Review of Foucault–Chomsky Debate on Human Nature, 1971
This is a review of the debate MIT linguist Noam Chomsky had with philosopher Michel Foucault on the topic of human nature. The video is below. I have skipped the sections where the DJ (not the moderator) interrupts. I also include some of Chomsky’s later commentary on the debate, and offer my own commentary on the commentary. I wrote this essay in a single afternoon, so if it occasionally reads like it needs an editor, you know why.
Chomsky begins with the argument in linguistics that got him attention in the first place. Noting that language is an “amazing range of abilities,” he points out that these abilities cannot be achieved merely through experience, i.e. that there is a poverty of sufficient external stimulus to account for how children learn languages. There must be some kind of internal structure in the brain, inherent to human biology, which enables us to take that relatively limited amount of information and create from it this “amazing range of abilities” we call language. That inherent structure gives credence to the idea of human nature. He also notes that language is “highly creative.” He can then say that creativity is a part of human nature, and from there produce the political argument in favor of a society that enables the free play of human creativity. As he sees it this is need is met neither by capitalism, with its alienating labor, nor state-socialism as demonstrated by the USSR, with its oppressive government apparatus. Chomsky advocates for a libertarian socialism, and has often associated himself with the anarchism of figures like Rudolf Rocker. In other contexts, such as his famous lecture/essay on “Language and Freedom,” Chomsky offers further detail of this view and grounds it in the Enlightenment philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. From Humboldt Chomsky borrows the idea that Bildung, the self-motivated furtherance of human development associated with the German Enlightenment, is really the core of human nature. Society ought to therefore encourage it and provide the greatest possible space for it.
Foucault provides a cutting critique of Chomsky at 37:44 in the video above. Political power is, as we all know, exercised through political institutions like the police and the army. Yet, Foucault argues, political power also exercises itself through apparently neutral institutions. The examples he gives are ideas like “justice,” though one could also throw “human nature” into that circle. Institutions like the university system, which are apparently designed to disseminate knowledge, also act as institutions of exclusion and therefore of power. This is less of a profound insight in 2021 when everyone is looking for a reason to hate evil university professors, but the mode of analysis can still be useful.
It seems to me that the real political task is to criticize the workings of institutions–particularly the ones that appear to be neutral and independent–and to attack them in such a way that the political violence, which has exercised itself obscurely through them, will finally be unmasked so that one can fight against them. If we advance straight away to a profile or a formula of the future society without having thoroughly criticized relations between different forms of political violence that exercise their power within our society, we run the risk of letting them be reproduced–even in the case of the noble and apparently pure forms such as anarcho-syndacalism.
This is a titanic statement from Foucault. Chomsky gives an uncharacteristically weak response, where he says that it is worthwhile to,
…draw the connections between a concept of human nature that gives full scope to freedom and dignity and creativity and other fundamental human characteristics, and relate that to some notion of social structure in which those properties could be realized and in which meaningful human life could take place.
I have never noticed Noam Chomsky begging the question. Here, he advocates for a “concept of human nature” that accounts for things he has already defined as “fundamental human characteristics.” I think what he really meant was a concept of human nature that can ground certain humanist values like creativity, dignity, and freedom. He finds those values to be desirable, as he comes from an intellectual tradition going back to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Indeed, the humanist tradition is an attractive one.
But Foucault’s critique has already gotten behind that comment. Ideas like creativity, dignity, and freedom are already used with great effect to achieve precisely their opposites. How often to we hear of “religious freedom” to justify oppressing women or LGBTQ people? How often was the word “freedom” evoked in the 2003 invasion of Iraq? How often does the openly corrupt Republican Party use the word “freedom” to justify its authoritarian and opportunistic politics? Concepts like freedom and creativity, while liberating on the surface, in fact function as part of what Deleuze might call an apparatus of capture.
Thought experiment: what if, upon investigating human nature, we discover that it is more greedy and violent than we ever knew? If greed and violence are at the heart of human nature, where does that leave Chomsky’s political project? Should we abandon libertarian socialism and adopt some kind of fascism in order to stick with human nature? Or should we abandon human nature in order to stick with humanist values?
To be fair, this is a young Noam Chomsky and he has had opportunity to reflect on the debate and his views on human nature. What has he said since then?
Chomsky is being slightly misleading here. The debate was not about “innate structures,” but about human nature, which is a philosophical concept. Chomsky may equate human nature with biological structures but that is itself an ideological maneuver. Nevertheless this is a strong statement on the issue. He gives a longer version of the same answer below:
I think in the above video Prof. Chomsky starts with a strong statement of the entire analytic philosophical approach to ethics. His response to being pressed is underwhelming, however. When he says at 17:55 that “over the course of time” prejudices are overcome by “thinking about your values,” that just sounds like naive Enlightenment-era progressivism (or the stereotypical image of it). His repeated point about how we gradually “penetrate” deeper into understanding our moral nature, and thus widen the ethical sphere is problematic. The examples he gives of moral progress all involve people doing horrible things in an earlier time, whereas now it is “completely unacceptable” to do those horrible things (slavery, persecution of LGBTQ+, etc). That is, Chomsky, in each example, equates moral progress with the imposition of greater limits, which he nevertheless describes as “widening” the ethical sphere. Those moments could be described in the language of liberation, but that’s not the language Chomsky uses.
The point is a Foucauldian one: that knowledge, in this case ethical knowledge, is tied up with power. The widening of the ethical sphere involves the restriction of other parts of it. In order for LGBTQ+ to be free from violence and harassment, would-be harassers must be constrained, unfree, to harass them. In order for women to be free to get abortions, religious zealots must be limited in their freedom to impose their restrictions on others. The potential examples are infinite. But this image shows that moral change is not some kind of progressive “penetration” into a deeper moral reality. It shows rather that the moral realm adopts different shapes at different times, expanding here, retracting there at the same time. Yet if the realm may change its shape, that does not necessarily mean it is moving forward, and (to expand the geometry analogy) any number of shapes may rotate around the same axis. Thus a changing shape of the moral realm does not, in itself, indicate progress.
To take a simplified example, it was once held in Europe that miracles happened regularly and were evidence of God’s presence in the world. During the Enlightenment it became common to argue that exploring the natural world scientifically contributed to the glory of God. There was tremendous debate around the issue, yet both ideas about what shape knowledge ought to take in this instance agreed that it would rotate around the axis of glorifying God, that is a theological axis.
This does not mean progress is not possible. But Chomsky’s approach to it, though persuasively phrased, is undermined by Foucault’s critique. It is a pity that Foucault is not around to respond to Chomsky’s criticism.
Chomsky identifies creativity, dignity, and freedom as essential to human nature, equated with a kind of biological structure, and then advocates for a society which maximizes the full expression of that biological structure. It is attractive because it is saccharine; it is a feel-good philosophy, not a critical one. Though it possesses an elegance befitting its Enlightenment roots, its greatest value is precisely its aesthetic, and not its critical, content.
