What Do We Mean by “Human Nature”? Foucault, Chomsky, and the Historical Conditions of Intelligibility
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| A Debate. AI image |
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 becomes more revealing once this prior question is made visible. Before asking whether there is a universal human nature, we might ask: what makes the question of human nature intelligible as a question?
That does not make the empirical question disappear. It changes the level at which we approach it.
II. Chomsky: What Must Be There?
Chomsky begins from a problem that is difficult to dismiss. Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of linguistic expressions. We do not merely repeat sentences we have heard before. We understand novel sentences, recognize grammatical possibilities we have never explicitly been taught, and construct forms whose complexity cannot be explained simply by imitation.
For Chomsky, this raises a question about what must be true of the human organism for such a capacity to exist.
The child is exposed to a limited body of linguistic material. Yet from relatively partial data, the child develops a highly structured competence. The problem is therefore not merely to describe the languages people happen to speak, but to explain the underlying capacity that makes language acquisition possible at all.
This leads Chomsky toward an idea of an innate human structure. The claim is not that every human being possesses a fully formed grammar in the mind, waiting to be revealed. Rather, the organism must possess species-specific properties that constrain and organize what can be learned. Without such constraints, the transition from limited linguistic evidence to sophisticated competence would be difficult to explain.
The argument also opens onto a broader question of creativity. Human beings can produce forms that are not simply repetitions of what they have encountered. For Chomsky, even the ordinary ability of a child to respond appropriately to a new situation, describe it, and think about it in a new way points toward a generative capacity that cannot be reduced to passive reception.
This is why Chomsky's appeal to human nature should not be understood as the simple assertion of a timeless metaphysical essence. His starting point is explanatory. Something must account for the fact that human beings can acquire complex systems of knowledge from limited data and then use those systems in remarkably varied ways.
His question is therefore: what must be there for this capacity to be possible?
Chomsky is not primarily asking us to contemplate an abstract definition of humanity. He is trying to identify the conditions that make specifically human capacities possible. His reasoning moves from an observable phenomenon—the ability to generate and understand novel forms—to a hypothesis about the properties of the organism that make this possible.
The universal enters here not as a dogmatic conclusion imposed from outside, but as part of an attempt to account for what human beings share.
At this point, however, another question becomes possible. Even if certain capacities require an underlying structure, what determines how that structure is identified and described? What makes it possible to recognize some features as fundamental, universal, or constitutive of the human being in the first place?
That question will eventually separate Chomsky's approach from Foucault's. For now, it is enough to state Chomsky's wager clearly: behind the observable diversity of human performances, there may be a common structure that makes those performances possible.
III. Foucault: What Makes It Intelligible?
Foucault approaches the question from another direction. Rather than beginning with the capacities that demand explanation, he asks about the conditions under which certain objects of knowledge become available to thought. The issue is not simply whether a proposition is true, but how something comes to function as an object about which truth can be sought.
This is visible in the 1971 debate. Foucault says that he distrusts the notion of human nature partly because scientific notions do not all have the same degree of elaboration, function, or use. Some concepts classify objects; others differentiate them, isolate elements, or establish relations. Alongside these, he identifies what he calls “peripheral” notions: terms through which a scientific practice marks out its domain, indicates its relation to other practices, and gestures toward the tasks that remain before it.
His example is life.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault argues, natural beings were largely organized within a hierarchical tableau that included both living and non-living things. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, transformations in biological knowledge brought into view new objects, relations, and processes. It was within this changing field that the notion of life acquired a distinctive epistemological role.
The important point is that Foucault does not say that the concept of life itself caused biology to emerge. He explicitly rejects that interpretation. Rather, transformations in biological knowledge produced new concepts and, at the same time, gave rise to a notion such as life that could designate, delimit, and situate a particular scientific discourse.
This is what he means by calling life an “epistemological indicator.” The term does not simply name a scientific object. It can indicate the organization of a field of knowledge: what kinds of objects belong to it, what problems define it, and how it distinguishes itself from neighbouring forms of inquiry.
Foucault then applies the same reasoning to human nature. He argues that linguists did not discover the laws of consonant mutation by first studying human nature, nor did Freud discover the principles of dream analysis by beginning from such a concept. In the history of knowledge, human nature can instead function as an indicator of particular kinds of discourse and of their relation to other domains such as theology, biology, and history.
The historical question is therefore not simply: What does “human nature” mean? It is: what role does the expression play within a particular configuration of knowledge?
IV. The Same Expression, Another Configuration
The phrase human nature can remain unchanged while the field surrounding it changes. Its words may survive across centuries, but the questions attached to them need not. It can appear within theological speculation, philosophical anthropology, naturalistic inquiry, political theory, or modern investigations of the human sciences. The expression persists; its function may change.
This is why the historical question cannot be reduced to tracing changing definitions. A history of definitions would tell us how people have described human nature. The Foucauldian question is more structural: what relations allow a particular description to function as an intelligible form of knowledge at a given moment?
The same question can now be applied to Chomsky's position. When he asks what properties of the human organism must exist to explain language and creativity, he is posing a powerful explanatory question. But Foucault invites us to step back from it. What makes the human organism available as the relevant explanatory unit? What makes it possible to distinguish universal properties from historical variation? And what makes human nature available as a name for what lies beneath those variations?
These questions do not refute Chomsky's empirical claims. They operate at another level.
There is a useful analogy here with Saussure, although the connection should remain strictly methodological rather than historical. In Saussure's account of language, a linguistic element does not possess its value simply by itself. Its identity depends on its relations within a system. A sign, for example, is not significant merely because of its intrinsic properties; its linguistic value emerges from its differences from other elements.
Something comparable can be said about historical intelligibility. A concept cannot always be understood by isolating the expression and asking what it “really means.” Its function depends on the relations in which it operates. What matters is not only the term itself but the position it occupies within a configuration of knowledge.
The analogy has limits. Saussure describes the structure of a linguistic system, whereas Foucault investigates historically changing formations of knowledge. The point is not that Foucault simply applies Saussurean linguistics to intellectual history, but that in both cases the intelligibility of an element depends upon a relational field rather than upon the element considered in isolation.
This helps clarify the difference between the two approaches. Chomsky asks what must be present in the human organism to explain capacities that appear across different cultures and histories. Foucault asks how a particular conception of the human being becomes available as an object of knowledge in the first place.
The disagreement is therefore not simply between a universalist and a historicist. It concerns the level at which explanation should begin.
V. Two Reactions to Two Reductions
The difference between Chomsky and Foucault can now be stated more precisely. They are not simply offering competing descriptions of the human being. They are responding to different forms of reduction.
Chomsky resists reducing human creativity to what can be derived from experience, environment, or existing social patterns. If human beings can generate forms that cannot be explained by what has simply been given to them, an adequate account must leave room for a generative capacity that exceeds those conditions.
Foucault resists another reduction: treating the knowing subject as the unquestioned starting point of inquiry. The problem is not only what the subject knows, but how knowledge itself functions collectively, according to rules that are not reducible to the consciousness of an individual knower.
Foucault captures the difference in his discussion of creativity:
“For me it is a matter of effacing the dilemma of the knowing subject, while for him it is a matter of allowing the dilemma of the speaking subject to reappear.”
The remark is important because Foucault immediately places the two approaches within a broader problem. Linguists, he observes, have long studied language as a system with a collective value. His own concern is analogous only at a different level: to investigate the collective rules through which knowledge becomes possible at particular moments, rather than treating new knowledge simply as the discovery of an individual subject.
The opposition is therefore not between creativity and determinism. Both thinkers are trying to explain how something genuinely new can emerge. They locate the conditions of that emergence differently.
For Chomsky, the relevant conditions lie partly in the structure of the human organism. For Foucault, they lie in the rules and transformations of collective fields of knowledge. One asks what enables an individual to produce something new within a system; the other asks how the system itself changes so that new forms of thought become possible.
VI. Human Nature as a Historical Problem
The debate consequently changes character once human nature is treated not only as an object of inquiry but also as a historical problem.
This does not mean that human beings have no stable biological properties, nor that claims about human capacities are merely products of discourse. That conclusion would go beyond what Foucault establishes in the debate. The point is more precise: the fact that human beings possess certain capacities does not by itself determine how those capacities become organized into a concept of human nature.
There may indeed be universal features of the human organism. But identifying some feature as universal, fundamental, or constitutive involves more than discovering a fact. It also requires a conceptual framework within which that fact can occupy a particular explanatory role.
The historical question therefore does not replace the empirical one. It asks how phenomena become objects of inquiry, how relations among them are established, and why certain forms of explanation become available at particular moments.
This is where the earlier distinction between an expression and its function becomes decisive. Human nature is not a sealed container whose content remains identical whenever the phrase is uttered. Its intelligibility depends on the configuration in which it operates. The same expression can participate in different forms of knowledge without having to become a completely different phrase.
Seen from this angle, the Chomsky–Foucault encounter is less a choice between nature and history than a confrontation between two starting points. Chomsky asks what must be present for specifically human capacities to exist. Foucault asks what makes it possible to formulate knowledge about the human being in particular terms.
The first question searches beneath performance for a generative condition. The second steps back from the question itself to examine the conditions under which it can be formulated.
That does not resolve the debate. It explains why the familiar opposition between universalism and historicism is insufficient to capture it. The two thinkers are, to a significant extent, answering different questions.
And that may be the most productive way to read the encounter. The important question is not simply whether human nature is real or invented. It is to ask what happens when we invoke the concept: what does it allow us to see, what relations does it organize, and what does it make intelligible?
Once that question is asked, human nature becomes more than a premise in a philosophical argument. It becomes an object of historical inquiry in its own right.
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature. The New Press.
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1966.)
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969.)
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds.; R. Harris, Trans.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1916.)
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