Foucault’s Madness: Ships of Fools, Confinement, Criticisms & Method

[@Phi792]

the idea of putting up a critical discussion video on an earlier video, is really cool

[@tylermacdonald8924]

He should definitely do more like this

[@cheri238]

👏👏👏

[@christopherdainton4224]

I know some have criticized this, but i want to say that i appreciate your slow speaking style, because these are heavy ideas to digest. Thank you!

[@wmgodfrey1770]

Agreed. There are many presenters whom speak or recite entirely too fast.

[@hotgurlpolly5236]

I subscribed bc i like his voice so much

[@cheri238]

Amazing 👏

[@ozlemdenli7763]

it is interesting that england being a protestant country - plus being the context in which the ideas of locke on work and desert were developed- has a more varied approach to idleness and madness

[@creepycrawlything]

I think that asking the question of "what is Foucault doing", is perhaps the best way to glean understanding from what he does and is; rather than approaching what he does in terms of him modelling or concretely depicting a world in which he and we find ourselves. I choose to approach Foucault in terms of him using "metaphors" which evoke a sense of our context of being and occurring. We begin with the individual Foucault who has sense of what he is as self, and a sense of the setting of being and occurring. We might understand that sense as shaped by life-experience, and biographical exigency. So that sense is multifacted and complex, organically rich. That sense has crucially come about through experience of myriad socials; myriad social experiences. Evidence as to self and other and world and all else, accretes. What is he then doing when writing and thinking and writing. I understand him as seeking "agency" by way of articulating perspective on his accreted sense of things. That sets up a dialectic where his sense of things evolves as others judge and react to his articulation. His sensing and its accretion (as deep personal understanding, private understanding) always in flux and everchanging. What social is for Foucault, and for others encountering him, becomes highly complex, highly contingent, and highly exigent. Populations divide as to embracing and rejecting the perspective he articulates across his evolving sensing. By metaphors I'm thinking of Foucault articulating perspective with all that he has to hand as resource for articulation. Its the ontic gist evoked by his usage of those metaphors, that seems central: some embracing him on that basis; others rejecting him on that same basis. I like his metaphors of "containment" and "disciplining", as they refer to an effect tending to be had as we take recourse to the integument of collective life, as resources in our articulating of perspective on our own sensing. The risk is always that our counter-cultural impulses end appropriated to the collective processes we might have to break free of, to articulate perspective on our sensing; language being crucial to that potentially unending containing and disciplining of our efforts to be free. Bottom line. For those and that embedded in prevailing societal being and occurring; Foucault's articulated perspective on madness and deviancy (and all else), is dangerous madness. In a first order manner, what Foucault has to say on such matters and all else, is self-advocacy, self-defense, refusal to give up the impulse to have agency expressing his own sensing. Metaphors are then the order of the day. Huge metaphors, rich metaphors, metaphors secured across a degree of genius. Defense of self with all you've got. Total effort, come what may.

[@wmgodfrey1770]

I would very much like to see an essay with the points and analysis made here, albeit expounded upon. Thx.

[@creepycrawlything]

Both Foucault and Nietzche explosively expand and deepen our sense and understanding of the inner dynamics of the social. What is possible ("necessary" Nietzche would say) within and across the social, is limitlessly open to redefinition, if we develop the capability to understand the matrix which currently defines it. Consideration of madness and deviancy are simply useful portals to some understanding of that matrix. Can we create conception and language with which we can deftly grapple with this nexus, so as to free up creative possibilities going forward. The first attempts to fly, were not all that great. Let's not too harshly judge Foucault for the limitations of his pioneering work.

[@wmgodfrey1770]

Everyone and everything placed on a Bell Curve can be viewed as a segment of the whole, in RELATION to the entire population or structure of society.

[@cheri238]

🙏❤️🌏🕊🎶🎵📚👏

[@jayjamesedawardgonzales9822]

I view Foucault as thinker or dweller on social constructs who’s ultimate aim is to spark more thoughts..a kind of pebble being tossed in a pond creating the ripple effect. An ever interesting and important man who should be considered but not necessarily subscribed to.

[@finneganlindsay]

Really the entire postmodern movement can be described as such.... Great general grasp on the problems with the world but unfortunately misguided. Infinitely more thoughtful than marxist movements; perhaps that is why the marxists hated them.

[@antimarx265]

It's constructed on logical fallacy... The motte and bailey technique. Before you read Foucault, you should really take a few logic classes.

[@creepycrawlything]

I understand Foucault as carrying forward the methods of enquiry authored by Neitzche. Carried forward in a manner taking account of an intervening historical period, and Foucaults own historical period and biographical circumstance. Such that the criticism that Foucault is "too speculative as history and too empirical to be philosophy", ironically captures the thrust of the evolution from Neitzche to Foucault and then beyond. The commonality with Neitzche and Foucault, is the determination to explore how to break out of being locked-in to the mainstream hegemonic meaning-making of their respective historical moments. Regard the scale of what is attempted. Regard the differential in mediating resource. In both cases one authoring individual, versus the huge personnel and time and material resource mediating and sustaining the collective meaning-making into which they found themselves respectively locked and confined. To reach out to others, Foucault chose to be less aphoristic than Neitzche. However Foucault is there still employing (empirical) metaphor. I read Foucault as speaking to the sense of madness and deviancy which my 1960s generation shared. Reading Foucault seemed to me more about the way he used language to speak to a sense of things, while striving to avoid being appropriated by a mainstream culture and society we had grown to distrust. It was up to us, having registered the example he set, to do our own thinking about the society and culture we found ourselves in. Foucault doesn't have to compete with the detailed narratives of the countless individuals who worked within a prevailing collective understanding in order to build and sustain it. Rather he appeals to and offers life-experience to, anyone who senses that collective understanding is something we must position ourselves to question and critique and ultimately be free off. In some crucial sense, both Neitzche and Foucault are 'mad' and 'dangerous' for many who have given over to mainstream meaning-making. Both are then self-advocates for those seen as mad and dangerous. Both counter that perception of their madness and dangerousness, with the hermetics of their respective corpuses. Where, again, those who find there is affinity between their own circumstance of being and that of Neitzche and Foucault, might glean useful resource from how each of them attacked this generic circumstance.

[@miat9039]

Yeah i can read nietzche traces in foucault work

[@itheuserfirst3186]

@@miat9039 And, in the end, he took it to heart.

[@wmgodfrey1770]

There are those too whom live their lives defending the very Structures of the SYSTEMS in their Society, meanwhile being alienated themselves, having a loathing for what actually IS, feeling an emptiness about their existence, even unto resentment of the shackles binding them if not a self-hatred as well.

[@antimarx265]

Then why doesn't his understanding of "truth" (ie his own convenient definition that only fits to support his points) apply to art or music, only language?

[@creepycrawlything]

@@antimarx265 You are right to recognise that the understanding of both Nietzche and Foucault serves their personal being, in addition to having value for some who read what they have to say. That aspect of the action of thinking being central to their respective and synergistic philosophies. What they say does have applicability to art and music. What Nietzche takes as his antecedents in ancient Greek culture and the work of Schopenhauer, is closely tied to music and art. The thinking which follows this duo, and is generally focused on how language usage works, is equally applicable to music and art. I get emails with papers in which academics who study Nietzche in depth, are currently working through laying out how his thinking applies to all the mediums across which we humans mediate our being.

[@EduNauta95]

Damn historians mistaking the forest for the trees, foucault's points use history as a low resolution background to make highly abstract points about ideological paradigms, so historical nitpicking is missing his point

[@beebleknievel2603]

Great vid! Although it's a year too late for me as I was writing a report on this book exactly 1 year ago 😂

[@alisonwalker7372]

I enjoyed this a lot, thanks!

[@MrTheo747]

Great video, really enjoyed it

[@maldoror5750]

Very elucidating. Thanks!

[@tylermacdonald8924]

Critical reflection on previous content, very nice

[@StarGossip23]

Wow it's really amazing video. I really loved it.

[@xenoblad]

Is the main point that the idea of normal human behavior is always, at least, largely constructed, but that the framework of all possible versions of construction falls within that list of points like deviation?

[@dominic9983]

Yes this is a good way to think of it, very much like Kant’s necessary conditions actually, by whom he was incredibly influenced.

[@krishnabrahma395]

Thank you sir

[@niklasbirksted8175]

History and civilization is his second book (or even the third, considering his thesis on Kant)

[@jademagic5791]

I feel it is wonderful

[@ralfmatters448]

There is an important difference between confinement and banishment. Banishment of the 'mad' confines the dominant epistemes to the cities and places of Law and Order which allows the 'disordered' to enter the ambiguous unknown. It is difficult to judge whether banishment is preferable or not to confinement, but it is at least a judgement upon both the 'mad' and the 'reasonable'. If you are 'reasonable' you enter the unordered (nature) at your own peril. It is a place that may judge your 'reasonableness' as wanting?

[@kathyschreiber9947]

Thanks for this. He was raising and exposing ideas about mental illness that were predominant (at least in the US) until the 1980s when the horrendous conditions at mental hospitals were exposed and most were shut down. Until then, everyone and anyone could literally be locked up indefinitely. Now the standard is a danger to themself or others. That probably lead to a lot of homelessness and other community mental health issues we see today. It's still a giant dilemma. It's hard to do, but it's more important to respect people's personal liberty than to warehouse them in a state mental institution.

[@cheri238]

I admire Foucault's work, Heraclitus stated one cannot step into the same rivers twice. During St. Anthony's becoming a preist one might see dungeons underneath buildings where the insane were placed away and hidden and locked in chains, as I have read he would go and wash their feet. The was water underneath also. Rivers of smells of water of the distaste of a population that did not understand or care maybe?

[@riikki___]

i dont think it really need sto be said that the trope of a ship of fools being popular in the 16th century is justification in of itself for Foucaults examination of the subject. the fact that there is little evidence for the ships (or even that ships were physically used in transporation of the condemned along rivers) doesn't really change what the idea of the ships says about madness and what other imagery and concepts it invokes. though it is interesting that while there is potential evidence of river based transport there is little to none of actual sea fairing ships of fools, despite the latter being more socially significant - as if the end destination of the condemned were inevitably the sea

[@niklasbirksted8175]

Also, your videos are better with you in them, makes it easier to listen.

[@somethingsomething1936]

what are your thoughts on recent allegations on foucault and has it changed your pov on the madness of the unreasonables?

[@simplycvrsive]

Jokes aside your YT videos are some of the very few that I've seen that explore ideas in different scenery as opposed to some others that have very meaningful content but feel a bit like a school lesson. Like it's a group of ideas a teacher is giving to us but we can only see it through imagination. Your videos feel like I'm actually experiencing what you're telling me. I've posted this message in multiple videos because I really fvck with what you're doing.

[@Jonah_79]

How can Foucault react to criticism in 1987, being dead since 1984?

[@derpfaddesweisen]

He was ahead of his time

[@marshacd]

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. --- Schiller

[@Rue747]

Can someone help me, please? I am trying to draw a parallel between this text and mental disorders in female villains like Cersei Lannister, Amy (Gone Girl), Adora, and Amma Crellin (Sharp Objects), and Esther (Orphan), I am unsure how to go about it from a psychological point of view. I would appreciate it if anyone can help me.

[@itheuserfirst3186]

Chomsky said that Foucault told him he has to write in incoherent ways, in order to be taken seriously by the intellegentsia. Yeah, thank you, but no. The French deconstructionists have had an altogether extremely negative influence on academia, and philosophy.

[@patrickkilroy6512]

So i.e. Foucault was completely full of it. Got it.

[@itheuserfirst3186]

He even admitted it himself. I think he was a depressed nhilist, struggling with being a homosexual in a prejudice society who also struggled with what, at the time, was considered a "gay" disease. For many gay people, it did seem like a cosmic judgement was being foist upon them, and that had to fuck with his head. But yeah, he forwarded very little useful philosophy. The French style was very trendy with theory academics looking to level up. We are reaping the effects of it now in society where there is no objective truth. There's just customized realities.

[@patrickkilroy6512]

@@itheuserfirst3186 That about summarises my views as well.

[@HxH2011DRA]

Bzz bzz

[@sircull4047]

Foucault went into existentialism, to the point that he thought it was a "gift", for all to experience that of others as a "gift". It is simple to me that he wanted the phenomena to go past the morality in the goal of sharing, whether demented idea's that resisted the normal social order, but that that was just a "border", that should be crossed to spreed the freedom of the individual outside their borders. He was a fool. Self absorbed.

[@BigHenFor]

Everyone is self-absorbed to a major degree. People see the world as they are, not as it is. Thus, there is no removing subjectivity. It is inescapable for even you.