AUTONOMY AS FOUNDATIONAL
Richard White
[Page 79] In the final pages of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault invokes Nietzsche's parable of the madman
and the death of God as an expression of the last word on humanism and a prediction of the end of our
anthropocentric age. (Anthropocentrism describes the tendency for human beings to regard themselves
as the central and most significant entities in the universe, a position that could be equated with madness
by some):
In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning-point from a long way off, it is
not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man. . . . is it
not the last man who announces that he has killed God, thus situating his language, his
thought, his laughter in the space of that already dead God, yet positing himself also as
he who has killed God and whose existence includes the freedom and decision of that
murder? . . . Rather than the death of God—or rather, in the wake of that death and in a
profound correlation with it—what Nietzsche's thought heralds is the end of his
murderer . . . it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself
carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the
identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man.'
Foucault argues that when human beings decided to no longer believe in God, they
“killed” him. For instance, one might ask, what happened to the Greek Gods? Why did
they cease to exist, except in mythological accounts? Simply because people stopped
believing in them, and eventually, stopped thinking about them. Then they vanished.
This is Nietzsche’s point. When this happens, there is a profound scattering of the center
in all directions, because “the center cannot hold.” Then all is carried off in “the
profound stream of time” by a pressure that is the very being of things. Ironically, when
we killed God, there followed a dispersion of human consciousness. That was one of its
results.
Foucault understood that Nietzsche was not just another nineteenth-century thinker, in the tradition of
Feuerbach, who celebrated the death of God in order to reaffirm the new divinity of man. (This tradition
placed human beings at the center of the universe with their autonomy in tact). Certainly, for some, God
is dead, but according to Foucault the real force of Nietzsche's parable does not lie in its atheism, since
the ultimate issue is actually the death of "man" as the one who has defined and dignified himself as the
murderer of God. We might [page 80] remember, for example, that in Nietzsche's original passage those
who are standing around regard the death of God as rather obvious and unremarkable. What they fail to
recognize are the momentous consequences of this deed . . . . Thus, according to Foucault, the final
meaning of the death of God is the death of "man," in the sense of the final passing of that episteme or
order of things which has focused upon "man," human experience, and human history as the origin and
locus of all meaning and truth. (This is the irony in the act of displacing God; when you displace that
center, you displace all centers. When you kill of God as the center of the universe, you have created a
precedent and it becomes logical to kill off man and woman as the center of their universe as well. Thus,
human history and human experience are still crucial to us, but we realize that it is not the center, origin,
and locus of all meaning and truth. Now we must admit that meaning and truth are provisional and
relative and not absolute. Now we are set adrift in a universe that is bigger than God and thus bigger
than us).
Foucault's interpretation of Nietzsche is quite compelling . . . [and it raises for all to hear] the madman's
apocalyptic warning: "What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it
moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?" The
death of God clearly implies the death of all fixed centers of meaning (all "suns," such as "man," "ego,"
"subject," "atom," etc.) which could provide a foundation from which we might derive a final account of
the meaning to the world. (This is a crucial point of analysis: it is not enough to make meaning, to
generate an interpretation; we can still do that. The problem becomes one of origins and ends. Now we
search for an origin that explains our purpose and function as beings on the planet; now we wonder how
to create a “final” account of the meaning of the world, a definitive account that is “true” or rather
“True.” Now we are left with many accounts that compete with each other, that contend with each other
to be considered true. This is what we face in our time. Of course, some people believe in God. That is
not the issue. It’s the thread of history in the West from the Enlightenment to our postmodern era. We
finally reached a point in Nietzsche’s time when it was possible to secularize religion and kill off God.
Once that happened, many people lost faith. They sought more: scientific proof, not faith, and that
produced the circumstances for the death of God. After that, some believed and others did not. More
importantly, the Western World began to face the crisis of meaning that both Nietzsche and Foucault
refer to here.) Once God is removed, every other substantial unity must be challenged as a simple
reflection of this central pole. So that, with the death of God, the self is effectively de-centered and the
traditional goal of self-possession becomes entirely problematic as we find ourselves straying through an
infinite void.
. . . Foucault's interpretation of the death of God may be read as a symbolic manifesto for much of recent
continental philosophy, insofar as it encapsulates the attack on "man," humanism, and every ordinary
notion of self-appropriation. (Why self-appropriation? To answer that question, simply think of the
appropriation of power to man from God after the murder of God. Do you see it? We stopped believing
so we could believe in ourselves. We displaced God from the center of the universe so we could set
ourselves up to occupy the center of the universe, but it didn’t work. Once you learn how to kill,
decenter, and appropriate, then that logic is in play. It is operative, and you become the next target!
Thus, human beings displaced themselves when they displaced God.) By challenging the sovereignty of
the enthroned subject of consciousness and proclaiming the absolute dispersion of "man," recent
continental thought has effectively cast suspicion on the received values of "reflection," (reflection in the
Descartes sense of the word – reflection that establishes us as the object of thought and thus objectifies
us as solid and object-like and, following from that solidification, conceptually provable as a first
principle) "experience," and "history." More particularly, as we will see, it challenges a major current of
modern philosophy which, from Kant to existentialism has focused upon the drama of the individual life,
and grasped the autonomy of the individual as the foundation for every value and truth.
Rather than attempting such a survey . . . I shall focus instead upon the single ideal of individual autonomy
which appears to inspire all modern and humanist perspectives, while it is explicitly rejected by
postmodernism and recent continental thought in general.