The Original
For many hundreds of years in western thought there
has been a concern with the idea of origins. People regularly trace their family
origins. There are well known genealogies or family trees going back over many
generations. But the notion of 'origins' is important in other ways.
There is the Biblical story of the tree of knowledge
and its fruit providing the origins for the fall of man. There are notions of
'original sin', of 'first principles'. It has been a common philosophical notion
to argue something from 'first principles', i.e. from a premise that is known to
be true you can draw out various conclusions.
Many branches of knowledge have operated with a
notion of origins. The idea of scientific improvement contains this notion.
Today we may smile at what we see as quaint ideas such as the pre-Galileo notion
that the sun went round the earth, or beliefs in mythical spirits. Science has
'progressed' from these early notions. But we recognize that work conducted in
earlier periods has provided an important starting point for modern science.
Einstein would not have been able to discover the theory of relativity without
the work of Newton. Modern philosophers often trace their ideas back to Plato
and Aristotle.
The idea of a point of origin, or start point with
theories of evolution as the most obvious, have been important in our history.
However, they have been questioned. Perhaps the most well known form of
questioning takes the form of questioning whether there was ever a golden age.
During the Renaissance we get a resurgence of
interest in the classics and the beginning of debates between the 'classics' and
the 'moderns'. The classics are seen as the 'start point'. The classical age is
seen as the golden age. This idea is still very common today. We frequently hear
about a golden age when things were better than they are today. The notion of
the pastoral or romantic country life is one example. There are frequent calls
for a return to family values, to traditional schooling. There is the notion
that there was a once a time when things were better than they are now. We
fallen away from the standards or forms of life that once existed. The picture
below, although contemporary, is an example of this romanticism:
This is the conventional rural scene. Behind the cottage
windows and gazing out on the placid lake are warm people with supposedly no ill
thoughts in their mind and good in their hearts! This romantic notion is
frequently criticised. Many golden ages such as elizabethan England or victorian
schooling turned out to be nasty and brutal. Ideas of people getting on well
together living in the same street have often been caricatured. In fact in the
picture above there is a suggestion of a malevolent eye looking out form under
the thatched roof! A well known example showing how desperate conditions were is
Hogarth's print 'Gin Lane':
This print shows in caricature form the way in which
people lived in seventeenth century London. The 'original' notion of gin as
'mother's ruin' comes from the idea of the drunken mother letting her baby fall
to the ground while all around deprivation and greed are to be found. The point
is that the notion of an original point is not only associated with 'good' or
'pleasant' things. It covers notions of the immoral and the unaccpetable. It is
invoked in notions of moral deprivation, and moral crusades.
A belief in an
originary point is often referred to as foundationalism. Perhaps one of the most
well known forms of foundationalism is a belief in God. Nietzsche had proclaimed
the death of God. Foucault takes this up in 'Preface to Transgression' which can
be found in language, counter-memory, practice where he writes:
In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an
experience of the impossible (the impossible being both that which we
experience and that which constitutes the experience). The death of God is not
merely an "event" that gave shape to contemporary experience as we now
know it: it continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline (32).
This quotation will be analysed elsewhere but for
now we can notice that Foucault denies God's existence, particularly the notion
of God as a creator of our human experiences. Following Nietzsche Foucault was
to say that we had to solve our problems ourselves but he also did not deny the
effects of a massive belief system that supports Christianity. Christian symbols
and the idea of God as the source of life are the ultimate in originary thought.
By removing God both Nietzsche and Foucault sought to displace this notion of an
originary and to shake us out of a comfortable conventionalism. Foucault knows
though that such conventionalism is part of our lives and needs explanation. His
attempt to ground a study of medicine in the clinic is part of his search for
the ways in which we ground our understanding of the body.
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