Philosophy is not normative: The meaning of the figure of Michel Foucault

There is a place for philosophers as civil servants and it is this: they tell us what is true, good, and right. Most philosophers are still doing that. Michel Foucault is exemplary in philosophy partly for systematically developing a critique of, and alternative to, doing that. The other model is as old as Plato. It includes those who tell us what is ethically "right," not to be confused from what is ethically actual, historical, or possible, something Foucault wrote much about. Not what is possible that one might consider doing but what is right that we ought to do or not do.

Which is more important: what we choose, perhaps because it seems interesting, and maybe fruitful, or out of desire and/or love; or what we do because we "must," due either to a natural or social compulsion, or a moral imperative or "command"? Note that in the latter case, we are compelled to repetition, because what can be commanded is only something already known "to be right," while what is desired may be something new. Morality invents nothing, creates nothing; it may believe that the world is already created perfect (per-facere: to make thoroughly) by a God, by whom what is to be done is always prescribed, so nothing new can ever be done, as doing is not making. (Contrary to Christian readings of the "old testament," Judaism to its credit actually split the difference, because it regards the world as created by the divine power, yet not completely, and so novelty remains to us, and in fact justice as well as happiness may depend on that; though it also relegated creativity in matters of justice to interpretation rather than invention proper). Compare a child's parents to an adult beloved: if they are like most parents in societies like ours, the parents (unfortunately) may give orders that must be obeyed; whereas a beloved can only be desired, and only someone with a bizarre and atavistic neurosis would make love to his beloved out of obligation.

Compare a philosophy that discloses interesting possibilities to one that imposes obligations to listening to a symphony on your car radio and stopping for a traffic light. Foucault is more interested in understanding the symphony; he stops at traffic lights, but does not dwell on this, while pedantic critics who think he is merely a puzzling epistemologist make stopping at the light the essence of their thinking, and demand that all other philosophers do so also. They're terrified that people listening to Foucault's analysis of the symphony will not stop at traffic lights, and soon the whole society will disintegrate into barbaric lawlessness like a riot in an American city. This sort of thing seems to be most of what they care about; no doubt that's partly because many American philosophy undergraduates are headed for law school and care little for art or science and much for the craft of courtroom judging.

It is easy to see that what is at stake here is also very much the question of state power, and thus an ethics of universal and absolute, unrelenting, management (including self-management), vs. the possibility of anarchy in thought, which is thought without a prescribed origin or endpoint, mastering principle (essence) or authority (the one who decides, judges, commands, and rules). Science as well as philosophy become misattributed as departments of law, when in fact they are closer to art, which is necessarily without law. Or, like the symphony played in a car that stops at the occasional traffic light, they are within something like a frame, form, or tradition, yet what is important about them is what is free and undetermined within those frames, with those forms, in those traditions, which are nothing but seemingly regular patterns of practice. Science does not discover facts; journalism does that and it's also part of what judges do. Science discovers models, which are partly invented, to explain the facts that make sense within them. Philosophy invents concepts and theories, while its pedants worry constantly about what in them is justified. But nothing discovered or invented is ever justified except in terms of what is there already, and it is that to which philosophies of pedantic normativity and normality are compulsively always returning.