Outline and assess Foucault's critique of modernity Essay - 1

Outline and assess Foucaults limited review of modernity - Essay ExampleFinally, the third section will be devoted to Foucaultian revaluation of institutional basis of modernity and the disciplinary disposition of its rationality. It will be argued that, while Foucault denounced various aspects of modernity, he did non attempt to idealise pre-modern thought/institutions, and remained unsure about social project alternative to modernity, thus alter to similar indecisiveness among the following post-modernist thinkers. 1. Foucaults Archaeology of Knowledge A Critique of Rationalist objectiveness The modern account of acquaintance was premised upon the representationalist epistemology founded by Descartes. Rejecting previous assumptions on the nature and purposes of human knowledge, Descartes posited that knowledge is derived from stainless determination of correspondence of certain representations with the actual objects of external world, a correspondence that can in article of faith be verified by constructing certain methodological arguments (Gutting, 1999, p. 116). Later modern thinkers basically followed this Cartesian epistemology, expect that representations under consideration are derived from some innate properties of human mind and reality. Foucault based his epistemological critique of modern philosophy on the thorough deconstruction of Cartesian notions of knowledge. He affirms the historically specific character of knowledge, as opposed to ahistorical Cartesian account of epistemological procedures, assuming that development of structures of human knowledge is governed by alterations in episteme, i.e. total set of relations that unite... the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalised systems (Foucault, 2002a, p. 211). Foucault believes that the development of distinctively modern episteme was caused by shift from the Renaissance view of knowledge as system of resemblances that was pred icated upon the clarification of interrelation between various objects of surrounding world and mens repoint in it, to analytical and interpretational forms of cognition (Carrette, 2000, pp. 15-16). The latter were based not on the sudden and illuminating breakthrough that all thought is thought but on constantly renewed interrogation of the forms of non-thinking that leads to the reduction of experiential world to some common and transcendental dialectics (Foucault, 2002b, p. 353). Foucault surmises that universalistic assumptions of modernitys epistemology are invalidated by the discursive and ultimately relative nature of knowledge as such, for, in his view, the structures of knowledge depend on the character of discourse as practice that brings about the very object that are spoken of (Mahon, 1992, p. 11). Here, single may find that Foucault maintains that the discursive nature of language and knowledge practices does not allow for some objective, universal discourse, and t herefore that modernitys pretences for formulating a transparent methodology of knowledge are unfounded. 2. Foucault on sheath The Rejection of A Priori Subjectivity The modernitys view on subject is generally predicated upon the idea of its catholicity and humanist character, which means that