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Foucault rejects the notion of truth as a matching of correspondence of ideas to things. He also rejects traditional beliefs that western science has been advancing towards this kind of truth. He does not take for granted that it has been advancing in some other sort of way, so rejects the traditional belief in scientific progress. This means he rejects the teleological version of scientific progress.

Foucault tries to see past periods through their own eyes without restrospective selection. He doesn’t only examine the discoveries that are still significant to us today, he examines the failures and more bizarre discoveries, the forgotten areas of human thought. There is no decisive revolution from ideology to science, Foucault avoids using the term ideology , to avoid any suggestion that it means ‘false’ and different to science.

Advent of Modern Medicine

Foucault believes the old medicine man of superstition had the correct view of disease, as something ‘evil’. The discourse viewed disease as counter-life, an evil, negative force. The new discourse around the 18th Century however, disease shows up not as a negative force but as a positive object.

Disease is no longer the ‘invisible other’ of the visible human body. Around the same time as this discourse, pathological anatomy emerged as a common practice, we were opening up bodies all the time to inspect disease actually within organs. This practice only works on dead bodies of course. The new discourse frames disease against a dominant assumption of death.

Disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil, to which it had been related for centuries; and it finds in the visibility of death the full form in which its content appears in positive terms.

Thinking and speaking about disease in terms of separate  static internal organs presupposes death as ‘the concrete a priori of medical experience’.

The object that modern medical science stuidies no longer appears as something natural and obvious; on the contrary, it has to be carved literally or mentally out of the body, by an unnatural act of violence against the body. Nor was the object there waiting to be discovered, it has to be created by a certain practice, pathological anatomy, and a certain way of speaking in terms of separate static internal organs.

A combination of a practice and a way of speaking is what constitutes a discourse for Foucault.

The vaunted objectivity of ‘scientific’ method here consists of tunring the human body into an object for being objective about.

Science is valid, it produces results!

For Foucault, a discourse itself furnishes the very criteria by which its results are judged successful. By other criteria, scientific success appears to be missing the point. The ‘Magic Bullet’ approach to curing infections, the psychological effects of the ‘hygenic’ approach to childbirth, the moral implications of the ‘human vegetable’ approach to maintaining bodily functions at all costs and so on.

Are we not here witnessing the final consequences of a way of looking at the body as though it were dead? Modern medicine has evidently produced its own kind of blindness along with its own kind of visibilities.

Its self confirming nature appears more plainly when it extends its sway from bodily health to mental health.

Psychiatric medicine depends on the authority figure of the doctor.It didn’t introduce science, but personality. Patients are pursuaded into speaking a scientific language about themselves, they are ‘mad’ because they have evaded primary socialisation which ordinarily enters into human beings along with their societies language; but they can be subdued and at least partially socialised by a secondary web of restraining language.

The ‘successful’ result in no way proves the psychiatrists language. They have not caught the truth of madness with their language, he has merely taught it to speak the same language back to him.

Episteme

There was a new conceptual framework for psychiatrists and doctors  in which they placed their ‘scientfic’ object.  These large scale conceptual frameworks is what Foucault calls episteme.

The episteme is a social a priori of a kind that preceeds any possible original discovery and any possible truth to the world. It is social because it is spoken together before it can be spoken individually. It preceeds any possible truth about the world because it is a priori therefore must constitute the very ground upon which truth and falsity can be debated. Foucault does not deny that theories may be more or less true and more or less original within an episteme.

Between epistemes however, he proposes a discontinuity so deep and unbridgableas to be beyond even conflict and disagreement.

Hegel

Hegel proposed a history that woud deal with much more than things in the world – a ‘philosophical’ history as distinct from the ‘anti-universal’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘critical’ and ‘fragmentary’ varieties of factual history. He developed the outlines of such a history in his account of the very general frameworks, or zeitgeists, that have dominated the successive periods of human thought. The Roman period was dominated by the concept of law for example.

These are rather crude and simplfied compared to Foucault’s epistemes, but Hegel did at least objectify objective ideas in social customs and institutions. He makes them dependent upon a given state of society. He relativises the concept of a priori in his Objective Idealism.

Foucault on the subject of those who do not conform to their society’s social a priori, gives us more than Hegel who does not even allow for the possibility of non-conformity. For Foucault discovers in the unrecorded and unrecordable side of history that the mind of the excluded that does not conform is treated as abberational, as mad, as perverted.

Foucault was at least happy with periods of overt social coercion,but resents how thanks to science, coercion has become insidious. Oppression by the smug superiority of ‘knowledge’ is particularly oppressive.

He looks through history,

[list]
[*]There were no human sciences during the Renaissance because there was no human object of knowledge
[*]In this episteme, the division between the human and the non-human does not exist
[*]By way of God, the whole world is a cultural project
[*]Natural world appears as a great artifice, a great book that God as Word itself inscribes signs and clues and an endless play of overlapping resembalances for men to interpret
[*]As the natural world is a kind of language, so human nature is a kind of nature
[*]The fables of extraordinary plants are just as reliable as seeing them with first hand experience
[/list]
What seems like subseervience to ‘authority’ is really the consequence of a totally different epistemological framework. In the Renaissance, language is ot regarded as a secondary human creation always liable to diverge from the primary world, it is a part of the world, ontologically interwoven with it.

In the Classical period the non-human splits off from the human. The natural world becomes an object to be known by the human mind as a subject. First hand observation depends on a single sense – sight. This is better suited to the ‘hard’ natural sciences.Wealth was seen as something ‘in nature’, in Economic studies. It’s nothing more than the nomination of the visible when observing the natural world of plants and animals.

The 18th century, the focus shifts from the mechanical interactions of solid bodies to insubstantial functionings of forces like electricity, heat and magnetism; Nature ceases to be an ‘object’ in the simple ‘thing-like’ sense of the term. Forces as they are in themselves are out of reach for sight; they can be known only by understanding, only in the abstract.

Economics and language suddenly took on a ‘hidden’ status too, they contain hidden forces.

Modern Period

The Modern Period invents a new image of man that recuperates his importance and apartness – a step in the wrong direction for Foucault. The image of psychological man.

This is evidenced by the rise of the ‘I’ Philosophers – psychological philosophy, such as Kant, the Phenomenologists and Existentialists. These created the human sciences, the ytruly human ‘human’ sciences for Foucault are sociology, psychology and anthropology. The human subject swings around on the side of the object. A dichotomy appears between the human and non-human, but within the human itself.

Subject and object come up face to face, side by side, once more. Man’s experience is still directly observable, even if the ‘forces’ hidden behind it are not.

[Socrates]

An episteme always forgets the episteme before it – what Nietzsche calls ‘the great forgetting’.

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