Sup Forums's opinion on Foucault?

What does Sup Forums think of Foucault and his works?

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Hokum-shilling civilization wrecker who literally died of butt AIDS.

It helps to understand some of his work to understand a bit about leftism. But I never read leftists for any other reason than my desire to understand the left, not to understand the world.

>read focault
>dont understand a word
> think i'm a complete retard
>wikipedia him
>"postmodernism"

good to know i'm not the crazy one

he's an actual philosopher, so I doubt he'll pass on Sup Forums
here's a video of Alex Jones instead;
youtube.com/watch?v=N8RtqxGM8TQ

Philosophy is nigger tier though

I agree. I read him to get another perspective.

>Civilisation wrecker

I think that's a bit extreme to be fair

Except Aristotle was right about everything..

I just realised that he looks like a nigger in that photo. What the fuck? He was French

Your country is nigger tier

why do you say that?

For the (Yous), obviously

He said some people were born to be slaves

But people who study philosophy "for a living" in my experience are people who were too dumb to do any serious math and science

He meant that in a spiritual sense, not necessarily a racial sense.

And can you disagree? What is capitalism except hordes of people who, even when given a great degree of freedom, work at menial shit all day for pittances?

Lots of people just choose to be used.

Yeah, his language is hard to follow for me.

Here's a Chomsky and Foucault debate in case you're interested.

youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

>too dumb to do any serious math and science
I knew it

As far as the pomos go, he is easy to read. The (((germans))) are far harder to get anything out of. That being said Foucault is an untrustworthy thinker and the examples he uses are too obscure to waste time fact checking so you get many undergrads parroting his stuff like its a revelation

E Michael Jones in his videos says Foucault came up with the idea that in return for unlimited sexual liberation the population would no longer examine the Oligarchs financial schemes. I need to read more about this Foucault as he had a major influence on society, one that I think was bad in the end.

youtube.com/watch?v=pigJliqEU5w

Well, you can take comfort in the fact that if it wasn't historically accurate he would have been called out on his shit ages ago.

No i think he meant actual slavery, spiritual slavery is something a 16 year old would say.

>But people who study philosophy "for a living" in my experience are people who were too dumb to do any serious math and science
lol

Congrats on misinterpreting a clearly written post. There's no hope for you.

I think many havent read him.

I think most here certainly havent read him

I also think his prose, the way he writes, is insufferable

his point wasn't to be historically accurate (although I doubt he was), he was more trying to demonstrate how we look at history in a flat and one dimensional way. And he didn't do all of that just cause he was trying to be smart, he wanted us to question how will history look upon us.

He's used in my commie teaching classes to justify constructivist learning. He's probably a bad dude.

Yeah, his language is difficult to follow, but I try, if not only to get another perspective on the world.

I don't like living in an echo-chamber.

But if he wasn't accurate, wouldn't he have been called out?

>But if he wasn't accurate, wouldn't he have been called out?
I agree, I doubt he was wrong in any meaningful way. he was a serious dude.

Ironically he wasn't a fan of Marxism at all, and yet he's used in modern Gender theory classes and Sociology classes.

Just another example of a Philosopher co-opted by Marxists and SJWs posthumously.

My opinion? Fuck you, too, buddy!

I think you are overestimating academia. An example would be the word parrhesia, Foucault does a huge write up on it based maybe on 10 instances found in ancient texts across pretty large time spans. He goes out of his way to try and show that parrhesia is unrelated to Christian confession despite how similar some of the practices seem. He's a homo Pomo so obviously he cannot give Christianity any credit. In order to dispute him you'd need a knowledge of classical languages so that you wouldn't have to read in translation and knowledge of ancient politics and early Christianity and its confession theories. How many people have those credentials and the courage to resist the legacy of an academic posterboy?

FPBP

I suppose you're right.

Fuck you, guy.

I'm studying maths and sciences, do well at it, yet I would have loved to study philosophy instead. So, you're wrong, bud

He was wrong in the sense of how he interpreted historical events. He would take isolated incidents and then apply them across the board.

At least that was my impression. This was more true in the history of sexuality than in madness and civilization.

I actually find Philosophy more difficult than Maths or science. At least Maths and science have an objective answer that can be deduced.

I'd find it much easier to read a University level Chemistry textbook than a University Philosophy text.

Shit, that was meant for I've only read some of Madness and Civilisation so far so I can't comment on the History of Sexuality.

I guess it makes sense, but I would have no idea to know. I just wanted to tell the other guy how he was wrong.

Seemed like a degenerate but had some very good ideas.

His description of the panopticon is one of the most important paradigms in political theory today .

His work contains a lot of truth but I disagree with him on most moral and philosophical issues. He was a sado/masocistic homosexual bipolar deviant. His moral codecs never managed to aquire him happiness which is why he so often tried to kill himself and eventually died of aids.

I agree. he was nitpicking certain historical truths to make his point. but that is allowed. he didn't make anything up, that's why nobody's accusing him in the scientific world.
But again I come back as to how I see the goal of him his works, he is simply expressing the idea of history not being streamlined, behavior anomalies were frequent and sometimes lasted for very long, and he used accepted scientific methods to present his case.
And again, not in the sense that "hey we should all accept this cause it was okay before, but you didn't know that", but to question how we live today. Is Pokemon GO more important to the western society than *insert serious issue*? and are we degenerate because of it

He tried to kill himself? Damn, I didn't know that.

Yeah, I don't necessarily agree with him so far but I can respect his arguments. As a hardcore right-winger, respecting a Leftist's arguments isn't something that comes easily.

His work is written quite entangled but once you get it you find that a lot of it is mediocer. People who doubt their own abilities tend to complicate them more than necessary.
Try asking any leftist about hermeneutics and if they fail to explain it withon two minutes then they have low self-esteem.

Atleast he's not a manlet.

He did, but it was in his younger days. It happend frequently though. His suicide attempts is also the reason his father had him institutionalized in an insanitary assylum which inspired his work called "birth of the clinic".

No but he was a masocistic homosexual.

Huh, I didn't know that. That's pretty depressing, to be honest.

Literally who? Who is this guys?

I'm not smart enough to read him

He was a Leftist Anarchist (although many would argue he was actually apolitical) who wrote a lot about power and knowledge and how they're interlinked in a system, and about sexuality too.

I haven't read much of his work yet, but that's what I've been told and the impression I've got.

Discipline and Punish is one of my favorite books!
Also very readable compared to his more theoretical work.

I've heard good things about Foucault, actually.

Degenerate homosexual who died of AIDS. His ideas were as bad as his personal life.

Gave the Maoist "long march through the institutions" a stronger ideological veneer by proposing intellectuals as the vanguard class of the communist revolution, and introduced moral relativism to the narrative to make it impervious to criticism & hatefacts.

An all round evil guy whose bad ideas and degenerate lifestyle couldn't cause his death soon enough to save the world from his poisonous mind.

Why? Can you reflect yourself on any of his moral ideas?
I agree on his observations regarding the power division of a society but where he critized them I, on the contrary, find them really effectful and wish we were to exploit these opertunities more. Focaults aim was to liberate the individual and its thoughts which in my book is impossible.

He is basically Nietzsche and Althusser combined, so you're better off reading those two to gain true understanding.

However, he was foundational to my development intellectually, and I think if he were around today he'd be a staunch critic of the way the American academy has bastardized his theories. He was fundamentally a libertarian, almost right-wing compared to today's neo-Maoist nigger professors and their minions.

He was very political. Everything he wrote on critics on instutions was political idealism.

Ha no where near as bad as Derrida or Lacan.

Yeah, I'm enjoying his work Madness and Civilisation so far even though I'm not a Leftist or an Anarchist.

I haven't gotten to that one yet, but I will eventually. I plan on buying all his books.

He wasn't a Communist, though. I believe he was actually critical of Marxist theory.

> if he were around today he'd be a staunch critic of the way the American academy has bastardized his theories

I completely agree. I think he'd be personally disgusted if he saw the way his theories were being used today in Gender theory classes or Sociology classes.

Try taking a elective philosophy class where one of his books is a big part of the semester with his seminal book Discipline and Punish

Like, check out this lecture. The professor compares and his work the History of Sexuality to Gender Troubles by that cunty Feminist Judith Butler.

youtube.com/watch?v=7bkFlJfxyF0

It's long, but if you want to see what they teach in these classes here you go.

The only reasons for a Sup Forums goy to read him would be to learn the go-to arguements of a leftist college student and then to refute those arguements because Focault is a scumbag.

There's a lot educational litterature I would suggest my fellow Sup Forums community before wasting their time with Focault.
There's even a lot of useless leftist refuteable litterature I would suggest them before suggesting Focault.

No, he just wanted to reframe communism, like all cultural/non-economic Marxism into his preffered way. He wanted to lead a troop of mental patients to be his vanguard class for his communist revolution (as opposed to the working class of normative economic Marxism), then settled on intellectuals like himself as the vangaurd class, hence the proliferation of mini-Foucaults in universities creating the university centric SJW phenomenon we see today.

SJWs as an intellectual vanguard of the communist revolution is Foucaults legacy to the world, birthed from his HIV ridden brain.

Although he was gay and into BDSM, he always hit his sexuality publicly and rarely advocated it. During his life he mostly apolitical, the only time he really got involved in direct action was in the late '60s on behalf of prison reform.

I think the greatest lesson I got from him is an historical one; societies change and what seems barbaric today was just an effective means of achieving the same goal in the past. That's one reason why I support the death penalty and summary execution of felons. Moral relativism can go both ways.

End yourself false flag

His work was like most false sciences. A load of waffle that is impossible to prove to any meaningful extent either way. Yes some of the things he argued were correct in some situations. However, they cannot be applied universally. Hence I find him massively overrated by people who don't understand the real sciences. Those who do duff degrees.

IE I could say men are evil. I would be right in the social science view as I could use a number of qualitative examples that have no real significance. The fact that I did not say all men are evil also helps back this viewpoint. However, it is an unfulfilling argument that just goes in circles as the judgement is completely subjective.

I will admit some of his work on surveillance is interesting. However, like with most philosophers he complicates the argument for no reason other than to appear superior. No making up new terms just for the sake of it does not make you more intelligent. It makes you a narcissist with an over inflated sense of self worth.

This.

>don't understand the real sciences

Hard sciences are actually easier to understand than Philosophy for me.
I would argue that you actually need *more* intelligence to understand Philosophy than hard sciences, because hard sciences have a provable and already determined answer.

An undergrad in science really doesn't need to think about anything at all, really.

Foucault was just another Marcuse, a Communist trying to figure out why normative economic Marxism had failed in the West, and trying to figure out a way to make it work and achieve a Communist revolution.

Foucault was the one who proposed to move away from the working class and to embrace all the minority weirdo groups as the revolutionary class with intellectuals as the vangaurd, literally the SJW phenomenon we see around BLM, gays, trannys etc. we see today.

Just another communist looking dor ways to make communism work and adjusting the theory & means to achieve the same end.

But Foucault was very anti-authority. Communists are for full government.

Doesn't that seem a bit contradictory?

No, you don't.

Anyone can do philosophy. You don't have public universities, but I enter their classes all the time. You can see everything in philosophy in 2 years. With math and science, in 2 years you are still at the beggining.

>the real sciences
philosophy is "real science" you fucking moron. And no, you can't just claim everything you want and just say it's true. it doesn't work like that, and more importantly, that's not the point.

But the answers in hard science courses are there in front of you in the textbook. It doesn't actually require much thought, you just have to understand what's being said. Now, you do need some level of intelligence to understand what the textbook is saying, but once you get it there isn't much thought involved.

With Philosophy, first of all I'd argue the language used can be just as convoluted, but Foucault, for example, doesn't provide solutions to anything he says, unlike a Chemistry textbook would.

What is this?

Science and math books don't give you all the answers. They just give you an introduction to the topic, and lots of problems to solve so you figure out the rest.

Yeah philosophy is much more intellectually taxing than the hard sciences. Most of the stem guys I know aren't that bright they're just super autistic so they're good with numbers.

you do know that modern physics and math are as unprovable and relative as is modern philosophy, right? you know that what you study at university on math and physics is as basic as the things students learn in their philosophy classes?

>math
>unprovable

No, not at all. Don't you observe Communists IRL?

They have a chronological morality, judged on historical materialism and the inevitability of communism. They are opposed to counter-revolutionary authority, which delays communism, and in favour of communist/leftist authority which advances and propels us towards the historical end of communism.

Red authority = good
Anti-red authority = bad

Marcuse called it repressive tolerance. Lenin would have called it red terror or counter-revolutionary terror, Mao likewise and so on.

You've just shown me an equation without any context. I don't have any guidance on how to solve that. You can't just say plop something down out of context and say 'what's this?'

I'm a Nursing major. I don't have the mathematical capabilities to answer that.

Answering your question, I've been to philosophy courses.

Math and physics are orders of magnitude more taxing.

The relationships are mostly linear and manageable, even in economics. You are never really on the boundaries of your mental capabilities.

I do observe them, but Foucault, from what I've read on him, was very anti-authority in general.

Unless he was some Anarcho-Communist (which doesn't even make sense), then I don't see how he could have been a Marxist.

So you never took Calculus, and you think you can determine whether math is harder than philosophy or not?

>Faggot

They make nurses study Foucault? Are they trying to teach you to organise and mobilise mental patients as a revolutionary class like he did?

Foucault tried to tell his patients that Captialism caused their mental illness, and the only way to cure their madness was to overthrow capitalism in a communist revolution.

Do you believe that? And have you thought about why you are bing taught that as a nursing student at uni?

yes, certain ideas/theories that modern math explores today are very abstract and purely speculative. that's why you have, lets say, two theories that are both logically rich and provable, but contradict themselves.

I get the feeling you're a highschool edgelord, or you're extremely stupid and ignorant.

Well, I'm sure if I had some worked example for that equation I could solve similar ones, but I've been out of the Maths scene for quite a while.

I'm sure you're rusty at stuff you studied in Secondary school.

No, I've picked up his books in my spare time.
What the hell would Foucault have to do with Nursing?

All higher educations in my country have mandatory philosophy of science classes. Foucault is a classic example of post-structuralism.

I just know you don't know anything about maths because you are using the wrong terms. Nobody that knows the first thing about math would use those terms to describe it, because they don't even remotely apply.

You are probably mixing it up with physics.

Physics on the frontier of knowledge are speculative, some bits contradict each other, etc. and so on, yeah. But how does that make it easier than philosophy?

>Math and physics are orders of magnitude more taxing.
that's just cause you don't know math. you don't know hermeneutics and semantics also, but you're just ignorant enough to dismiss them cause you think solving a math equation makes you a scientist.

I didn't tell you to solve it. I just asked what it was.

You don't understand communist morality. Re-read my post. They judge things on a chronological basis, if it advances history towards communism, it is good. If it regresses history away from communism, it is bad.

Nothing more complicated than that, everything else is morally relative to the advancement of history towards or away from the communist utopia. Anything can be good or bad depending on which way it is used to advance or regress "history".

I didn't want him to solve it, I just asked what it was. How can you talk about math when you don't even know the most basic geometrical figures?

A differential equation, correct?

Well, I mean, isn't that a bit of a generalisation? I hate Commies as much as the next guy, but I don't like lumping them all together like that.

He was a communist, and his work was done to benefit the communist cause, but I believe his ideas are quite useful to the modern dissident right.

The context where Foucault wrote his works was a context where the "establishment" was still conservative (the President of France was De Gaulle), and real communism had failed. That's why he wrote so much about criticizing "scientific worldview", and denying the validity of "grand metanarratives". These ideas weren't useful to the left in the 60s.

Now that changed. We live in a world where the greatest arguments of the left are "It's the Current Year" and "You Don't Want to be on the right side of history, do you?" In this context, Foucault criticism of metanarratives and cultural relativism are useful to the right.

It can go like this.

>"As I was explaining, there is no cultural absolute path to modernity and the Enlightenment..."
>"I agree with you professor! That's why I reject all tenets of liberal progressivism!"
>"No, that's not what I meant, I wanted to criticize the grand narrative of modernity, but in the name of revolutionary communism, that's why I see the scientific worldview..."
>"It's bullshit, I know, we should strive for localized narratives instead, like my belief that the white race is descended from Hyperborean Aryans from Atlantis".

They can't really escape from that trap, they made it themselves.

>You don't understand communist morality
and like you do. fuck off australia, you add nothing to the thread. you're just shitposting about communism while I doubt you even know what it is.

Much of Foucault's work was about mental illness and what caused it. He believed that capitalism caused mental (and much physical) illness and the only cure was a communist revolution. He provided an ideological justification for people in positions of authority (like doctors and nurses) to manipulate the mentally ill into being dupes for left-wing causes.

Angry philosophy student spotted
.That's because hard sciences are grounded empirically. The qualitative road that philosophers choose has no real answers. It just ends with circular arguments with neither side being able to provide substantive evidence to disprove the other.
They spend far too long trying to answer almost rhetorical questions. An example I quickly made up - Which was more important for the large increase in life expectancy in Western nations over the last 250 years, advances in food production and sanitation or development in the Field of Biology?
This question has no real suitable answer. Everything can be defined mathematically. It is just the equations for some phenomenom like emotion are extremely complicated. Thus there is a tendency to rely on experience and qualitative data. Data that far to easily is affected by the academics' positionality.

Part of my degree was studying work from academics like Foucalt and Agamben. It does not take long before you realise they provide little knowledge of any real value, bar over complicating the obvious. The arguments around the State of Exception are pointless.

It is because of the circular nature of the arguments that they form infinite loops of arguments and counterarguments that provide nothing of real value. Well except perhaps giving academics dong useless degrees overpaid jobs.

No, it's just a volume integral, and the volume is an ellipsoid

Mandatory "Cultural Studies" classes? Analyse things from a Marxist/Feminist/Queer/Post-X perspective?

I get why that's accepted, and given the scope of his project i can see why he would present case studies the way he did. I guess that I don't really have a problem with his research, I have a problem with its interpretation.

The way it's sold to us in the states, is that there is no such thing as degenerate behavior. There are only levels of repression. All behavior can be "normal" given the correct discourse.

I didn't really get that from his readings, the only thing I really took away philosophically was that we our products of our times and places of origin, and we are biased as well as controlled due to this. It's a great observation and really interesting work, but at the end of all of it I'm still left thinking "so what?"

To be fair, I double majored in physics and was much more focused in logic than in continental philosophy.