Human Nature and the Ideal Society
In the 17th century, when Galilei discovered that
the Earth turned around the Sun instead of the other way around
many people were in a state of great shock.
They had thus far believed that humans were at the center of the cosmos
and around this idea they had built their entire belief system.
Suddenly, this did not seem to be the case anymore.
Foucault's theory can be clarified by pointing out that
he takes a Galilei-type standpoint in relation to culture.
Since the time of Galilei,
people had thought that when it came to culture and society
humans were at the center.
After all, it is they who created them.
Foucault denies this.
He says that when it comes to culture, it is not the subject that counts
but the structure, the universal.
Something that is in itself understandable if one realizes
that the rules according to which mankind behaves
were already invented long before one was born
and that the name of the inventor remains completely unknown to us.
One can compare Foucault to Galilei, but from another perspective,
one can also compare Chomsky to Galilei
because his work in the science of language, linguistics,
has had a great revolutionary influence all over the world.
Chomsky has brought about a major transformation in the field of linguistics.
Interestingly, Chomsky's theories point in the exact opposite direction
as those of Foucault.
Chomsky gives much more primacy to the subject.
In the confrontation between these two completely different thinkers,
it is moreover good to remember that they work in very different fields.
Foucault is a cultural researcher; Chomsky is a language researcher.
In other words, Foucault's interest lies in the history of scientific language,
while Chomsky's interest lies in the daily language we use.
It is interesting, and maybe also not coincidental
that the debate between these two thinkers only really
gets exciting in the second half when they start discussing politics.
Still I believe it is good that this is preceded by a theoretical part
because in any discussion about philosophy and society
what matters are not the political standpoints
certain thinkers happen to take, but rather
the arguments on the basis of which they do so.
It might also be nice to note that this discussion took place
in the auditorium of the technical college of Eindhoven (NL).
A discussion between two philosophers, two researchers
whose work is characterized by great precision, great detail
and also great clarity.
Moreover I thought it was quite symbolic that the debate took place
in a space with a lot of glass:
the inner- and outer-world blended together.
During the broadcast you could see the traffic outside passing by.
Symbolic indeed, because the relationship between inner- and outer-world
is central to the first half of the fourth philosophers' debate
about human nature and the ideal society.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fourth debate
of the International Philosophers' Project.
Tonight's debaters are Mr. Michel Foucault of the College de France
and Mr. Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Both philosophers have points in common and points of difference.
Perhaps the best way to compare both philosophers is to look at them
as mountain-diggers working at opposite sides of the same mountain
with different tools, without knowing even
if they are working in each other's direction.
All learning concerning man,
ranging from history to linguistics and psychology,
are faced with the question of whether, in the last instance,
we are the product of all kinds of external factors
or if, in spite of our differences,
we have something we could call a common human nature
by which we can call each other human beings.
So my first question is to Mr. Chomsky
because you employ often the concept of human nature
and even in this connection you are using terms
like "innate ideas" and "innate structures".
Which arguments can you derive from linguistics in order to give
such a central position to this notion of human nature?
Well, let me begin in a slightly technical way.
A person who is interested in studying languages is faced with a
very definite empirical problem.
He's faced with an organism, a mature, let's say adult speaker,
who has somehow acquired an amazing range of abilities,
which enable him in particular to say what he means,
to understand what people say to him,
To do this in a fashion that I think is proper to call highly creative.
Now, the person who has acquired this intricate
and highly articulated and organized collection of abilities,
the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language,
that person has been exposed to a certain experience,
he has been presented in the course of his lifetime
with a certain amount of data,
of direct experience with a language.
We can investigate the data that's available to this person.
Having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear
and well-delineated scientific problem, namely the problem
of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data,
small and rather degenerate quantity of data
that's presented to the person, to the child
and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organized
resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from this data.
Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that
in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously,
there are remarkable limitations on the kinds of systems that emerge
from the very different kinds of experience to which people are exposed.
There is only one possible explanation,
one can say in a rather schematic fashion,
for this remarkable phenomenon, namely
the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal,
an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure
and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge
that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience.
That is, to put it rather loosely: the child must begin with the knowledge,
certainly not with the knowledge that he's hearing
English or Dutch or French or something else,
but he does start with the knowledge that he's hearing a human language
of a very narrow and explicit type
that permits a very small range of variation.
And it's because he begins with that
highly organized and very restrictive schematism,
that he's able to make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data
to highly organized knowledge.
I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like
this schematism that makes it possible to derive
complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data
is one fundamental constituent of human nature.
But then I assume that in other domains of human intelligence,
in other domains of human cognition and even behavior,
something of the same sort must be true.
The collection of this mass of schematisms, innate organizing principles
which guides our social and intellectual and individual behavior,
that's what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.
Well, Mr. Foucault, when I think of your books like
The History of Madness and Words and Objects,
I get the impression that you are working on a completely different level
and with an opposite aim and goal.
When I think of the word schematism in relation to human nature,
then you are just trying to work out that
there are several periods with several schematisms.
What do you think about this?
Well if you permit, I will answer in French because my English is so bad
that I would be ashamed of answering in English.
It is true that I mistrust the notion of human nature a little
and for the following reason:
I believe that of the concepts or notions that a science can use
not all have the same degree of elaboration.
Let's take the example of biology.
Within the field of biology,
there are concepts that are more or less well-established
like the concept of a "reflex".
But there also exist "peripheral" notions,
which do not play an "organizing" role within science,
they are not instruments of analysis
and they are not descriptive either.
These notions simply serve to point out some problems
or rather to point out certain fields in need of study.
For instance, there exists a very important concept in the field of biology:
the concept of life.
In the 17th and 18th centuries,
the notion of life was hardly used when studying nature.
One classified natural beings, whether living or non-living,
in a vast hierarchical tableau.
Life was a concept they didn't use and didn't need.
At the end of the 18th century, a number of problems arose
for instance in relation to the internal organization of these natural beings.
Moreover, thanks to the use of the microscope,
different sorts of phenomena suddenly came to light,
which could not have been perceived until then
and whose mechanisms and function had been unclear in the past.
The developments in chemistry have also highlighted certain problems
in relation to the connections between
chemical reactions and the physiological processes of organisms.
And that's how an entire field appeared,
one that was completely new for biologists,
one that is nowadays known as life.
Life was a concept that served to point out
new fields of study that science still had to discover.
I would say, as a historian of science,
that the concept of life was an epistemological indicator,
an index of the problems that still had to be uncovered.
And I wonder whether one could say the same thing about human nature.
Foucault is therefore comparing Chomsky's concept of human nature
with the concept of life as it is used in biology and in its history.
He does this because he sees the concept of human nature
more as an indication of a research program
rather than as an indication of humans' potential for achievement.
For him, human nature acts as a scientific shopping list and nothing more.
Chomsky is willing to accept this as long as it is clear
that the fields of biology, physiology and neurology
still don't have the means to
adequately describe human nature and human capacity for language.
Quite early on in the debate, the moderator Mr. Elders finds it difficult
to keep the interaction flowing between the two speakers.
This is partly due to the different languages they speak,
but most importantly due to the fact that
Chomsky and Foucault inhabit such different worlds of thought,
to the point in which their ideas easily slide past each other.
We actually observe the curious phenomenon
of two brains thinking simultaneously,
where one picks up the last claim of the other
in order to further elucidate it from his own system of thought.
For Chomsky the concept of creativity plays a great role,
and the following part of the debate will be largely dedicated to this issue.
For him, creativity is actually a characteristic of all human beings.
Everybody uses it.
People stuck in traffic who, unexpectedly and on the spot,
have to think about what to do next.
A teacher who doesn't want to fall into a pattern of authoritarian behavior
but when confronted with a difficult pupil,
has to come up with an alternative type of behavior.
But above all, this creativity applies to the child who learns a language
and who curiously learns to produce new language.
Foucault is opposed to this idea.
He constantly emphasizes the so-called "epistemological field"
within which human activity takes place.
This "epistemological field" or "episteme" is described
as the totality of unconscious rules
that manage the totality of all separated fields of knowledge.
Foucault also talks of "tableau", which he also calls "system of elements".
In the debate he also mentions the word "grille": bar or grid.
Perhaps it's best to understand it as a network
that all people are part of in a certain culture, whether they want it or not.
It is a set of rules to which people obey in their thoughts
and derive their search for identity, coherence and so forth.
This network is not a creation of particular individuals:
It decides the rules of the "think-and-do" habits we call culture,
which every individual is subjected to.
Such a network is not a "thing" or an "idea":
it lies precisely in between the two.
For Foucault, the history of thought is not associated with
the history of ideas or with the development of the mind,
rather it should be understood as discontinuous transformations,
transitioning from one network to another.
Foucault's approach highly differs from Chomsky's,
for whom creativity plays a central role.
At this point we clearly realize Foucault's tendency
to dethrone the subject,
as already illustrated with the example of Galilei.
The philosophy of Foucault is a philosophy in which the philosopher
constantly disappears from sight.
One could say that, paradoxically, it is a philosophy without philosophers:
an idea that has to be generalized
because people are, according to Foucault,
greatly absent within their own culture.
In this respect, we can understand Foucault's strong and negative reaction
towards the moderator who showed interest in his private matters.
When Foucault debates, it is about everything except Foucault himself.
This is an introduction to the following,
quite detailed theoretical part of the debate,
which seems to mainly focus on one question:
To what extent is the individual able to discover something new,
and if so, how should we make sense of this?
This seems to me to be a very relevant question,
especially if we remind ourselves that
new forms of behavior, knowledge and science will need to be unveiled
as long as we want to survive together in this world.
We resume the debate where Foucault explains
why he does not pay much attention to the creativity of the individual
from a historical perspective.
Within the traditional history of science,
the creativity of individuals has been accorded maximum importance.
The history of science, up until recently, essentially consisted of showing
how an individual, whether it was Newton or Mendel, had been the creator
or rather the discoverer of a reality
that was already existing in things and in the world,
a reality that no other person had previously discovered.
I believe the postulate that lies dormant
within the traditional history of science is
that truth exists in order to be known, yet
the human mind, due to the effect of a number of inhibitions or obstacles,
has not managed to see this truth.
The mind is made to see the truth and
a contingent obstacle is impeding him to see it.
According to some historians, this obstacle could be linked to
socio-economic conditions, or to different forms of mentality,
or to the belief and naivety in old religious myths and moral themes.
All of these could act as obstacles, as blinders
to those who want to see the truth.
In reality the mind is meant to see, it is made to have access to the truth.
In this traditional conception of the history of science,
on the one hand there is an emphasis on the creativity of the individual
who has the right to possess the truth,
and yet this truth is taken back from him due to a system of obstacles
which will prevent him from capturing, formulating and
constructing this truth to which he is essentially entitled to possess.
I believe the problem that is being posed is the exact opposite.
What happens when we witness a great scientific transformation?
In a great scientific transformation, for instance the birth of biology
in the mid 17th century, or the birth of philology
at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century.
It is true that a number of obstacles, prejudices
and preconceived ideas tumble and disappear.
What strikes me is that science, at the moment of its birth,
not only gets rid of a certain number of obstacles,
but also eliminates and masks a certain amount
of existing knowledge and wisdoms.
It's as if applying a new grid
that, while it allows for the appearance of phenomena
that had been previously masked, it also masks
already existing knowledge.
Therefore a science, the advancement of science
and the acquisition of science,
is not simply the oblivion of old prejudices, or the fall of certain obstacles.
It is a new grid that masks certain things
while allowing for the appearance of new knowledge.
Therefore, when I criticize the notion of creativity, what I mean is that
truth is not acquired through a kind of continuous and cumulative creation,
but through a set of grids stacked on top of one another.
I think in part we're slightly talking in cross-purposes
because of a different use of the term creativity.
In fact, I should say that my use of the term creativity
is a little bit idiosyncratic
and therefore the onus falls on me, not on you in this case.
But when I speak of creativity, I'm not attributing to the concept
the notion of value that is normal when we speak of creativity. That is,
when you speak of scientific creativity,
you're speaking, properly, of the achievements of a Newton.
But in the context in which I have been speaking about creativity,
it's a normal human event.
I'm speaking of the kind of creativity that any child demonstrates
when he's able to come to grips with a new situation:
describe it properly, react to it properly, tell one something about it,
think about it in a new fashion for him and so on.
I think it's appropriate to call those creative acts,
but of course without thinking of those acts as being the acts of a Newton.
It's the lower levels of creativity that I've been speaking of.
Now, as far as what you say about the history of science is concerned,
I think that's correct and illuminating, and particularly
relevant in fact to the kinds of enterprise that I see lying before us
in psychology and linguistics and the philosophy of the mind.
That is, I think there are certain topics that have been,
in your words, repressed or put aside
during the scientific advances of the past few centuries, century and a half.
But now, I think we can overcome,
it's possible to put aside those limitations and forgettings,
and to bring into our consideration precisely the topics that animated
a good deal of the thinking and speculation of the 17th and 18th century,
and to incorporate it within a much broader
and I think deeper science of man that will give a fuller role,
though it is certainly hoped not to give a complete understanding
to such notions as innovation and creativity and freedom
and the production of new elements of thought and behavior
within some system of rule and schematism.
Those are concepts that I think we can come to grips with.
I believe that what Mr. Chomsky said and what I tried to show
is actually very similar.
Indeed, there exist only possible creations, possible innovations.
In terms of language or knowledge,
one can only produce something new by putting into play
a certain number of rules that will define
the acceptability or the grammaticality of certain statements
or which will define, in the case of knowledge,
the scientific character of the statements.
Thus, we can roughly say that linguists before Mr. Chomsky mainly insisted
on the rules of construction of statements
and less on the innovation represented by every new statement,
or the hearing of a new statement.
In the history of science or in the history of thought
we placed more emphasis on individual creation.
We had kept aside and left in the shadows these communal, general rules
which obscurely manifest themselves through every scientific discovery,
every scientific invention, and even every philosophical innovation.
These are not only linguistic rules but also epistemological rules,
which characterize contemporary knowledge.
Well, perhaps I can try to react to those comments
within my own framework in a way
which maybe will shed some light on this.
How is it that we are able to construct any kind of scientific theory at all?
How is it that, given a small amount of data,
it's possible for various scientists, for various geniuses even,
over a long period of time,
to arrive at some kind of a theory, at least in some cases,
that is more or less profound and more or less empirically adequate?
This is a remarkable fact.
And, in fact, if it were not the case that these scientists,
including the geniuses,
if they didn't have built into their minds somehow an obviously
unconscious specification of what is a possible scientific theory,
then this inductive leap would certainly be quite impossible.
Just as if each child did not build into his mind
the concept of human language in a very narrowing way,
then the inductive leap from data
to knowledge of a language would be impossible.
So even though the process of, let's say
deriving knowledge of physics from data
is far more complex, far more difficult for an organism such as us,
far more drawn out in time, requiring intervention of genius...
Nevertheless in a certain sense the achievement
of discovering physical science
or biology or whatever you like,
is based on something rather similar to the achievement of the normal child
in discovering the structure of his language. That is, it must be achieved
on the basis of an initial limitation,
an initial restriction on the class of possible theories.
And the fact that science converges and progresses, that itself shows us
that such initial limitations and structures exist.
That is, I don't think that scientific progress is simply a matter of
accumulative addition of new knowledge
and absorption of new theories and so on.
Rather I think it has this sort of jagged pattern that you describe,
forgetting certain problems and leaping to new theories...
And transforming the same knowledge.
But I think that one can perhaps hazard an explanation for that fact.
Oversimplifying grossly,
I really don't mean what I'm going to say now literally,
it's as if, as human beings of a particular biologically given organism,
we have in our heads, to start with,
a certain set of possible intellectual structures, possible sciences.
Now, in the lucky event that some aspect of reality
happens to have the character of one of these structures in our mind,
then we have a science.
And it's because of this initial limitation in our minds
to a certain kind of possible science that provides
the tremendous richness and creativity of scientific knowledge.
It's important to stress that,
this has to do with your point about limitation and freedom,
if it were not for these limitations,
we would not have the creative act of going
from a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of experience,
to a rich and highly articulated and complicated array of knowledge.
It's precisely because of that that the progress of science, I think, has
the erratic and jagged and transformational character that you described.
And that doesn't mean that everything is ultimately going to fall
within the domain of science. Quite the contrary.
Personally I believe that many of the things we would like to understand,
and maybe the things we would most like to understand,
such as the nature of man, or the nature of a decent society,
or lots of other things,
might really fall outside the scope of possible human sciences.
Well I think we have now two questions out of this statement.
One question is: if you can agree, Mr. Foucault,
do you agree with the statement
about the combination of limitation, fundamental limitation?
It is not a matter of combination.
Creativity only becomes possible thanks to a system of rules:
it is not a mixture of order and freedom.
Freedom can only be truly exercised thanks to a system of regularity.
Where perhaps I don't completely agree with Mr. Chomsky is when
he places these regularities within the sphere
of the human mind or human nature.
I ask myself whether one cannot discover
this system of regularity and of constraint
that makes science possible,
somewhere else, even outside the human mind:
in social forms, in relations of production, in class struggles, etc.
But what is the reason for you to discuss the death of man
or the end of the period of the 19th and 20th century?
But this is not related to what we are talking about.
I don't know, because I was trying to apply
what you have said in relation to your anthropological concept.
You have already refused to speak
about your own creativity and freedom, right?
Well, I'm wondering what are the psychological reasons for this.
You can wonder about it, but I can't help that.
But what are the objective reasons,
in relation to your perception of understanding,
of knowledge, of science, for refusing to answer personal questions?
Does it have to do with your conception of society?
When there is a problem for you to answer a question,
what are your reasons for making a problem out of a personal question?
No, I'm not making a problem out of a personal question.
I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
In the entire tradition of the history of thought, ideas and sciences,
one has always questioned the problem of knowing.
At what age was Newton weaned
in order to conceive the law of universal gravitation?
At which period did Cuvier meet his first mistress
in order to finally make the discovery of fossils
and of comparative anatomy, etc.?
I believe these types of analyses, which I am now caricaturing,
are not very interesting.
It is much more interesting to understand
the transformations of a certain knowledge
within the general field of science and within the so-called vertical field,
which consists of a society, a culture,
a civilization at a particular moment in time.
Once we finally grasp the totality of this transformation,
we realize that the little individual moments of a wise man's life
are not important.
Foucault's last comment suggests yet again
how the individual life of the researcher tends to disappear from sight.
But then what about the relation between man and his culture
when it comes to politics, also when asking the question
of how we can change culture and society?
After all, one can show that in the history of science and culture,
the input of the individual plays an almost negligible role,
but the question 'how do I act?', the political question, remains standing.
It may thus become clear by now
that the political question, from Foucault's perspective,
rapidly develops into "how far can mankind escape from its own culture?"
It is important to note that Foucault
doesn't want to distance himself from politics. In the contrary, he says:
"I would have to be ideologically blind to not interest myself for that
which is most substantial to human existence:
economic relations, power relations, you name it"
Therefore, Chomsky and Foucault do agree
on the importance of the political question.
It may also be informative to explicitly mention
that Chomsky defines anarcho-syndicalism as his political standpoint.
In his opinion, it is necessary to abolish the different forms of capitalism
in order to favor direct workers' participation in workers' councils and so on.
Decentralization, socialization and participation
are keywords in Chomsky's political program.
Chomsky might say he sees no obvious relationship
between his scientific and political views,
but the following opening statement reveals
that he heads straight from his scientific conceptions to politics.
His political and scientific views may not flow logically from one another,
but they certainly are heading in the same direction.
Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed.
That is, if it is correct, as I believe it is,
that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work
for creative inquiry, for free creation
without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions,
then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should
maximize the possibilities for this
fundamental human characteristic to be realized.
That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression
and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society,
ours for example, as a historical residue.
Now a federated, decentralized system of free associations,
incorporating economic as well as social institutions,
would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism.
And it seems to me that it's the appropriate form of social organization
for an advanced technological society, in which human beings
do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine;
in which the creative urge that I think is intrinsic to human nature,
will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will,
I don't know all the ways in which it will.
In this respect, I would say I am much less advanced than Mr. Chomsky.
That is, I admit not being able to define, not even to propose,
an ideal social model for the functioning
of our scientific or technological society.
However, one of the tasks that seems urgent and immediate to me,
over and above anything else, is this:
it is the custom, at least in our European society,
to consider that power is localized in the hands of the government
and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions,
such as the administration, the police or the army.
One knows that all these institutions are made to transmit and apply orders
and to punish those who don't obey.
But I believe that political power also exercises itself
through the mediation of a certain number of institutions
that appear to have nothing in common with political power
and as if they are independent from it, but in fact they are not.
One knows that the university and more generally all teaching systems,
which simply appear to disseminate knowledge,
are made to maintain a certain social class in power
and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Another example is psychiatry,
which in appearance is also intended for the good of humanity
is at the knowledge of psychiatrists.
Psychiatry is another way to bring to bear
the political power over a social class.
Justice is yet again another example.
It seems to me that the real political task in our contemporary society
is to criticize the workings of institutions,
particularly the ones that appear neutral and independent,
and to attack them in such a way that the political violence,
which has always exercised itself obscurely through them,
will finally be unmasked so that one can fight against them.
If we seek to advance straight away
a profile or a formula of the future society
without having thoroughly criticized all the relations between
the different forms of political violence that are exercised within our society,
we run the risk of letting them reproduce
even as the noble and apparently pure forms, such as anarcho-syndicalism.
I would certainly agree with that, not only in theory but also in action.
That is, there are two intellectual tasks:
one, and the one which I was discussing,
is to try to create the vision of a future just society.
Another task is to understand very clearly the nature of power
and oppression and terror and destruction in our own society.
And that certainly includes the institutions you mentioned, as well as
the central institutions of any industrial society, namely
the economic, commercial and financial institutions, in particular
in the coming period, the great multinational corporations,
which are not very far from us physically tonight [Philips in Eindhoven].
Those are the basic institutions of
oppression and coercion and autocratic rule
that appear to be neutral; after all they say:
"Well, we're subject to the democracy of the market place"
Still, I think it would be a great shame to put aside entirely
the somewhat more abstract and philosophical task of
trying to draw the connections between a concept of human nature
that gives full scope to freedom
and dignity and creativity and other fundamental human characteristics,
and relate that to some notion of social structure in which those properties
could be realized and in which meaningful human life could take place.
And in fact, if we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution,
though it would be absurd of course to draw out in detail
the point that we are hoping to reach;
still we should know something about where we think we are going,
and such a theory may tell it to us.
Yes, but then isn't there a danger here?
If you say that a certain human nature exists,
that this human nature has not been given in our contemporary society
the rights and possibilities
that will allow it to realize itself...
That's really what you have said, I believe.
And if one admits this, doesn't one risk defining this human nature,
which is at the same time ideal and real,
which has been hidden and repressed until now,
doesn't one risk defining it in terms
borrowed from our society, from our civilization, from our culture?
I will give an example by greatly simplifying it.
Marxism, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,
admitted that in capitalist societies man hadn't reached his full potential
for development and self-realization;
that human nature was effectively alienated in the capitalist system.
And Marxism ultimately dreamed of a liberated human nature.
However, what model did it use
to conceive and dream of this human nature?
It was, in fact, the bourgeois model.
Marxism considered that a happy society
was a society that gave room, for example,
to a bourgeois type of sexuality, to a bourgeois type of family,
to a bourgeois type of aesthetic.
And it is moreover very true that this has happened in the Soviet Union:
for humans to finally be able to realize their true nature
a kind of society, simultaneously real and utopic, had been reconstituted
and transposed from the bourgeois society of the 19th century.
The result, that you also realized, I think, is that it is difficult to conceive
of what human nature precisely is.
Isn't there a risk that we will be led into error?
Mao Zedong spoke of a bourgeois human nature
and a proletarian human nature,
and he believes they are not the same thing.
I think that in the intellectual domain of political action,
that is the domain of trying to construct a vision of a just and free society
on the basis of some notion of human nature
In that domain we face the very same problem that we face
in immediate political action.
For example, to be quite concrete,
a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War,
and a good deal of my own energy goes into civil disobedience.
Well, civil disobedience in the U.S. is an action undertaken
in the face of considerable uncertainties about its effects.
For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might,
one might argue, bring on fascism.
That would be very bad for America, for Vietnam,
for Holland and for everyone else.
So that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act.
On the other hand there's a great danger in not undertaking it, namely
if you don't undertake it, the society of Indochina
will be torn to shreds by American power.
And in the face of those uncertainties one has to choose a course of action.
Similarly, in the intellectual domain,
one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose.
Our concept of human nature is certainly limited,
partial, socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects
and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist.
Yet at the same time it's of critical importance that we have some direction,
that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve,
if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals.
And that means that we have to be bold enough
to speculate and create social theories on the basis of
partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility
and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects
we're very far off the mark.
Well, perhaps it is interesting to go on a little bit further
into this problem of strategy.
So, for example, in the case of Holland,
we had something like a population census.
You were obliged to fill in your papers, and so on.
So if you refused to fill in your papers, you would call it civil disobedience?
I would be a little bit careful about that, because
going back to a very important point that Mr. Foucault made,
one does not necessarily allow the state to define what is legal.
The state has the power to enforce a certain concept of what is legal,
but power doesn't imply justice or correctness even, so the state
may define something as civil disobedience and may be wrong in doing so.
For example, in the U.S. the state defines it as civil disobedience to,
let's say derail an ammunition train that's going to Vietnam.
And the state is wrong in defining that as civil disobedience
because it's legal and proper and should be done.
It's proper to carry out actions that will prevent the criminal acts of the state,
just as it's proper to violate a traffic ordinance in order to prevent a murder.
If I was standing at a street corner and the traffic light were red,
I was standing in my car
and I drove across the traffic light to prevent somebody from, let's say
machine-gunning a group of people, of course that's not a violation of law.
It's an appropriate and proper action.
No sane judge would convict you for such an action.
Similarly, a good deal of what the state authorities
define as civil disobedience is not really civil disobedience.
In fact, it's legal, obligatory behavior
in violation of the commands of the state,
which may or may not be legal commands.
So one has to be rather careful about calling things illegal, I think.
Yes, but I would like to ask you a question.
When, in the United States, you commit a truly illegal act...
Which I regard as illegal, not just the state...
When the state considers it illegal.
Do you make your action because you find it just,
by virtue of an ideal justice?
Or do you make it because class struggle renders it useful and necessary?
Do you refer to an ideal justice?
Again, very often when I do something which the state regards as illegal,
I regard it as legal because I regard the state as criminal.
But in some instances that's not true.
Let me be quite concrete about it and
move from the area of class war to imperialist war,
where the situation is somewhat clearer and easier.
Take international law, a very weak instrument as we know,
but nevertheless it incorporates some rather interesting principles.
International law, in many respects, is the instrument of the powerful.
That is, international law permits much too wide a range
of international forceful intervention
in support of existing power structures that define themselves as states
and against the interests of masses of people who happen to be
organized in opposition to states.
But, in fact, international law is not solely of that kind.
And in fact there are interesting elements of international law, let's say
embedded in the UN Charter,
which permit, in fact I believe require the citizen to act
against his own state in ways that the state will falsely regard as criminal.
Nevertheless, he's acting legally,
because international law also happens to prohibit the threat or use of force
in international affairs, except under some very narrow circumstances
of which, for example, the war in Vietnam is not won.
Which means that in the particular case of the Vietnam War,
the one that interests me most,
the American state is acting in a criminal capacity.
And people have the right to stop criminals from murdering people.
Just because the criminal happens to call your action illegal
when you try to stop him, it doesn't mean it is illegal.
A perfectly clear case of that is the present case of
the Pentagon Papers in the U.S., which I suppose you know about.
Reduced to its essentials and forgetting legalisms, what is happening is
that the state is trying to prosecute people for exposing its crimes.
That's what it amounts to.
So it is in the name of a purer justice
that you criticize the functioning of justice?
It is important for me to know about this, because
In France there is currently a debate about this problem of justice
and that of a popular judicial institution.
A certain number of people, including Sartre,
believe that in order to make a critique of the current penal system
or of police practices, we have to create a kind of tribunal,
which in the name of an ideal, a superior and generally a human justice,
will condemn the practices of the French judges or policemen.
Moreover, there is another group of people, myself included,
who say this shouldn't be done because when they refer to an ideal justice,
which the tribunal is supposed to apply,
they refer to a certain number of judicial ideas that were formed in our time
by a certain group of individuals who are themselves,
directly or indirectly, a product of their societies.
We have to attack the practices of justice,
we have to attack the police and their practices:
but in terms of war and not in terms of justice.
Surely you believe that your role in the war is a just role,
that you're fighting a just war, to bring in a concept from another domain.
And that, I think, is important.
If you thought that you were fighting an unjust war,
you couldn't follow that line of reasoning.
I would like to slightly reformulate what you said.
It doesn't seem to me that the difference is between
legality and ideal justice.
It's rather between legality and better justice.
Now this better system may have its defects, it certainly will.
But comparing the better system with the existing system, and not
being confused into thinking that our better system is the ideal system,
we can then argue, I think, as follows: that the concept of legality
and the concept of justice are not identical.
They're not entirely distinct either.
Insofar as legality incorporates justice in this sense of better justice,
referring to a better society, then
we should follow and obey the law, and force the state to obey the law,
and force the great corporations to obey the law, and
force the police to obey the law. If we have the power to do so.
If in those areas where the legal system happens to represent
not better justice, but rather the techniques of oppression
that have been codified in a particular autocratic system,
then a reasonable human being should disregard and oppose them,
at least in principle. He may not, for some reason, do it in fact.
I would simply like to reply to your first sentence, when you said that
if you didn't consider the war you wage against the police to be just,
you wouldn't wage it.
I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and tell you that
the proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class
because it considers such a war to be just.
The proletariat wages war against the ruling class because it wants,
for the first time in history, to take power.
And it's because it wants to take power
that it considers such a war to be just.
Yeah, I don't agree with that.
One wages war to win, not because it is just.
I don't personally agree with that. For example, if
I could convince myself that attainment of power by the proletariat
would lead to a terroristic police state,
in which freedom and dignity
and decent human relations would be destroyed,
then I wouldn't want the proletariat to take power.
In fact the only reason for wanting any such thing, I believe, is because
one thinks, rightly or wrongly, that some fundamental human values
will be achieved by that transfer of power.
I will answer you this:
When the proletariat takes power,
it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert
towards the classes over which it has just triumphed,
a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power.
I can't see what objection anyone could make to this.
But if you ask me what would happen if the proletariat exerted this
bloody, tyrannical and unjust power towards itself, then I would say
this could only occur if the proletariat hadn't really taken power
but a class outside the proletariat,
or a group of people inside the proletariat,
or a bureaucracy or petit bourgeois elements, had taken power.
Well, I'm not at all satisfied with that theory of revolution
for a lot of reasons, historical and others.
But even if one were to accept it for the sake of argument,
still that theory is maintaining that it is
proper for the proletariat to take power and exercise it
in a violent and bloody and unjust fashion, because
it is claimed, in my opinion falsely,
that that will lead to a more just society,
in which the state will wither away, in which the proletariat
will be a universal class and so on and so forth.
If it weren't for that further justification,
the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat,
violent and bloody, would certainly be unjust.
For example, I am not a committed pacifist.
I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances
wrong to use violence, even though
use of violence is in some sense unjust.
I believe that one has to estimate relative injustices.
But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice
can only itself be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment,
which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously
and with a good deal of skepticism,
that this violence is being exercised because
a more just result is going to be achieved.
If it does not have that grounding, it really is totally immoral, in my opinion.
As far as the aim of the proletariat in leading a class struggle is concerned,
I don't think it would be sufficient to say that it is in itself a greater justice.
What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the ruling class
and by taking power
is precisely the suppression of class power in general.
Okay, but that's the further justification.
That is the justification,
but not in terms of justice but in terms of power.
But it is in terms of justice. It's because the
end that will be achieved is claimed as a just end.
No Leninist or whatever you like would dare to say
"We, the proletariat, have the right to take power,
and then throw everyone else into crematoria"
If that were the consequence of the proletariat taking power,
of course it would not be appropriate.
The idea is, and for the reasons I mentioned I'm skeptical about it,
that a period of violent dictatorship,
of perhaps violent and bloody dictatorship, is justified because
that will mean the submergence and termination of class oppression,
a proper end to achieve in human life.
But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself
functions within a society of classes
as a claim made by the oppressed class
and as a justification by the oppressive class.
I don't agree with that.
And in a classless society,
I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice.
Well, here I really disagree. I think that
there is a sort of an absolute basis,
if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble because I can't sketch it out,
ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities,
in terms of which a "real" notion of justice is grounded.
I think it's too hasty to characterize our existing systems of justice
as merely systems of class oppression.
I don't think that they are that. I think that they
embody systems of class oppression
and they embody elements of other kinds of oppression,
but they also embody a kind of a groping towards the
true, humanly valuable concepts of justice and decency
and love and kindness and sympathy and so on, which I think are real.
Well, do I have time to answer?
Yes
How much?
Two minutes.
Well I would say that is unjust!
Absolutely, yes.
No, but I don't want to answer in so little time.
I will simply say that I can't help but to think that
the concepts of human nature, of kindness, of justice,
of human essence and its realization...
All of these are notions and concepts
that have been created within our civilization,
our knowledge system and our form of philosophy,
and that, consequently, are part of our class system
and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these concepts
to describe or justify a fight that should, and shall in principle,
overthrow the very fundaments of our society.
This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification.
Well, I think we can start immediately the discussion.
Mr. Chomsky, I would like to ask you one question.
In your discussion you had the vocabulary
"proletariat", "we as proletarians".
It's the irony of history that at the moment,
young intellectuals coming from the middle class and upper class,
call themselves proletarians and say "We must join the proletarians"
But I don't see any class-conscious proletarians,
and that's a great dilemma.
It is not true in our given society
that all people are doing useful, productive work
or self-satisfying work, obviously that's very far from true.
Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labor.
And I think the revolution, if you want,
should be in the name of all human beings.
but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings
and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are
involved in the productive work of society.
Now what that is will differ, depending on the society.
In our society it, I think, includes intellectual workers.
So I think that the student revolutionaries, if you like,
have a point, a partial point.
That is, it's a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society
how the trained intelligentsia identify themselves.
If they're going to be technocrats, let's say
or servants of either the state or private power. Or alternatively,
whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the workforce
who happen to be doing intellectual labor. If the latter, then they
can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution.
If the former, then they're part of the class of the oppressors.
I have one small additional question, or more a remark to you.
That is: how can you, with your very courageous attitude
towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT,
which is known here as one of the Great War contractors
and intellectual makers of this war?
There are two aspects to that: one is the question how MIT tolerates me,
and the other question is how I tolerate MIT.
Well, as to how MIT tolerates me,
here again, I think, one shouldn't be overly schematic.
It's true that MIT is a major institution of war research.
But it's also true that it embodies very important
libertarian values, which are, I think,
quite deeply embedded in American society, fortunately for the world.
They're not deeply embedded enough to save the Vietnamese
but they're deeply enough embedded to prevent far worse disasters.
And here, I think, one has to be a bit qualified. That is,
There is imperial terror and aggression, there is exploitation,
there is racism, lots of things like that.
But there's also a real concern, coexisting with it, for individual rights
of a sort which, for example, are embodied in the Bill of Rights,
which is by no means simply an expression of class oppression.
It is also an expression of the necessity to defend
the individual against state power.
Now these things coexist. It's not that simple, it's not just all bad or all good.
And it's the particular balance in which they coexist that makes an institute
that produces weapons of war be willing to tolerate,
in fact in many ways even encourage, to be quite honest,
a person who is involved in civil disobedience against the war.
Now as to how I tolerate MIT, that raises another question.
There are people who argue, and I have never understood the logic of this,
that a radical ought to dissociate himself from all oppressive institutions.
The logic of that argument is that Karl Marx shouldn't have studied
in the British Museum, which, if anything, was the symbol
of the most vicious imperialism in the world, the place where
all the treasures of Empire were gathered,
the rape of the colonies was all poured in there.
But I think Karl Marx was quite right in studying in the British Museum.
He was right in using the resources
and in fact the liberal values of the civilization
that he was trying to overcome, against it.
And I think the same applies in this case.
But aren't you afraid that your presence at MIT
gives them a clean conscience?
I don't see how, really. I mean, I think
my presence at MIT serves marginally to
I hope a lot, I don't know how much, to increase student activism
against a lot of the things that MIT stands for, for example.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think this has to be the end of the debate.
Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Foucault,
I thank you very much for your far-going discussion
on both the technical and theoretical way, as the political way.
I thank you very much both on behalf of the audience, here and at home.