Okay, here's what the video is saying, in slightly-longer form. The exchange in the video is basically Chomsky saying "human nature" and Foucault laughing.
This gets at the heart of the hour-long debate: do humans have some sort of nature? Foucault, and philosophers like him, think that the idea of 'human nature' is complete and utter garbage. So when Chomsky admits that his position boils down to an appeal of human nature, Foucault just laughs at him.
It's a great moment that really highlights the whole thing. I love it.
That's what Foucault wants to know.
https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=9m48s
And from my little understanding, because they don't believe there's such thing as a human nature, since society, and other things from our surrounding affect us, and the "nature" could change in a different context, which would imply it isn't some kind of force behind us.
Okay, so the concept of 'human nature' in general needs some more definition, like you've said. Here's maybe a better phrasing of the problem: "Do humans have some sort of _innate_ properties that are shared amongst all humans?" This phrasing calls back to an old debate in philosophy: essentialism. This is a question of ontology, in other words, what kinds of things are there in the world, and how do we categorize them?
An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties, and then any entity which has those properties is one of those things. In other words, let's say something like "You're a human as long as you have a name." This is a position which is essentialist. And that might be a workable definition.
A non-essentialist may come along and challenge your ontology, though. "Ships also have names, but they are clearly not human." You may agree with this, and so you need to revise your set of properties. "Humans are things that have names, and walk on two legs." The non-essentialist may respond, "birds have names, and when they walk, they use two legs. Your ontology is incorrect.
You see where this is going. Those who take a position against essentialism claim that this approach to categorization is a folly. It's fundamentally broken.. To give you a counterpoint, I generally agree with a process philosophy, which means that I equate identity with _doing_, not with _being_. An example of a process philosopher's standpoint on ontology: "You're a Rubyist if you write Ruby code." This kind of categorization is more useful, because over time, my identity can change. I might be a Rubyist for a while, but at some point, I wasn't. And I might stop being one in the future, too. An approached based on do-ing includes things like a time component that an essentialist position never can.
So, returning to the original question, no, the question of an inherent nature doesn't make any sense, and therefore, neither does 'human nature'. So where do we go from there? Well, any claim that's reliant on an appeal to human nature is incorrect. For example, "Humans are inherently greedy."
Anyway, that's a hastily-typed overview of a concept in a HN comment, but hopefully that helps you get the gist of it.
In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
Definitions are very important. For example, one of the defining movements from second to third wave feminism was a move from essentialism. Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals. (this is of course not the only thing that separates them, just one example)
These kinds of questions are full of real-world implications. This stuff matters when it comes down to questions like healthcare, and if some procedure is covered, for example. Any law which affects people based on some criteria. That's a lot of laws.
> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species.
Absolutely, which is an other example of where this issue raises its head. Ontology is very relevant to many, many fields.
What a dishonest attempt at a characterization. You took the opporunity of the readers' unfamiliarity with a topic to interject your own subjective and vague opinion ("Second-wave essentiallism couldn't handle" -- what function does this phrase even serve beyond emotional release for the writer? What does it even mean?), without providing any links or citations to the extensive existing material that exists.
If you valued actual discourse, you would link to some article like Michelle Goldberg's "What is a Woman?"[0] in the New Yorker to provide some sort of context on the conflicting ideas of feminism and queer theory. But time and time again my fellow men who cheerlead for queer theory and identity politics bring nothing to the table but opportunistic, ingenuine rhetoric bordering on non-sequitur. I don't even need to claim anything about second-wave or modern radical feminists -- the transparently anti-intellectual liberal male digs his own grave.
If one's confidence in one's own bias is such that one can inject it into discourse without feeling the need to cite any material which asserts ideas which they are biased "against" ("Second-wave essentiallism", whatever that entails), or even import material supporting their own claims, would one not mind if another was to comment with some reading material for those who may be interested in this thread? For example, the 2013 letter "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of 'Gender'" written by 37 second-wave and modern radical feminists [0], or the essay "SSCAB/DSCAB: Reconsidering the Conversation" written by a black radical feminist [1], or glosswitch's "Beauty and the cis" [2]? Surely it shouldn't change anything to point out that these writings exist.
[0] reprinted here: https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/authenticity-...
[1] https://bmgnedra.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/sscabdscab-reframi...
I didn't make any claims about the origin of the term. Your history is accurate, to my knowledge.
> without feeling the need to cite any material
This isn't a dissertation. It's HN. Not every last thing needs a citation.
And no, I don't 'mind' at all. I'm very sympathetic to many arguments made here. People should read second-wave stuff. I just come down on a different side of them, personally.
That assertion is a good illustration of the problem some Continental philosophers tried to address - what is a "species" and how is it defined? It's an arbitrary labeling we put on a collection of individuals that we perceive to have similarities.
This kind of thinking is exactly what lead Chomsky into the erroneous theories of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device. Studying real neurons in actual brains is what got linguistics out of the generative grammar dead-end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_Wars
(It is part of our nature to have constraints keeping us from being dogs. Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.)
In your argument against human nature, you stated: "An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties". But that's seems a strawman definition in this context, because no one can even define a chair. Much less a human. Fortunately, people who believe in the concept of human nature (virtually everyone) don't need to sit around making futile constructivist definitions.
Saying that there's no essential dog-nature does not inherently imply that one can become a dog.
> (virtually everyone)
Yes, Plato and Aristotle were essentialists, and you can't possibly over-state their influence on Western thought. But, I would argue that your 'everyone' includes many non-philosphers, who haven't necessarily considered this problem in the depth that philosophers have. That doesn't mean that essentialism is disproven or anything! But rightfully, in my mind anyway, a number of schools of thought take issue with it, just like any other position.
That said, actually, it depends on who you're talking to.
> that's seems a strawman definition in this context
It's not! That's the problem itself: you're absolutely right that defining what is a chair and what is human is very difficult.
It's sad that Foucault laughs at it, because it's essentially an argument by authority (his own) and not based on anything with scientific substance.
Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Oddly enough, this is a common ploy used by cult leaders.
My disdain for the pomo and Crit Theory people has no limits - because while academics have persuaded themselves that Foucault etc are geniuses who offered the humanities profound insights into culture and power etc, they've also been completely marginalised and screwed over by neo-capitalism, and have offered no useful resistance to it.
Somehow I can't help wondering if the two are related - because the whole nub of Critical Theory is the utterly mistaken assumption that deconstruction and tentative subjectivity have political power, when in fact they're the opposite of political power, and offer neither a useful insight into how power really works, nor any effective strategy for resisting its excesses.
> Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Or at least to a position where science is not a valid source of criticism.
If I understand correctly, poststructuralists say that all truth claims are about power, and only that, because objective truth cannot ever be determined. That leaves them free to make ever-more-blatant power plays in their own claims.
What you call "the history of ethology" hopefully comprises the blunders that at different points in history "the scientific establishment" made regarding the "nature" of a) black men, b) women, c) gay people, d) irish people, e) jewish people, f)... you get the idea.
These observations of "animal behavior" are both extremely unsophisticated, always failing to control for critical variables, and very tied up to what the society of the day wants the conclusions to be.
Even today, ignorant people go around talking about how "human nature is selfish". I think Foucualt's contributions were pretty great re: this precise discussion we're having over here. Certainly more important than the vast majority of ethological work out there.
If you want to challenge me on this, just answer my question: What is human nature, and what do you claim to know about it in 2015?
Are you going to try to explain the remarkable consistency of these interests across all political systems and historical periods as a purely political phenomenon?
If so, why are there clearly analogous interests in many primates and other animals?
I say you're wrong - and challenge you to provide solid observational evidence to prove conclusively that social and political traditions generate these interests.
No, I do not think so. There are vast, vast numbers of people who opt to teach and nurse instead of gunning for leadership, who opt to do salaried engineering instead of management, and I don't see why the latter in each case have a better claim on our "nature" as a species.
What do you mean by "interest in sex"? Human nature seems to also have an "interest in food", that in places like america is exacerbated into an obesity epidemic, but doesn't seem to say anything super meaningful about our relationship to eating. Isaac Newton died a virgin, I guess he wasn't human? Gay men have no interest in reproduction... is their humanity in question?
You should read stuff like UBC's "WEIRD" study, or how women were believed to have bigger sexual appetite than men at various places in time, before going off about observations "across all political systems and historical periods".
You seem to be obliquely pushing some notion that we are more dominant than cooperative, which is pretty ignorant in a thread about Foucault and Chomsky.
Indeed. And sex. And status in herd hierarchies.
That was my point. But it doesn't stop there. I'd also include symbolic abstraction, myth-making and narrative logic (as an efficient but flawed heuristic for passing on knowledge), persistent shared memory, embodied metaphors as per Lakoff - and so on.
It seems to me - and maybe to a lot of the Internet - that humans spend a lot of time and energy on these things.
Other species spend a lot of time on some of them, but not all of them.
There may be a reason for the difference.
So I have issues with the suggestion that they're always evidence of pathological socialisation - or that writing impenetrable books and laughing at and condescending to anyone who disagrees with their content is likely to make that socialisation any less pathological, where it does exist.
[1] http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manif...
Rather than starting with axioms that lead to a sort of universal knowledge, Foucault did studies that could be considered more sociological in nature to show how relations of power affect the way that we experience ourselves and others, i.e., how it fashions our subjectivity. This is what he terms his "archaeological" method in articles like "What is Enlightenment?" http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault..... Examples of these studies include his works Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
At the very least, Foucault's studies show how some of the most significant ways in which we experience the world and ourselves are socially constructed, rather than essential. Identity then becomes political, rather than something that is distinctly our own. In some of his work, he also directly takes on thinkers like Kant in an attempt to show their work as historically situated rather than universal.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=BODdpZCvvrQC&lpg=PA201&ots...
Joking aside, without taking away from Chomsky, at least in places I found Foucault surprisingly clear:
[O]ne of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me,
over and above anything else, is this: that we should
indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the
relationships of political power which actually control the
social body and oppress or repress it.
What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in
European society, to consider that power is localised in
the hands of the government and that it is exercised
through a certain number of particular institutions, such
as the administration, the police, the army, and the
apparatus of the state. One knows that all these
institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a
certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or
of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who
don't obey. But I believe that political power also
exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number
of institutions which look as if they have nothing in
common with the political power, and as if they are
independent of it, while they are not.
One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows
that the university and in a general way, all teaching
systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are
made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to
exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as
medicine, also help to support the political power. It's
also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain
cases related to psychiatry.
It seems to me that the real political task in a society
such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions,
which appear to be both neutral and independent; to
criticise and attack them in such a manner that the
political violence which has always exercised itself
obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can
fight against them.
This critique and this fight seem essential to me for
different reasons: firstly, because political power goes
much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and
invisible, little-known points of support; its true
resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't
expect it. Probably it's insufficient to say that behind
the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there
is the dominant class; one must locate the point of
activity, the places and forms in which its domination is
exercised. And because this domination is not simply the
expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it
is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition
which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is
achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.
Well, if one fails to recognise these points of support of
class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist;
and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after
an apparent revolutionary process.
Foucault believes that seemingly neutral institutions such as education and medicine act to preserve the power of one social class over another. While it's clear how the police and military maintain authority, it's less clear how topics like constant surveillance and attitudes toward sexuality would tilt the playing field. Foucault's philosophy offers a framework to analyze these different forms of power based on their effect rather than their apparent mechanism.
> One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Wasn't Foucault a professor? He just, essentially, refuted himself (because he's part of that teaching system, which appears to disseminate knowledge, and is really about maintaining a certain social class in power).