THREE ELEMENTS OF MORALS FOR MICHEL FOUCAULT

🔵 The following passages are taken from a not very widely known interview with Michel Foucault, containing some of the most crucial statements by him on his stance on morals.

"In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us."

"We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power."

"Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good."

"This doesn’t mean that one must live in an indefinite discontinuity. But what I mean is that one must consider all the points of fixity, of immobilization, as elements in a tactics, in a strategy—as part of an effort to bring things back into their original mobility, their openness to change."

"I was telling you earlier about the three elements in my morals. They are (1) the refusal to accept as self-evident the things that are proposed to us; (2) the need to analyze and to know, since we can accomplish nothing without reflection and understanding—thus, the principle of curiosity; and (3) the principle of innovation: to seek out in our reflection those things that have never been thought or imagined. Thus: refusal, curiosity, innovation."

This interview with Michel Foucault, titled “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual” dates back to November 3, 1980. According to Stuart Elden, “because it was published after Foucault’s death, it was deemed to be a ‘posthumous publication’ and therefore not included in ‘Dits et écrits,‘” a compilation of Foucault’s shorter writings in French. It remains one of Foucault’s lesser-known interviews.

In it, Foucault speaks with then UC Berkeley  graduate student Michael Bess. Bess is now a professor at Vanderbilt University. Foucault distances himself from some common misconceptions about his work. Namely, that he’s an amoral anarchist (fun fact: Noam Chomsky once referred to Foucault as the most amoral person he’s ever met).