Understanding the Present Moment #4 (Michel Foucault)

if you watch him on youtube he's a highly articulate man obviously and there's just something mesmerizing about foucault welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vott the host and the senior publishing director today we wrap up our four-part series of discussions looking at four massively influential figures who together help explain our present moment how we arrived at where we are today today's final figure is michel foucault perhaps the least known of the four but he might be the one with the greatest direct impact on the way that many in our culture think today before we get to foucault though i welcome bishop baron filming now from his new diocese in minnesota bishop baron good to see you thanks brandon always good to see you it's still um very warm here in minnesota as i arrive it's the summertime and it's uh it's midwestern you know it's heat and humidity so i've not been used to that out in california well we got a few new books that have just been released by word on fire i always love to mention them here on the show i'll mention two of them now we'll talk about the third one at the end of the episode um the two i want to mention go together because they're both about thomas aquinas i'm holding them up here the first one is thomas aquinas spiritual master this is a book by by you um you wrote this a while ago but then it's been updated a lot of new things added including footnotes and an index what is this book about tell us about it that book is a um somewhat more popular version of the first half of my doctoral paper so when i wrote that many years ago and you know very high academic sort of jargon i wanted to make it more accessible and the argument of my dissertation in many ways was that aquinas is not to be read simply as an abstract philosopher but he's someone who's deeply in love with the lord and his christology is perhaps the most important element but often overlooked and so what i do in that book is i take the the great doctrines or teachings of aquinas and show how they're meant to draw someone finally into a christ-like stance um they have a spiritual and moral implication now in my doctoral paper i lay that out in in great you know detail and with more technical language i do it more accessibly uh in this book so it was the first book i wrote when i got back from my doctoral studies it would have been like i was writing it probably 1993 94 or something like that so again beautiful new edition hard cover um great book yeah it looks nice this one along with the second one are both part of our new word on fire academic imprint we're trying to publish more serious higher level books on theology in the spiritual life this second one is titled thomas aquinas selected commentaries on the new testament and it's edited by our own jason paone who is the editor of word on fire academic it's a big thick book i think it's runs 400 plus pages it's a selective anthology of thomas aquinas's new testament commentary so aquinas wasn't just a philosopher he was a biblical theologian and wrote a lot about the bible it's uh organized to reflect especially the centrality of christ and his commentary so that was kind of our organizing principle so the cool thing is that right now if you buy bishop baron's book thomas aquinas spiritual master you get the second book for free so we normally are going to sell this for 30 bucks eventually but you get it for free when you order bishop baron's book so i'll include a link to both of those books and the show notes but you can find out more at wordonfire.org okay let us turn now to the fourth and final discussion in our series on understanding the present moment again this series was born of a talk you gave a couple years ago titled ideas have consequences the philosophers who shaped our time that talk was hugely popular i think it's got almost a million views now and so we wanted my great surprise i must say yeah i agree it's it i never expected that talk to be popular again i always think we've mentioned this in the past how early on you were advised by media consultants keep it short keep it punchy lower level people don't want long in-depth talks and here you are talking high-level philosophy for an hour to a million people yeah um okay so let's turn to foucault we've talked about marks we've talked about nietzsche we've talked about sartre michel foucault before we get to his main ideas who was this guy what should we know about michelle foucault yeah you know my memory brandon when i was a student in paris i arrived there in 1989 and foucault died in 1984 so just five years before and you know paris is famous for restaurants and bookstores you go around paris every block has got a little restaurant with great food and a bookstore you know they love to feed the body and feed the mind well my memory is at practically every bookstore had a photograph of michelle foucault kind of looking out at you you know um he's very distinctive looking guy he had a bald head and kind of owlish glasses and he was like the embodiment of the french public intellectual because the french you know to their credit they treat their intellectuals a bit like rock stars they're the way we might treat sports figures and you know foucault wrote at a super high abstract level yet some of his books became bestsellers um anyway that's my memory of foucault when when i first arrived in paris he's born in 1926 i think it was so you know he'd be like my mother's generation uh died pretty young he's only 58 when he died uh he went through that the that great parisian uh academic system i talked about last time in regard to sartre leixar went to the ecole normale superior which is like the creme de la creme of french academic life it was a few blocks away from where i lived in paris i used to go buy it all the time and it's on the the olm street is where you find the echo no foucault went there and then like sarah too he commences a career as a as a teacher he spent a little time in uppsala up in sweden he was there on the on the philosophical faculty he then begins to write in the in the 60s and 70s these extraordinary texts that were on issues such as the prison system and one is called surveillance and punishment he has a book on foley the phrase madness uh what constitutes madness how is that determined by society then one of his last studies is the history of sexuality what are the changing views about the morality of sex and these books um you know had quite an impact i'd say on on french cultural life he dies as i say relatively young in 1984 but i've said brandon i think of all the people we looked at the most influential on the postmodern woke uh mentality is michel foucault and i think in many ways he sums up the three figures we looked at at marx and nietzsche and sartre and kind of gives them an expression that then makes his way into um american intellectual life so foucault had a big impact on the american universities and you know at first it probably stayed in faculty lounges or it stayed in high-level classrooms but in time it's trickled down into the wider culture and i do think if you like wokism then michelle fuco's your guy if you don't like it he's the one that you should be blaming i think um so whatever you say about a massively impactful figure foucault is notoriously complicated i think beginners to his writing quickly get overwhelmed and find it obscure and difficult um but i want to talk about some of his major ideas and some of his his methods one of his methods was to traffic in what what he might call the archaeology of ideas what does this mean yeah think of an archaeological dig where you know you're looking at what's on the surface but then you're you're digging down to the various levels of a city and and let's say or like you're remember in rome at san clemente that great church and then they've dug down underneath they found all kinds of earlier churches and even going back to pre-christian times and so on so that's the image i think he has in mind that you're looking at something on the surface today so there's something some an institution there's a way of thinking away behaving it's oh yeah there it is you know that makes sense but now dig down underneath it look at earlier forms of it go way back go back centuries now how do people uh inhabit that space intellectually sort of take his his famous examples um punishment the prison systems who gets punished and why what's considered criminal behavior and why and we say well you know this this and that and for these reasons okay but now dig down do your archaeology and what will you find well in other ages those things weren't considered crimes those things weren't punished or other things that we now say oh that's perfectly fine those were severely punished maybe the best example would be a heresy go back to you know our hero thomas aquinas i mean one of the greatest intellectuals in the west took it for granted that a heretic should be publicly uh killed you know and aquinas is no you know barbaric figure on the contrary he was the leading intellectual of his time thomas more you know one of my heroes too would have taken for granted that a heretic should be burned at the stake in a public place um foucault was very interested in that why today we would say no that's horrific you know even if we were to say yeah that guy's a heretic i'm not going to recommend i burn him at the stake in a public place right so he's interested in what happened what shifted around what does that reveal now do other examples madness you know what's considered madness in one era and and that guy needs to be put away you know and then today what's considered madness where that person needs to be put away and they might be very different depending on on the society and so on or then most famously maybe the last study he did on sexuality so we say oh you know there is that's the way people should behave sexually and sure that makes sense and that's the right way but yet go way back as he did like to the pre-christian times to classical uh the classical world you'd find entirely different sexual mores you know who are the people that gave us the natural law so we'd say yeah natural law philosophy that we follow in terms of sexual ethics well the ancient greeks did but yet it seems pretty clear that that ancient greeks thought it was okay for an older man to have sex with it with a younger man that was sort of just part of the way things happen they did think there were bad expressions of sexuality but they were for very different reasons than we we would offer today okay so that's the kind of thing foucault is very interested in is when you dig down and then what does he find and this is where nietzsche comes in very strongly he's i think hugely impacted by nietzsche power plays of power who's in charge of the society and how are they how are they structuring society in such a way as to maintain themselves in power that becomes a major preoccupation of michel foucault and then here's an interesting distinction brandon um if i get his language right there's like coercive power which is very obvious so i'm i'm going to threaten you you know i'm going to fire you or i'm going to threaten you with prison or threaten you with death that's coercive power but he's more interested in what he calls i think it's normalizing power meaning all those ways that subtly within a society we structure things in such a way that people are they're going to behave a certain way you know we just we just make it so that yeah they want to behave that way but in point of fact it's powerful people within that society have so structured the operation that they get people to do what they want and to think the way they want them to think so foucault wants to do the archaeology and then find who are the people that were kind of running the society and what did they want and how are they controlling people through uh forms of discourse through ideology through certain cultural practices now i i hope i'm just doing a very quick sort of uh overview of it but i think you probably can hear a lot of the rhetoric of of the of the woke thing today right so hey here's the other way she behaved yeah but wait a minute you're you're a white man who's part of a power structure that's patriarchal and why should i be listening to you and you've set this thing up so that your people are going to have an easier go than my people right so that's how foucault's thinking i think has come into uh the operation today but he did you know to his credit he was not a superficial guy and did very serious kind of research into the different layers hoping to uncover the plays of power that were operative at given moments maybe the central theme of foucault's philosophy you've hinted at it just a couple moments ago is the relationship between knowledge and power or to use right his jargon modes of discourse what's yes what's he getting at here yeah i think that's a good way to to sum it up um because he modes of discourse which means the way we talk about things the way we argue the way we present our ideologies can seem very innocent you know yeah i'm just here thinking the thing through and coming to my conclusions foucault is like the great masters of suspicion you know recur used that language to describe marx and and freud yeah i know that's what's going on on the surface but what's really going on is something else so i know that that discourse you're using and that argument you're making just seems yeah very rational and commonsensical and obvious but in fact it's serving this often hidden uh power structure think here of marx right substructure superstructure i think that's where marx influences foucault so marx's say yeah on the surface there's religion and there's the army and there's politics there's the arts and you know and they seem innocent enough and and they would all justify themselves in obvious ways but then mark says yeah but deep down what's really going on is some kind of economic exploitation right and these things are just protecting the economic powers or sigmund freud there's someone behaving you know yeah that makes sense on the surface that yeah i understand what he's doing no no what's really going on is this guy's acting out some repressed sexuality you know so they they tend to play the marxist superstructure substructure game and i think foucault comes into that picture too yeah there's the way we organize our lives sexually we organize our our prison system here's how we organize the process by which we institutionalize people etc and it all seems you know rational and innocent no no look down deep do a little archaeology there and you're going to find there's some power structure in place you know it's funny brandon but i was i know you're you're very active in um in the chesterton school and founding a chester school and i think he is a other day you sent me this beautiful picture of the books you know that you're recommending right for the kids and they're all these wonderful the great the great books right and look you and i we love the great books i i was raised on them and the great books go back to someone like mortimer adler early part of the 20th century who determined these are the great books well if you're freud or marx or michel foucault what do you begin to say you say okay why did mortimer adler choose those books and mormon adler who's a white guy he's a jew who had become a marxist and then became an ardent christian so what's going on there what's his agenda you know what is he trying to to pull here why would why would he think these are the great books and therefore the other ones aren't so great you know what i'm saying and you can hear this the way the woke mentality goes but it's coming out i think of this foucaulian suspicion of so let's say in in your case well brandon vaught is so he's suggesting me plato and aristotle and aquinas and well okay but who is this brandon vaugh fella and what does he want and and well he's a white guy isn't he and he's got this certain economic background and he's coming out of a deeply catholic perspective and and how come all the people he's recommending are white and how come they're all europeans and you know so that manner of thinking i think is very conditioned by these people we've been looking at and especially foucault i can't resist at this point asking you to briefly share your encounter with mortimer adler now that you brought his name up which is always from even one of the funniest bishop baron stories it's a word story i was a kid and i was writing my master's thesis at catholic u and i was writing on karl marx and not because i was some some ardent marxist i wasn't i i was trained in the classical tradition but i wanted to learn a contemporary or more modern thinker so there was a professor i liked who knew that stuff so i was i was writing on marks so i was there it must have been a summer break or something i was home in chicago and i i had bought this commentary book on on marx and in the store that day was mortimer adler and i knew oh there's more rattler you know and he was signing so he had just written remember he wrote a lot of popular books toward the end of his career he was signing one of those and just stupidly naively i get in line and i went up to him and i'm a kid i didn't have any money to buy his book and i said you know i wonder would you be willing to autograph this book and it was a book on marxism you know and he looked at me like what is this a joke and he said should i sign a karl marx or mortimer adler and i said morgan radler please so yeah that's the one time i met him i'm sure he was he was rather unimpressed by me okay let's get back to foucault um i i want to ask about the connection between foucault and one of the other four influential figures we've been discussing namely friedrich nietzsche um both of them focus a lot on power uh power just talked about foucault's relationship between knowledge and power but we got nietzsche's will to power how do these two conceptions coincide yeah i think foucault represents a kind of refinement of nietzsche there i think he's very niche in in stressing power if you bracketed objective value if you say look there you know there really isn't some pure objective truth in regard to sex or to punishment or who's who's crazy and who isn't that his archaeology revealed to him well there's no nothing objectively the case it's just you know shifting uh cultural forms right and different plays of power so therefore the really interesting question is who's got power and how are they exercising it and why who's in who's out where i think nietzsche you've got a kind of valorization of the will to power i think in foucault he's suspicious of power plays he's he's not saying like hey great off you go you know just will the power buddy i mean he's saying wait a minute who in this situation is pulling the levers and and why and he's kind of you know i use that image before the wizard of oz pulling back the curtain on the wizard of oz you know i know these things look very impressive but they're actually just this bozo behind the curtain pulling levers and i think his philosophy it's like mark's that way he's trying to pull the curtain back on the the somewhat questionable forces that are in fact operating our society so i'd say it's a kind of refinement of nature that way you've pointed out how a lot of today's policing of language of the way we talk can be traced back to foucault so think of things like microaggressions trigger warnings disguise sexism hidden racism homophobia transphobia how much of this stems from foucault's understanding of language yeah and it's interesting question brandon to ask how he'd respond to that if he were alive i don't know but but i think there's um there's a lot of inspiration from foucault behind those moves because they're born of suspicion um why am i aggressed well because i know you're making this argument that just seems very you know objective and and rational but in fact what's going on is you're harming me you're excluding me you're you're putting me down and go back to that example that i used of you know the great books well then the natural reaction of people say well what do you mean i guess my book isn't great i guess and the great books all seem to be written by by white european males and so i guess that means if i'm a you know i'm a latino latina woman of color then i i guess i don't qualify to write a great book you know so that instinct to look behind the surface to what are the power plays that's a fucoian move now has it run a muck in our society i would say yes you know to anticipate your question about that what did foucault get right i think he got actually a lot of things right but is it foucault run amok today like where there's such suspicion of everyone's claim to anything they're like okay i'm sorry aquinas is a dead white male but i still think he's right you know about whatever or yes i know plato was a white european male but he was right about a lot of things i know shakespeare you know et cetera so i i think there is a co-ism run amok that we see in the wokism today you've said in some ways i think you said this at the beginning of today's conversation that it foucault represents the summing up of all the figures we've looked at in this series marx nietzsche sargon how is that so yeah i think mark's maybe substructure superstructure nietzsche is the power stuff sartre is the is the self-invention um you know culture and the sort of bracketing of objective moral norms etc i think he's got all that in him but it was the particular focus he had that made him i think kind of a mesmerizing thinker for a lot of people of his generation i think part was the way he looked and if you watch him on youtube he's a highly articulate man obviously and there's just something mesmerizing about foucault and um you know as i suggest brandon and you've asked this before like what do these people get right uh there is a lot right there and and i think the archaeology of knowledge is is not a bad thing to do uh when we get a little bit too smug or a little bit too cocky or self-confident about well that's the way it is and that's so that's right and that's wrong and that's true and that's false well yeah i mean i i've been the great advocate over many years of you know objective moral and epistemic values and all that but you know can we be maybe a bit more modest about the claims we make and maybe a little more suspicious see maybe classical people like ourselves need to be a little more suspicious of you know what are power plays going on and what's really behind that language you know i'll confess i i find challenging uh foucault's later work on sexuality when you look back as i say it the very people that gave us the natural law morality you know it's clear in the platonic dialogues you know that uh sex between an older man and a younger man was kind of taken for granted by the the leading figures in the society well how do we how do we deal with that you know and i think foucault raises some of those those questions in ways that maybe make us think uh a little harder about these things uh and again that's not to embrace some kind of cultural relativism but you know i think it's okay when we get challenged or or that issue of um who's insane and who isn't like why don't we burn heretics of the state you and i both love thomas moore and thomas aquinas the brilliant men good good saintly men who both took that for granted and now we'd see that as abhorrent even people you and i would strongly disagree with we're not going to drag them out in a public place and burn them alive right so what happened you know what happened and are those worth looking at those examples and i think the answer is yes well you preempted my final question which i've asked about all these people what did they get right what did they get wrong you just talked a lot about what we can respect and even absorb with from foucault's thought yeah and maybe i just specify brandon you know the modern turn beginning with descartes and it's easy enough for classically-minded people like ourselves to say oh these moderns with their subjectivism and relative they turned away from the objective and there's something to that you know but but i come back to lonergan here you know who to me summed up the right answer the condition for the possibility of true objectivity is a properly constituted subjectivity and his point was we're not just these little blank slates on which the world writes but we're these active involved thinking agents you know who go out to meet the world and we ask questions and we draw a conclusion and let's face it our subjectivity can be messed up we can be operating with weird prejudices and we can have blind spots we can succumb to pressure like if you hold to that view you're going to lose your job and if you hold to that they're not going to like you anymore you know so wandering and said we got to be continually calling ourselves to a conversion at the subjective level if we are to appreciate the objective for what it really is so take someone like foucault are there these plays of power sometimes that work their way into our own psyches into our communities into our our modes of discourse um and and maybe that would prompt in a healthy way a sort of examination of conscious conscience uh epistemically you know like boy was i really dispassionately objective today in the way i was assessing that argument or was i influenced by lots of things that that distorted my vision am i part again without going into wokism but am i part of certain modes of life that are distorting my vision of reality you know am i conditioned by people around me in such a way that i don't see things as they really are and i think you know at their best people like foucault you know raise those questions in a healthy way [Music] [Music] well it's time now for a question from one of our listeners we take one question every episode if you would like to ask bishop baron a question just visit the website askbishopbarren.com and there you can record it on any device today we hear from michael here in my home state of florida he's asking about something you said in your recent discussion with lex friedman when defining god so here's michael's question hello this is michael from florida dear bishop baron in your conversation with lex friedman you spoke clearly at the beginning about god as being rather than as a being but later you talked about god as the love between a father and his son isn't that again taking god as a mere being or two or three beings rather than as capital b being no thanks for that question we need a whole course in trinitarian theology to really parse that out here's a quick way to get at it though um when we talk about father son and spirit we're not talking about three beings you're not talking about three persons in the ordinary sense of the term like brandon's a person i'm a person and you're a person and with these three persons talking to each other that's not the way to think about it when augustine was asked how come we call these things persons he said so we have something to say when people ask us what they are and his point was the word person's misleading because it seems to indicate three beings what we're talking about are three subsistent relations that obtain within the sheer unity and simplicity of god now as i say we need a whole course in the trinity to to parse all that out the father is the or fundamental knowledge right that god has this sort of catholic self-possession the son is the act by which the father knows himself he's the imago of the father the spirit as he suggests there the love between the father and the son but notice just as my mind can engage in those three moves right augustine calls it men's mind no titiasui self knowledge amor sui self love the mind can do that without becoming three minds there aren't three minds they're doing it it's their three i don't know what they are that's what and someone asked he called them neshio quidd they're three i don't know what they are a christ called them subsistent relations which is kind of metaphysical nonsense in a way because the one thing a relation is not in classical thought is subsistent but anyway you get my point that there are three moves within the unity and simplicity of god so they're not three beings so that's why there's no conflict between saying god is being itself ipsum essay and god is a community of three persons well thank you michael for your question i mentioned that we have three books to mention here in this episode and we've covered two of them already the two thomas aquinas books the third one i don't have here in front of me but it's a very exciting new book from word on fire titled the holy hour meditations for eucharistic adoration this is a unique collection of hymns poetry prayers and reflections for adoration pulled from across the 2000 year tradition of the catholic church designed to draw readers more and more toward the mysterious silence of christ in the blessed sacrament it has an introduction by fulton sheen where he talks about his emphasis on the holy hour and then a forward by bishop baron it includes the eucharistic hymns of thomas aquinas in both latin and english over 25 poems with eucharistic resonances from saints like john paul ii edith stein john of the cross teresa lassiu gerard mainly hopkins dante and g.k chesterton it has passages from each of the last several popes on eucharistic adoration passages from the catechism and then brief theological and spiritual reflections from bishop baron but also from other heroes of ward on fire including flannery o'connor irenaeus von balthazar thomas merton dorothy day tolkien mother teresa of calcutta and many more so it's a very unique special collection if you're looking for a book to guide you in the spirituality of adoration to bring with you to the chapel this is the one you want again it's titled the holy hour and i'll include a link to it in the show notes and then finally one last bit of homework next time bishop aaron and i are together we're going to be recapping his discussion with lex friedman and some of the comments that were left on the video so i want to encourage you if you haven't listened to that discussion yet between bishop baron and lex friedman do it now in a couple weeks we'll have our episode here so you have two weeks to listen to it it's a long discussion it's about two hours and it's it's high level it's invigorating but watch it please and then you'll be ready for our recap episode here well thanks so much for listening and watching and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Keywords: michel foucault, michel foucault philosophy, bishop barron philosophy, bishop barron atheists, bishop barron, bishop robert barron, word on fire show, the word on fire show, modern philosophers, foucault, philosophy, the present moment, present moment, philosophers who shaped the culture, karl marx, bishop barron foucault, catholicism, catholic podcast, christian podcast, philosophy podcast, philosophers, catholic, word on fire bishop barron

Id: Py_4NBfCDnU

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022