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The Vital and the Positive: a Genealogy of the Science of Man

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The Vital and the Positive: a Genealogy of the Science of Man The Vital and the Positive: A Genealogy of the Science of Man Robin Brooks Department of History Goldmiths College, University of London PhD, August 2010 1 Declaration I confirm that this submission is my own original work. Rob Brooks 2 Abstract Abstract - The Vital and the Positive: A Genealogy of the Science of Man The thesis presents a historical study of the Enlightenment project for a Science of Man which takes its perspective from the 20th century philosophical „death of man.‟ From the contemporary move against humanistic ideals associated already from the 1930‟s exemplified contrasting interpretations over an Enlightenment Science of Man and its ambitions. In the 1960‟s Michel Foucault‟s pivotal approach gave this dispute the perspective of the „death of man,‟ which this thesis frames in relation to his reading of Kant. This forms a perspective from which to examine Kant‟s positive ambitions, as Foucault saw them extending beyond Critique. But a second perspective is taken up through what Gilles Deleuze ascribed to an empiricist tradition subjugated under a vitalism. This is indicated by the „age of Bichat,‟ the French medical tradition which Deleuze contrasted with Foucault‟s „rarefied form of positivism.‟ A genealogical history of the Science of Man frames these as alternative models to a critique of reason, two perspectives derived of the Enlightenment project. The „age of Bichat‟ is understood around the French Enlightenment discourse on vitalism modelled on a post-Cartesian concept of the body. This gave the positive ambitions for early 19th century Positivism explored through Saint Simon‟s „concept of labour‟ and August Comte‟s epistemological critique, intended as substitute for an older Enlightenment model. However, this becomes further complicated by the new positive paradigm of experimental medicine. The effect, during the early Third Republic, was to re-orientate the philosophical perspective on the older project for a Science of Man. This served Henri Bergson‟s critique of Positivist historical formations, but also the neo-Positive model of Emile Durkheim and the ambition for an autonomous new science that delimits a collective „order of things.‟ The dilemma was legitimating vital norms in a modern society. This genealogy situates these as perspectives seen through the 18th century Science of Man from which the vital and the positive remained elements historically resistant to being the determinable object of study. 3 Table of Contents Abstract page 3 Contents page 5 Introduction page 6 Chapter One: A “Rarefied Positivism” page 19 Chapter Two: Kant‟s Anthropology and the Science of Man page 67 Chapter Three: The Science of Man and the Medical Revolution page 117 Chapter Four: Radical Positivisms page 170 Chapter Five: The Concept of the Positive: Organic and Critical page226 Conclusion page 284 Bibliography page 287 4 Introduction: The Vital and the Positive: A Genealogy of the Science of Man From the theoretical disputes between Structuralism and Existentialism leading up to the period around 1968, Michel Foucault saw the positive sciences as a media driving social processess against contemporary humanism. After 1970, he took up a genealogy serving as a „training‟ of historical conditions which was credited with invigorating critical possibilities with the radical concept of power, which he later called his positive approach.1 It has been claimed that this positively served new and concrete ways of how “power penetrates the subject‟s very body,” and gave the “biopolitical potential of a new paradigm,” and which saw Foucault opening “a promising alternative to a critique of reason.”2 In the 1986 commentary by Gilles Deleuze, Foucault‟s concept of power is described as close to an empiricist tradition that was validated according to an aesthetic „of the body.‟ Yet this appeared to define more closely Deleuze‟s own thought. His commentary describes Foucault‟s epistemological practice as a “rarefied form of positivism” which expressly distinguished Archaeology from the concept of power on the basis that the latter did not pursue a positivistic form of validation.3 Rather, the concept of power was a positivistic empowerment – something which Deleuze subjugated under a vitalism. Others, however, saw this as lacking scope for critical autonomy. Critical theory, for example, which associated itself with an anti-naturalist intent, saw both Positivism and a vitalism as inherently problematic.4 This is a problem defined in this thesis through a stance vis á vis an Enlightenment Science of Man. During the Enlightenment, a Science of Man meant an idea that could be sustained of a unified science that would expand the understanding of man‟s nature through the active study of human beings and their world: since science stood as the creation of man‟s higher faculties, a 1 Foucault (1997a) p124-125, Foucault‟s comment on a „felicitous positivism‟ in „The Discourse on Language‟ in Adams (1986) p162, Foucault discusses the background to his development during the 1960‟s in Foucault (1991) esp p131ff. 2 “Biopolitical potential of a new paradigm of Power,” Hardt & Negri (2000) p23. The possibility accorded to an “unpredjudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates the subjects very bodies” according to Agamben (1998) p5 3 Deleuze (1988) p13 4 On anti-naturalistic argument see Popper (1961) and Adorno (1976) p xxxvii, Habermas „A Critique of Human Reason as the Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault‟ originally chapter 9 in Habermas (1987), reproduced in Foucault (1994a) 5 Science of Man looked to sustain this through the ambition for creating a higher language, a scientific form of discourse adequate to the task of articulating man and his world.5 Such a reflexive ambition is, for example, evident in Germany towards the end on the 18th century, where the drive for new and rich philosophical languages culminated in Kant‟s Transcendentalism. Separated from the Kantian tradition, an Enlightenment ambition in France grounded general theories of societies a relation to the history of science. At the start of the 19th century, this was an engagement evident in a nascent French Positivism, commonly associated with Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. This aimed at displacing a scholastic legacy with modern science they followed an ambition that remained closely tied to a political legacy of the French Revolution and its universalising hegemony. The paradox is that even as the scientific foundations on which they initially drew disipated through diverging scientific practices during the 19th century, the aspirations persisted in various theoretical forms. These give twin perpectives to be taken up as a problem of an Enlightenment Science of Man In this thesis, the positive and the vital relate to the idea of what could be sustained under this unified science of this era. When a later Critical perspective took up a twofold stance to such an Enlightenment project it was without rejecting what it understood as the ideals or ambitions of the Enlightenment, while also seeking to extend these as an impulse through a dialectic. From this perspective, it could claims that Foucault‟s concept of power could only extend its discourse in “a prejudiced way.”6 The Critical perspective likened this to a form of history simply grounding a “naturalistic theory of society,” it is because is already a problematic legacy of humanism in modern social theory.7 The controversy which surrounded the category of power emerged from Foucault‟s critique of anthropocentric thinking, which he presented as a form of scepticism for displacing a „nature of man.‟ 8 But Foucault also intended to give agency to a new ethico-political discourse which was seen as an ambition for giving tools of analysis for “contemporary dangers” in society.9 A later essay on Kant saw Foucault relates this to his own 5 See introduction to Fink & Marchand (1979) p1-3 6 This was a prejudice claims Habermas that followed the fact that Foucault “never returned to the epistemological role of the clinical gaze,” „Questions Concerning the Theory of Power‟ Habermas (1987) reproduced in Foucault (1994) p85. 7 „The Critique of Reason as the Unmasking of the Human Sciences‟ Habermas in Foucault (1994) 8 “a positivist attitude with a critical claim,” Habermas Ibid p83 9 Dreyfus and Rabinow, „What is Maturity?‟ Rabinow (1986) p118, see also Bernstein in Foucault (1994) p225 6 interpretation around the legacy of the Enlightenment dispute, and gives one perspectives under focus in this study.10 This perspective is characterised by Foucault‟s relation to his own intellectual development and two models which reached beyond academic interests in the political “crisis of the 1960‟s.” A division within French thought that focusses on what in the early 1930‟s was introduced by Phenomenology but, according to Foucault, this followed an earlier division, “one that separated a philosophy of experience, hermeneutics, and the subject, from a philosophy of knowledge, rationality, and the concept.”11 The theoretical significance for him was in the new confrontation between the new interpretations of psychoanalysis, and a historical legacy of that “great postulate of French philosophy from Descartes to our own time,” the subject. An emerging Structuralism supplemented with Foucault‟s reading of Nietzsche gave him the significance of an idea of human subjectivity as a “limit-experience,” which served as the suitable rupture for the formation of his own thought.12 From the broad context of the 1960‟s dispute on humanism, Foucault took up a perspective on an Enlightenment Science of Man that followed the historical impetus in the polarities in French thought through the 19th century. His early focus was derived from the 20th century French „epistemological tradition‟ which analysed autonomous ambitions behind the diverse forms of scientific reasoning, notably associated with medicine, as they related to the progressive project. Science was understood as the modern knowledge that could perpetually revise its own reasoning and substitute errors with the spontaneity of a new language.13 From the 10 See the essay by Foucault What is Enlightenment? Foucault (1997).
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