“Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey,” (Foucault, 132P) Foucault paraphrases Kant. While Kant seemed to mean this literally (i.e. when humanity no longer blindly follows authority), Foucault may have seen this as the even less achievable goal of breaking out of the social institutions that, to a large extent, define us. Foucault saw himself as a historian of ideas and social structure; like Marx, he saw the individual as product of his time and place, emphasizing the role of the public in private lives.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in contrast, believed that humans are “condemned to be free”. As long as we are alive, he would argue, we are choosing. The anti-Semite makes the choice to “live on the plane of passion” (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 18) instead of using his reason. Is hate really such a conscious choice? I believe that hate’s object and intensity is dependent on its environment. My views on subjectivity more closely align with Foucault’s.
In Care of the Self, Foucault gives the example of how attitudes towards sexuality have changed with the rise of Christianity. He cites a “movement of ideas … that opposed current laxity” (Foucault, Care of Self, 40). Whether this movement was caused by individuals or by external forces (as he goes on to discuss) is almost irrelevant. As the public views on sexuality changed, so did individuals’. A new norm was created and everyone was affected by it.
Even Foucault would agree that we have choices within our social structure. However, we do not have the limitless array of choices suggested by Sartre. Do you really think that someone growing up in Nazi Germany, surrounded anti-Semites, could have the same chance of liking Jewish people as anyone else?
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