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Foucault And Lau-Tzu A Comparison Essay, Research Paper

The philosopher Michel Foucault and the ancient chinese sage Lao Tzu are separated by some twenty centuries. This seems to be of minor consequence, however, when it comes to the essence of their ideas. Both figures deal with concepts that explore the relationship between society and power. Specifically, the ways in which social bodies gain or lose power. In this paper, I will use their ideas to support my theory that equality is impossible in social interactions. These interactions may range in significance from a blind date to a political dictatorship. I will deal mainly with the more common, every day, interactions in order to support my stance that equality on any social level is impossible.

The concept of equality is rendered impracticable because of utilization’s of power which I call ?exchanges?. I refer to these utilization’s of power as exchanges because one social body offers subservience while the other offers control. I feel that there exists two classes of these power exchanges, the voluntary and the involuntary. An example of the voluntary power exchange is war; one social body is intentionally attempting to control another. The involuntary power exchange is more difficult to categorize. I would, however, venture to offer a social commune as an example. In this fictional commune, all inhabitants are ?equal?. Decisions within the commune are made through voting. It would seem that all bodies are equal and therefore an autonomous vote can be cast by all. However, I feel that there would be individuals within such a community that posses a stronger inclination towards dominance than others. These dominant personalities would hence, however unintentional, influence and thereby control the the personalities more inclined towards subservience. Such involuntary power exchanges occur in every social interaction, therefore equality can not exist.

I have structured my argument around a story involving a set of twins, Jill and Jane. I use twins as my example in order to argue against the existence of ?equality?. As twins, the girls are the same age, the same build, and, probably, about the same intelligence. They are, for all practical purposes, ?equal?. Yet, Jill is able to use power to control Jane. Even in the case of twins, a dominant personality will garner control over the less aggressive one. the first power exchange I will discuss is the voluntary, as this to me is the more obvious and therefore the less significant of the two.

A teenaged girl, Jill, and her twin sister, Jane, are on a train traveling East. They are going to their fathers house in downtown Chicago. It is a Tuesday, the slowest business day of the week for the train, so the girls happen to have the entire car to themselves. Jill hatches a wicked plan. “I have a great idea!” says Jill to her sister.

“What is it?” asks Jane.

“Well, I was thinking that, instead of meeting daddy downtown,

we could get off in the suburbs and visit my friend Johnny.”

“But daddy will be waiting for us at the train station. He told us

to go straight there to meet him and not to get off anywhere else.”

“That’s o.k., we can call him on his cell phone from Johnny’s and

tell him that we accidentally got off at the wrong stop.”

“I don?t know, that sounds wrong to me.”

“Oh, don’t be such a goody-goody, Jane. We’ll have a lot of fun.”

“All right, Jill, I guess I’m in.”

So Jane, not wanting to be a goody-goody, agrees to disobey her

father.

Here, Jill and jane experience a ?voluntary? or ?intentional? power exchange. By calling Jane a ?goody-goody?, Jill is able to gain control over Jane. Voluntary power exchanges can vary greatly in there severity. To the lesser extreme can be a situation such as we have Jill and Jane engaged in. This could be classified as nothing more than a verbal manipulation with no threat of physical pain. A greater extreme could be spouse abuse. Spouse abuse involves, among other factors, verbal and physical manipulation. Both extremes, however, are working from the same concept of control. This control is normally achieved through fear. In the example with Jill and Jane, the use of fear is subtle but present. Jane is scared, to an extent, to be a goody-goody. She associates socially conditioned negativity with the concept ?goody-goody?, and therefore fears to be a ?goody-goody?. In the greater extreme of spouse abuse, physical violence and verbal intimidation are combined to gain power over another body. The physical violence of course causes pain. People fear pain. This is one way in which power is accessed. In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault makes the argument that our society is based on control through fear.1 Those who control an individuals fear, control the individual. This not only includes the fear of pain but also of death. Chapter 74 of Lao Tzu?s Tao Te Ching reads, ?when normal descent people don?t fear death, how can you use death to frighten them??2 . Here we have Lau Tzu stating quite bluntly that, in order for people to be subject to power, they must fear death.

Control of truth is another way social bodies can intentionally access power. On this idea, Foucault comments,

?…when i talk about power relations and games of truth, I am absolutely not saying that games of truth are just concealed power relations- that would be a horrible exaggeration. My problem, as I have already said, is in understanding how truth games are set up and how they are connected with power relations. One can show, for example, that the medicalization of madness , in other words, the organization of medical knowledge around individuals designated as mad, was connected with a whole series of social and economic processes at a given time, but also with

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