It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinatio. The latter always presupposed signs anterior to it: so that knowledge always resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly transmitted, sign. Its task was to uncover a language which God had previously distributed across the face of the earth; it is in this sense that it was the divination of an essential implication, and that the object of its divination was divine. From now on, however, it is within knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; it is from knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability. And though God still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of our knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our impressions, in order to establish in our minds a relation of signification. Such is the role of feeling in Malebranche or of sensation in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in feeling, in visual impressions, and in the perception of the third dimension, what we are dealing with are hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and obligatory kinds of knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of knowledge which we humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer have the time or the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided strength of our own minds. In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by God is the cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge. There is no longer any divinatio involved - no insertion of knowledge in the enigmatic, open, and sacred area of signs - but a brief and concentrated kind of knowledge: the contraction of a long sequence of judgements into the rapidly assimilated form of the sign. And it will also be seen how, by a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs within its own space, is now able to accommodate probability: between one impression and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other words, a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the weakest probability towards the greatest certainty.
The connection of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified. The fire which I sec is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it.
The knowledge that divined, at random, signs that were absolute and older than itself has been replaced by a network of signs built up step by step in accordance with a knowledge of what is probable. Hume has become possible.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), 59-60 [Emphases in original]
When confronted by Foucault's argument here it is natural to scrutinize each of the steps and try to figure out how they correspond to, say, the underlying material in Malebranche and Berkeley. But here I wan't ask a different question: why does Foucault want to emphasize that [the philosophy of] a certain definite individual has become possible? This is peculiar because the strength of Foucault's general argument does not rest in the analysis of individual philosophers, but rather in showing a kind of higher order similarity, a style of thought, or a set of structural and conceptual constraints on an era's production of knowledge in, and that only becomes visible by the study of, different fields (including a kind of linguistics and a kind of political economy and so on) alongside each other. And these constraints make all the folk in an era possible (in Foucault's sense). This is why, for example, in context, he uses the language of a "single network of necessities" and gives us a string of individuals "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (63; see also, p. 117, where this list returns, and p. 65, where Condillac seems to be key figure in the network, and p. 70, where Hume has equal billing with Condillac. Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume" -- at p. 162.)
So, why single out Hume on p. 60? Now part of the answer is clear from one of my posts earlier in the week (here). Hume becomes exemplary, for Foucault, to show that while similitude/resemblance loses its central significance in its characterization of the nature of a sign, resemblance does not disappear but resides, as Foucault puts it in Humean terms, mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind (see p. 68). In that post, I argued that Foucault ends up misreading Hume (and suggested that Foucault ends up misrepresenting what he calls the classical age.) I don't mean to relitigate that claim. Rather, to restate my question: why is Hume exemplary for this argument (since it is by no means obvious Foucault went back to Hume to analyze him carefully, yet simultaenously offers numerous examples that draw on Hume)?
Part of the answer is that Hume plays a role in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, (Husserlian) phenomenology, that Foucault is reacting to. In this self-understanding Hume's critique is the source of the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (325) So, in this narrative Hume is a kind of steppingstone. Familiarity with this narrative and this Hume is often presupposed in Foucault's narrative in The Order of Things (see especially, the role of Hume in representing "radical doubt" (162)).*
It is worth noting that Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology and also how it fits in the West.+ He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault has diagnosed (in the book) in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (325) As it happens Foucault's analysis of Hume's friend, Adam Smith, is central to understanding the nature of that hiatus (see pp. 224-225). In Foucault's account Smith articulates a principle of order that is not reducible to the analysis of representation that Foucault thinks characteristic of the classical era. (225) How to make sense of this is a topic of interest to me, but about that some other time more.
So, let me sum up. Hume plays a triple role in The Order of Things. First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers his works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the classical episteme. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume (and these other thinkers) among his implied audience. That Foucault can do so is explained by the second role Hume has, that is, of being a familiar steppingstone in a narrative that undergirds the self-understanding of phenomenology (which is treated as the ruling philosophical status quo by Foucault). This narrative is Foucault's target.
The main argument against this self-understanding of the past does not turn on a single philosopher -- although Adam Smith is central to the argument but on a more general reconfiguration of what the human sciences (and philosophy) were (recall this post that tries to illuminate by comparing Kuhn and Foucault).
However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume. And this is so because he can both assume familiarity with Hume (given the familiarity of Foucault's audience with Hume as a steppingstone in their standard narrative) as well as render Hume unfamiliar in virtue of his retelling of the story of early modern philosophy. As my post earlier in the week suggests, Foucault's analysis of Hume cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem, if I am right, raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project [since the leading representative of the classical age by Foucault's lights does not conform to his template), although it goes beyond my remit (even pay-grade) to adjudicate the significance of this to his debate with phenomenology. But as should be clear, when Foucault revisits Hume in his lecture of 28 March 1979 in The Birth of Biopolitics his understanding of Hume is (recall here); and here) much more text-sensitive than it was in the earlier book.
*See this passage:
In natural history, however, which is a well-constructed language, these analogies of the imagination cannot have the value of guarantees; and since natural history is threatened, like all language, by the radical doubt that Hume brought to bear upon the necessity for repetition in experience, it must find a way of avoiding that threat. (162)
+How to think of the eurocentrism in all these remarks is a bit complicated. It's pretty clear he does not endorse phenomenology's self-understanding. But Foucault himself also doesn't problematize the category of 'the West' and 'Western philosophy' (which he also uses) elsewhere in the book.
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