Much of Foucault's work is different from projects that you would find in thinkers like Plato or Kant. Kant for example treats cognition as the product of certain universal categories that exist apriori. Chomsky is heavily influenced by this sort of thinking, and for both Kant and Chomsky the product of starting from those premises tends to be an essentialist view of human nature.
Rather than starting with axioms that lead to a sort of universal knowledge, Foucault did studies that could be considered more sociological in nature to show how relations of power affect the way that we experience ourselves and others, i.e., how it fashions our subjectivity. This is what he terms his "archaeological" method in articles like "What is Enlightenment?" http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault..... Examples of these studies include his works Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
At the very least, Foucault's studies show how some of the most significant ways in which we experience the world and ourselves are socially constructed, rather than essential. Identity then becomes political, rather than something that is distinctly our own. In some of his work, he also directly takes on thinkers like Kant in an attempt to show their work as historically situated rather than universal.
There's a lot of different ways to tackle this problem, obviously, so I'll just point you in one of many directions. You'd have to consult the specific thinker's works to get their exact takes.
Okay, so the concept of 'human nature' in general needs some more definition, like you've said. Here's maybe a better phrasing of the problem: "Do humans have some sort of _innate_ properties that are shared amongst all humans?" This phrasing calls back to an old debate in philosophy: essentialism. This is a question of ontology, in other words, what kinds of things are there in the world, and how do we categorize them?
An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties, and then any entity which has those properties is one of those things. In other words, let's say something like "You're a human as long as you have a name." This is a position which is essentialist. And that might be a workable definition.
A non-essentialist may come along and challenge your ontology, though. "Ships also have names, but they are clearly not human." You may agree with this, and so you need to revise your set of properties. "Humans are things that have names, and walk on two legs." The non-essentialist may respond, "birds have names, and when they walk, they use two legs. Your ontology is incorrect.
You see where this is going. Those who take a position against essentialism claim that this approach to categorization is a folly. It's fundamentally broken.. To give you a counterpoint, I generally agree with a process philosophy, which means that I equate identity with _doing_, not with _being_. An example of a process philosopher's standpoint on ontology: "You're a Rubyist if you write Ruby code." This kind of categorization is more useful, because over time, my identity can change. I might be a Rubyist for a while, but at some point, I wasn't. And I might stop being one in the future, too. An approached based on do-ing includes things like a time component that an essentialist position never can.
So, returning to the original question, no, the question of an inherent nature doesn't make any sense, and therefore, neither does 'human nature'. So where do we go from there? Well, any claim that's reliant on an appeal to human nature is incorrect. For example, "Humans are inherently greedy."
Anyway, that's a hastily-typed overview of a concept in a HN comment, but hopefully that helps you get the gist of it.
How is that different than arguing over definitions?
In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
> How is that different than arguing over definitions?
Definitions are very important. For example, one of the defining movements from second to third wave feminism was a move from essentialism. Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals. (this is of course not the only thing that separates them, just one example)
These kinds of questions are full of real-world implications. This stuff matters when it comes down to questions like healthcare, and if some procedure is covered, for example. Any law which affects people based on some criteria. That's a lot of laws.
> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species.
Absolutely, which is an other example of where this issue raises its head. Ontology is very relevant to many, many fields.
"Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals."
What a dishonest attempt at a characterization. You took the opporunity of the readers' unfamiliarity with a topic to interject your own subjective and vague opinion ("Second-wave essentiallism couldn't handle" -- what function does this phrase even serve beyond emotional release for the writer? What does it even mean?), without providing any links or citations to the extensive existing material that exists.
If you valued actual discourse, you would link to some article like Michelle Goldberg's "What is a Woman?"[0] in the New Yorker to provide some sort of context on the conflicting ideas of feminism and queer theory. But time and time again my fellow men who cheerlead for queer theory and identity politics bring nothing to the table but opportunistic, ingenuine rhetoric bordering on non-sequitur. I don't even need to claim anything about second-wave or modern radical feminists -- the transparently anti-intellectual liberal male digs his own grave.
As always, everything is presented at a certain level of abstraction. I was alluding to TERFs, whose 'e' stands for 'exclusionary,' ie, they exclude trans women from their idea of 'woman.' As with any summary, it of course glosses over details, and is clearly biased by who is speaking. It seems a bit strange to have to state that in a thread about Foucault. You are totally correct that my bias lies with queer theory.
I did understand who you were alluding to. But for those unfamiliar, are you implying that modern and historical feminists who have a conception of the oppression of women that you and some people in Queer Theroy and some tumblr users disagree with, coined the name "TERF", rather than the latter group? An uninformed reader would possibly take away that some number of feminists actually, non-ironically, take on the label "TERF". In my time in reading dozens of writers on these issues, which has been at least a year now, I've never seen this. So hopefully that wasn't the implication.
If one's confidence in one's own bias is such that one can inject it into discourse without feeling the need to cite any material which asserts ideas which they are biased "against" ("Second-wave essentiallism", whatever that entails), or even import material supporting their own claims, would one not mind if another was to comment with some reading material for those who may be interested in this thread? For example, the 2013 letter "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of 'Gender'" written by 37 second-wave and modern radical feminists [0], or the essay "SSCAB/DSCAB: Reconsidering the Conversation" written by a black radical feminist [1], or glosswitch's "Beauty and the cis" [2]? Surely it shouldn't change anything to point out that these writings exist.
I didn't make any claims about the origin of the term. Your history is accurate, to my knowledge.
> without feeling the need to cite any material
This isn't a dissertation. It's HN. Not every last thing needs a citation.
And no, I don't 'mind' at all. I'm very sympathetic to many arguments made here. People should read second-wave stuff. I just come down on a different side of them, personally.
> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
That assertion is a good illustration of the problem some Continental philosophers tried to address - what is a "species" and how is it defined? It's an arbitrary labeling we put on a collection of individuals that we perceive to have similarities.
This kind of thinking is exactly what lead Chomsky into the erroneous theories of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device. Studying real neurons in actual brains is what got linguistics out of the generative grammar dead-end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_Wars
From what angle? Is this question "How do we differentiate between species" or "what stops us from killing anyone" or "what makes human life more valuable, if it even is, than an animal's?"
People believe there's a dog-nature, just as much as they believe there's a human-nature. Regardless of the philosophical position they profess.
(It is part of our nature to have constraints keeping us from being dogs. Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.)
In your argument against human nature, you stated: "An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties". But that's seems a strawman definition in this context, because no one can even define a chair. Much less a human. Fortunately, people who believe in the concept of human nature (virtually everyone) don't need to sit around making futile constructivist definitions.
> Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.
Saying that there's no essential dog-nature does not inherently imply that one can become a dog.
> (virtually everyone)
Yes, Plato and Aristotle were essentialists, and you can't possibly over-state their influence on Western thought. But, I would argue that your 'everyone' includes many non-philosphers, who haven't necessarily considered this problem in the depth that philosophers have. That doesn't mean that essentialism is disproven or anything! But rightfully, in my mind anyway, a number of schools of thought take issue with it, just like any other position.
That said, actually, it depends on who you're talking to.
> that's seems a strawman definition in this context
It's not! That's the problem itself: you're absolutely right that defining what is a chair and what is human is very difficult.
And from my little understanding, because they don't believe there's such thing as a human nature, since society, and other things from our surrounding affect us, and the "nature" could change in a different context, which would imply it isn't some kind of force behind us.
You could approach the problem from the opposite direction. How do you define human nature, and what evidence do you put in favor of that definition and your assertions about it?
It's sad that Foucault laughs at it, because it's essentially an argument by authority (his own) and not based on anything with scientific substance.
Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Oddly enough, this is a common ploy used by cult leaders.
My disdain for the pomo and Crit Theory people has no limits - because while academics have persuaded themselves that Foucault etc are geniuses who offered the humanities profound insights into culture and power etc, they've also been completely marginalised and screwed over by neo-capitalism, and have offered no useful resistance to it.
Somehow I can't help wondering if the two are related - because the whole nub of Critical Theory is the utterly mistaken assumption that deconstruction and tentative subjectivity have political power, when in fact they're the opposite of political power, and offer neither a useful insight into how power really works, nor any effective strategy for resisting its excesses.
I'm sorry that you ineptly pin the blame on the victim re: neo-capitalism.
What you call "the history of ethology" hopefully comprises the blunders that at different points in history "the scientific establishment" made regarding the "nature" of a) black men, b) women, c) gay people, d) irish people, e) jewish people, f)... you get the idea.
These observations of "animal behavior" are both extremely unsophisticated, always failing to control for critical variables, and very tied up to what the society of the day wants the conclusions to be.
Even today, ignorant people go around talking about how "human nature is selfish". I think Foucualt's contributions were pretty great re: this precise discussion we're having over here. Certainly more important than the vast majority of ethological work out there.
If you want to challenge me on this, just answer my question: What is human nature, and what do you claim to know about it in 2015?
Do you think human nature might consistently include an interest in power, and a not-entirely-unrelated interest in sex?
Are you going to try to explain the remarkable consistency of these interests across all political systems and historical periods as a purely political phenomenon?
If so, why are there clearly analogous interests in many primates and other animals?
I say you're wrong - and challenge you to provide solid observational evidence to prove conclusively that social and political traditions generate these interests.
> Do you think human nature might consistently include an interest in power, and a not-entirely-unrelated interest in sex?
No, I do not think so. There are vast, vast numbers of people who opt to teach and nurse instead of gunning for leadership, who opt to do salaried engineering instead of management, and I don't see why the latter in each case have a better claim on our "nature" as a species.
What do you mean by "interest in sex"? Human nature seems to also have an "interest in food", that in places like america is exacerbated into an obesity epidemic, but doesn't seem to say anything super meaningful about our relationship to eating. Isaac Newton died a virgin, I guess he wasn't human? Gay men have no interest in reproduction... is their humanity in question?
You should read stuff like UBC's "WEIRD" study, or how women were believed to have bigger sexual appetite than men at various places in time, before going off about observations "across all political systems and historical periods".
You seem to be obliquely pushing some notion that we are more dominant than cooperative, which is pretty ignorant in a thread about Foucault and Chomsky.
> Human nature seems to also have an "interest in food"
Indeed. And sex. And status in herd hierarchies.
That was my point. But it doesn't stop there. I'd also include symbolic abstraction, myth-making and narrative logic (as an efficient but flawed heuristic for passing on knowledge), persistent shared memory, embodied metaphors as per Lakoff - and so on.
It seems to me - and maybe to a lot of the Internet - that humans spend a lot of time and energy on these things.
Other species spend a lot of time on some of them, but not all of them.
There may be a reason for the difference.
So I have issues with the suggestion that they're always evidence of pathological socialisation - or that writing impenetrable books and laughing at and condescending to anyone who disagrees with their content is likely to make that socialisation any less pathological, where it does exist.
> It's sad that Foucault laughs at it, because it's essentially an argument by authority (his own) and not based on anything with scientific substance.
> Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Or at least to a position where science is not a valid source of criticism.
If I understand correctly, poststructuralists say that all truth claims are about power, and only that, because objective truth cannot ever be determined. That leaves them free to make ever-more-blatant power plays in their own claims.
This is becoming a widely held belief within the humanities via Accelerationism[1]. If anybody's interested, I know folks in the Bay Area organizing events around these ideas.
