philosophy and psycholog by michel foucault.pdf

8/18/2019 Philosophy and psycholog by Michel Foucault.pdf

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M I C H E L

F O U C A U L T

AESTHETICS

METHOD

AND

EPISTEMOLOGY

dited y

JAMES D.

FAUBION

Translated

y

ROBERT HURLEY

ND OTHERS

ESSENTI L

W O R K S O F

FOUCAULT

1954 1984

V O L U M E

T W O

ALLEN LANE

THE PENGUIN

PRESS


2/7

PH I LOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY

A.B.

What

is psychology?

M F Let me say that I don t think we should try to define psychol-

ogy as a science but perhaps as a cultural form. It fits into a whole

series

of phenomena with which

Western culture

has been

familiar

for a long time, and

in

which there

emerged such

things as confes-

sion, casuistry, dialogues, discourses, and argumentations that could

be articulated in certain milieus of the Middle Ages, love courtships or

whatnot in the mannered

circles of the seventeenth century.

A.B. Are there

internal

or external relations

between

psychology

as a cultural form and philosophy as a cultural form? And is philoso-

phy a cultur al form?

M F You re asking two questions:

1.

Is philosophy a cultura l form? I have to say that I m

not much

of

a philosopher, so

I m not

really

in

a position

to

know. I

think

that s the

great problem

being debated now; perhaps philosophy is in fact

the

most general cultural form in which we might be able to reflect on the

reality of the West.

2

Now, what are the relations between psychology as a cultural

form and philosophy? Well, I believe that we are looking at a point of

conflict that for five

hundred

years

has

set philosophers

and

psy-

chologists against one another, a problem that is given a new perti-

nence by all the questions

that

revolve

around

educational reform.

'This

interview, conducted

by

Alain Badiou, appeared in ossiers p edagogiques

de

la

r d i o ~ t e t e v i s i o n scolaire (27 Feb. 1965),

pp.

65 71. Robert Hurley s translation.


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Aesthetics Method nd Epistemology

I think

we

can say this: first, that psychology and, through psychol

ogy the human sciences have indeed

been in

a very tangled relation

ship

with

philosophy since the

nineteenth

century. What is one to

make of

this

entanglement

of philosophy

and the

human sciences?

One

can

tell

himself

that philosophy in the Western world delimited a

domain, blindly

and in

the void as

it

were, in darkness, in the obscu

rity of its

own

consciousness

and

its

methods-the

domain that

it

called the soul or thought,'' and that now serves as a legacy that the

human sciences have to cultivate in a clear, lucid,

and

positive

man

ner. So the human sciences would be legitimately occupying that

rather vague domain which was marked

off

but

left fallow by philoso

phy.

That is

what

one might reply. I think it is what would be said,

rather willingly, by people who can be thought of as the defenders of

the

human

sciences, people who consider that the ancient philosophi

cal task, which originated

in

the West

with

Greek thought,

should

now be resumed using the tools of the human sciences. I don't think

that defines the exact dimensions of

the

problem.

I t seems

to

me

that

such a way of analyzing things is clearly tied to a philosophical per

spective,

which

is positivism.

One might also

say something

else- the contrary. It may be part of

the destiny of Western philosophy that, since the nineteenth century,

something

like an anthropology became possible;

when

I say anthro

pology I am not referring to the

particular

science called anthropol

ogy, which

is

the study of

cultures

exterior to our own;

by

anthropology I

mean

the strictly philosophical structu re responsible

for the fact

that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within

the domain that can

be called

that

of

human

finitude.

If one

can

no longer philosophize about anything but man insofar

as

he

is a

Homo natura

or insofar as he is a finite being, to

that

extent

isn't every philosophy at bottom an anthropology? This being the

case, philosophy becomes the cultural form within

which

all

the

sci

ences of man in

general

are possible.

That

is what could be said,

and it

would be,

if you

will, the opposite

analysis to the one I outlined a

moment

ago, so that in the great des

tiny of Western philosophy it could co-opt the

human

sciences, just as

previously one could co-opt philosophy as a

kind

of blank program of

what

the human sciences should be. That is the entanglement, which

Philosophy nd Psychology

is

what we

have to think through, bot h now, here where

we

are, and

generally in the coming years.

A.B. You

said in the first perspective that, on the whole, philoso

phy

was

conceived as presc ribing its

domain

to a positive science

that

would later ensure its actual elucidation. In this perspective

what

can

ensure

the specificity

of

psychology, in comparison

with

other types of

investigation? Can positivism, by its own means, ensure that specific

ity

and

does

it intend to

do so?

M F Well, at a time

when

the human sciences did in fact receive

their problematic, their domain, and their concepts from a philosophy

that was mainly that of the eighteenth century, I

think

that psychology

could be defined either as a science, let's say, of the soul, or as a

science of the individual. To that extent, I

think

the differentiation

from the other human sciences that existed then, and that was already

possible, could be

made in

a

rather

clear manner: one could oppose

psychology to the sciences of the physiological order, just as one op

posed

the

soul to the body; one c ould oppose psychology to sociology,

just as on e opposed the individual to the collectivity or the group, and

if one defines psychology as the science of consciousness, to

what

is

one going to oppose it? Well, for a period extending roughly from

Arthur

Schopenhauer

to Nietzsche, it could be said that psychology

was

opposed to philosophy, just as consciousness

was

opposed to the

unconscious. I think, moreover, that it was precisely around the eluci

dation of the

nature

of the unconscious that the reorganization

and

the repartitioning of the human sciences were carrie d out, essentially

around

Freud,

and

the positive definition, inherited from the eigh

teenth century, of psychology as a science of consciousness and of the

individual can no longer stand, now that Freud has existed.

A.B.

Now let's place ourselves

in

the other perspective:

the

prob

lematic of the unconscious, which you see as the source of the re

structuring of the domain of the human sciences. What meaning do

you

assign to it, given that the human sciences are regarded as a

moment

in the destiny of Western philosophy?

M F This

problem

of the unconscious is really very difficult, be

cause apparently one

can

say that psychoanalysis is a form of psy

chology that is

added

to the psychology of consciousness, doubling

the psychology of consciousness

with

a supplementary layer

that

would, be that of the unconscious. And, as a

matter

of fact,

it

was

realized immediately that by discovering the unconscious one pulled


4/7

Aesthetics Method nd Epistemology

in

at the same

time a lot

of

problems

that no

longer involved

either

the

individual, exactly, or the soul opposed to the body; but that one

brought back inside the strictly psychological problemati c what had

previously been excluded from it,

either

on the grounds that

it

was

physiology, rein troducing the

problem

of the body, or sociology,

rein

troducing the problem

of

the individual with his milieu, the group to

which he belongs, the society in which he is caught, the culture in

which

he

and

his ancestors have always thought. With

the result

that

the simple discovery of the unconscious is not an addition of domains:

it is

not

an extension

of

psychology,

it

is actually the appropri ation, by

psychology of most of the domains

that

the human

sciences

covered-

so that one can say that, starting with Freud, all the human

sciences became, in one

way

or another, sciences of the psyche. And

the old

realism a

a

Emile Durkbeim- conceiving of society as a sub

stance in opposition to the individual

who

is also a

kind

of substance

incorporated into society-appears to me to be

unthinkable

now. In

the

same

way,

the

old distinction

of

the soul

and the

body,

which

was

still valid

even

for

the

psychophysiology

of the

nineteenth

century,

that

old opposition

no

longer exists,

now that

we

know that our

body

forms part of our psyche, or forms

part

of that experience, conscious

and unconscious at once, which psychology

addresses-so

that all

ther e is now, basically, is psychology.

A.B.

This restructuring, which culminates in a sort of psychologi

cal totalitarianism, is carried out

around

the theme of the discovery of

the unconscious, to repeat your expression. Now, the word discovery

is usually linked

to

a scientific context. How do

you understand

the

discovery of the unconscious, then? Wbat type of discovery is in

volved?

M.F.

Well,

the

unconscious

was

literally discovered

by

Freud

as a

thing; he perceived it as a certain

number

of mechanisms that existed

at

the same time in man in

general

and in a given particular

man.

Did Freud thereby commit psychology to a radi cal concretification

[chosification]

against

which

the entire subsequent history ofmodem

psychology never ceased to react, up to Maurice Merleau-Ponty; up to

contemporary

thinkers? Possibly so;

but

it

may

be precisely

in

that

absolute horizon of things that psychology was made possible, if only

as

criticism.

Then again, for

Freud

the unconscious has a languagelike struc

ture; but one

should

bear in mind that Freud is an exegete and not a

Philosophy

nd

Psychology

semiologist;

he

is

an interpreter and not

a

grammarian.

His problem,

finally, is not a

problem

oflinguistics, it is a problem of decipherment.

Now,

what

is it to interpret,

what

is it to treat a language not as a

linguist does but as an exegete or hermeneut does- if not in fact

to

grant that there exists a kind of absolute graphy that we will have to

discover in its very

materiality- and

go on to recognize that this mate

riality is meaningful, a second discovery; and then to find out

what

it

means a third discovery;

and

finally, fourthly, to discover

the

laws

according to which these signs

mean

what they do. t is then,

and

only

then,

that

one

encounters the

layer of semiology,

that

is, for example,

the

problem

of metaphor

and

metonymy, that is, the ways

in

which a

group of signs may be able to say something. But this fourth discovery

is fourth only in relation to three more fundamental ones,

and

these

three primary discoveries

are

the discovery of something that is there

in front of us, the discovery of a text to be

interpreted-

the discovery of

a

kind

of absolute ground for a possible hermeneut ic.

A.B.

The

specialists

of decipherment of

texts distinguish decipher

ment and

decoding:

decipherment

consisting

in

deciphering a text to

which

one

has

the key,

and

decoding, a text

to which

one doesn t have

the key, the

very

structure of the message. Would psychological meth

ods be in the category of decipherment or that of decoding?

M.F. I ll say that it s decoding, and yet not entirely, becaus e there

again the concepts of

decipherment

and decoding are concepts that

linguists have essentially defined in order to co-opt what is, in my

view, unco-optable for

any

linguistics-that is, hermeneutics, inter

pretation. Let us accept, if you will, the notion of decoding: I

would

say that Freud in effect decodes, which is to say, he recognizes that

there

is a message there. He doesn t

know

what

that

message

means;

he

doesn t

know

the laws according to

which

the

signs

can

mean

what

they

mean.

So he has to discover at one

go

both

what

the mes

sage means and what the laws are by which the message means what

it means. In other words, the unconscious

must

convey not only

what

it says

but

the key to what

it

says. And

it

is for that reason, moreover,

that psychoanalysis, the exper ience of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic

language

have

always intrigued literature.

There

is a

kind

offascina

tion of contemporary literature, not only with psychoanalysis but

with

all the phenomena that

are

connected with madness: because

what

is

madness now,

in

the contemporary world, if not a message, if not

language, signs that one hopes-because

it

would be too dreadful


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Aesthetics, Method, nd Epistemology

otherwise-mean something, signs

whose meaning

is

not known and

whose means of conveying

it

is not known. And, consequently, mad

ness must be treated as a message that would have

its

own key

within

itself. That is what Freud does when he's faced with a hysterical

symptom; that is what is done by people who are now trying to ad

dress the

problem

of psychosis.

And, after all, what is literature if not a certain language

about

which we

know

very

well

that

it

does

not

say what it says.

For

if

literature meant to say what it says,

it

would simply say: The mar

quise went

out

at five o'clock We

know very well that

literature

doesn't say that, so we

know

that

it

is a second-order language, folded

back on itself, which means something other than

what

it says. We

don't

know

what that other language is that's underneath; we know

just that, at the end of our

reading

of the novel, we should have dis

covered what

it

means and in

terms

of

what,

of what laws the author

was able to say what he meant. We need to have done both an exege

sis

and

a semiology of

the

text.

Hence there is a

kind

of symmetrical

structure

of literature arid

madness that

consists in the fact

that

one

cannot

do

their

semiology

except by doing

their

exegesis, their exegesis except by doing

their

semiology, and this reciprocal tie absolutely cannot be undone, I

think. Let us say simply that up to 9 5 ~

it had

merely

been

understood,

very poorly moreover,

very

approximately,

with regard

to psycho

analysis or literary criticism, that something like

an

interpretation

was at issue. It had not

been

seen that there was a whole dimension of

semiology, of analysis of the

very

structure

of

signs. T his semiological

dimension is now being

uncovered

and, consequently, the interpre

tive dimension is being

hidden

-and,

in point

of fact,

it

is the

structure

of envelopment,

of

wrapping,

which

characterizes the language of

madness

and the language of literature, and that is why we would

arrive at

a situation

where

not only all the human sciences are psy

chologized, but even literary criticism and literature are psychologized.

A.B. If the unconscious

presents

itself on the whole as a text

object, to preserve your concretist [chosiste perspective,

in

which the

message is discovered as always

adhering

to a code-so that

there

is

no

general

code

within

which the message might disclose its meaning

in an a priori fashion, as

it

were-then a psychology

cannot

be a gen

eral

science:

it

never deals with anything but texts that are radically

singular, being the bearers of their own specific code. And psychology

Philosophy

nd

Psychology 255

is, therefore, a science

of the

individual,

not

only by virtue

ofits

object

but ultimately by

virtue

of its method. Or is there a general herme

neutic?

M F

One

needs

to distinguish,

in

this instance and elsewhere, be

tween

the general and the absolute; there is no absolute hermeneutic,

in

the

sense that

one

can

never be

sure

that one has obtained the final

text,

that

what

one

has

obtained doesn't

mean

something else

behind

what

it

means. And one

can never

be sure,

on the

other hand, of doing

an absolute linguistics. So, whatever the approach, one is never

sure

of reaching

either

the absolutely general form or the absolutely pri

mary text.

That being said, I still

think

that there are relatively large general

ized structures,

and

that, for example, there may

be

among several

individuals a certain

number

of identical processes

[procedes]

that

may be encountered in all of them alike; and there is no reason why

structures

you

have discovered for one would

not

apply to the other.

A.B.

Will psychology be, in the last instance, the science of these

structures

or

knowledge of the individual text?

M F Psychology

will

be the

knowledge

of

structures;

and the

eventual therapeutics,

which cannot

fail to be tied to psychology, will

be knowledge of the individual text-that is, I don't

think

psychology

can

ever dissociate itself from a certain nor mative pr ogram. Psychol

ogy

may

well be, like philosophy itself, a

medicine and

a thera

peutics-actually, there is no doubt that it's a

medicine

and a

therapeutics. And the fact

that

in its

most

positive forms psychology

happens to be separated into two subsciences, which would be psy

chology

and

pedagogy for example,

or

psychopathology

and

psychia

try, separated into two

moments

as isolated as these, is really nothing

but the

sign

that

they must be brought together. Every psychology is a

pedagogy, all

decipherment

is a therapeutics:

you

cannot know with

out transforming [sans tran,iformerj.

A.B. Several times you have

seemed

to say that psychology is not

satisfied

with

establishing relations, structures,

no matter

how rigor

ous and

complex,

between

given elements,

but

that it always involves

interpretations-and that the other sciences, on the contrary,

when

they

encountered

data to be interpreted,

were

no longer adequate to

the task. And you

seem

to be saying that psychology

had

to

appear

on

the scene. If that is the case, does the word psychology seem to you


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Aesthetics, Method,

and

Epistemology

to

have

the

same meaning in

expressions like

human

psychology

and animal psychology?

M.F. I'm glad you've asked that question, because as a matter of

fact I'm res ponsible for a shift. First, I said that the

general

articulation

of the human sciences had been completely

remodeled

by the discov-

ery of the unconscious,

and

that psychology

had

paradoxically as-

sumed a

kind

of imperative over the other sciences; and then I started

talking

about

psychology

in

a strictly Freudian

perspective-as

if all

psychology could only be Fr eudian. There was a

general

repartition-

ing of

the human

sciences starting

with

Freud; that's

an

undeniable

fact, I believe, one that even the most positivist psychologists couldn' t

deny. This doesn 't mean that all psychology, in its most positive devel-

opments,

became

a psychology of the unconscious or a psychology of

the relations of consciousness to the unconscious. There remained a

certain physiological psychology; there

remained

a certain experi-

mental psychology. After all, the laws of memory, as they were estab-

lished by my

namesake fifty,

sixty years ago,

have

absolutely nothing

to do

with Freudian

forgetting.

That remains

what

it

is,

and

I don't

think that at

the level

of

positive, quotidian knowledg e

the presence

of

Freudianism

has really changed the observations

that can

be

made

either about

animals, or

even about

certain aspects of human behav-

ior. Freudianism involves, a

kind

of archaeological transformation;

it

is not a general

metamorphosis

of all psychological knowledge.

A.B. But then, if the

term

psychology encompass es aspects

that

are so different, what meaning do these aspects share? Is there a unity

of psychology?

M.F. Yes if we grant that

when

a psychologist studies the

behavior

of

a rat in a maze, what he is trying to define is the general form of

behavior

that might

be

true

for a

man

as

well

as a rat;

it

is always a

question of

what

can be known about man.

A.B.

Then

would

you

agree with the

statement

that the object of

psychology is knowledge of

man,

and the different psychologies are

so many ways of gaining that knowledge?

M.F. Yes basically, I would agree

with

that- but I wouldn't want to

repeat it

too often, because

it sounds

too simp le But it's much

less simple if one considers that, at the beginning of the

nineteenth

century,

there appeared

the very curious project

of

knowing

man.

That is probably one of the fundamental facts

in

the history of Euro

pean culture- because

even though

there were, in the seventeenth

Philosophy

and

Psychology

and

eighteent h centuries, books titled

Traite de l hommr? or A Treatise

q

uman

Nature,

2

they absolutely did not treat of man in the way that

we

do when

we

do psychology. Until the end of the eighteenth

century-that is, until

Kant-every

reflection on

man

is a secondary

reflection with respect to a

thought

that is primary, and that is, let's

say, the

thought

of the infinite. t

was

always a

matter

of answering

questions like these: Given that the truth is what

it

is, or that math

ematics

or

physics have

taught

this thing

or

that,

why

is

it that

we

perceive in the way that we perceive, that we know in the way that we

know,

that

we

are wrong

in the

way that

we

are

wrong?

Starting

with

Kant, there is a reversal: the problem of man will be

raised

as a kind of cast shadow,

but

this will not be in terms of the

infinite or the t ruth. Since Kant, the infinite is

no

longer given, there is

no

longer anything but finitude; and it's in that sense that the Kantian

critique carried the possibility-or the peril-of

an

anthropology.

A.B. During a certai n period,

in

our classes, much was made of the

distinction

between

explain

and understand in

the human sci-

ences. Does

that

distinction

have

any

meaning in your

view?

M.F. I'm

afraid to say yes,

but it

does

seem

to me that

the

first time

explain and

understand

were distinguished and put forward in

that way- as radical, absolute, and mutually incompatible epistemo-

logical forms-it

was

by Wilhelm Dilthey. Now, all the same, it is

something

very

important, and it was precisely Dilthey who wrote, to

my knowledge, the only history

of hermeneutics

in Western history, a

work that was a bit rough but extremely interesting. Now, I think

what is profound in

him

is the feeling he

had

that

hermeneutics

rep-

resented

a quite

particular

mode of reflection, whose meaning

and

value risked being

hidden

by different

modes

of knowledge

more or

less

borrowed

from the

natural

sciences. And

he

had

a strong feeling

that the epistemological model of the natural sciences was going to be

imposed as a

norm

of rationality on the human sciences, whereas

these

same sciences were probably just one of the avatars of the

hermeneutic

techniques that had always existed

in

the Western

world, since the first Greek grammarians, in the exegetes of Alexan-

dria,

in

the Christian

and modern

exegetes. And I think tha,t Dilthey

intuited the historically general context that psychology

and

the hu

man sciences

in

general belonged to in

our

culture.

That

is what he

defined, in a

rather

mystical way, by understanding as opposed to

explanation. Explanation would be the bad epistemological model;


7/7

Aesthetics Method

nd

Epistemology

understanding is the mythical figure of a

human

science restored to

its radical meaning as exegesis.

A.B.

Do

you

think that what is said of the exact and rigorous sci

ences

can

be

said

of psychology as a science and a technique-that

it

carries out its own critique of its methods, its concepts, and so on?

M.F.

I beiieve that what is currently taking place in psychoanaly

sis and in certain other sciences such as anthropology is

something

similar to that.

The

fact

that

after Freud s analysis

something

like

Jacques Laca n s analysis is possible, that after Durkheim something

like Claude Levi-Strauss is

possible-all

of

that

proves, in fact,

that the

human sciences are establishing in and for themselves a certa in criti

cal relationship that calls to mind the relationship that physics or

mathematics

maintain

towards themselves. The

same

is true of lin

guistics.

A.B. But

not of

experime ntal psychology?

M.F. Well, no, not up to now. But, after all,

when

psychologists do

studies on

learning and

they look

at

the data, determining the extent

to

which

their

informational analyses

may

enable

them

to formalize

the

results obtained,

that

is also a kind

of

reflexive

and generalizing

and foundational- relationship that psychology establishes for itself.

Now, it cannot be said that cybernetics or information theory is the

philosophy or the psychology

oflearning, just

as it cannot be said that

what

Lacan is doing, or

what

Levi-Strauss is doing, is the philosophy

of

psychoanalysis

or

of anthropology. t is instead a certain reflexive

relationship of science with itself.

A.B. If

you were in

a philosophy class, the

kind

that

we have

now,

what would

you

teach on the subject of psychology?

M.F.

The first precaution I

would

take,

i f were

a philosophy pro

fessor

and

I

had

to

teach

psychology,

would be

to buy myself the

most

realistic mask I

can

imagine and the one farthest from my normal

face, so that my students would not recognize me. I would try, like

Anthony Perkins in Psycho to adopt another voice so that none of my

speech patterns would appear.

That

is the first precaution I

would

take. Next I would try, as far as possible, to introduce the students to

the techniques

that are

currently being

used

by psychologists, labora

tory methods, social psychology methods. I would try to explain to

them what psychoanalysis consists in. And then, the following hour, I

would remove my mask, I would take up my own voice again, and we

would do philosophy,

even

if this meant

reencountering

psychology,

Philosophy

nd

Psychology 59

at that moment, as

a

kind

of absolutely unavoidable

and

inevitable

impasse that Western

thought

entered into

in

the

nineteenth

century.

But when I would say that it s an absolutely unavoidable and inevi

table impasse, I would not criticize

it

as a science; I would not say that

it

is not really a positive science; I wouldn t say that it s something that

ought to

be more

philosophical or less philosophical. I would say sim

ply that there was a kind of anthropological slumber in which phi

losophy

and the

human sciences

were

enchanted, as

it were, and

put

to sleep by one another- and that we need to awake from this anthro

pological slumber, just

as in the past

people

awoke

from

the

dogmatic

slumber.

NOTES

1 Rene Descartes, Traite

de

l homme

Paris:

Clerselier, 1664), in

Oeuvres et

lettres ed. A. Bridoux

Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp 8o5 73

[lreatise q Man,

trans. Thomas Steele Hall Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972)].

2

David Hume, A

Treatise

Q[ Human Nature, Being an Attempt to Introduce

the

Experimental

Method

q

Reasoning into oral Subjects London:

J.

Noon, 1739-1740), 5 vols., trans. by A.

Leroy as Traite

de

lii

nature humaine: essai pour introduire la

mk.thode

experimentale dans

le s

sujets morau.x

Paris: A u b i e r ~ M o n t a g n e 19T3), 2

vols.

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