Foucault's cartesian meditations

International Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 41-59

  McGushin, Edward F ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77951566139     PISSN: 00190365     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/ipq200545163     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 193. From here on references to this volume will be made as "Descartes I, p.#." Volume II will be cited as "Descartes II, p.#."
2. Descartes II, pp. 193-94
3. Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 336, p. 459 n 149
4. Susan Bordo's The Flight to Objectivity is an excellent attempt to re-animate the energy of Descartes's text (The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture [Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1987])
5. Reading her essays has helped me understand these texts in a different light - in particular I am very interested in her discussion of the development of sensory capacity as well as her appreciation of the radical and real nature of "epistemic anxiety." My approach however is quite different from hers. Bordo makes use of "the psychological (and often psychoanalytic) categories of 'anxiety,' 'dread,' 'denial,' 'reaction-formation,' and 'escape'" in order to study both Descartes's motivations and the cultural mood within which his work is situated Susan Bordo's The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture [ibid, pp. 4-5)
6. Walter J. Stohrer, "Descartes and Ignatius Loyola: La Flèche and Manresa Revisited," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979) 11-27 at p. 12
7. Walter J. Stohrer, Journal of the History of Philosophy Ibid., p. 16
8. Bradley Rubidge, "Descartes's Meditations and Devotional Meditations," Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990) 27-49 at p. 27
9. Bradley Rubidge, Journal of the History of Ideas Ibid., p. 27
10. There are two main sources for Foucault's understanding of the Meditations. First is an essay that appeared in 1972, Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu in Dits et Ecrits, Vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), #102, pp. 245-67
11. also in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, 3 vols. (New York: The New Press, 1998)
12. My citations are to the English translation, hereafter abbreviated as "My Body." This essay was written as a rebuttal to Derrida's famous deconstruction of Histoire de la folie. See Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978) pp. 31-63
13. Derrida responds to the original, 1961 text, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Paris: Plon, 1961). Even apart from this debate, Foucault's essay is remarkable for the interpretation of Descartes it puts forward. Foucault proposes that Descartes's Meditations must be read not merely as an argument proceeding according to logical reasoning, but also, and especially at certain points of its progression, as an "exercise," a work or practice. The second source that I will draw on is Foucault's lecture course at the Collège de France in 1982, L'hermeneutique du sujet. The purpose of this course is two-fold. On the one hand, Foucault attempts to reconceive ancient philosophy as a practice of spiritual exercise, as a way of living rather than as aproject of theoretical system-building. Second, he outlines an argument about the historical transformation through which philosophy loses its character as a spiritual exercise and becomes, instead, a primarily theoretical activity. He makes that claim that Descartes's Meditations exist in a sense at the hinge of these two different experiences of the practice of philosophy
14. See Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002)
15. In particular, in the chapter entitled, "Un dialogue interrumpu avec Michel Foucault: Convergences divergences," Hadot reflects on Foucault's appropriation of the notion of spiritual exercises that is developed in the essay, Exercices spirituels
16. Foucault's interpretations of ancient philosophy appear in his lecture courses at the College from 1982-1984 and at Berkeley in 1983. Of the courses at the College only one has yet been published, L'Hermeneutique du sujet: cours du Collège de France 1982 (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil: 2001; from here on, CdF82)
17. The Berkeley is published under the title, Fearless Speech (SemioText(e), 2002)
18. See Hadot, Exercices spirituels
19. in particular, the chapter entitled, "Exercices spirituels antiques et 'philosophie chrétienne.'"
20. CdF82, pp. 16-17
21. The full title of the Meditations is: Meditations on First Philosophy in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul and body
22. For an example of this reading see Laurence Lampert's thorough and convincing, Nietzsche and Modern Times: a Study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993). The approach that I am taking, following the method of Foucault, skirts around questions concerning the intentions of the author or even to an extent those of the intended audience. Rather, for Foucault, and for me in this paper, what is of interest is the discursive structure of the Meditations. The point is not to prove that the Meditations recount, for example, the exercises that Descartes may have actually performed in order to arrive at certainty. Nor is it to prove that his readers would have necessarily followed the Meditations as a guide through a spiritual exercise. Rather, what is at issue is to show that the discursive structure of the "spiritual model" orders the composition of the text. Whether the author was ironic or in earnest, the text itself takes the form of a spiritual exercise. The principal character in this text is "Descartes"; the text is written in the first person. Therefore, I will continue to speak as if Descartes actually performs or performed these exercises, when in essence it is "Descartes," the "fictional" character in the text, who recounts his experience of the meditational exercise. While showing that the Meditations are structured according to the model of the spiritual exercise, and therefore imply a unique relationship between the subject and the truth, this does not prove that either Descartes or perhaps much of his audience would have practiced those exercises, but it does prove that such a structure was in fact an actual possibility for a philosophical text. In other words, even if we take Descartes to be writing ironically in order to appease the religious authorities, we still have to face the fact that his text functions according to a certain procedure. The structure of the text itself calls for a certain kind of reading. In order to understand the text, then, we have to understand and follow the procedures that structure its composition. By failing to do so, by reducing the text to a certain procedure imposed upon it, or avoiding to take account of its operation and instead explaining it by the intentions of the author or the "times," we may fail to see the full meaning of the text
23. Descartes Ibid., p. 8
24. "My Body," p. 405
25. The notion that the spiritual exercise or meditation is a "genre" of philosophical writing comes from Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, "The Structure of Descartes's Meditations," in Essays on Descartes's Meditations, ed. Rorty (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-20. See Rubidge's discussion of this essay (Rubidge, pp. 37-41)
26. Foucault's reading of Descartes is in fact quite subtle. He does not attempt to argue that the Meditations, or philosophical concepts in general, determine history and culture, but rather that they are involved in complex relations with them. Therefore, while it is tempting to blame our modern philosophical situation on Descartes, Foucault complicates this picture. It is, of course, in Descartes's Meditations that philosophy takes on its modern form in the cogito ergo sum. However, Foucault's interpretation will show that our current situation is less a matter of Descartes's conceptualization of the cogito than of the proliferation and elaboration of various techniques and institutions of power and knowledge that frame our concern for who we are today
27. "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 251-52