Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Wilber's View
Foucault gets a genuinely serious hearing in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality — closer, critical engagement than the near-hagiography given to Plotinus, but far warmer than the pre/trans-fallacy treatment of Campbell. Wilber's Foucault is centrally the theorist of "the subject" — Foucault's own gloss (quoted directly) is that his life's work was never really about power as such but about the subject, "the general theme of my research." Wilber uses two of Foucault's specific arguments almost without qualification: the diagnosis of the "sciences of man" as pseudo-sciences that reduce human beings to objects of information rather than subjects in communication (what Foucault called the birth of "the Age of Man"), and the account of biopower — modernity's obsessive turn toward sexuality and the body as objects of knowledge and control, developed at length in ch. 13 in connection with Wilber's own account of the Ego's repression of the biosphere.
The most striking move Wilber makes with Foucault is recruiting him as an ally of Habermas — two thinkers usually read as opposed (Foucault the poststructuralist skeptic of grand narratives, Habermas the defender of a critical theory of communicative reason) turn out, on Wilber's reading, to agree completely that instrumental reason's "objectifying gaze" is the central pathology of modernity. Wilber is also careful to track Foucault's own self-correction: the early "archaeological" Foucault, who bracketed both truth and meaning to describe discourse as pure systematic behavior, later recanted that approach as "arrogant" and folded meaning back in. The larger critique of Foucault that Wilber develops elsewhere — postmodern antifoundationalism collapsing, if pushed too far, into its own kind of "flatland" — is present in the book but less concentrated than the sympathetic material excerpted here.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research" (Foucault, quoted)
Not only was it the central problem of the Enlightenment and the Romantic-Idealist rebellion, it has continued to be a central, often the central, topic in theorists from Habermas to Foucault to Taylor. (Foucault, for example, said, "The goal of my work during the last twenty years… has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.")
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
"These objectifying and systematic 'sciences of man' are in fact pseudo-sciences, according to both Foucault and Habermas"
These objectifying and systematic "sciences of man" are in fact pseudo-sciences, according to both Foucault and Habermas, and pseudo-sciences driven by self-aggrandizing power.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
"Humans became 'the object of information, never the subject in communication'"
And thus was born what Foucault called "the Age of Man"—the merely "objective" study of humans. And in a beautiful phrase that would summarize the net effect of the entire Enlightenment paradigm… Foucault points out that with the "Age of Man," humans became "the object of information, never the subject in communication."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
"This is likewise what Habermas refers to as 'the totalitarian characteristics of an instrumental reason'… In this respect, Habermas is in complete agreement with Foucault"
This is likewise what Habermas refers to as "the totalitarian characteristics of an instrumental reason that objectifies everything around it, itself included." In this respect, Habermas is in complete agreement with Foucault.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
"Sex became the object of a major investment of signification, of power, and of knowledge" (Foucault, quoted)
As Foucault ably demonstrates, the rise of modernity was marked, not so much by a repression of sexuality… as by an obsession with sexuality… Never, says Foucault, had an epoch's discourse been so dominated by sexuality in so many domains. "Never, it seems, had so much attention been focused on every aspect of the body and every dimension of its sexuality. Sex became the object of a major investment of signification, of power, and of knowledge."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
"Foucault eventually abandoned archaeology… precisely because archaeology was itself merely a part of the larger holon of social practices"
And let us immediately note that Foucault eventually abandoned archaeology as an exclusive methodology precisely because archaeology was itself merely a part of the larger holon of social practices: not wholes, but whole/parts.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4
