Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Wilber's View
Foucault gets a genuinely serious hearing in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality — closer, critical engagement than the near-hagiography given to Plotinus, but far warmer than the pre/trans-fallacy treatment of Campbell. Wilber's Foucault is centrally the theorist of "the subject" — Foucault's own gloss (quoted directly) is that his life's work was never really about power as such but about the subject, "the general theme of my research." Wilber uses two of Foucault's specific arguments almost without qualification: the diagnosis of the "sciences of man" as pseudo-sciences that reduce human beings to objects of information rather than subjects in communication (what Foucault called the birth of "the Age of Man"), and the account of biopower — modernity's obsessive turn toward sexuality and the body as objects of knowledge and control, developed at length in ch. 13 in connection with Wilber's own account of the Ego's repression of the biosphere.
The most striking move Wilber makes with Foucault is recruiting him as an ally of Habermas — two thinkers usually read as opposed (Foucault the poststructuralist skeptic of grand narratives, Habermas the defender of a critical theory of communicative reason) turn out, on Wilber's reading, to agree completely that instrumental reason's "objectifying gaze" is the central pathology of modernity. Wilber is also careful to track Foucault's own self-correction: the early "archaeological" Foucault, who bracketed both truth and meaning to describe discourse as pure systematic behavior, later recanted that approach as "arrogant" and folded meaning back in. The larger critique of Foucault that Wilber develops elsewhere — postmodern antifoundationalism collapsing, if pushed too far, into its own kind of "flatland" — is present in the book but less concentrated than the sympathetic material excerpted here.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
Not only was it the central problem of the Enlightenment and the Romantic-Idealist rebellion, it has continued to be a central, often the central, topic in theorists from Habermas to Foucault to Taylor. (Foucault, for example, said, "The goal of my work during the last twenty years… has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.")
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
These objectifying and systematic "sciences of man" are in fact pseudo-sciences, according to both Foucault and Habermas, and pseudo-sciences driven by self-aggrandizing power.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
And thus was born what Foucault called "the Age of Man"—the merely "objective" study of humans. And in a beautiful phrase that would summarize the net effect of the entire Enlightenment paradigm… Foucault points out that with the "Age of Man," humans became "the object of information, never the subject in communication."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
As Foucault ably demonstrates, the rise of modernity was marked, not so much by a repression of sexuality… as by an obsession with sexuality… Never, says Foucault, had an epoch's discourse been so dominated by sexuality in so many domains. "Never, it seems, had so much attention been focused on every aspect of the body and every dimension of its sexuality. Sex became the object of a major investment of signification, of power, and of knowledge."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
(Foucault, in his reductionistic archaeology phase, actually proceeded in just this manner, bracketing both the truth and the meaning of linguistic statements, and just reported their systematic behavior, which caused quite an uproar. He later recanted and labeled the exclusive use of that approach "arrogant." But it is an arrogance that all such "happy positivism" is prone to.)
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4
Foucault, like all relativists, had exempted himself from the very criteria he aggressively applied to others. He was making an extensive series of truth claims that denied all truth claims (except his own privileged stance), and thus his position, as critics from Habermas to Taylor pointed out, was profoundly incoherent.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1
