/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12411398]

Is Foucault's historical a priori the ultimate in Kantian thought?

[Anonymous No.12411405]

>>12411398
lol michel fuck-no was a weeb, who knew

[Anonymous No.12411505]

>>12411405
In many ways, he is one of the greatest Eastern thinkers

[Anonymous No.12411509]

daily reminder

[Anti-/lit/ !N4bnZoKwfU No.12411524]

I can't read Kant, I can barely read Foucault (and suspect I make of him whatever, like a Rorschach).

I would be troubled to know that someone who can do both visits this board.


This thread is fucking dumb.

[Anonymous No.12411528]

>>12411398
tldr?

[Anonymous No.12411917]

>>12411528
Kant’s copernican revolution in philosophy was to introduce the synthetic a priori, grounding all knowledge on the categories of human perception. Foucault goes further than Kant in saying that knowledge js not only limited by the limits of reason or perception, but also by the historical (but not necessarily temporal) conditions of an epoch. He uses the concept of the “episteme” to mean the conditions of possibility for a certain historical epoch. In this way he can be thought of aa the ultimate transcendentalist

[Anonymous No.12411938]

>>12411509
>implying fucking kids isn't a great way to own the libs

[Anonymous No.12411973]

Why do people accuse Foucault of "intentional obscurantism"? His writing, or at least the English translations that I've read, are perfectly readable.

[Anonymous No.12412159]

>>12411973
Because it’s easier to accuse him of being something that he isn’t than actually engaging with his ideas. Foucault is one of those writers whose ideas are actually harder to grapple with than the language he uses to present them, which is particularly impressive, given the continental tradition he comes from.

[Anonymous No.12412172]

>>12412159
I agree with his ideas being tougher than his language. Or at least I think I do, if I know what you mean by them being difficult. I do think Foucault presents to us a challenge: one to really unravel the principles of society we see as normal (courts, clinics, etc.). From here, though, I'm not sure if I should read other philosophers who do the same or if I should read secondary works on Foucault.

[Anonymous No.12412188]

>>12411505
>indulgent hedonism
>Buddhism
pick one. He's just yet another western plebeian who indulged in superficial orientalism.

[Anonymous No.12412300]

>>12412172
Foucault’s real challenge to his audience is in his rampant amoralism, particularly seeing as how attitudes towards his work have changed over time. What does it mean for someone like him to become an academic and institutional staple of the curliculum? How many countless misreadings and misinterpretations of his works are being propagated, and how dangerous will the effects be if such lazy criticism goes unchecked?

As to your question of who/what to read next, of course all the natural suggestions would be Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, etc. But it may be best to reinforce your readings of Foucault with secondary reading first.

[Anonymous No.12412392]

>>12411973
Get's confused with Derrida.

[Anonymous No.12412401]

>>12411398
What the hell

[Anonymous No.12413452]

>>12411398
i thought buddhism was about learning to control desires.
difficult to take someone claiming to understand (let alone practice) buddhism that can't control his desire to get aids or get fisted in bathhouses.

[Anonymous No.12413476]

>>12411509
>(((age of (((consent))) )))

[Anonymous No.12413957]

>>12412392
Is he a tough one? I checked out Writing and Difference from the library but I haven't opened it yet.

[Anonymous No.12414742]

>>12413957
Yeah Derrida is borderline unreadable

[Anonymous No.12414967]

>>12411398
>>12411505
Why is he approriating Asian culture? I hope this shit gets him decanonized.

[Anonymous No.12415049]

>>12413957
Foucault himself called Derrida an obscurantist terrorist:
>With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That’s very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.
http://www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

[Anonymous No.12415183]

>>12411917
that's exactly what hegel did

[Anonymous No.12415269]

>>12412188
budddhism is pure hedonism

[Anonymous No.12415370]

>>12414967
power flows through him
he doesn't appropriate, he claims

[Anonymous No.12415389]

>>12411524
I have read both thoroughly in the original.

[Anonymous No.12415972]

>>12415183
Hegel doesn't go as far as Foucault did though, Hegel still retains his humanistic focus on "man" and a modernist historical-temporal-progressive narrative that we see echoed in Marxism

[Anonymous No.12416418]

>Foucault spent many evenings in the San Francisco gay scene, frequenting sado-masochistic bathhouses, engaging in unprotected sex. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously."[147] Foucault contracted HIV and eventually developed AIDS.

Is this proof of a Right and Just God?

[Anonymous No.12416471]

>>12416418
What the hell is wrong with the French? Why are so many of their intellectuals so degenerate?

[Anonymous No.12416982]

>>12416471
The two pious factions in the French Wars of Religion, the Huguenots and the Catholic League, lost, and the degenerate Royalist faction of amoral decadents won. France and Europe never recovered.

[Anonymous No.12417817]

>>12411917
I know Kant. No Foucault. But it what you say is an accurate rep Foucault is wrong. Hermeneutics, gadamer.

You can, to a degree, escape your historical perspective by actively engaging in a process of reflexive self othering. Becoming other to yourself and returning.only now other to the original self before the othering occurred.

Essentially empathy. By trying to really understand what it meant to a Greek to Be Greek.

[Anonymous No.12417846]

Me on the left

[Anonymous No.12418773]

From Archaeology of Knowledge:
>to analyse a discursive formation therefore is to deal with a group of verbal performances at the level of the statements and of the form of positivity that characterizes them; or, more briefly, it is to define the type of positivity of a discourse.
>positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori.
>what I mean by the term is an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgements, but a condition of reality for statements.
>an a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history is given, since it is that of things actually said.
>discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but a history, and a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of an alien development.
>(a discourse) involves a type of history--a form of dispersion in time, a mode of succession, of stability, and of reactivation,a speed of deployment or rotation--that belongs to it alone, even if it is not entirely unrelated to other types of history.
>the a priori of positivities is not only the system of a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable group.

Essentially, it seems what Foucault means by a historical a priori is a pre-conceived notion based on notions already conceived within the period of history in which we're analysing. We're operating at the level of statements, not of oeuvres, books, texts, or even singular documents--and thus we're seeing how different statements play off of each other; what concepts, objects, strategies and enunciative modalities are at play within a certain sphere of history. This "sphere of history" contains itself the notions which arise to a certain discursive formation. Of course, the modes of power and knowledge at play here can also interact with other discursive formations, but what we're analysing is a sequence of events deployed in a certain temporal structure.

[Anonymous No.12418838]

>>12411973
He gets grouped in with people who can more justifiably be accused of that, and he’s just dense enough for people to go along with it.

[Anonymous No.12418849]

you want to become a braindead woman=>study tibetan buddhism
you want to become a brain dead man=> study chinese buddhism
anything else=> theravada?

[Anonymous No.12419602]

>>12418773
It’s hard for me to get behind this presentation of history as that which is said/done culminating in a fundamental coloring of our perception/understanding. It seems to me to deny entirely the possibility of some ultimate truth, another rejection of idealism. For Foucault and his contemporaries, living during the Cold War, I see how this could’ve been the case for them. However, if Truth exists, and I maintain it does, the historical environment to which someone belongs, and I’m using history here like Foucault is, does not necessarily define the individual nor Truth nor Truth to that individual or collective or culture. To a point, absolutely. But as I said earlier itt, anyone who works can escape it. Empathy can become an enormously powerful tool when combined with knowledge and imagination.

I would also say that this is the purpose of history and maintaining an historical record; to escape the cage of history. Nietzsche has an interesting essay on history. But historicity as a concept I think is a little trapped in subjectivity. Foucault demanding that it is only the positive that aggregates to historical or momentary reality also feels shaky to me. The necessity of the negative is undeniable and anyone learned, even the ancients, knows the negative implications of their actions and statements. The more woke, the more attuned they are to this situation.

It can be done in language, from a modern perspective especially, to cordone an area and call it an historical/temporal structure for analysis. But this puts everything into a container of subjectivity. I believe this is what is called “historicity”. This being bound to time and place, and how it’s always been true. But I do maintain that we possess the potential for escaping this cage of perspective. Because while change seems a priori to existence, we people are in essence changeless. Or we have our feet in both pools. To say either side, not contained by history, or entirely contained by history, is to equally miss the truth of knowledge and wisdom. It is through the process of examining that we can understand what it is to be. And that just is, regardless of time or place. Plato saw the same light everyone else has ever seen.

[Anonymous No.12419611]

>>12411398
>>12411505
Gomenesai, my name is Michi Fuko(Michel Foucalt for you gaijins)

[Anonymous No.12419612]

>>12416418
based and judgement pilled

[Anonymous No.12419726]

>>12419602

>we possess the potential for escaping the cage of perspective
You raise a fair point here, and I agree that the tools we have for analyzing the scope of history remain bare for all those willing to grasp them. However, it is worth noting that the masks we deploy in a contemporary context are, by and large, already conceived and constructed by those elements dispersed throughout society at large. We can analyze the statements made at certain points in time and construct a certain thread running through them, and announce: "humanity has not really changed." But the archive of each part civilization gradually disappears over time as some statements are omitted and others are replicated and transformed. We can think outside society to some extent, but when reading a text or document of some kind, some statements will undoubtedly stand out as being more relevant than others--anything that doesn't fall within our immediate realm of understanding is often too abstract for us to fully internalize as being ultimately true; although we can grasp these statements on a rational level, we may not be able to do so on an instinctual one. It seems that no matter how much one studies ancient realms of discourse, we are still biased towards industrial society.

[Anonymous No.12419768]

>>12419602
>we possess the potential for escaping the cage of perspective
You raise a fair point here, and I agree that the tools we have for analysing the scope of history remain bare for all those willing to grasp them. However, it is worth noting that the masks we deploy in a contemporary context are, by and large, already conceived and constructed by those elements dispersed throughout society at large; these are only masks, but they still make up essences of our personality, and remain to be actual constructions and deployments of persona. We can analyse the statements made at certain points in time and construct a certain thread running through them, and announce: "humanity has not really changed; look at this element that is common throughout history." But the archive of each past civilization gradually disappears over time as some statements are omitted and others are replicated and oftentimes transformed. Thus nothing is ever preserved in its entirety. We can think outside society to some extent, but when reading a text or document of some kind, some statements will undoubtedly stand out as being more relevant than others--anything that doesn't fall within our immediate realm of understanding is often too abstract for us to fully internalize as being ultimately true; although we can grasp these "other" statements on a rational level, we may not be able to do so on an instinctual one. It seems that no matter how much one studies ancient realms of discourse, we are still biased towards industrial society.

[Anonymous No.12419773]

>>12419726
>>12419768
Oops, accidentally posted this twice.

[Anonymous No.12420491]

>>12419726
WHat do you mean by biased? A preference or a necessary binding? I think we can move from rational understanding to instinctual. Gadamer speaks of thjs in truth and method, PEL has a podcast on the book. Yes the archive is incomplete, and yes we really only have sketches to work with. But I think that a changeless element binding all people, the binding thread through history as the people themselves, linking us to them. This is one of the purposes of art and also why art is often conflated with an almost incidental consequence of art. People frequently say that art must be journalistic to be art. But as we are touching here it’s impossible to not Be a product of our history and the same goes for our art. This is why we say you need homer and and Thucydides and Aeschylus and a lot of other shit to understand Plato. However, I think there is a point that, once passed, will satisfy the sufficient condition for escaping historicity. I’m assuming our soul is the necessary condition, and then self knowledge is the sufficient. But not just individual self knowledge. It’s a spiritual self knowledge. A knowing being knowing Being.

This is called a process of reflexive self othering. Becoming other to ourselves, with empathy, and then returning. Only after this return we have been changed. Dfw puts thins as we are empty Forms who are the shapes of the things that’s fill them, or something idr.
By reading all we have remaining of Greek thought we can become, yes to an extent, Greeks ourselves. Yes we have a certain lense through which we perceive and understand the greeks. But we can, with Kant etc, understand the understanding and the lense through which we perceive both perception and understanding.

if you go far and wide enough, and try to be a Roman or Lutheran, poet, philosopher, etc, all of the above is required; after enough critical reading, and working, to understand, from the inside, what it was to these people, who are other to us, to be. We can approach the meaning of being.

I think that this potential is adequate to dismiss the necessity of an a priori historical connection to knowledge. Because Zeno was right.

This whole process is the entire purpose of education in the most precise sense. Truth is within us. But to grasp its entirety takes a team effort working across millennia. Me reading Plato is not me reading distant thought. It’s me thinking of myself. You mayve seen somewhere that Books are mirrors, this I think is Nietzsche too actually.

If we ditch this idea of separation, which would’ve been Hard to do during times of modern war, we can participate in the communal effort to lift the veil from the statue of truth that has been occurring from the dawn of history.

[Anonymous No.12420592]

>>12418849
yikes

[Anonymous No.12420847]

>>12411509
based