Foucault, Humanitarianism and the Will-to-Power

This is the first post that’s coming out of my attempt to read ‘Discipline and Punish‘ by Michel Foucault. I want to start with the broadest idea of the book: an analysis of how our attitudes to and methods of punishment have changed in the emergence of modern society.

Foucault’s story is like this: in the previous ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as something outside of and opposed to the social body – that social body being identified with the body of the king. The function of punishment was to reaffirm the superiority of the sovereign body over the criminal’s body by destroying it; the more complete the destruction, the more effective. Hence criminals taken out in public, tortured, dismembered, and finally executed.

In the currently ascendant ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as always still a part of the social body, but a malfunctioning and diseased part (partly because the social body was now the nation and the people, not the sovereign). So now the function of punishment is to restore it to health – to strengthen and clean society.

Some key consequences of this new approach to punishment: that rather than seeking excess (after all, to rip off someone’s flesh with pincers, and kill them, and then string out their guts, is pretty excessive) it had to seek balance between two opposed imperatives. On the one hand, to attack and harm (after all, that’s what punishment is), but on the other, to respect and preserve the criminal (for they must eventually be returned to society in ‘mended’ form).

Secondly, knowledge of the criminal now becomes vital – detailed understanding so that they can be changed both inside and outside. This again tells against ‘excess’ and ‘violence’, because they might disrupt the collection of systematic data. The prison thus appears as the paradigm of punishment it preserves a symbolic ‘something’ about the prisoner that is not violated (they can keep their bodily integrity as long as they follow the regulations) and because its regimented, drawn-out nature allows for the collection of detailed information, the detailed composition of schedules and regulations, and the endeavour of trying to ‘fix’ the defective human being.

That’s how Foucault presents matters – and in many respects this account is not too different from the conventional liberal story. As society became more ‘civilised’, its efforts at punishment shifted away from being motivated by base motives of vengeance and cruelty, and came to embrace ‘humanitarian’ punishment that respected the ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ of the criminal, along with seeking to ‘understand’ them so as to ‘rehabilitate’ them.

Hegel on Property

Short Version: Hegel said some stuff about how private property is socially important. I criticise it, and conclude that while he is onto something, it still implies that communism is a good idea.

What Hegel says: ‘property is the mark of personality.’ Through owning things, that is, you realise your freedom and your personhood.

Now Hegel draws two critical conclusions from this. Firstly, he uses it to argue against a certain sort of ‘communism’, for him symbolised by Plato’s ‘philosopher-republic’, where things like personal families, private property, and the right to make poetry, are all abolished in the name of promoting the ‘greater good’ as divined by the self-selecting caste of ‘philosopher-kings’.

He also, however, uses this view of property as a criticisim of bourgeois society, prefiguring a neat line in the Communist Manifesto: the the necessary condition for private property for capitalists is the lack of property for proletarians. If, therefore, property is a mark of personhood, then those who are deprived of property are not only made, in material terms, worse off, they are also de-personalised, de-humanised. The problem of poverty is one that haunted Hegel throughout his life but to which he could never offer a coherent solution.

Now this all sounds rather fishy though. Is property actually a precondition for personhood? I think there is in fact something of importance here. We can see it better if we bring in an idea which was important both for Hegel and for Marx: ‘alienation’.

Hegel, the Family, the Market, and the State

I’ve been reading a lot recently about Hegel’s political thought, and one aspect in particular provoked me to comment, namely his division of social life into three ‘moments’: the family, the market, and the state.

(‘Moment’ is a quasi-technical term in Hegel drawn from its usage in physics. The moments of something are the constituent elements which compose it but which, unlike mere ‘parts’ cannot be separated from each other except by a simplifying abstraction but rather determine what each other are)

The three sorts of social life could be roughly characterised as ‘particular altruism’ (I care about my family members for their own sake, but this applies only to a contingent few people, not to all people), ‘universal egoism’ (in a market, although I respect the rights of each other person, I use them simply as means to my own satisfaction), and ‘universal altruism’ (in considering a state policy I concern myself with the common good of all other citizens, for its own sake).

Why is this worth remarking on? Isn’t it just an obvious little list? But what Hegel wants to say with this three-fold distinction is that the three are all different and all equally basic – none can be derived from or understood in terms of the others.

In Defense of Hegel’s Idealism

It is conventional for Marxists to present Marx’s conception of history as superior to Hegel‘s (which is I think true), and to present this superiority as being essentially a matter of replacing ‘idealism’ with ‘materialism’ (which I think is ambiguous). I want to argue that there are two separate oppositions that could be called ‘idealism vs. materialism’ and applied to Hegel vs. Marx, and that while one gives Marx and ‘materialism’ the advantage, the other does not.

(Obviously this isn’t about materialism in the sense of greed and desire for material things, or idealism in the sense of having high ideals)

Hegel’s philosophy can be called idealism in two ways. The more conventional philosophical way is as a metaphysical description: in Hegel’s view, everything that exists is some form or manifestation of ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, or ‘spirit’.

That’s not the sort of idealism associated with Bishop Berkely, for whom this ‘spirituality’ of all things means that, for example, the mug I drink out exists only as my idea, an image in my mind, that only exists as long as I can see or feel it. For Hegel, the mug is perfectly real and independent of me – but its nature is basically the same as mine, since we are both (in a vague sense I won’t try to pin down) ‘manifestations of spirit’.

Hegel’s view of history is thus that it is ‘a process of spirit becoming aware of itself’ – so at first spirit manifests only as rocks and space dust, then as bacteria, which are alive, then living and conscious things (higher animals), and then finally living, conscious, and self-conscious things (humans). Humans then in turn progress through various stages of illusion and ignorance, progressing, through science, art, religion, and philosophy, towards greater and greater ‘self-consciousness’.

Canada’s Seal Hunt/The Roots of Animal Rights

So the Canadian seal hunt is starting around now. There are predictable arguments, like here. So I might as well weigh in.

The first thing to say is that, unsurprisingly, I’m against it and support the efforts of all those trying to prevent or disrupt it. She who saves one life, it is as though she had saved the whole world, etc. etc.

The second thing is to put this in perspective. This hunt involves killing 2 or 3 hundred thousands individuals. The same number of individual birds are killed for food every three minutes.

So there’s a certain validity to the common response to criticism, “if you’re not a strict vegan, shut up”. Indeed, since, though vegan, I am not entirely ‘strict’ (I eat honey, drink wine and beer filtered through fish scales, will, if unsure of something’s ingredients, often with it to hell, etc.), I might as well situate myself as the target of the ‘shut up’.

But the validity is really only as a defective version of a more appropriate statement, “if you’re not a vegan, be a vegan”. That is, it has no bearing on the truth of claims such as “the Canadian seal hunt is hideous and barbaric”.