THE ERRORS OF HISTORY

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

Keywords:

• error
• history
• rationalism
• epistemology
• science
• Gaston Bachelard
• Georges Canguilhem
• Michel Foucault

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

My thanks to an anonymous reviewer and to Mark Kelly for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Stuart Elden and Clare O’Farrell for their help in locating the source of a citation from one of Foucault’s interviews.

1 Cf. Foucault’s contrast in “What is an Author?” between the category of the “founder of a science” and “the initiation of a discursive practice.” The latter “is heterogeneous to its [i.e., a science’s] subsequent transformations” whereas the former “can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations which derive from it” (218–19).

2 At least according to his self-characterization. See his comments in the 1984 interview with Paul Rabinow, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations”:

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. (111)

3 There are a number of varieties of scepticism, of course. In this article, I will propose that Foucault’s scepticism about the value of institutions is one that does not propose to replace them with anything. It is outside the scope of this essay to make this point in further detail, but this brand of scepticism may be contrasted with another type found in certain circles of twentieth-century German philosophy. Hans Blumenberg, amongst others, practices a scepticism aimed at the “art of living” that explicitly accepts the necessity of this “art,” under the authorization of an anthropological thesis. The instinct deficiency of human beings means that they rely on such an “art” in order to adapt to an otherwise hostile environment (Blumenberg 8).

4 In this regard, we might note the moral code of Bachelard’s La Formation. Michel Serres aptly characterizes this as “a work aimed at moral reform.” Serres interprets Bachelard’s epistemological obstacles as the deadly sins of: “covetousness (realism), libido, lust (sexualization of nature), sloth (non-science at large), pride (will to power and narcissism).” He adds, however, that “Bachelard turned two deadly sins, envy and anger, into scientific virtues” (“La Réforme,” translation from Chimisso 149 n. 52).

5 Brenner and Gayon 8: “Foucault acknowledged his debt towards Canguilhem, who reversely considered that Foucault had accomplished his own program. He developed Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s program, giving it a broader and more systematic orientation.” We can see here how the idea of continuity between the projects is facilitated by the contextual approach of the history of ideas. The authors do not provide a reference for the cited view of Canguilhem on Foucault. The reference they provide for Foucault’s relation to Canguilhem is to the later French version of Foucault’s English-language Preface to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, also used by Gary Gutting and discussed in further detail later in this article.

6 There is an ambiguity here, which closely follows on the rhetoric of placing scientific activity before any philosophical commitment; the latter needs to be rooted out and examined in light of its suitability for the former. Does this approach to epistemology identify factors pertinent to these sciences themselves, or is the question of history really part of the (external) frame of their analysis? To be more specific, are we highlighting issues to do with the narration of science or those native to different scientific practices when notions like the epistemological threshold or the epistemological obstacle are used?

7 Han attempted to show that Foucault wavered between a mode of analysis that favoured the Kantian identification of the conditions of possibility for historical practices and an approach that sees the focus on these practices themselves as somehow resistant to the transcendental approach. For Han this is a characteristic tension across Foucault’s entire corpus (Michel Foucault). Her approach raised the question of the relevant theoretical sources for the analysis of Foucault’s writing. Gutting countered that the question of norms in Foucault was explicitly treated in the framework of French epistemology of science (i.e., Bachelard and Canguilhem in particular) and that in this tradition the Kantian approach was problematized and superseded. In short, Han’s approach imported the lineage of a philosophical problematic that was the explicit object of Foucault’s critical attention (Gutting, “Review of Béatrice Han”; cf. Han, “Reply to Gary Gutting”). The question posed here is whether this exclusive marshalling of particular intellectual traditions, whatever its heuristic merits, captures some of Foucault’s distinctive ambivalence about philosophy (e.g., Kant) or knowledge practices (e.g., French rationalism).

8 The rhetoric of adaptation to changed circumstances that both use has been overdone to the point of absurdity in some of Agamben’s writing; neither Bachelard’s nor Foucault’s position should be confused with such excessiveness. See Ross, “Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp,” for a comparative analysis of Agamben’s and Foucault’s positions on the topic of conceptual adaptation to change.

9 In his “Lecture One: 7 January 1976,” Foucault describes “subjugated knowledges” as “incapable of unanimity […] [it] owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (Power/Knowledge 82).

10 Foucault is critical of the way in which some practices of knowledge are authority bearing, but this does not amount to a disrespectful attitude to science. The ambivalence expressed here in Foucault’s scepticism regarding the capacity of knowledge to change anything, a feeling which he acknowledges runs counter to the evidence of the revolutionizing effects of advances in science, may be taken to parallel the perspective Bachelard has on the mind as both primitive and scientific. In each case there is a fundamental ambivalence of sentiment expressed.