What do you Foucauldians make of this?
"There is no inertia in consciousness" (Sartre 1957:8).
[I'm hoping to get some refs/ideas for my following argument.]
"There is no inertia in consciousness" for Sartre because our actions are
always being pulled along by our responses to reality, meaning we are always
presented with a choice, "always" being a key word here, meaning that we
always have to respond, that reality presents us with options from which we
must always choose, and (the ringer) since we always have a choice then we
are always free, because freedom is stipulated as "having a choice"--this is
Sartre's idea of freedom? This could be circular logic? Sartre stipulates
freedom as "having a choice" (don't have a ref but I remember it from a
philosophy class, hope that's good enough) and then reasons that if you
always have a choice then you must always be free.
Foucault would with some brilliant historical example, which I can't do, so
I'll just say that a Foucauldian would counter with criticism on Sartre's
brand of "choice." What are we free to choose? The answer could be simple.
It could be that we are only ostensibly free in that the choices themselves
from which we "choose" are determined, and so in the end we are not so free
as Sartre claims.
Is Sartre perverse or can a philosopher intentionally define freedom as the
fact of always having to choose? "Having" is the key word here. If all we
can ever do is respond to some stimuli, i.e., respond to a situation from
which we must choose, then how can we be truly free when reality has up
jumping through one of its hoops?
But the above is assuming--in "reality has us jumping through hoops"--that
we are puppets jumping through hoops, being led around by the nose with the
very constructions of reality hoisted on us by a, possibly Marxist (?),
social determinism in which there's a one to one correspondence between
representation and reality, which in a round aboutly sinister way has lead
us right back to structuralism, not quite Foucauldian theory.
So to avoid this round trip contradiction, we could talk about Foucauldian
power. Power for Foucault, please someone elaborate for me here, is
productive and always creates its own resistance due to the fact power
creates the options from which people choose--are we back at Sartre?
Foucault, as I understand, came along in the 60s and laid waste to Sartrean
"freedom"? How?
m
"There is no inertia in consciousness" (Sartre 1957:8).
[I'm hoping to get some refs/ideas for my following argument.]
"There is no inertia in consciousness" for Sartre because our actions are
always being pulled along by our responses to reality, meaning we are always
presented with a choice, "always" being a key word here, meaning that we
always have to respond, that reality presents us with options from which we
must always choose, and (the ringer) since we always have a choice then we
are always free, because freedom is stipulated as "having a choice"--this is
Sartre's idea of freedom? This could be circular logic? Sartre stipulates
freedom as "having a choice" (don't have a ref but I remember it from a
philosophy class, hope that's good enough) and then reasons that if you
always have a choice then you must always be free.
Foucault would with some brilliant historical example, which I can't do, so
I'll just say that a Foucauldian would counter with criticism on Sartre's
brand of "choice." What are we free to choose? The answer could be simple.
It could be that we are only ostensibly free in that the choices themselves
from which we "choose" are determined, and so in the end we are not so free
as Sartre claims.
Is Sartre perverse or can a philosopher intentionally define freedom as the
fact of always having to choose? "Having" is the key word here. If all we
can ever do is respond to some stimuli, i.e., respond to a situation from
which we must choose, then how can we be truly free when reality has up
jumping through one of its hoops?
But the above is assuming--in "reality has us jumping through hoops"--that
we are puppets jumping through hoops, being led around by the nose with the
very constructions of reality hoisted on us by a, possibly Marxist (?),
social determinism in which there's a one to one correspondence between
representation and reality, which in a round aboutly sinister way has lead
us right back to structuralism, not quite Foucauldian theory.
So to avoid this round trip contradiction, we could talk about Foucauldian
power. Power for Foucault, please someone elaborate for me here, is
productive and always creates its own resistance due to the fact power
creates the options from which people choose--are we back at Sartre?
Foucault, as I understand, came along in the 60s and laid waste to Sartrean
"freedom"? How?
m