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