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What Do We Mean by “Human Nature”? Foucault, Chomsky, and the Historical Conditions of Intelligibility

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A Debate. AI image I. The Question Behind the Question The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often presented as a disagreement about human nature . Chomsky argues that there are universal features of human beings; Foucault is said to reject such universality in favour of historical and social determination. The contrast is attractive because it is simple. It is also misleading. The more interesting question is not simply whether human nature exists. It is what each thinker is asking when he uses the expression human nature in the first place. A concept does not acquire its signification in isolation. What it can mean, what questions it permits us to formulate, and what counts as a satisfactory answer depend on the relations within which it operates. To ask what human nature is may therefore already presuppose a particular way of organizing knowledge: one in which something called “human nature” can be identified, investigated, and explained. The debate ...
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Foucault’s Glove and Derrida’s Shoes: Thinking at the Threshold

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I. The Problem of the Outside What happens when a philosophical problem becomes an object? Philosophy has always made use of images, analogies, diagrams, and things. Plato gives us a cave, Descartes a piece of wax, Wittgenstein a beetle in a box. Such devices are often treated as aids to understanding, ways of giving an abstract argument a concrete form. Yet some philosophical images do more than illustrate: they put a problem into a form that makes the distinction itself difficult to maintain. This becomes particularly striking when the problem concerns an inside and an outside. Philosophy has repeatedly sought a position from which what is ordinarily taken for granted can be examined. To understand a system, one might imagine that one must somehow step outside it; to identify the conditions governing thought, one might seem to require a standpoint not governed by those same conditions. But what if the thinker is already situated within the language, history, culture, or c...
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