Foucault and Plato’s Cave

They seem so similar and are yet at bottom so different. For a long time, I had my prejudices against Foucault: his writing style (at least in translation) but above all I tend to read a thinker’s philosophy in light of his biography – which Foucault himself encourages everyone to do: “One must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.” In Foucault’s case, I cannot view the way he lived with anything except pity. If that makes me seem intolerant or worse, I must accept that.

     But for some time now I have been struck by the way he in his writing absolutely nails down certain truths in an unforgettable way; I experience things constantly that bring him to mind; and I do see the world differently having thought his thoughts. And I am struck by how similar to Plato are large veins of this post-philosopher. Just take a couple of quotes ripped out of context: 

 

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. 

 

All teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power.

 

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. 

 

Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it.

 

Do I think these descriptions are insightful? Absolutely. Do I think they are true? Depends on how the key concepts – truth, knowledge, and power – are understood. I think of Plato’s Cave, and all apply. In the Cave truth and knowledge are conditioned by, in a sense are manufactured by, power. And power is defuse, unclear. Some of the constructions projected against the wall of the Cave – the screen – are consciously designed to hide the power of the ruling social class. 

     The way these and other constructions are disseminated in used are put in the service of power in the sense the individuals reflect the striving for power, a striving almost innate to a society in which the self is a product of constructions without any true Ideas to measure them by. What Schopenhauer and Nietzsche believed the basic (metaphysical) principle of reality – the will-to-life or the will-to-power – is natural only when one steps back and contemplates social reality in the Cave, and then sees that as an expression of nature, of reality. The conscious life orients itself to power because it lacks a Northern Star. 

    Well, love can penetrate the darkness of the Cave and its constructed truths, its constructed regimes of knowledge. We know God’s love even during the darkest night through the light of the stars, a light that doesn’t seem to come from the Cave precisely because it has nothing to do with power or ego-promotion or class-elevation. That we live in a Cave is itself a view from inside the Cave. The stars – the concept ‘star’ – is a social construction of reality and thus belongs to the Cave only insofar as you don’t see the wonder in the sky, as those who see God’s love in the light of the stars do. But of course, that love can be socially constructed to be part of the Cave world too – as we know, for example, from Church history. 

      Where I think Plato and Foucault differ, radically differ, is here: Plato would always put quotation marks around “truth” and “knowledge” as used by Foucault, as used in the Cave. Plato believed, as do I, that reality transcends our socially constructed reality of Cave and Screen. Beauty, love, truth – all these may be constructed and absorbed by the society of the Cave – indeed must be for there to be a Cave at all; the foundation of the Cave is built from constructions of the central metaphysical ideas. For Foucault, there is only Cave; Cave is the whole of human reality, and the only temporary escape is negative: to rebel in whatever way against the Cave.

  I would differ from both Plato and Foucault in that I believe some Cave shadows can in happy circumstances be the shadows of something real and good. The further away you get from power, the more likely to find shadows of what is real and good and the less likely that the shadows are of fantasies that prop up ego power.

       To step back from the Cave, from life, as did Foucault but also Marx, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and interpret (conceptualize) the deepest principle of the life of the individual in society as involving some principle of power, of little centers of power that define themselves and ultimately compete against other centers of power, that define society, nature, and reality as such in terms of this defuse and underlying competition – those interpretations are judged by each of us according to our own experience of life in the Cave, of life in this interpreted world. But as to whether the Cave is the sum of reality – or not: all these wonderful thinkers (except Schopenhauer) just assume that reality is a human construction, nothing more; Schopenhauer thought the logic of the Cave expressed a metaphysical principle; Nietzsche and Foucault just assume any idea of a reality beyond the Cave was wishful thinking in the service of power.

        They might be right but would have to be able to get out of the Cave to prove it. They don’t try. Where I part company with Foucault and side with Plato is in this:  reality, logically, conceptually, cannot be reducible to our self-elevating ideas of it, or the ideas of it that elevate groups of power elites. That much of experience is determined by such ideas of reality I do not dispute.  But even if it is impossible to offer definitive, objective proof that I am right to believe that reality is bigger than the Cave – and everyone must speak personally here – I know in my heart that there is beauty that breaks the heart; there is love that makes the bullshit of Cave and the screen bearable; there is injustice in the world and the rare occurrence of justice is intensely beautiful; there is truth beyond ideology critique. As dragged down by social constructions of reality and self that I in fact am, my heart knows more. Perhaps in some moments, Foucault did too.

 

. . .

 

Constructed and intimate selves. Very little moves me more than the knowledge that a person, particularly women I have known, has been constructed by the fashion industry, by the reduction of human worth to social worth, the reduction of social worth to sex appeal, and the reduction of sex appeal to a very physical ideal of the taut body of a thirteen-year-old girl, hairless, with long legs, thin hips, and firm, protruding breasts. I can’t imagine any crueler way to damage the soul of women (and thus of men), despite any fleeting moments of heightened pleasure when they get their bodies to approach this procrustean ideal and get some brainwashed man to gaze at it, lust over it, or even find her ‘love-able’ because of it. (The female image constructed by the pornographer is soul-destroying.)

       And yet I have been moved when confronted by some accoutrement or accessory of a woman bought from the fashion industry to enslave herself to its standards. It is as though some of her own self has passed into these objects (chains) and transformed them into something human, into some part of her. Like she has not only been objectified and degraded, but she has at the same time humanized the very instruments of her subjugation. I don’t know whether this is pity, a kind of compassion, or another kind of love. Perhaps it is sentimentality I should purge. 

       In any case, I find it strange. This little personal experience is also the kind of thing that flows into concept formation. Concept formation is a very complex, complexly human miracle, though you wouldn’t know that if you studied semantics or mainstream academic philosophy.