505.
Foucault and Chomsky
Recently,
I viewed a debate on human nature between Foucault and Chomsky, on YouTube, recorded
on 1-10-2002. It was presented as a disagreement, but I think the two views can
be reconciled.to some extent. Foucault and Chomsky agree that thought requires
some regulating mental structure, but while Chomsky ascribes this to some
innate, internal, universal brain structure, which by induction creates rich knowledge
from the sparse ‘data’of experience, Foucault ascribes it to external social
and institutional structures While Chomsky granted that those do have
influence, but the individual mind can wrest loose from their influence, and
engage in civil disobedience to fight for improved human rights, Foucault
claimed that in our thinking we cannot fully escape our culture and its
institutions. If we manage to escape from some ideology, we are inevitably
caught up in some other ideology, from the experience with some other slice of
society and history.
They
can both be right, up to a point. In evolution we have developed a now innate
potentiality of language and thought that enables us to construct theory from
experience. It both enables and constrains our thought.I disagree with Chomsky
that we can always escape from outside influence, but I do think, against
Foucault, that we are not totally imprisoned in externally imposed structures
of ideology. With Foucault, the authentic, autonomous individual is out of
reach. We can however, I believe, escape from a dominant culture to some
extent, but not from all of it. There are rebels.
Innate
structures of language and thought not only enable but also constrain thought.
This limits our mental scope. For example, I have, also in this blog, proposed
the hypothesis of an ‘object bias’: I claim that our linguistic and conceptual
aptitudes arise from an evolution from almost 400.000 years as hunter-gatherers,
where an ability to categorise things in terms of objects moving in time and
place, retaining their identity in it,.was crucial for survival. That was
needed to adequately assess the path of beasts preying on us, seeking a prey
ourselves, of finding a lost child, a hut or cave to live in, a lost child, and
to trace the trajectory of an arrow. Thankfully, survival of the group required
collaboration for hunting and defense, which also created an instinct of benevolence
and empathy. Subsequently, we conceptualised abstract concepts in analogy to
objects moving in time and space (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). But that thinking does
not apply to abstract things that are now crucial for the survival of society,
such as notions of happiness, truth, democracy, meaning, justice. Those are not
entities so much as processes (Nooteboom 2021). When a word is transferred from
one sentence and action context to another, its meaning changes, as if when
moving a chair from one room to another, it changes colour and drops a leg.
Alternatively
to seeing things as given objects moving in time in place, we can instead try
to see persons and institutions as being constituted in interaction with the
world and other people, in continually changing network relationships. The
relations count more than the objects. This confirms Foucault’s view that our
thinking is contingent upon social and political structures, without which we
cannot constitute our identity.
Ij
the terms of Aristotle’s multiple causality of action, the agent (‘efficient
cause’) lives with the goal (‘final cause’) of a good life, and according to
Chomsky ecperience, effects of the world, called ‘facts’ by Chomsky, are the
stuff the mind works with (‘material cause’), and how thought is developed (‘formal
cause’) is the innate capability of thought, while for Foucault outside effects
of institutions, are not just the material but also the formal cause of how
thought is created.
Lakoff , G. and M.
Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bart
Nooteboom, forthcoming 2021, Process philosophy,
a synthesis, Cambridge UK: Anthem Press
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