This is the fifth essay in my series, The Phenomenological Papers, a series of essays on topics in phenomenology and metaphysics. You can find the first essay here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here. Here I discuss the phenomenology of what I call 'concepts', ways entities (yourself, others, or institutions) conceive of people as being, and the effects applying these concepts have on the ways we are, but most especially how we relate to ourselves. This essay is very much a product of my engagement with Foucault, part of whose general methodology and views about how reality is constituted for and by us has always seemed to me to be fundamentally correct. Unfortunately the fundamentals about which I believe he is correct (as well as his importance) have been obscured for various reasons. The present essay is an attempt to bring out, in my own way, some of what I believe he has already shown with his work.
The term [“sexuality”] did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which “sexuality” refers. The use of the word was established in connection with other phenomena: the development of diverse fields of knowledge (embracing the biological mechanisms of reproduction as well as the individual or social variants of behavior); the establishment of a set of rules and norms – in part traditional, in part new – which found support in religious, judicial, pedagogical, and medical institutions; and changes in the way individuals were led to assign meaning and value to their conduct, their duties, their pleasures, their feelings and sensations, their dreams. In short, it was a matter of seeing how an “experience” came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a “sexuality,” which was accessible to very diverse fields of knowledge and linked to a system of rules and constraints. What I planned, therefore, was a history of the experience of sexuality, where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture.I. There are specific ways that specific people are. One person will be outspoken, while another will be reserved. One person will be competitive, while another lacks any taste for it. One person will tend to be sexually attracted towards men, while another will tend to be sexually attracted towards women. What a person is, it seems, just is the sum of ways they actually are at a given point. Some of the characteristics people have are shared in common with others. Which is to say, people are, in particular respects, the same, or at least similar to one another, in some respect. Thus, just as we say of one person that they are competitive, or left-handed, we say of another that they are too, if, and only if, they have ‘the same’ qualities as the other. We try to capture these shared characteristics in collections of persons by classifying and categorising them.
– Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume Two, The Use of Pleasure
To classify and to categorise people is to abstract one or a cluster of common characteristics shared by different individuals and forming a concept out of them. A concept, for the purposes of this essay, is just that: a possible way, or a cluster of ways, that a subject could be. I mean this in the broadest sense as including everyday, moral, cultural, and scientific concepts. For example, we may describe subjects as being resilient, honest, suave, introverted or autistic. Or, we may say that they are a man, woman, mother, husband, influencer, dandy, manager, executive, scientist, king, or queen. These are all concepts in the sense used here. There are of course other concepts that don’t capture ways that people are but ways other things are, such as specific types of animals, plants, chemicals, or artifacts. However, unless otherwise made explicit, when I talk about concepts in this essay, I only mean those concepts meant to classify persons.