
for their own actions.
They had to learn to behave like civilized
people, and the belief was that this would
rid them of their insanity.
It was immoral behavior that made them go
insane, and it would be moral behavior that
would cure them.
Thus, the insane were no longer treated as
animals, but as children.
Due to the work of reformers like Pinel in
France, and Samuel Tuke in England, they were
detached from criminals, and from now on they
will be kept in a place of their own, the
insane asylum.
In the asylum, the doctors and the staff would
take the place of their family, and try to
do what their families failed to do: bring
them up right.
The crazy person had to relearn civilized
behavior.
The medicine of the Classical Age, as we recall,
believed that body and soul are one unity,
and tried to treat madness by taking care
of both the body and the soul.
In the 19th century, madness was seen as having
nothing to do with the body.
It was an ailment of the psyche, brought about
by immoral behavior, and thus its only treatment
can be treatment of the psyche.
Thus, the science known as psychiatry was
born.
But while the Classical Age tried to cure
the spirit by entering into the mad person's
world, and trying to converse with them on
their terms and lead them back to reality,
19th century psychiatry had no interest in
the mad ramblings of the insane.
The order of the sane people, the order allegedly
based on reason, was imposed on the crazy
person, and it was their responsibility to
internalize it.
In the Classical Age, madmen were imprisoned
in the houses of confinement, but there they
were left alone.
In the Modern Age insane asylums, the inmates
were under constant regulation.
Their own mind became their prison, as they
had to internalize guilt, and constant fear
of punishment for behaving improperly.
Foucault asks us to ponder if this is really
an improvement.
But in the narrative that the Modern Age people
told themselves, this was a story of progress,
of the creation of a more humane society.
One example for the progress was the fact
that in the insane asylums, the madmen suffered
less physical abuse.
When there was physical abuse, such as cold
showers, it was punishment for bad behavior,
whereas in the houses of confinement they
were constantly suffering from such measures.
But actually, in the Classical Age these measures
were not punishment, but methods of medical
treatment.
Cold showers, and other such measures, were
seen as having an effect on the nervous system,
and thus as something that might cure the
insanity.
Because the paradigm shifted, 19th century
people could no longer understand this as
treatment, and it seemed like mindless cruelty
to them.
And so they regarded themselves as more humane
and advanced.
Another example was the fact that the houses
of confinement locked the insane together
with criminals, which was seen as a travesty
in the eyes of the Modern Age. how could you
take people whose mind is like the mind of
children, and put them together with vicious
criminals.
But, as we recall, in the Classical Age the
paradigm actually led to the opposite view.
The first separation of madmen from other
inmates already happened towards the end of
the Classical Age, and it came not to protect
the madmen, but to protect the other inmates
from them, because it was deemed wrong to
put them together with madmen, who are little
more than animals.
Again, what was seen as progress in morality
was simply the result of a paradigm shift.
The science of psychiatry, once established
in the early 19th century, described all of
this as the result of scientific progress.
But actually, says Foucault, none of these
changes happened due to any empirical observation
or findings.
It all happened in the field of morality.
Since the paradigm shifted, insanity started
to be viewed differently, and insane people
started to be viewed differently.
As a result, the view of what is the most
humane way to treat them shifted as well.
The science just rearranged itself around
that.
In the insane asylums, the psychiatrist became
a godlike figure.
It was the doctor who had the authority to
determine what is wrong with the patient,
and how they should be treated.
But actually, there was no science behind
it.
Since it completely detached from the body,
from the thing that we can observe, psychiatry
didn't have anything to rely on.
The doctors actually just accepted the ideas
of Pinel and Tuke, that the treatment should
be the imposing of moral behavior on the patient.
But, since they wanted to feel like real scientists,
this was not enough for the psychiatrists.
Throughout the 19th century, psychiatry tried
to establish itself as an empirical field,
by observing the behavior of insane people
and creating theories based on it.
They didn't get far.
It was only at the end of the century that
Sigmund Freud found a more productive approach,
and he did it by reestablishing the conversation
with the insane person.
After a century in which madmen were treated
as little children who have nothing to tell
us about themselves, Freud decided to talk
to them, dive into their psyche, and find
out what ails them.
But while 18th century doctors regarded the
insane as adults whose minds are disconnected
from reality, Freud, as a product of his time,
regarded them as children, whose mentality
did not fully develop, and can therefore be
studied to understand how we develop psychologically.
Soon, he mapped out what he believed to be
the structure of the human psyche, and the
science of psychoanalysis was born.
Here's what Foucault has to say about this
new science:
Get it?
Freud claimed that he had found the key to
understanding the development of the human
psyche, namely, the Oedipal Complex.
The Oedipal Complex, for psychoanalysis, is
something that every human boy goes through,
no matter what time or culture he was born
in.
But actually, says Foucault, all that Freud
discovered was the key to understand the European
Man of the 19th century.
And this is because of the importance that
was given to the family, and to the parents
as authority figures, in the beginning of
the century.
This is what constructed the psyche of the
people of that culture, and this, compounded
by the fact that insane people were put in
the position of children, is what Freud found
when he talked to these people.
And here, at last, we must put the question
to Foucault: how do you know?
How can you be so sure that this is what happened?
We can understand how he reached this conclusion.
After analyzing the history of the past centuries,
and realizing that every period had beliefs
that its contemporaries thought were universal
truths, but we, looking back, perceive as
mere constructs derived from the paradigm
that they were in, it is logical to assume
that all of what we are is also merely constructs,
derived from the Modern paradigm.
And so it is understandable why Foucault would
say that the Oedipal Complex, or BDSM, are
not part of human nature, but just Modern
constructs.
But he didn't prove it.
Maybe some beliefs are different.
Maybe Freud is actually right that the Oedipal
Complex is universal, an innate part of human
nature.
If Foucault would have argued that he showed
that Freud could be wrong, since there's a
way to explain the Oedipal Complex as a historical
construct, I would have agreed.
But he goes further than that.
He asserts that Freud is wrong, and here is
where he jumps to conclusion.
Sigmund Freud was a Modern thinker.
The Modern Age believed that all the human
beliefs of the past were just narratives.
They were not truths, but prejudices.
At best, they were half-truths.
The goal was to progress out of these prejudices,
and the belief was that eventually we will
get to the point where we can figure out the
truth about nature.
Freud's idea of progress was that we developed
from animism to religion, and from religion
to science, and the people of these previous
stages are parallel in their psychology to
the stages of the psychological development
of children.
So now he, possessing advanced scientific
thought, has a top-down view on people from
previous times, and can scientifically explain
their behavior.
The Oedipal Complex, he claimed, was the starting
point of religion, morality, society and art.
Previous societies did not realize that this
complex is what is behind their beliefs and
actions, so they formed themselves on shaky
grounds.
Modern society, seeing this truth, can build
itself on solid ground.
Modern thought, then, purported to liberate
us from the prejudices of the past, in a gradual
progress towards truth, which will enable
us to form the best possible human society.
What Foucault shows us that is that Freud's
presumptions to have a top-down view of previous
times is itself merely a prejudice.
Freud's thought was a construct of the Modern
paradigm, and the Modern paradigm was the
construct of the people whose minds were constructed
by the Classical paradigm.
And the Classical paradigm was constructed
by people of the Renaissance paradigm, and
so forth.
In other words, we are not talking about a
process of liberation here, in which our thought
is liberated from prejudices.
It is just a construct upon a construct, and
every new construct has its own prejudices.
This is what post-modernism is about.
Post-modern thought showed that the whole
Modern pretension of liberating us from narratives,
and leading us to truth, was itself nothing
but a narrative, born from the paradigm of
its time.
The idea that our mind can figure out the
truth about nature is itself an unproven prejudice,
which Modern thinkers accepted without questioning,
and it became the grand-narrative of the Modern
Age.
Post-modernism purported to liberate us from
this grand-narrative.
But here we see how post-modernism itself
has fallen into a grand-narrative, which it
accepts without questioning, namely, the belief
that everything that we are is a construct
of the paradigm that we were born into.
Madness and Civilization is one of the texts
that is responsible for the establishment
of this post-modern myth, and, as we can see,
Foucault never substantiated it.
Foucault himself, of course, didn't realize
that this is what he was doing with his careless
assertions.
When you read the book, it is obvious that
Foucault does believe that he can make some
truth statements about the world.
But looking back at it today, we can see that
it led to a lot of unfortunate academic mishaps.
When we talk about post-modernism today, we
talk about thought that goes much further
than Foucault, and often devolves into idiocy.
While Foucault deconstructed certain concepts
in order to show us the processes that constructed
them, today there are academics who are doing
nothing by deconstructing, without constructing
anything instead.
While Foucault casted doubts on Western culture's
presumptions to be morally superior, today
there are academics who take it as a given
that it is morally inferior.
And while Foucault tried to break away from
the paradigm by applying analytic thought,
today there are academics who are doing so
by inventing new words, which reduce their
language to gibberish.
This reflects back on Foucault, and people
who find him hard to understand, prefer to
just lump him with today's post-modernists.
But I think that we have shown that, once
you manage to get what he is trying to say,
Foucault does make sense.
So now, let's ask: what merit does his philosophy
have?
What can we learn from this book that we have
just gone through?
Well, first, we learn to be careful about
things that we believe to be self-evident
truths, that are universal and eternal.
Even if we disagree with the post-modernists
that everything is a construct of the paradigm
that we are in, we have to accept that a very
large portion of it is.
Our thought is built on contingent grounds,
and leads us to beliefs and acts that, in
the future, will be regarded as irrational
and silly.
We should be especially suspicious of whatever
it is that our age defines as the root of
all evil.
Secondly, we learn that we are very limited
in our ability to break out of the paradigm.
It is not a new thing to believe that our
thoughts are structured by a paradigm – it
is a belief that goes all the way back to
Plato, and his cave allegory.
But Plato, and many who followed, believed
that the human mind can transcend the paradigm
and see the truth.
What Foucault shows is that the paradigm is
structured by historical forces that are beyond
our control.
We can eventually break out of a paradigm,
but when we do, it is through ideas that were
born within that paradigm, so they are still
constructed by it to some extent.
In other words, those ideas are not the truth,
and do not take us out of the cave and into
the daylight.
We just find ourselves in a new cave, a new
paradigm.
Third, we learn to be careful in judging people
of the past.
What seems like cruel and inhumane actions
to us, were actually done for humane reasons.
We just can't see it because we perceive the
world differently.
Fourth, and this was very important at the
time the book was published, we learn that
the Modern pretensions of progress are groundless.
We do progress technologically, but the presumptions
of progress in our morality, or in our understanding
of human nature, are dubious, stemming from
the fact that we do not understand the people
of the past.
Human Civilization does change and evolve,
but we cannot say with certainty that it is
progressing towards being better.
Fifth, and this is important for us as we
read the book today, we see how and why post-modernism
was born, and we can see that some of its
claims are unsubstantiated.
Foucault ends the book by discussing the art
of the Modern Age.
He begins with The Madhouse, an early 19th
century painting by Francisco de Goya, depicting
an insane asylum.
He then proceeds to discuss Goya's art, and
points out that it contains monsters, which
remind us of the monsters of the gothic art
or the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
But in Bosch's paintings, the monsters looked
like they come out of the Earth, part of nature.
The demonic realm was perceived as real.
In Goya's paintings, they are not connected
to anything.
As we already saw with Sade, the gothic monstrosities
are now perceived as metaphors for things
that exist in the human psyche.
In the Modern Age, art that represents unreason
isn't claiming to be representing a demonic
realm outside of us, but our own subconscious.
But one thing that Modern art does not claim
to represent, is insanity.
There were artists who claimed they were crazy,
but they were actually just a little touched,
not completely insane.
Insane people, in the Modern Age, are not
perceived as able to tell us anything of value.
It is something that is true throughout the
Age of Reason, for both the Classical Age
and the Modern Age.
Madness is perceived as the other of reason,
and cannot have a say.
This is how it was when Foucault wrote the
book, and this is how it still is today.
When the book was published, it was immediately
coopted into the debate around the insane
asylums.
On one side of that debate stood those who
believed in the myths that psychiatry has
been telling since the beginning of the Modern
Age, and saw the asylums as the most humane
solution.
On the other side were surrealists, existentialists
and Marxists, who regarded them as instruments
of oppressing the unique minds of people who
were different.
Foucault tried to show that both sides are
driven by prejudices that were constructed
by the Modern paradigm, but his book was not
understood at the time.
His name became associated with the side that
wanted to free the madmen.
This was the fate of most of his writings
since then.
They were used by movements that twisted his
intent, and Foucault got blamed for a lot
of things that he didn't actually advocate
for.
I hope this video helped to shed some light
on what he actually was about.
To end the video, let's go back to what we
started with: Foucault's style of writing.
I want to read a section out of the book,
and show you that his writing actually does
make sense once you can decipher the poetry.
We are going to read and interpret the last
two paragraphs of the preface.
Foucault wants to go beneath the language
of reason.
That is, he wants to see what constituted
what we believe to be the language of reason,
and he believes that it was born from the
confrontation between sanity and insanity.
For that, he doesn't want to follow the development
of the language of reason, how it progressed
from one idea to the next.
Instead, he wants to look at the paradigms
which this progress took place in.
This is what he means by the distinction he
makes between horizonal and vertical.
The horizontal plane is where the progress
takes place.
The vertical plane is the paradigm that engulfs
it, and if the paradigm changes, it will affect
the direction of the horizontal progress,
although the people of the time might not
notice it.
Every paradigm defines what is reason and
what is not, and thus established the borders
in which it believes a sane conversation can
take place.
This is what the pun "establishes its range
by its own derangement" means.
Foucault is telling us that he is going to
do something new here.
He is not going to talk about the history
of thought, as his predecessors have done.
He is going to examine the history of the
paradigms, those structures that establish,
for every period and every culture, the borders
in which it can think.
This is a passage that we can understand only
after we read the book, and only if we remember
the sections he is referring to.
This is one of the problems with Foucault:
he constantly drops names and uses references
which no one can get, unless they read his
books many times.
Thomas Willis was one of the doctors who,
at the beginning of the Classical Age, established
the medical thinking that dominated it.
Philippe Pinel, as we discussed, was the reformer
who, at the end of the Classical Age, established
the way the Modern Age would regard and treat
insanity.
Oreste is the tragic hero in Racine's play
Andromaque, and we discussed how he represents
the transition to the Classical Age in art.
Sade and Goya, as we mentioned, heralded the
transition to the Modern Age.
During this Classical Age, says Foucault,
there was a radical change in the relationship
between reason and madness.
Again, two events that we discussed, which
bookend the Classical Age.
Here is where Foucault states his intention.
He is not going to become part of the debate
around the insane asylums, but rather show
us how the two positions in the debate were
formed in the first place.
Both positions are born out of the same structure,
the same paradigm.
We are going to unearth this paradigm.
This is pretty straightforward, I think.
The structure he is talking about is the Classical
Age paradigm, and he says that by studying
it, we can understand how we transitioned
from the way madness was perceived in the
15th and 16th centuries, to the very different
way in which we perceive it now.
Ah yes.
We discussed this.
Before the Classical Age, madness used to
be perceived within the Christian frame of
mind, and believed to contain some secrets
about nature.
Whereas nowadays, we do not think that madness
holds any useful knowledge, so we don't listen
to what insane people are saying.
We believe that we know everything there is
to know about madness, so we completely banish
it from our thoughts.
Or as Foucault puts it, we know so much about
it that we forget it.
So, you see, it all makes sense.
You won't find any post-modern rubbish here.
Ah, yes, yes, yes…
That's rubbish.
