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We talked about a passage on pg. 16 where Foucault quotes Mably saying that the soul should be punished instead of the body. I believe this is the transition we have had in our evolution of the law system. Before, the law was primarily focused on the idea of punishing the body. People wanted to punish the crime with the same crime, i.e. the death penalty and torture punished murder. Now this ideology has shifted to punishing the soul of a person through acts of discipline. This starts at a very young age. It seems to me that the souls of children are “publicly tortured” in the school system. The example we had in class was when a kid is bad, he had to change the flag at his table to red or yellow. This is a public humiliation. Teachers are trying to get a positive response from a student by insulting his or her public standing in the classroom. The same goes for disciplinary acts in the workplace. If someone does not perform his job adequately, he or she is fired from the respective position. This is a public execution from the person in the workplace. This person has lost the social standing that he or she once held in the workplace. By this token, punishment and torture have evolved to hurt the soul, or public standing of a person, as opposed to bodily harm. Thus, discipline is not only used for cataloging an individual’s personality, but also for hurting the social aspect of a social creature.

Today I was intrigued by the idea that Foucault claims delinquency is used to naturalize the social order. This idea seemed to illuminate all of Foucault’s previous work at the beginning of the book. Earlier, the idea of punishment is to rectify any wrong to the king’s power. Foucault gives us an evolution of this power’s transformation as society evolves. We no longer have a king to rule us. Instead, the power now resides with the sovereign, which is supposed to represent all of the people. I believe Foucault is trying to illuminate, by way of expounding upon the discipline structure of society, how the sovereign is not necessarily the people. Punishment and the establishment of the delinquent are the means by which the middle and upper class keep their power over that of the lower class. The interesting thing about this idea is that it is even more believable when we look at real life examples.

In America today everyone is granted a lawyer if they are accused of the crime. Yet, there is a huge difference between the lawyers given to a poor criminal and the lawyers that a rich criminal can afford to pay. For example, a very good lawyer can get charges reduced or dropped for a rich client through their knowledge of the law system. These lawyers spend much more time on their clients diverting charges until they can find a good defense case. This type of attention cannot be afforded by the poor criminal. Thus, he is stuck with harsher charges, and the power of the class systems are maintained.

I was confused today as to what exactly Foucault means by the individual. It seems to me that the individual must be the soul that Durkheim speaks of. Foucault focuses on how the body can be trained. This gives the body a value of utility. However, the soul or the mind of the person is what separates one person from another, and this soul can be the only thing that forces the body to be disciplined. It would then make sense that the individual is the soul of the person since it is the part of the human in charge of decision making.

One thing that I noticed is that Foucault does not seem to refer to any person outside of society. For him, the individual is dependent on a larger social construct. What about the person outside of any social construct? We talked in class about how the individual is in contradiction to the mass for Foucault. It appears to me that the individual outside of the mass or society does not seem to fit this definition. If a person has never experienced society, then he or she can not be evaluated by the same standards. This person has no idea about an social rules and cannot comprehend being a contradiction to the mass when they themselves are the mass or collective society within their world. I would be interested to hear Foucault’s ideas on the hermit who has never lived in society.

I was surprised that we never talked about a community’s inherent need for an “incite to acting in a certain way” We discussed how the knowledge power produced by discipline has the quality of making people act a certain way, but we never discussed how this relates to communities. In fact, I believe communities completely rely on an incite to action. This is the reason people join communities to begin with. They want to be disciplined and forced to act a certain way so that they can survive and become more efficient. Otherwise, one would think they would be left behind by those in a community. Community-discipline is more efficient than self-discipline.

This thought brings up another interesting point about discipline. Is true discipline possible if one is without a community? Is self-discipline the same as discipline in a community? A complex comes into play here. The man is both the one who gives out discipline and receives the discipline from himself. He has different motives than the managers of a factory or a school. Left on his own, without contact from anyone, man still seems to be able to be disciplined. Take a fisherman who learns not to touch an eel because it sends out a shock. He disciplines himself to not repeat the same mistake. In this example he still holds power because he is disciplined. The man grows more powerful over the environment that he lives in as he learns to discipline himself accordingly. Following the same logic, nature is also disciplined. One likely sees the layers of nature’s discipline in the hierarchy of predators.

I did not come to class today due to falling ill with the flu and strep throat.

I was particularly interested today by the statement “truth is invested in sites of power.” I feel that I have heard a similar statement multiple times before. The example that comes to mind is “history is always written by the winners.” We hear of the bravery and cunning from the scribes of the winners much more often than the accounts of the losers. Why is this so? Simply put, the winners win the right to recount history, and the losers forgo this right when they surrender to the opposing side. Thus, truth with a historical context tends to not fit our modern definition of truth. Instead, it is something skewed by the bias of the writers who, more often than not, were the prevailing side in the account.

The interesting part of Foucault’s work is that it seems to be a collection of evidence from people not in power. Some of the people he quotes were well respected men and thinkers of the time, however, we would be strained to say that they were in power. The power rested in the hands of the sovereign or king. Foucault’s work depends on the accounts of people not in power to show how truth, the correct verdict of punishment for crimes such as the death penalty, was really a reassertion of the sovereign’s power during this time. Foucault opens the curtain to show us where this power comes from and how its relation to truth changes over time.

I think the class did not discuss enough about whether we can apply determinism to science. As we add more people, or variables, to a society, determinism becomes more prominent. Think about one person for a moment. It is much easier to influence all factors of life with human will if there is only one person in a society. Now think of two people in the society. It becomes harder for one person to influence things with his will because there is the will of the other person that might contradict the will of the first. The growth of determinism’s relevance becomes greater and greater with each new person that you add.

There are real world examples of this. If we compare the United States to another country like Switzerland, there is a significant size difference. The United States argues for days or weeks to get a bill passed. It seems that we get nothing done, and everyone blames other opinions for the lack of progress. Switzerland, on the other hand, has some of the best living conditions in the world. Their country is small enough that there is not as much bickering and differences of opinions. This difference in progress could be attributed to determinism. Switzerland might be able to control what happens more often than the United States because there are less people, and therefore, less relevance of determinism in their society. Thus, Switzerland progresses much faster than the United States.

Today we focused on a paradigm’s or science’s objectivity. The overall consensus was that Kuhn does not believe there is an objectivity to science. He talks about paradigms as something that is temporary. A paradigm can always be replaced if a new paradigm is there to take its place. This does not seem to fit the definition of objective. Objective is something absolute, and he specifically mentions that paradigms often change over time. There could be an instance where science is objective; however we would have to ascribe many constraints to make it so. For example, we could say that every time you release a ball from a standing position, the ball falls to the ground. This would not be entirely correct because we have to have the constraints to make it objective. We would have to add that the person is on the earth, not moving, no other force acts upon the ball, etc…

We also mentioned the emotional and cultural implications of the science. I asked in class if Kuhn thinks culture could portray an emotion onto the work and if this could show how certain discoveries are made. I believe that this is true. Every culture has emotional patterns. There are anomalies, but as the collective, I believe this is an accurate statement. Because of this, I can see many discoveries being made because of cultural tendencies. An example of this could be the Chinese. As a nation they have an excellent work ethic, which is attributed to the work required to care for rice paddies (I read this somewhere. I believe in Freakonomics). This work ethic might translate to many technological discoveries made today in China, i.e. blockchain.

The quotes that we used with Durkheim today provided a lot of thought provoking discussion on the similarities between Durkheim and Kuhn.

Durkheim believes science and religion have the same goal to establish a relationship between things; however, he believes science is the more perfected form of religion in this aspect. During the time we separated into groups, my group could not sense what exactly separated science from religion for Durkheim. The two factors that we conversed about were collective passion and critical spirit. Yet, both religion and science seem to have these traits. Personally, I think that though both have these traits, science differs from religion because it is more critical and has less collective passion. This answer does not suit me well, but it is the best answer that I found during our discussion.

Kuhn does not mention religion in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Instead, we can only compare Durkheim’s and Kuhn’s idea of how science impacts society. The starkest difference between the two’s idea of science involved the collective aspect of science. Durkheim seems to think that the collective is objective. Every one is connected in some way as a society, and this is objectively true. Kuhn has a different approach in that he thinks the collective is more of a social agreement, not objective. He seems critical of the idea of objectivity and searches to find if there is anything in the world that can produce the objective.

I loved the class today because it primarily focused on the real world application of Durkheim’s ideas. A constant theme that kept appearing was the tension that has built over the definition of society. I believe that the definitions that Durkheim give for society work for the tribal communities that he was studying; however, I think that as time has gone on and communities have grown, Durkheim’s idea of society can no longer be used. Durkheim’s definition of society only works for small communities. The large nations of today cannot fit into his definition of a collective unit operating under the same ideas. The fact of the matter is that the nations are too big and have too many people with different opinions. Because of this we can not define modern society using Durkheim’s definition. We need to tweak it.

The other main topic we covered was the evolution of religion. Religion is not what it used to be. Today nations are built on ideas instead of gods and other mystical beings. Science, or the logical way the earth works, has become the new medium through which we view the world. I thought it was interesting that Durkheim thinks science still needs religion as a community driving force. I think that this might be a little naive. There are things out there today that can cause people to come together as a community, like sports or environmental activism. I think religion is at the end of its bell curve.