Many scholars have compared Michel Foucault to Friedrich Nietzsche, including Michel Foucault. Foucault has written papers on Nietzsche and talked about Nietzsche’s influence on his writing and philosophy in interviews. When Foucault talked about Nietzsche in an interview, he said that Nietzsche’s ideas can be used and abused. There is some contention between scholars on how much of an influence Nietzsche had on Foucault. Although some might argue that Foucault’s ideas are fundamentally based on Nietzschean ideas, I argue that Foucault’s faithfulness to Nietzsche’s ideas is only foundational because Foucault takes the basic structure of Nietzsche’s theories and builds on it with his own style with the exception of their views on punishment. …show more content…
There are many similarities between these two transformations. Noble morality and sovereign power in particular are very closely related. Both concepts demonstrate that society is hierarchical and that the people at the top hold the power and the influence. The nobility has the power to dictate what is good and bad within their society. The sovereign has all the power in the world to do whatever he chooses to anyone who even attempts to break a law, such as in the case of Damiens who only attempted to harm the sovereign. Damiens was not even successful, but the sovereign was able to order Damiens’ brutal public execution. Both the nobility and the sovereign asserted their dominance. Nietzsche and Foucault realized there was a fundamental shift in types of morality and power respectively. And the transition from one type to the other displayed a complete reversal of what the previous type of morality and power was like. Slave morality was purposefully the complete and total opposite of the noble morality because the people did not want there to be any resemblance to the previous system. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, while very different from sovereign power and could potentially be argued as the exact opposite of sovereign power, is not in the same realm as sovereign power. Disciplinary power is not central to the state or anyone in particular. It is the product of society. Disciplinary power is where Foucault is less faithful to Nietzsche and goes his own way with his theories on power. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche does not talk about some invisible force that is shaping and molding people’s bodies and behaviors, a force that is practically everywhere and once started basically impossible to stop. Foucault goes above and beyond the map that Nietzsche laid out. They are talking about very similar things,
Nietzsche begins his discussion of good and moral with an etymological assessment of the designations of “good” coined in various languages. He “found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation—that everywhere ‘noble,’ ‘aristocratic’ in the social sense, is the basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’… developed…” (Nietzsche 909). Instead of looking forward at the achievement for morality, Nietzsche looks backward, trying to find origins and causes of progression. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that strength implies morality, that superiority implies the good man. The powerful nobles, through pathos of difference, construed plebeians and slaves as bad, because of their inferiority in every sense of the word. From this concept of the pathos of difference was born the priestly morality, wherein the nobles were construed in an altogether different and less favorable light.
Nietzsche thought nobility was to see one’s self as the center and origin of value. He believed that people in power force common people into bidding their will, and those in charge are separated based on good or bad measures of their value. The rulers, or people in charge have master morality, the people who do their bidding have slave morality. Slave morality is how common people make their lives more bearable by using Christian ethics such as kindness and sympathy.
Shearing and Stenning's analysis in "From Panopticon to Disneyland” demonstrates Foucault's ideas concerning the disciplinary society. Foucault defined a disciplinary society as “A society characterized by increasing surveillance wherein citizens learn to constantly monitor themselves because they are being monitored. A society in which control over people is pervasive”. Shearing and Stenning’s article does this by illustrating to us how Disney goes about its day to day operations. An example is when exiting the parking lot to get on the monorail to go to the park the people on the train tell all guests to stay with their family for safety. However, this is really done to accomplish two things, one maintain family unity, and two to keep children with their parents so that if a child misbehaves the parents can discipline them instead of the park. “Thus, for example, the batching that keeps families together provides for family unity while at the same time ensuring that parents will be able to control their children” (Shearing and Stenning pg. 298). Foucault’s definition also states that control over people is pervasive or spread throughout. Disney’s way of controlling people is also pervasive, because every garden and fountain are not
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish. New York: Random House Inc, 1978. Print. 3 May 2014.
Nietzsche introduces the differences between what he names later in his first essay the "master morality" and "slave morality." The first master morality is the ideas of the nobles, including solders and other ruling classes. This he says is power deciding what good and bad is they see the qualities they possess such as physical strength, political power, over all better health and longer lives, monetary gains wealth and what they see as contentment, all these things are what they see as what is good, after all these are the things that set them apart. The nobles then see the di...
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
(Flynn 1996, 28) One important aspect of his analysis that distinguishes him from the predecessors is about power. According to Foucault, power is not one-centered, and one-sided which refers to a top to bottom imposition caused by political hierarchy. On the contrary, power is diffusive, which is assumed to be operate in micro-physics, should not be taken as a pejorative sense; contrarily it is a positive one as ‘every exercise of power is accompanied by or gives rise to resistance opens a space for possibility and freedom in any content’. (Flynn 1996, 35) Moreover, Foucault does not describe the power relation as one between the oppressor or the oppressed, rather he says that these power relations are interchangeable in different discourses. These power relations are infinite; therefore we cannot claim that there is an absolute oppressor or an absolute oppressed in these power relations.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense represents a deconstruction of the modern epistemological project. Instead of seeking for truth, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without such truth, and without a sense of longing for that truth. This revolutionary work of his is divided into two main sections. The first part deals with the question on what is truth? Here he discusses the implication of language to our acquisition of knowledge. The second part deals with the dual nature of man, i.e. the rational and the intuitive. He establishes that neither rational nor intuitive man is ever successful in their pursuit of knowledge due to our illusion of truth. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes that all we can claim to know are interpretations of truth and not truth itself.
Golder, B. 2009. Foucault, anti-humanism and human rights. Published online by the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Underdale, SA, 2009.
Problems with Foucault: Historical accuracy (empiricism vs. Structuralism)-- Thought and discourse as reality? Can we derive intentions from the consequences of behavior? Is a society without social control possible?
A comparison and contrast between two philosophers, they lived in different times and had divergent views. Although there was a semblance to be found in both, the struggle, and the effort. The parallel drawn here is between Marcus Aurelius and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some view Aurelius as a resemblance of Plato’s philosopher king and a man fit to rule. And rule he did, as emperor of Rome. Who, although not viewed unanimous favorable he was a favorite of many. Nietzsche was a Germany philosopher during the 19th century. Who famously said he was the last philosopher. Dramatically different times contribute to vastly different perspectives, this is accurate in both Aurelius and Nietzsche.
Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Ways of Reading. Fifth ed. Ed. David Barholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999, 312-342. Print.
Sarah Snyder Professor Feola Gov’t 416: Critical Theory Assignment #2 On Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” Michel Foucault may be regarded as the most influential twentieth-century philosopher on the history of systems of thought. His theories focus on the relationship between power and knowledge, and how such may be used as a form of social control through institutions in society. In “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Foucault addresses the development of the nineteenth-century penal regime, which completely transformed the operation of the traditional penal justice system.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Dante’s Inferno both exhibit Foucault’s idea of categorization and subjectification using “dividing practices.” (Rabinow 8) Foucault argued that people can rise to power using discourse, “Discourse has the ability to turn human beings into subjects by placing them into certain categories.” (Rabinow 8) These categories are then defined “according to their level of deviance from the acceptable norm.” (Rabinow 8) Some examples of such categories are the homosexual, the insane, the criminal and the uncivilized. (Rabinow 8). By the above method, called “dividing practices,” people can be manipulated by socially categorizing them and then comparing them to norms. In this way human beings are given both a social and a personal identity (Rabinow 8) and this is how superiority among human beings can be established.
Foucault wrote a book called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison explaining his thoughts on how he discipline should be taught. Discipline and Punish is a book about the emergence of the prison system. The conclusion of the book in relation to this subject matter is that the prison is an institution, the objective purpose of which is to produce criminality and recidivism. The system encompasses the movement that calls for reform of the prisons as an integral and permanent part. Foucault states that The more important general theme of the book is that of “discipline” in the penal sense, a specific historical form of power that was taken up by the state with professional soldiering in the 17th century, and spread widely across society, first via the panoptic prison, then via the division of labor in the factory and universal education. The purpose of discipline is to produce “docile bodies,” the individual movements of which can be controlled, and which in its turn involves the psychological monitoring and control of individuals, indeed which for Foucault produces individuals as