Foucault and Society

People reacted against the bourgeois dominated culture or what the bourgeoisie defined as cultural norms in the forties and Foucault and Sartre were philosophers who spurred that reaction. After the WWII there was probably much discontent on the nature of the institution and the what meaning there is to life that got philosophers to write about their existential theory.The philosopher, Heidegger had already referred to man’s experience on the earth as being ‘thrown into the world’ and scholars wanted clarity on the meaning that life has especially after the destruction that took place in Europe, the dispossession that occurred when certain affected minorities lost their rights and belongings and people had to rebuild.

Instead of just accepting what we observe in the natural sciences as truths, on the basis of cognition,  Foucault offered some contingent interpretations.   Scientific truths to him were the outcome of historical forces and this affected social views at the time. To him those scientific truths were the result of the moral and political commitments of a particular society.

One could say that Foucault was so influenced by the current existential philosophy of the day, a search for meaning in life, that he questioned how we look for identity. Existentialists like Keirkegaard had already laid the groundwork for existentialism as a need for man to find meaning in what he does in life more than a century earlier.

Observations on madness in society took on a new meaning, such observations once since as unchallengeable scientific discoveries were questioned; it appeared that they were a product of the social commitments of the time they were made. Foucault also criticized medical practice specifically the clinical system through a book and his social critique is strongly felt as he examined the change in the penal system in modern times.

It is in Discipline and Punish, his critique on prison reform that he challenged the idea of prisons being used as the established form of punishment. Today there are many reduced sentences and perhaps they are due to his questioning of the use of power within that accepted mode of punishment. It is interesting to note that the punishment found in prison environment was likened to that in schools and hospitals under a new technological power that he referred to.