[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
As I have noted before (recall), Hume plays a triple role in Foucault's (1966) Les mots et les choses (hereafter: The Order of Things).* First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers Hume’s works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the episteme of the so-called ‘classical’ period. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume 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 one of Foucault's main targets in The Order of Things. However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume individually. 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. In today's post I am focused on Husserl's role in these matters, especially the second role.
As a flirt, I argue that Foucault’s analysis of Hume’s account of resemblance cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project in The Order of Things, but that's best left for another time (including a forthcoming paper in Cosmos + Taxis edited by Elena Yi-Jia Zeng.)
Be that as it may, one of the main claims of The Order of Things is to provide what Foucault calls an “archaeological analysis of knowledge” (p. xxiv) in the human sciences that shows how across disciplines and over periods of time one can identify, to simplify, conceptual and argumentative similarities that obey similar underlying conceptual constraints. These constraints are durable for centuries on end, but can get replaced during what Foucault calls a “general hiatus” (p. 325) by new underlying conceptual constraints, which then structure what Foucault calls an ‘episteme’ or “single network of [conceptual] necessities.” (p. 63) The period between ca 1600-1800 is called the “Classical period.” (p. 43)
The first role Hume plays in Foucault’s argument is to illustrate the effects of these conceptual necessities among a string of thinkers (who all live in the same ‘Classical age.’) When it comes to the Classical period, Hume figures repeatedly in such strings: for example, "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (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.) Again with Hume included, Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume." (p. 162)
When Foucault offers such examples, Foucault does not refer to particular passages or texts to provide evidence for his claims. That is, he presupposes considerable familiarity with the authors repeatedly singled out as illustrative member of the ‘network of necessities’ among his implied audience.[1]
Second, that Hume can play this illustrative role in Foucault’s argument is, in turn, the effect of the role Hume plays in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, Husserlian phenomenology, that Foucault is explicitly reacting to (p. 248; elsewhere, Foucault registers the significance of Deleuze’s work on Hume, and their joint satisfaction with the “phenomenological theory of subject.”+ On Deleuze’s Hume, see my friend Jeff Bell: 2008.) In this phenomenological self-understanding, which Foucault reports, [i] “Hume's critique” is the trigger for the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif [ii] gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so [iii] via Kant's incomplete Copernican revolution [iv] produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (The Order of Things, p. 325)[2] Here Hume is a kind of steppingstone, who generates Kant’s response which becomes co-constitutive for key features of phenomenology. I have added numbers to facilitate discussion. I have added [iii] because it is contextually implied: "It may seem that phenomenology has effected a union between the Cartesian theme of the cogito and the transcendental motif that Kant had derived from Hume's critique; according to this view, Husserl has revived the deepest vocation of the Western ratio, bending it back upon itself in a reflection which is a radicalization of pure philosophy and a basis for the possibility of its own history. (325; see also p. 65))
In earlier versions of discussing this material, I had already focused on Hume's role in Husserl's works. But a perceptive anonymous referee called my attention to the significance of Husserl's (1927) Formal and Transcendental Logic which I had overlooked. (In what follows I cite and quote Dorion Cairns' (1969) translation, published with Martinus Nijhoff.) And, in particular, if we go to the "historico-critical digression" (Husserl (1969), p. 266) that closes chapter 6 (it's paragraph 100 "Historical-critical remarks on the development of the transcendental philosophy and, in particular, on transcendental inquiry concerning formal logic"—Husserl’s titles shows he should have been born two centuries earlier), we find what Foucault has in mind. I have added the numbers.
The way leading to the whole inquiry concerning origins, an inquiry that must be taken collaterally, as belonging to pure psychology and transcendental philosophy, and includes in its essential universality, all possible worlds with all their essential regions of real and ideal objectivities and all their world-strata (therefore, in particular, the world of ideal senses, of truths, theories, sciences, the idealities of every culture of every socio-historical world) -- that way remained for centuries untrod. This was was entirely understandable consequence of naturalistic and sensualistic aberration on the part of all modern psychology based on internal experience. This aberration only drove the transcendental philosophy of English empiricist into that well known development which it end in countersensical fictionalism; [iii] it also arrested the transcendental philosophy of Kant's Copernican revolution short of full effectuation, so that the Kantian philosophy could never force its way through the point where the ultimately necessary aims and methods can be adopted. If the pure concrete ego, in whom all the objectivities and worlds accepted by him are subjectively constituted, is [as Hume argued] only a senseless bundle or collection of Data--which come and perish, cast together now in this way and now in that, according to senseless accidental regularity analogous to that of mechanics, --the result is that only surreptitious reasons can explain how even as much as the illusion of a real world could arise. Yet Hume professed to make it understandable that, by a blind matter-of-fact regularity, purely in the mind, particular types of fictions having the names "objects with continued existence", "identical persons", and s forth, arise for us. Now illusions, fictions, are produced sense-formations; the constituting of them takes place as intentionality; they are [ii] cogitata of cogitationes...
[iv] Hume’s greatness (a greatness still unrecognized in this, its most important aspect) lies in the fact that, despite all that, he was the first to grasp the universal concrete problem of transcendental philosophy. In the concreteness of purely egological internality, as he saw, everything Objective becomes intended to (and, in favourable cases, perceived), thanks to a subjective genesis. Hume was the first to see the necessity of investigating the Objective itself as a product of its genesis from that concreteness, in order to make the legitimate being-sense of everything that exists for us intelligible through its ultimate origins. Stated more precisely: The real world and the categories of reality, which are its fundamental forms, became for him a problem in a new fashion. He was the first to [ii] treat seriously the Cartesian focusing purely on what lies inside.-Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 255-256 [Emphases in Husserl]
To be sure, elsewhere Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology (as he presents it). He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault diagnoses in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (p. 325)
One might claim that [i] is absent in the passage I quoted and that even the cogito is only implied in it. But Husserl goes on to write (after discussing Hume), "as for Kant...with the dependence on Hume implicit in his reaction against that philosopher, Kant took over the constitutional problem, at leas so far as it concerns Nature; but without the full sense of even the problem of Nature, as only one component in the universal complex of constitutional problems to which Hume's re-conception of the Cartesian ego-cogito as concrete mental being, had pointed." (Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) Familiarity with this Husserlian narrative, which supplies the phenomenological tradition self-understanding, is often presupposed in The Order of Things.
Now, it goes beyond my expertise to show the role of and familiarity with Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic in French philosophy of the period that Foucault is writing in. But it is worth noting that Suzanne Bachelard had published her Study on it in the preceding decade. Scholars of Foucault have noted, of course, The Order of Things is, in part, a critique of Husserl. While drawing on Lebrun, Stuart Elden recently (2023) emphasizes this in The Archaeology of Foucault, although Elden also suggests this tends to be missed (see p. 76). Elden also calls attention to Foucault's engagement with Husserl in the 1950s (p. 79).
As a concluding aside today, in this very context in Husserl, Hume is actually characterized as falling "into the countersense of a "philosophy of as-if." ((Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) That is, Husserl treats Hume as a stalking horse for criticizing Hans Vaihinger's Die Philosophie des Als Ob (a kind of neo-Kantianism). I mention this because I suspect the idea stayed with Foucault. For, when years later (recall), Foucault returned to Hume in his lecture series the Birth of Biopolitics, on 28 March 1979, in the the eleventh lecture, he treats Hume as the fount of Benthamite radicalism and Chicago economics. It is, in fact, not silly to treat Chicago post Milton Friedman's 1953 essay on the methodology of positive economics as a philosophy of as-if. (While I tend to emphasize Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, it's a commonplace of the secondary literature on Friedman's essay to note this connection to Vaihinger.) But I return to this before long.
- This first appeared at: <Hume, Husserl's Digression, and Foucault's The Order of Things (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*I quote from the Vintage books (1994) edition of the 1970 English translation by Alan Sheridan with page numbers to it.
[1] I put it like that because here my point is not to complain about Foucault’s citation practices. This is not to deny that the near total absence of citation to (competing) secondary literature and possible sources of influence on Foucault is not odd. But where needed Foucault does cite primary sources in The Order of Things.
+Foucault, Michel (1988 [1990]) “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, London: Routledge, p. 24
[2] Foucault does not problematize the eurocentrism of this narrative.
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