Richard Rorty, whose books included Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Truth and Progress, was professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University. He died in June 2007.
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Vol. 3 No. 3 · 19 February 1981
pages 5-6 | 3670 words
Beyond Nietzsche and Marx
Richard Rorty
- Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, edited by Colin Gordon
Harvester, 270 pp, £18.50, October 1980, ISBN 0 85527 557 X
- Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth by Alan Sheridan
Tavistock, 243 pp, £10.50, November 1980, ISBN 0 422 77350 6
- Herculine Barbin by Oscar Panizza and Michel Foucault, translated by Richard McDougall
Harvester, 199 pp, £7.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 85527 273 2
Russell and Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Sartre are dead, and it looks as if there are no great philosophers left alive. At the end of his book, Alan Sheridan hesitantly stakes a claim for Foucault: ‘It is difficult to conceive of any thinker having, in the last quarter of our century, the influence that Nietzsche exercised over its first quarter. Yet Foucault’s achievement so far makes him a more likely candidate than any other.’ This judgment is probably right. Foucault offers the two things which people want from a philosopher: a view about what values to place on current knowledge-claims, and hints about how to change the world. More specifically, he combines a sceptical judgment about the nature of science with concrete suggestions about how power might be taken from those who presently possess it. His view of knowledge derives from Nietzsche. His view of power derives from Marx. But he uses each of these men to criticise the other. The common complaint about Nietzsche is that he offers no social hope, no sense of human community. The common complaint about Marx is that he is in bondage to simple-minded 19th-century ideas about philosophy as ‘science’, that Marxist theory is a hindrance to Marxist practice. People who like Nietzsche on the subject of knowledge are embarrassed by Nietzsche on power. People who like Marx’s analysis of power-relations in modern society are embarrassed by his (not to mention Engels’s and Lenin’s) pretentions to methodological and epistemological theory. Foucault offers one a chance to be as sceptical about science and philosophy (and ‘theory’ generally) as Nietzsche, while being as socially concerned and politically-minded as Marx.
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Letters
Vol. 3 No. 6 · 2 April 1981
From Patrick Curry
SIR: Richard Rorty’s exposition of Foucault contains at least two glaring circularities which undermine his verdict, ‘a philosopher of the first rank’ (LRB, Vol. 3, No 3).
The first stems from his embrace of the ‘Wittgensteinian philosophers of science’. Foucault’s ‘episteme’ is unimpressive as a ‘fleshed-out’ version of an already widely discredited and – my point – self-defeating notion. If knowledge is wholly limited by (or equivalent to) its episteme, as is certainly implied in Rorty’s account, how can Foucault be supposed to be giving us an account of its historical changes? If he is, he must be relying perforce on some trans-epistetmic meta-rationality – the existence of which he is committed to denying. Rorty tries to escape this conclusion, or nullify it, by describing Foucault’s intent as not to supply a theory, but a history or ‘genealogy’. But if the weltanschauungen philosophers of science have taught us anything, it is the ‘theory-ladenness’ of facts. Theory as a partial determinant of facts is inescapable, and much the worse for being wholly implicit. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that here Foucault is simply unwilling to live up to his full responsibility qua philosopher (historian, what-have-you) to consciously and consistently theorise.
The second circularity is related to the first, insofar as Rorty would reply to the above that the point of Foucault’s ‘theory’ is really to liberate those ‘caught “in the fine meshes of the webs of power” ’. But Rorty has already characterised Foucault’s position as non-Rousseauistic or non-Marxist – i.e. that power is unavoidable, and that without social pressures ‘there is nothing much to us.’ In that case, is all that Foucault wishes to see the replacement of old slaves by new? Perhaps my question is wholly rhetorical, given the unpleasant sentiments of Foucault which even Rorty must note, towards the end of his review.
The same conclusion follows in any case, since by Foucault’s lights, his own work must be, in essence, only a ‘part of the apparatus of social control which forms our society’. If that’s all it is, there is no reason why we should find it more interesting (or ‘liberating’) than any other. If that’s not all it is, his work constitutes its own refutation.
The remarkable thing about all this is how unattractive and unsatisfactory Foucault sounds with respect to both knowledge and power. His real interest seems to be much more sociological than philosophical – as the crest on the present wave of the trendy pragmatist and relativist revival. It is also interesting to notice how many of his (unacknowledged) problems could be cured by a dose of despised critical and fallibilistic realism, à la Popper and Lakatos. Pace Rorty’s litany, one of these philosophers is even still alive.
Patrick Curry
London W14
