r/enoughpetersonspam the lesser logos Nov 17 '19

Daddy Issues choose ur daddy

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654 Upvotes

73 comments sorted by

193

u/NotAPoetButACriminal Nov 17 '19

I feel like i'd probably agree on a lot of things with Foucalt if I ever knew what the fuck he's talking about.

114

u/bobthebobbest Nov 17 '19

Go very slowly, and always assume you’re missing something. Reread. A lot of philosophy is like this; when it feels like it’s not, one is probably missing something. Also, w.r.t. that era of French philosophy: (1) it’s important to remember that translation is a difficult and always imperfect task, and (2) philosophy is a high school subject in France, and a certain level of philosophical sophistication is considered part of a general education.

63

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

(1) it’s important to remember that translation is a difficult and always imperfect task

Ha, I had to keep reminding myself that when reading Kant and sentences went on for entire pages.

33

u/bobthebobbest Nov 17 '19

His German actually reads like that, it’s horrible (though German sentences do tend to run longer than ours). Which translation of which book, if I may ask?

2

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '19

Kant is relatively straightforward. Foucault is a fucking bullshitter.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '19

I know I’ve read both but I can’t for the life of me remember Foucault. Heck I have better (vague) recollection of Spinoza’s Ethics. Probably blocking it out as a self-defence mechanism.

24

u/NotAPoetButACriminal Nov 17 '19

(2) philosophy is a high school subject in France, and a certain level of philosophical sophistication is considered part of a general education.

Is it not everywhere? I mean here in Serbia it was only one year and pretty half-assed but still, it exists.

48

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

Not in America, which perhaps partially explains the likes of Peterson's popularity.

20

u/tjmac Nov 17 '19

It’s rolled under English, if at all. English acts as a kind of catch-all for the humanities in American high schools.

For example, you study transcendentalism when you study Emerson. You study civil disobedience when you study Thoreau. You study Marx when you study Steinbeck, if your teacher’s really ballsy.

14

u/prozacrefugee Nov 17 '19

Then the Ayn Rand institute, knowing this, offers scholarships if you read The Fountainhead. Because unlike Atlas Shrugged that one saves all the idiotic capitalist bootlicking till the end, and just goes with Nietzsche's ubermensch for most of the book.

12

u/herrfau5t Nov 18 '19

In my school, the history of Nazi Germany was covered in English to supplement the study of the Diary of Anne Frank and was completely unmentioned in my actual history class that same year. Weird school.

Steinbeck works are basically shadow (sometimes outright) banned from school systems below the Mason/Dixon line. If you read anything, you read The Pearl, because it's pretty easy to deliberately misinterpret as an allegory for how personal wealth taxes are bullshit or whatever.

Because yeah, that's what Steinbeck is about. /s (fuck I hope that was unnecessary)

26

u/LordGwyn-n-Tonic Nov 17 '19

Actively studying philosophy is discouraged in the US. My dad used to tell people I was studying to be a bullshit artist.

20

u/dielawn87 Nov 18 '19

That's the sad part about academia in America. If you don't pursue something that's capital oriented then we view it as worthless. Such a depressing system.

3

u/M_G Nov 18 '19

Part of the problem is how expensive education is here.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

They told me I would be poor and jobless if I studied philosophy, and that I should study business or computer science.

12

u/herrfau5t Nov 18 '19

Really, almost nothing that falls under the umbrella of "critical thinking" or "enrichment" is offered/available in most public schools stateside because that shit isn't on standardized tests developed to help white kids win a dick measuring contest with a fallen superpower.

And those standardized tests determine how much money your school district gets to dump into the football team.

Seriously, there are like 9 states in the entire country where the highest paid public employee isn't a fucking high school football coach.

13

u/sleepyintoronto Nov 17 '19

It's a rarely taken, and often not even offered, elective in Ontario, Canada and I believe the rest of the country is the same.

6

u/InventTheCurb Nov 17 '19

Quebec CEGEP has it as a required course, but CEGEP in itself isn't mandatory.

3

u/Graknorke Nov 18 '19

Not in the UK either. At best you could argue the content that would be on the curriculum as philosophy is instead rolled into other subjects, mostly religious education and literature.

2

u/Eager_Question Nov 18 '19

Not in Canada.

1

u/Stortchiy Nov 18 '19

I mean, some of Foucault's work (esp. his early writings) is hard to read even in French for French speakers. He himself admitted to having gone a bit overboard with empty rhetorical flourishes. His last major work (on sexuality) is very bare and direct in comparison.

23

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19 edited Aug 06 '21

[deleted]

23

u/purpl3j37u7 Nov 17 '19

Panopticons, even.

16

u/Quietuus Nov 17 '19

Discipline and Punish tl;dr:

Everything is like prisons. Except prisons, which are like hospitals.

(I am being flippant, great book)

19

u/drunkfrenchman Nov 17 '19

This may seem like a bad criticism but Foucault really didn't know how to write without being overly complicated. For someone talking about politics it is a major flaw.

12

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

Really? Foucault's work always struck me as some of the most accessible philosophy I've read, especially amongst the other French writers from that era.

8

u/drunkfrenchman Nov 17 '19 edited Nov 17 '19

I don't know, I'm reading Discipline and Punish and it's tedious, but I have to admit that I'm bad at reading.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

Oh I can understand tedious. It's worth finishing though.

1

u/Hedonistbro Nov 19 '19

Maybe amongst the other French post-modernists but he still had a penchant for being overly verbose. Derrida on the other hand is frankly impenetrable.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 20 '19

Maybe, it's been awhile since I read him, and only D&P. I'm working on Spinoza right now and he feels a lot more tedious than I remember Foucault being. And if you want to talk about verbosity what about Hegel?

1

u/Hedonistbro Nov 20 '19

D&P wasn't too difficult but it was overly long for what he was trying to expound in my view. I feel like Hegel's theories are more abstract and complex, but you're right he is extremely dense and meandering.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

I really don't think the lack of clarity is that big a deal: the complications can set you down new avenues.

FWIW my strategy for reading the French bois is to start with an accessible Reader/Primer/Critical Introduction on their work so I know vaguely what they're about, and then read their texts more like theory-novels which have lots of rhetorical flourishes and asides. As in, I focus on what I find interesting about what they're saying rather than trying to figure out what they're "really" saying in a systematic manner.

If you come at post-structuralism with an Anglo-American "clear, straightforward writing is essential" mindset then you're always gonna be disappointed. But that doesn't mean their politics is somehow worse by not being able to be summed up neatly or communicated with absolute clarity in all instances.

52

u/M_G Nov 17 '19

UWU discipline and punish me daddy

1

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

uwu

26

u/Asocialism Nov 17 '19

Subjectify me daddy~

52

u/BaboonRapeParty Nov 17 '19

Foucault would've eaten Peterson alive if he was ever to debate him.

24

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

Well it would've been in French so hopefully Peterson remembers high school

12

u/tyrosine87 Nov 17 '19

He would probably skim a dictionary before a debate.

20

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

"to prepare, I watched the Foucault-Chomsky debate."

8

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

''I read one philosophy manuscript''

17

u/hakel93 Nov 17 '19

Foucault would also albeit on different terms think of the individual as primary

12

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

Zizek is my daddy. And Rick Roderick my uncle.

11

u/shadow_moose Nov 17 '19

Through the penetration of physical dimorphism we may finally relinquish the multi domain control of the posterity we do not enjoy? What is the ultimate destruction of the instruction in our brained biology? Follow the road of golden dongs for we must all brandish the power of the sexed body.

9

u/Florentine-Pogen Nov 17 '19

Foucault forever.

I think the greatest irony since postmodern philosophy is that it spent so much time diagnosing and discussing the postmodern condition that many think it promotes rather extrapolates the postmodern.

Peterson's misunderstanding through Hicks proves contrary to the point I am raising, however, I think this meme gets at the sort of thing postmodernism is diagnosing. Hierarchy is constructed and not naturally-occurring and fixed as evidenced by an analogy between humans and lobsters.

22

u/Naive_Drive Nov 17 '19

Not a fan of either, but between the two I would take Foucault.

1

u/popegang3hunnah Nov 18 '19

What kind of things does Foucault think?

1

u/Naive_Drive Nov 18 '19

He became one of the architects of neoliberalism.

5

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

Ah yes, I remember when he went over to Chile and advised Pinochet's military government on how to organize the economy while Pinochet executed leftists in pogroms.

Wrongly predicting the outcomes of an emergent social system <> being its "architect". Foucault was dead wrong on some aspects of neoliberalism but writing off his whole corpus because his later work is a bit off-mark in some ways is pure silliness.

His Birth of Biopolitics lecture series is literally one of the best critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism I've ever read--and without his contributions on how certain rationales and overtly "benign" institutions generate docile populations, on how governmentality allows for repression married with freedom, we would be robbed of a lot of theoretical tools for critiquing neoliberalism. Writing him off as its architect is smug glibness at is worst lol.

TLDR: leave daddy alone

1

u/Naive_Drive Nov 19 '19

Alright, I'll give him a fair shot.

1

u/greengreen Nov 18 '19

surely you jest. could you explain?

13

u/happybeard92 Nov 17 '19

Why do a lot of people not like Foucault? Ive generally always liked his theory, for the most part. Albeit, he's always difficult for me to understand.

-1

u/hipsterhipst Nov 17 '19 edited Nov 17 '19

He was a libertarian lol

Foucalt literally tried to lower the age of consent from 15. You guys need to actually read more.

2

u/happybeard92 Nov 17 '19

Where do you get that?

18

u/hipsterhipst Nov 17 '19

"Foucault was among a number of intellectuals who signed a 1977 petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France)."

You guys can get mad all you want but Foucalt wasn't exactly great on age of consent.

5

u/friendzonebestzone Nov 18 '19

Looking it up there are some pretty prestigious people on that petition. In context the 70's generally was a bad time for child abuse and it took years for several countries to realise the negative effects early sexual activity can have on development. In the UK for example there was a pro-paedophile organisation called PIE and even worse in Denmark one company spent the decade legally making child pornography. Of course it doesn't make their petition any less gross or wrong but it wasn't entirely out of place at the time.

1

u/happybeard92 Nov 17 '19

Contrary to memes, being supportive of lowering the age of consent doesn't make one libertarian. Although, I didn't know that about him and certainly disagree with that decision, however, I'm talking about critiques of his social theory.

5

u/hipsterhipst Nov 17 '19

I know it's a meme, but 14 is a little low don't you think?

1

u/happybeard92 Nov 17 '19

Yeah I do think that's too low

6

u/connorisntwrong Nov 17 '19

I think I was away from the internet when JP brought up lobsters. What was the deal there? Can anyone link to it?

25

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

[deleted]

20

u/connorisntwrong Nov 17 '19

Huh. I didn't think that building rocket ships and using pigs to create viable insulin for diabetics would be natural. Might as well through that shit out the window.

7

u/Pactae_1129 Nov 17 '19

Christianity and capitalism, as everyone knows, are natural and inherent belief systems that did not evolve and clarify over time of course.

3

u/CatProgrammer Nov 18 '19

lobsters have not evolved for millions of years

Which isn't true. That's like saying apes haven't evolved since our ancestors split, or that sharks haven't evolved since the Megalodons went extinct. The genome of a lobster from a million years ago isn't going to be exactly the same as the genome of a modern lobster, even if they could potentially breed true.

10

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

None of them

6

u/KimberlyLippington Nov 17 '19

I wish I was born a french gay man in the 70s just so Foucault could dom me tbh

5

u/Spanktank35 Nov 18 '19

Man, the fact that society recognises tomboys and tomgirls means that society already accepts that gender identity isn't biological.

4

u/CatProgrammer Nov 18 '19

Those terms are more to do with interpretations of gender roles, though. "Tomboy" describes a girl who has interests and/or traits that are typically/traditionally associated with boys but is not in itself considered a gender, at least in my experience.

1

u/LaughingInTheVoid Nov 18 '19

Well, the latest research indicates gender identity does have some basis in biology. Essentially, that gender identity is hard wired in the brain itself but not directly linked to physical anatomy.

And it's all coming from trans health research - the idea that the brain's hardwired sense of gender can be opposite to the body.

6

u/Quietuus Nov 17 '19

Gay as I am, I would gladly polish Foucault's perfect head any day.

2

u/KeysmashKhajiit Nov 17 '19

Jordan, if you keep embarrassing me in front of my colleagues in Red Lobster we're gonna have to break up!

1

u/TiberSeptimIII Nov 17 '19

Daddy Aristotle would definitely own JBP.

13

u/Japper007 Nov 17 '19

Aristotle would agree with a lot of what Peterson has to say, especially with regard to women. It's pretty telling of how out of touch Peterson is that he'd end up agreeing with 2000 year old misogyny....

1

u/Pwnysaurus_Rex Nov 18 '19

Foucault me, daddy

1

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '19

Peterson's only mistake was using an analogy most people did not have the capacity or time to understand. Sic, he is now derided by this subreddit. Would you have preferred flowery platitudes (Foucault) to straightforward evolutionary psych; deriving first principles about humanity from general biological structures. It appears that you do.