Review of C. Mantzavinos, _Naturalistic Hermeneutics_

Philosophy

Naturalistic Hermeneutics // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24966-naturalistic-hermeneutics/[12/23/15, 10:25:01 AM] C. MANTZAVINOS Naturalistic Hermeneutics C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 198pp, $68.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521848121. What philosophically viable theoretical approaches exist with regard to providing a theory of meaning (for natural languages)? C. Mantzavinos proposes to sort approaches into two broad categories -naturalistic and non-naturalistic -and to examine what he takes to be methodological exemplars from each category -the hypothetico-deductive method and hermeneutics, respectively. He argues that the hypothetico-deductive method offers a viable approach to a theory of meaning and that hermeneutic approaches do not. But how has Mantzavinos's favored methodology fared as a type of theory of meaning? What does philosophical history indicate about the method he favors? I return to these questions below. Although relatively brief, this book has large ambitions. Divided into two parts of three chapters each (a total of just 156 pages of text), the first part surveys, only to repudiate, the accounts of hermeneutics found in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. In the second part, Mantzavinos develops an exposition of a naturalistic account of meaning and text interpretation founded on the hypotheticdeductive method. Here he takes himself to be pursuing an account of meaning which Popper and Hempel failed to see through to completion. "The protagonists of the hypothetico-deductive method, Popper and Hempel, originally viewed it as a method that is directed toward deductive causal explanations in the sciences. This seems to me to be the decisive weakness of their analysis... . I regard it as the main thrust of my argument to extend the range of application of the hypotheticodeductive method to what I call the 'reconstructions of meaning.'" (xi-xii) As this brief characterization suggests, Mantzavinos takes the notion of meaning to be explicable as part of the natural world and in roughly the (methodological) fashion in which the natural world comes to be theoretically comprehended. The methodological opposition between hermeneutics and natural science gives rise to two dualisms, both of which Mantzavinos looks to repudiate -understanding v. explanation and (my terms, not his) idiographic v. nomothetic. Anti-naturalism, that is, enters into the debate because assessing meaning cannot be done causally (i.e., yield explanations), and it cannot be done by causal analysis because of the singularity of the events scrutinized (i.e., these events are historically specific and non-generalizable). In this regard, the second of the two dualisms mentioned proves decisive in giving the debate its 2006.02.14 Search NDPR Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz Naturalistic Hermeneutics // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24966-naturalistic-hermeneutics/[12/23/15, 10:25:01 AM] philosophical shape. For the alleged singularity of the socially real gives to the human sciences its distinctive, non-natural Fach, a reality constituted by the psyche of those studied, and not the physical world historical beings inhabit. The reality so plumbed constitutes, on this view, a reality not of a material world.1 (See, e.g., p. 7) But having taken the conceptual as the object of investigation, Mantzavinos finds, not too surprisingly, the method for accessing the objects of understanding to be woefully underspecified. The author concludes that hermeneutics of, e.g., Dilthey's sort, prove "unproductive" and a methodological "dead end" (20) because Dilthey provides no hint of how to connect mental facts with "other facts in this world." (20) I leave it to others to decide on the relative merits of Mantzavinos's exposition of Heidegger. I focus instead on his exposition of the "hermeneutic circle," in large part because I have elsewhere argued that exactly this problem arises on any conception of language learning which rejects the analyticsynthetic distinction. In particular, the problem (which I take to be most compelling when one considers the infant language-learning case) arises when one asks how, in learning a language, one makes sense of the individual bits of linguistic expressions to which one is exposed when, ex hypothesi, words and sentences only have their meaning against a general background of linguistic and other knowledge. Yet Mantzavinos dismisses Gadamer in particular and the hermeneutic circle generally for a number of reasons, one of them being that if Gadamer is correct, the whole notion of understanding and communication -the very idea of a determinate meaning -comes under a skeptical cloud from which there appears to be no escape. "Gadamer confronts us with the impossibility of understanding, indeed with the impossibility of any sort of communication." (58) But here (as elsewhere) fundamental philosophical points fail to surface in Mantzavinos's discussion. Skepticism about the notion of meaning has been rife: Wittgenstein on private language, Sellars on the Myth of the Given, Quine on indeterminacy of translation, Davidson on conceptual schemes, and Kripke on rule-following. A way to deal with such skepticism in short compass would be to show how criticisms directed at one school or approach -e.g., the hermeneutic -plausibly extend to silence skeptics or critics in the analytic tradition. Mantzavinos offers no such extension of his arguments, no such extension suggests itself given what he says, and, worst of all, he betrays no awareness that problems abound for any proposal linked to a naturalist theory of meaning. In any case, the supposed methodological failure of hermeneutics resides in its insulating determinations of meaningfulness from empirical test. Hermeneutics so conceived traffics in methodological antinaturalism, "the position, namely, that presupposes that occurrences in the sociohistorical reality cannot be viewed in continuity with occurrences in the natural world, and that they therefore require entirely different research methods from that drawn upon in the natural sciences." (81) This contrasts with methodological naturalism, "which maintains that all empirical sciences, including the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, can and must employ the same method, regardless of the differences in object area. In all areas in which increasing our knowledge about the real world can be presupposed as an aim, hypotheses can be formulated, consequences can be drawn by deduction, and these can be tested against empirical data." (81) Now, Mantzavinos sometimes glosses the naturalistic approach as requiring only that one "set up hypotheses whenever attempting to acquire knowledge and to test them critically using empirical observations." (82) However, and most characteristically in this work, he focuses on the hypothetico-deductive method as a scientific method par excellence. (See, e.g., 83, 86) What does Mantzavinos take to be the meaning of 'meaning,' at least with respect to human action? One definition he gives goes as follows: "Human behavior is bestowed with meaning when the actor engaging in this behavior interprets it against the background of his goals, his beliefs, and his other mental states while interacting with his natural and social environments; this is a complex process and can involve the conscious or unconscious use of symbols -though it need not." (87-8, italics in the original) The formulation suggests that Mantzavinos considers this statement, at least up to the semicolon, to state what is both necessary and sufficient for meaningful behavior. Mantzavinos speaks of "nexuses of meaning" (e.g., 88) which can in turn be accounted for by the hypothetico-deductive method. (88) The term 'nexus' -of causes or of meanings -receive no elucidation or explication. Nonetheless, his use of the term suggests an interconnection of parts logically determinate enough to allow for application of the hypothetico-deductive method. The method so applied, I take it, links attributions of psychological states or propositional attitudes of agents -beliefs, desires, motives, and the like -to observable (and so testable) aspects of the environment. Repeated actions allow for what Naturalistic Hermeneutics // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24966-naturalistic-hermeneutics/[12/23/15, 10:25:01 AM] is tantamount to causal explanation. For specific (singular) acts, the claim is that the hypotheticodeductive method reconstructs the "nexus of meaning ... so that it is accurately depicted." (88) Mantzavinos has much to say in his Chapter 5 with regard to how meaning cannot be apprehended. These remarks will be of less concern than discerning what one apprehends, on the view Mantzavinos promotes, when one apprehends "meaning." What, for example, constitutes the "truth-makers" when it comes to attributions of meaning? When ones depicts meaning accurately, just what has been depicted? Here Mantzavinos's remarks prove no help. For while he gestures to various types of brain scans and other empirical research (117ff.), he nowhere indicates how one moves from the evidence so obtained to a determination of semantic content. Of course, the fault is not his alone. I am not aware that this can be done. But what then of "accuracy" with regard to meaning attribution? Here Mantzavinos makes the following suggestion: "In reconstructions [of nexuses of meaning], as in identifications of individual facts in general, certain singular descriptive statements serve as hypotheses precisely because one looks for reason for their truth or falsity." (118) The suggestion seems to be that one can treat individual statements as having their own individual empirical truth conditions. But now the aforementioned history which shadows the hypothetico-deductive method must be confronted. For surely, one would think, Mantzavinos cannot want to tie the application of his method to something like the verifiability criterion of meaning? Yet here, as throughout his work, Mantzavinos neither discusses nor acknowledges the problems which motivate the sort of holistic view of language which has set the problem agenda since the mid-1950s in this area. But, even worse, no worked out account of the sort Mantzavinos proposes to defend -an application of the hypothetico-deductive account to the analysis of meaning in the social sciences or the humanities -receives any detailed working through of examples. There occurs only bald assertions of the following kind: "For us, however, what is of primary importance is that this particular type of understanding can be explained, and thus the hypothetico-deductive method can be applied to it without any difficulty ." (123) That it can be applied at all, much less "without any difficulty" Mantzavinos never demonstrates. Lest it be thought that these critical remarks slight the author's efforts, consider the following example which the author offers as a paradigm case of "meaning invariance." Let us take the example of a one-year-old child, X, who, in the presence of her mother, points to a ball and says the word 'ball.' The meaning of this expression can be apprehended by identifying the intention of the expression -in this case, that the child wants to communicate to her mother that the object in front of her is called that. The fundamental element in this nexus of meaning is the intention of giving the object a name. If one can show that this element arises in connection with other expressions from other children in similar situations, then one has discovered an invariance and thus has transformed the nexus of meaning into a causal nexus. (126-7) Post Philosophical Investigations, one wonders just how such an unwitting evocation of the 'Fido'-Fido principle makes it into print. More amazing yet, Mantzavinos finds invariances of the sorts he requires everywhere -in genetics, in cultures, in individuals. (127) Why, one wonders, has it taken so long to put the pieces together? If the notion of meaning could be explicated just by reference to the truth conditions for individual statements, the skeptical and methodological challenges -hermeneutic or otherwise -would be quite different. The inability to explicate meaning in terms of individual statements, however, just is what makes the problem of meaning appear logically intractable for the hypothetico-deductive approach. Mantzavinos apparently never considered exactly why Hempel did not advocate the hypotheticodeductive approach as a theory of meaning. Hempel's characterization of the problems in "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning" (first published in 1950) remains apposite concerning the relation of the hypothetico-deductive model and questions of meaning. As Hempel notes: In effect, the criterion thus arrived at qualifies a sentence as cognitively meaningful if its nonlogical constituents refer, directly or in certain specified indirect ways, to observables. But it does not make any pronouncement on what "the meaning" of a cognitively significant sentence is, and in particular it neither says nor implies that that meaning can be exhaustively Naturalistic Hermeneutics // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24966-naturalistic-hermeneutics/[12/23/15, 10:25:01 AM] characterized by what the totality of possible tests would reveal in terms of observable phenomena. Indeed, the content of a statement with empirical import cannot, in general, be exhaustively expressed by means of any class of observation sentences. ... In other words, the cognitive meaning of a statement in an empiricist language is reflected in the totality of its logical relationships to all other statements in that language and not to the observation sentences alone. In this sense, the statements of empirical science have a surplus meaning over and above what can be expressed in terms of relevant observation sentences.2 Hempel did not fail to see through to completion the project of applying the hypothetico-deductive method to the analysis of meaning. Rather, he articulated what has turned out to be an iterated philosophical lesson, viz., the "meaning" of statements concerns their complex relation to other statements held true and the very complex relation of all these statements, taken collectively, to experience. And what holds for determining the observational consequences of sentences of a logically articulated scientific theory holds, a fortiori, for the testable consequences of statements in ordinary language. Mantzavinos simply fails to properly characterize the issues that gave rise to characteristic contemporary puzzles regarding meaning. "If a difficulty arises in the language comprehension process ... then cognitive resources for resolving the problem are activated... . Our language comprehension system keeps all the information available so that it is possible to have recourse to all of the information categories at any time. The 'talk of a hermeneutic circle' does nothing more than imprecisely depict the search process that is activated if the interpreter of a linguistic expression does not understand something immediately." (46-7) But in describing the solution this way, Mantzavinos only demonstrates that he missed the problem motivating talk of the circle in the first place. Speakers of a language just are those who have solved, in some sense, the problem of meaning. How language users turn the trick of acquisition remains to be explained. The hypothetico-deductive model might be used once a linguistically expressible theory of the world is in hand. But a theory of meaning which presupposes the ability to formulate, e.g., testable statements, allows itself the use of exactly what it should explain. Mantzavinos solves no mysteries about the theory of meaning because he overlooks what makes the "hermeneutic circle" a problem for all philosophers to ponder. 1 Conceiving of the social as real and yet existing only conceptually marks a key position even for those who do not claim to be hermeneutically inspired, e.g., Peter Winch. For extended discussion of "meaning realism", see my "Mistakes," Synthese (September 2003) 136:389-408, "Why There is Nothing Rather than Something: Quine on Behaviorism, Meaning, and Indeterminacy," Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism: Critical and Historical Readings on the Psychological Turn in Philosophy, ed. D. Jacquette (Kluwer Academic 2003), 263-287, and "The Object of Understanding," Empathy and Agency, ed. K. Stueber & B. Kögler, (Westview, 2000), 243-269. 2 C.G. Hempel, "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Robert R. Ammerman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990), 226-7. Copyright © 2015 Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews ISSN: 1538 1617 College of Arts and Letters


Philosophy

REVIEW CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Karsten Schubert University of Freiburg, DE firstname.lastname@example.com KEYWORDS: freedom; critique; church fathers; Christianity; sexuality; power; genealogy of critique TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Schubert, Karsten. "The Christian Roots of Critique. How Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh Sheds New Light on the Concept of Freedom and the Genealogy of the Modern Critical Attitude." Le foucaldien 7, no. 1 (2021): 2, pp. 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/ lefou.98 ABSTRACT Finally published 34 years after his death, Foucault's book Confessions of the Flesh sheds new light on the debate about freedom and power that shaped the reception of his works. Many contributors to this debate argue that Foucault's theory of power did not allow for freedom in the 'genealogical phase,' but that he corrected himself and presented a solution to the problem of freedom in his later works, especially through his reflection on ancient ethics and technologies of the self in volumes two and three of History of Sexuality, as well as the concept of parrhesia. In contrast to this view, I argue that Confessions of the Flesh shows that a concept of freedom as self-critical hermeneutics that aims at identifying a foreign power within the subject was only developed in Foucault's analysis of Christian practices of penance and confession. This interpretation of Confessions of the Flesh opens a new field of inquiry into the genealogy of critique and both the repressive and emancipative effects of truth-telling and juridification. KARSTEN SCHUBERT The Christian Roots of Critique. How Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh Sheds New Light on the Concept of Freedom and the Genealogy of the Modern Critical Attitude 2Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 1. INTRODUCTION The English translation of Foucault's fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh (hereafter: Confessions), was long and eagerly awaited by the international Foucault community and the interested public.1 Until the recent publication of the French original in 2018, the volume was kept under wraps due to Foucault's ban on posthumous publications. All the more reason for the readership to hope that the unveiled secret would provide new insights not only into the subject of the book-the reflections of the Church Fathers up to Augustine on sexuality and subjectivity-but also on Foucault's work in general and its last decade in particular. After Philipp Sarasin analyzed, in Le foucaldien in 2018, how Confessions helps understand Foucault's critique of the occidental subject as subjected through law, I will address a very specific aspect of these expected revelations: the themes of power and freedom, which have shaped the reception of Foucault's works like no other. Hence the question I am trying to answer is the following: Does the volume provide new insights into the problem of power and freedom? To answer this question, I first describe the book and its translations in general terms, situate it within Foucault's oeuvre, and summarize its central themes and theses. Then I reconstruct the discussions about power and freedom in Foucault's work, or more precisely, the view that Foucault's work on ancient ethics, technologies of the self, and parrhesia can be interpreted as a contribution to a normative concept of freedom, which is widespread today.2 Sarasin, too, puts forward an interpretation of the ancient technologies of the self as Foucault's "contrepoint" against (Christian) law.3 In the third section, I analyze and criticize this view with regard to Confessions of the Flesh. I argue that the specific form of freedom Foucauldian thinking centers on-the capacity for a reflexive critique of the self and of subjectivizing powers-has its origins in the subjectivations of early Christianity rather than in antiquity. Here, for the first time, subjectivity was constituted through a critical reflection on power. This insight, which Foucault does not formulate explicitly but can be reconstructed from his analyses, is the decisive and surprising contribution of reading Confessions of the Flesh from the perspective of a theory of power and a genealogy of critique. 2. BOOK AND OEUVRE Confessions of the Flesh is an extensive work on the early Church Fathers and their problematizations of lifestyle and sexuality. Foucault covers the period from the second century to the beginning of the fifth century, beginning with a detailed analysis of the texts of Clement of Alexandria (ca. AD 150-215) and concluding with an extensive study of the work of Augustine (AD 354-430). In doing so, he traces the complex conflicts concerning baptism, 1 Key arguments of this text appeared before in German, as Karsten Schubert, "Die christlichen Wurzeln der Kritik. Wie Foucaults Analysen der Kirchenväter neues Licht auf die Debatte um Macht und Freiheit werfen: Rezension von Michel Foucault: Die Geständnisse des Fleisches. Sexualität und Wahrheit 4. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2019," Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur 7, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.21827/zfphl.7.2.35687 and in a shortened version as "Die christlichen Wurzeln der Kritik. Lesenotiz zu Michel Foucaults 'Die Geständnisse des Fleisches. Sexualität und Wahrheit 4,'" Theorieblog, https://www.theorieblog.de/index.php/2019/10/diechristlichen-wurzeln-der-kritik-lesenotiz-zu-michel-foucaults-die-gestaendnisse-des-fleisches-sexualitaet-undwahrheit-4/. 2 The interpretation entails that Foucault corrects his theory of power and freedom in his later works; that it is widespread is shown by the fact that it is presented as the only interpretation in a handbook entry on Foucault, cf. Paul Patton, "Foucault, Michel (1926–1984)," in Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publ., 2010). Already the anthology Jeremy Moss, ed., The later Foucault: Politics and philosophy (London: SAGE Publ., 1998) asks how Foucault's late work answers the problems of the works of the 70s. Some of the many articles based on the correction thesis are Hans H. Kögler, "Fröhliche Subjektivität: Historische Ethik und dreifache Ontologie beim späten Foucault," in Erdmann; Forst; Honneth, Ethos der Moderne; Vikki Bell, "The promise of liberalism and the performance of freedom," in Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism, and rationalities of government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: Routledge, 1996); Mark Bevir, "Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy," Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999); David Webermann, "Are Freedom and Anti-Humanism Compatible? The Case of Foucault and Butler," Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000), https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00185; Kristina Lepold, "Die Bedingungen der Anerkennung," Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 62, no. 2 (2014), https://doi. org/10.1515/dzph-2014-0022, and, with a special focus on Foucault's analysis of parrhesia, Nancy Luxon, "Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault," Political Theory 36, no. 3 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591708315143. That this interpretation has lost nothing of its popularity is shown by the most recent monograph based on it: Richard A. Lynch, Foucault's critical ethics, Just ideas (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016). 3 Philipp Sarasin, "Adam und Eva: Michel Foucaults ominöser 'vierter Band' schliesst endlich die Histoire de la sexualité ab," Le foucaldien 4, no. 1 (2018): 8, https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.45. 3Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 penance, confession, virginity and abstinence, marriage, and sex. The flesh is a specific concept of early Christianity, with which sexuality is problematized in relation to the other themes. Foucault delves deeply into the material, aiming to make the premises and problems of the Church Fathers intelligible for his contemporary readers. Due to the distance between the Church Fathers' thinking and our own, the book makes for an extremely laborious reading for the modern-day reader, although Foucault does an excellent job as translator and analyst of the discourses, presenting their rationalities intelligibly. Foucault is rather reserved in his own comments, interpretations, and theorizations. Particularly the themes of power and freedom are hardly ever explicitly mentioned. In relatively few of the 400 pages, he explains his own thesis: in the early Christian discussions of sexuality, a new experience of subjectivity emerges, to which veridiction (speaking truth about oneself, 111) and jurisdiction (the juridification of thought and behavior, 222) are central (286, 300). The preface by Frédéric Gros and Stuart Elden's review from 2018 provide solid background information on the status of the text, translated by Robert Hurley, as a non-authorized manuscript, on its relations to other texts, and on the history of its origin.4 Therefore, I limit myself to what is necessary here. After Foucault had published the first volume of History of Sexuality, he deviated from the original plan for its continuation, as his research took him to reading the Church Fathers as early as 1977.5 He then wrote the manuscript of Confessions until about 1981/82, before writing volumes two and three of History of Sexuality, on pagan and Hellenistic ethics and sexuality. Confessions was held back from publication because Foucault realized that he had to start the History of Sexuality earlier, which is why his path led into antiquity. There is no introduction and no chapter on methods, and the text starts rather abruptly, because volumes two, three, and four form a larger project, which expanded and was divided among the volumes in the course of the work. Volume three has no introduction either; instead, the introduction to volume two may apply to all three volumes. The style of the fourth volume corresponds to that of volumes two and three: sober, unagitated, and detailed, Foucault analyzes the material, which consists of the Church Fathers' theological texts alone, and does not include other material, such as texts on institutional procedures. Foucault writes as an historian of philosophy, less as a genealogist of power. Anyone who expects a similar reading experience to that of Discipline and Punish (1977) will be disappointed. The text is not hyperbolic, it does not exaggerate, nor suggest or frighten. Similar to The Order of Things (1970), the main work of the early archaeological phase, Foucault barely addresses material and institutional aspects. Combining the discursive with the question of power and subjectivation in institutions is the innovation that characterizes the transition to the 'genealogical phase' and the 'analysis of power.'6 That Foucault neglects or forgets the question of power in his 'ethical turn' was an early suspicion voiced with regard to volumes two and three of the History of Sexuality.7 Irrespectively of the conclusion one reaches regarding this question, Confessions can be clearly assigned to the late, ethical phase because of its style and method-which are interrelated-although it was written before the other two volumes. Viewed as an independent text, Confessions does not consist of a contribution to a genealogical critique of power, of which, according to Martin Saar, a specifically hyperbolic style that exposes power is characteristic.8 However, in the context of Foucault's oeuvre and the debates about 4 Stuart Elden, "Review: Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair," Theory, Culture & Society 35, 7–8 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418800206. 5 Elden, "Review," 294. 6 See for a critique of the dominant periodization in the secondary literature based on the new insights of Foucault's "Last Decade" Stuart Elden, Foucault's Last Decade (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 4. 7 Hinrich Fink-Eitel, Foucault zur Einführung, 3rd ed. (Hamburg: Junius, 1997), 94–112; Axel Honneth, "Einleitung: Zur philosophisch-soziologischen Diskussion um Michel Foucault," in Erdmann; Forst; Honneth, Ethos der Moderne. 8 Martin Saar, Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault, Theorie und Gesellschaft 59 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007). 4Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 freedom and power, Confessions appears as part of Foucault's genealogical project and offers new insights into a Foucauldian conception of freedom.9 The book is divided into three parts. Some of the titles were given by the editors and not by Foucault-I will neglect these and other editorial details in the following, because apart from a certain general caution in dealing with the text, nothing further can be deduced from them. There are no notes commenting on the translation. The English translation (2021) is lacking some separators of passages (lines or asterisks, for example on 157 and 167) and some headlines of subdivision that are present in the French original (2018) and the German translation (2019) and that help structure the text. There is also at least one omission of text in the English translation (see below). The inconsistent translation of the French "la pénitence" (German "die Busse"), that is mostly rendered as "penance", yet at times as "penitence" and "repentance" (French "le repentir", German "die Reue"), without any explanation for these decisions by the translator, may lead to confusion.10 The first part, "The Formation of a New Experience" (approx. 110 pages), deals with Christian penitential practice and examination of conscience. It begins with a chapter on Clement of Alexandria, whose rules for moderating sexuality are, according to Foucault, continuous with those of the pagan philosophers. At the end of this section, Foucault explains the thesis of the book: sexual morality changes from pagan moderation in Clement to strict purity and total renunciation in Augustin, who perceives mankind and its sexuality negatively, based on the Fall of Man (34–7). This transformation is not, however, primarily one of the codex, that is, of the areas of regulation and their strictness, as is often claimed, but "it's a different type of experience that is being formed little by little" (35). The practices of penance, monastic asceticism, and confession lead to new forms of technologies of the self, to a new form of subjectivity characterized by the fight against evil and telling the truth about oneself. This is already the definition of the flesh that gives the title: "a mode of experience," that is, "a mode of knowledge and transformation of oneself by oneself" (36) that is based on fighting evil within oneself through self-examination, penance, and confession. Thus, Christianity entails a wholly new type of subjectivity that is constituted through the relation of "wrong-doing" and "truth-telling" (36) in the "manifestation of truth" (37) about oneself. The concept of flesh forms part of Foucault's overarching thesis on the history of sexuality: the area of experience and the problem that we call 'sexuality' today only emerged in the course of the 18th century; its predecessors were first the ancient aphrodisia and then the Christian flesh. The remainder of the chapter explains through the reconstruction of Tertullian and Cyprian how penance-first in preparation for baptism, then increasingly independently from it-becomes a more and more complex technique of self-examination and reflection aimed at fighting the inner evil. Here Foucault states for the first time the central theme of the previous chapter, the "juridical avowal" (68, French: "l'aveu juridique"), but only in the French and German versions- in the English translation this sentence is omitted. Regarding Cassian, Foucault shows that the leadership practices and techniques of the examination of conscience (the French "l'examen de conscience" is weirdly translated as "soul-searching" (80), or "spiritual examination" (81)) in Christian monasteries (87–8) originate in pagan philosophy. Christian practices of direction-in contrast to ancient ones-aim at the renunciation of one's own will and not at the sovereign exercise of the will (96–7), and are performed through unconditional submission and obedience (92–5). A hermeneutics of suspicion is formed, with which the Christian subject constantly examines itself for foreign, diabolical elements of evil within itself. In this way, a new kind of subjectivity develops in relation to truth. The second part, "Being Virgin" (approx. 80 pages), traces the development of virginity in the third and fourth centuries to a form of life that goes far beyond pure abstinence and strict 9 This method of interpreting Foucault's later works in light of social theoretical debates initiated by the earlier works is similar to Saar's method, who argues that Foucault's late work provides the theory of power and freedom that fits genealogy as a critique, as it helps to describe subjects both as power-determined and free. He claims that only this later social theory can account for relatively free subjects that can be addressed by the genealogist. Cf. Saar, Genealogie, 249–75. In difference to Saar's account of the volumes one and two as a general theory of the possibility of freedom, I show that Confessions offers elements of a genealogy of the specific form of freedom as critique. 10 These and other remarks on the translation are based on the proofs that I received by the publisher on 20-10-19. Attaching a draft of this review, I inquired if this is the final version of the translation or if there are corrections expected. The publisher stated that this would be the final version. 5Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 regulation of sex. Here, too, Foucault emphasizes that one does not fully grasp this development if one only notes the increasing strictness of the codex. Rather, the Church fathers interpret individual sexuality in light of the history the Fall of Man and salvation. Therefore, the life form of virginity becomes a crucial concern (145–54), which explains the Christian 'upvaluation' of sexuality, through which the latter attained a significance never seen before (155–7). A complex technology of the self is evolving, in which the inner knowledge of the self and the struggle against the flesh (the foreign, evil element within the self) are integrated in complex relationships with others to whose power and direction one must submit in order to survive in this struggle (167–91). In the third part, "Being Married" (approx. 90 pages), Foucault turns his attention to marriage and analyzes, based on Augustine's writings, how it was subjected to more complex regulations in the fourth century. According to Foucault, in Augustine's reflections on marriage, a process of juridification begins that characterizes Christianity up to the 20th century (279) and that Foucault wanted to analyze in the planned fifth volume of History of Sexuality. In contrast to virginity, asceticism, and penance, which are based on veridiction, that is, speaking the truth about oneself, in married life spouses are conceptualized as legal subjects with mutual obligations and debts (214–22). Foucault traces the complex theological considerations that led to the creation of the legal subject: free will, a will that is independent of God, arises with the Fall of Man and is henceforth internally divided, because libido and desire now form part of it (270–8). That following one's desire is an act of free will is the foundation of the juridical principle of guilt and of the juridification of marriage (280–6). The autonomy of the will constitutes the legal subject. The main text is followed by four appendices, which could not be integrated into the main text, yet enrich the material. The second appendix is relevant from the perspective of power analysis. Here, Foucault discusses the development of Christian pastoral power from the 7th century onwards. In this text, the connections to already published ideas, which accordingly have already influenced Foucault's reception, become clearer than elsewhere in the book. Pastoral power is the specific form of power and government that is spread by monastic life, that became central to the history of the Occident and is still effective in today's governmentality (296–9). The modifications of the exercise of power that Foucault analyses in Confessions are crystalized in pastoral power, which is why the book is so important for us today. These developments entail governing and monitoring people "through the manifestation of their individual truth" (313), and judging them as part of complex groups. In this second appendix, therefore, Foucault discusses more clearly than in the main text how Christian confessional practices fit into the history of Western mechanisms of government and repression, which can be traced up to contemporary biopolitics. 3. POWER AND FREEDOM What can we learn from Confessions of the Flesh regarding the problem of power and freedom? How does the book relate to the debates about how Foucault developed his thinking on these issues in volumes two and three?11 The problem of freedom consists in a social-theoretical description of subjectivity in which subjectivity is determined by power, which is why there can be no freedom and no resistance. While Foucault never took this position explicitly, and, in reaction to such reception even emphasized that he conceptualizes power and freedom as equiprimordial,12 social philosophical readers interpreted his works as leading to this problem. This, as I argue elsewhere,13 is neither Foucault's nor his readers' 'fault', but rather due to the fundamental difference between the systematic methods of these social philosophers and Foucault's genealogy as critique; furthermore, it is a sign of the enormous productivity of Foucault's work that was able to provoke rich research on the concepts of power and freedom, 11 For a reconstruction of this social-philosophical debate about freedom in Foucault's works, see Karsten Schubert, Freiheit als Kritik: Sozialphilosophie nach Foucault (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018) and, with a detailed analysis of Foucault's The Subject and Power Karsten Schubert, "Freedom as critique: Foucault beyond anarchism," Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453720917733. 12 See Michel Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power," in Dreyfus; Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2. ed (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1983), 208–26. 13 See Schubert, Freiheit, 34–7, 251–66. 6Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 which goes beyond Foucault and is an important contribution to social philosophy in its own right. This reading of the problem of freedom was put forward in relation to Foucault's archaeological and genealogical works.14 In the archaeological phase, the problem is related to language and thought. Foucault argues that the possibilities of thinking are determined by a historical a priori, the so-called episteme, and thus also fundamentally limited. In the genealogical phase, Foucault expands his social theory and increasingly examines institutions, power technologies, practices, and bodies. Discipline and Punish (1977) is both a genealogy of the modern prison and a critique of modern capitalism, since according to Foucault, modern capitalism is based on the same technologies of power that are developed in prison to discipline and oppress individuals. Due to his rejection of the methods of normative social philosophy, which would make it possible to differentiate between liberal and repressive aspects of modernity, and the lack of a concept of socialization that could explain how subjects develop their own capacity to act, Discipline and Punish was interpreted as amounting to an image of modernity as total oppression. That there is no outside of power and that power is productive and not only repressive are the central critical and innovative ideas of Foucault's intervention against classical state centered and juridical theories of power and against liberal normative political theories. However, despite developing a concept of power as productive, he focused on the repressive sides of this productive power. Therefore, many commentators saw no place in such a theory for freedom and the associated concepts of resistance and emancipation.15 One claim that is widespread in secondary literature is that the solution to this problem is to be found in Foucault's late work, the so-called 'ethical phase,' especially in volumes two and three of History of Sexuality. Here one finds terms that could provide hope for overcoming the one-sided focus on the repressive side of productive power: technologies of the self instead of technologies of domination, care for the self and aesthetics of existence instead of discipline and bio-power, ethical choice instead of moral regulation, and resistance against power through parrhesia, speaking the truth with courage. In particular, the distinction between a morality based on ethical relationships of the self with itself and a morality based on moral codes, which Foucault develops in the Introduction to the Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1990, 29– 32), is understood as the foundation of a normatively substantive concept of freedom that can serve as a basis for the critique of power relations.16 Foucault argues that there are various dimensions of morality, especially the moral code and associated sanction-proven rules, as well as "the manner one ought to 'conduct oneself'-that is, the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code" (Foucault 1990, 26). Foucault very cautiously suggests that this second, "ethical" dimension of subjectivation tended to be central in ancient morality (Foucault 1990, 29), in which wealthy men freely adhered to the moral code and shaped their lives, described by Foucault as an "aesthetics of existence." Christian (sexual) morality was based more on strict adherence to the code and corresponding institutions. Despite Foucault's cautious and balanced description, the distinction was often understood to mean that there can be, and 14 See Thomas Lemke, Foucault's analysis of modern governmentality: A critique of political reason (London, Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019), 108–18 for a detailed analysis of these problems, which are evoked by many commentators, for example Nancy Fraser, Unruly practices power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Pr., 1989), 17–66; Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen, stw 749 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988); Axel Honneth, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 738 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000); Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984), https://doi. org/10.1177/0090591784012002002 and Peter Dews, Logics of disintegration: Post-structuralist thought and the claims of critical theory (London: Verso, 1987), 155–70. 15 Of course, these social-philosophical attempts to systematize a theory of power and freedom from Foucault's analysis and to debate its coherence were not only widespread, but also contested. Petra Gehring, "Foucault'sche Freiheitsszenen," in Parrhesia: Foucault und der Mut zur Wahrheit, ed. Petra Gehring and Andreas Gelhard (Zürich: diaphanes, 2012) and Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2005) for example show that and how conceptions and scenes of freedom can be found throughout Foucault's oeuvre. 16 The clearest interpretation of ancient ethics as a normative counter-concept to modernity is found in Wilhelm Schmid, Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst: Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegründung der Ethik bei Foucault (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000). But even authors who are justifiably cautious with such normative attributions find building blocks for a theory of freedom in the distinction between moral code and ethics and the subject-theoretical description of self-relations, see for example Lemke, Foucault, 265–83 or Saar, Genealogie, 251–75. 7Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 has been, a freer ethic of self-practice in antiquity, as opposed to Christian repressive morality. Confessions ultimately complicates this overly simplistic picture. 4. THE CHRISTIAN ROOTS OF CRITIQUE It is not surprising that a schematic reception of the difference between ancient, ethical, and free ethics on one hand, and modern, Christian, juridical, institutional-repressive morality on the other emerged before the publication of Confessions of the Flesh. The History of Sexuality was at the time incomplete,17 with only the end and starting points available: the description of modern repression together with the relative freedom in antiquity. With the now published link, Confessions of the Flesh, not only the greater historical continuity between antique and Christian subjectivations becomes visible, but also the systematic complexity of the subjectivation processes that Foucault meant to capture with his analytical categories from the introduction to volume two. Furthermore, in Confessions of the Flesh-or more precisely, in the confessional and penitential practices described therein-the origin of an alternative concept of freedom can be found, which, along with the ancient concept of freedom, plays an important role in current debates on freedom along Foucauldian lines. The core of this concept of freedom is the critique of power that works within subjectivity, which is why it is better suited to resolve the Foucauldian problem of freedom than ancient ethics. I will explain these three aspects in the following. Firstly, historical continuity. While the dual typologization of free ethics in contrast to repressive morality has shaped the reception of Foucault, the new volume shows one thing above all: historically, the two forms cannot be strictly separated. Rather, there is a continuity between Christian norms and subjectivations and ancient ethics. Foucault develops this thesis in the first chapter and often emphasizes this continuity within the slow process of transformation. This gradual transmutation characterizes not only the continuity of the code, that is, of the areas of regulation, concerns, and prohibitions; Foucault repeatedly emphasizes in particular that the developments cannot be interpreted as "reinforcement of prohibitions" or "greater strictness in morals" (35). Furthermore, the transformation of the modes of subjectivation, whose gradual change Foucault traces, takes place through continuous development. The experience of aphrodisia slowly and seamlessly develops into the experience of the flesh. Secondly, the complexity of subjectivation. The continuity of the history of sexuality after antiquity makes it even clearer that Foucault's central critical method is to demonstrate the "relentlessness of historicity" through genealogical analysis.18 The great contrast in method, style, and theme between the first and second volumes of History of Sexuality could still tempt some readers to view Foucault's perception of antiquity as fundamentally different from that of the following periods in terms of power and to interpret the analysis of ancient modes of subjectivation as contributing to the development of a systematic concept of freedom. But the tedious and stubborn continuity of Foucault's historical-philosophical analysis, which stylistically and methodically simply continues where volume three left off, makes clear how strongly the supposedly free subjectivation of antiquity itself is bound to historically contingent forms. Subjects are bound by their respective historically valid forms of self-relation, even if these emphasize free ethics rather than adherence to moral codes, as stated for the case of antiquity. In short, free and ethical subjectivation is also a matter of power, imposed from the outside, even though it demands care of the self and aesthetic choices. For this reason, a concept of freedom that would help to solve the problem of freedom cannot be found in a specific ethics of free choice, but rather in questioning the historicity and subjection of ethics in its entirety, and in developing a critical relationship to it. Such a concept of freedom as critique, in which freedom is understood as a practice of critique of power and historical regimes of subjectivation through which subjects can reflect their 'inner unfreedom' and thereby potentially 17 It is still incomplete today, as a first manuscript for a volume on the Children's Crusades is still in the Bibliothèque nationale and will probably never be published. 18 Ulrich Brieler, Die Unerbittlichkeit der Historizität: Foucault als Historiker, Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur Bd. 14 (Köln: Böhlau, 1998). 8Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 transform themselves, is found in Foucault's late reflections on the concept of critique and his own method of genealogy as a historical critique of power and subjectivation.19 Thirdly, the Christian roots of the critique of subjectivation. Reflections on this concept of freedom as critique are not explicit in Confessions of the Flesh. Yet Foucault's analyses offer astonishing insights into the genealogy of this critical capacity, despite the fact that his objective is to show how we are still bound today by technologies of power that originated in early Christianity. Foucault's central thesis is that Christianity constitutes the legal subject to whom autonomy and thus also responsibility for its desire is attributed. According to Foucault, the legal regulation and subjectivation, the juridical forms and their knowledge/power complexes, which are of enormous significance for the present day, have their origins in the problematizations of marriage and desire by the early Church Fathers, and in the Christian confessional and penitential rituals. Not only is the Christian pastoral power one source of contemporary (neo-) liberal governmentality. By forcing the subject into a coherent self-identity in order to hold it accountable and responsible, the confession is also an original scene of contemporary "ethical violence", according to Judith Butler.20 The violence lies in binding the subject to specific, historically contingent regimes of subjectification: "If they become naturalized, taken for granted [...], if they become the terms by which we do and must live, then our very living depends upon a denial of their historicity [...] In Foucault, it seems, there is a price for telling the truth about oneself, precisely because what constitutes the truth will be framed by norms and by specific modes of rationality that emerge historically."21 It is this problem of unfreedom due to the subject's constitution within historically specific regimes of subjectification, its being formed by the social norms in place during the historical period to which it belongs, to which Foucault's freedom as critique and his method of genealogical critique reacts. And in addition to the genealogy of the Christian "ethical violence", Confessions also entails a genealogy of such critical reflexivity as originating in the emerging Christian subjectivity. In the "telling-the-truth-about-oneself" (54) of the Christian penitential ritual, a practice of critical reflection on power emerges for the first time. The self is supposed to keep itself pure, and in order to do so it must constantly search for and critically examine foreign, diabolical powers within itself. This practice of critical examination of internal heteronomy by external powers with the goal of autonomy and transformation bears significant systematic similarity with the critical practice of Foucault, the central difference being that it is not a historical-genealogical critique of power and subjectification, but rather a theological-ethical one. If the contemporary legal subject can be traced back to the early Church fathers, as Foucault claims, it is plausible that this also holds for the contemporary form of critical subjectivity, which is constituted and transformed through reflexivity with regards to inner foreign power, the inner other: What is at issue, in fact, is the form of subjectivity: the exercise of oneself upon oneself, knowledge of oneself, the constitution of oneself as an object of investigation and discourse, the liberation or purification of oneself and salvation by means of operations that carry light to one's innermost being, and drive one's deepest secrets up to the light of redemptive exposure. It is a form of experience- understood both as a mode of presence to oneself and a program for selftransformation -that was developed in that period. (36) A further aspect of modern critiques of power, which is already rooted in the Christian experience, is the realization that questioning the other's inwardly working power is necessarily an endless activity. If there is a subjectification, it implies an indefinite objectification of oneself by oneself-indefinite in the sense that, never acquired once and for all, it has no end in time; and in the sense that one must always push one's examination of thoughts as far as possible, however tenuous and innocent they may appear. Further, this 19 Michel Foucault, "What is Critique?," in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997); Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?," in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). For a systematic conceptualization of Foucault's freedom as critique, see Schubert, Freiheit, 305–12; Schubert, "Freedom," 9–15. 20 Judith Butler, Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2005), 42. 21 Butler, Giving, 121. 9Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 subjectification in the form of a quest for the truth about oneself is carried out through complex relations with others. And in several ways: because it's a matter of ridding oneself of the power of the Other, of the Enemy that hides beneath the appearances of oneself. (191) Christianity-and not ancient ethics or parrhesia22-practices subjectivity for the first time as critical self-reflection of foreign and inwardly acting power (evil) and continuous selftransformation (truth). This is where the basic elements of the modern hermeneutics of suspicion arise that critically examine the own and seemingly free thinking with regard to heteronomy and repression. This hermeneutics cannot come to a standstill because there is no free core of the subject at which criticism would come to an end.23 For subjectivity is only conceivable with and through others, that is, constituted through power; this remains the core of Foucault's concept of subjectivation. In What is Critique, Foucault argues that critique as a "critical attitude" or "the art of not being governed like that"24 developed in the 15th century as a counter-movement to the governmental intensification of Christian pastoral power. He also sees the origins of the critical attitude in the questioning of the Christian doctrine and in the development of a newer, purer relationship to the Bible.25 Confessions of the Flesh shows that the foundations of critique lie much earlier, namely in the Christian experience of the flesh and its connection between subjectivity, truth, and critique. Because it was already constituted by critically examining the relationship of truth and power, Christian subjectivity was able to turn the critique of power against the Catholic Church during the reformation.26 This interpretation shows how Foucault's analysis of the critical hermeneutics of Christian subjectification in Confessions makes intelligible the connection between Christianity and the will not to be governed that he describes in What is Critique. Of course, this does not mean that the confession is an emancipatory practice in itself. It is ambivalent and, especially as part of conservative church politics, repressive; however, the Christian self-reflective subjectivity also prefigures the critique of subjectivation that later becomes central to social and political critiques of the social norms of "ethical violence".27 For the contemporary social-philosophical reflection on power and freedom, this means that not only the repressive power that normalizes and subjects us can be traced back to antiquity. The origins of the emancipative and rebellious side of critique, as well, reach far back into the past. The current reception of Foucault's late works tends to locate freedom in antiquity and detects the origin of critique in parrhesia, following Foucault's own genealogy of the modern critical attitude. Confessions of the Flesh may help to revise and complete this genealogy of critique, which contains a gap: The truth-telling through ancient parrhesia is grounded in the subject's courage and does not rely on a hermeneutics of self-reflective critique that is central for Foucault's freedom as critique. On the contrary, doubting and questioning if one's own truth might be constituted through foreign power seems to severely limit the confidence, commitment, and courage that define parrhesia. The question thus is how through the transformations of parrhesia from antiquity to modernity, the hermeneutics of suspicion became part of the modern critical attitude. Foucault's analysis of the Christian penitential practice suggest that they might be the missing link, as they bring about self-reflective and 22 Reconstructions of Foucault's genealogy of his own enterprise of critique that he undertook in his last years, such as Andreas Folkers, "Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique," Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414558885, should be extended and corrected accordingly. Although Foucault begins the genealogy of critique with the ancient parrhesia, fearlessly speaking the truth to political authorities, constituting truth through the courage and the self-transparency of the protesting subject, this is precisely not the critical hermeneutics towards one's own subjectivity that is so crucial to Foucault's concept of freedom of critique. Such reflexivity originates in the Christian confessional practices. 23 Schubert, "Freedom," 11. 24 Foucault, "Critique" in The Politics of Truth, 45. 25 Foucault, "Critique" in The Politics of Truth, 45. 26 See for an analysis of Foucault's interpretation of Christianity that stresses his affirmative stance towards the reformation as begin of the enlightenment Friedemann Voigt, "Genealogie der Lebensführung. Michel Foucaults Deutung des Christentums," Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte (Journal for the History of Modern Theology) 14, no. 2 (2007), https://doi.org/10.1515/ZNTH.2007.008. 27 The ambivalence of the confession as both repressive and potentially emancipative is also subject of progressive theology, for example Gunda Werner, "Specifically Catholic: At the Intersection of Power, Maleness, Holiness, and Sexualised Violence. A Theological and Historical Comment on Power," Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 27 (2019), https://doi.org/10.2143/ESWTR.27.0.3286560. 10Schubert Le foucaldien DOI: 10.16995/lefou.98 self-critical subjectivity-a hypothesis that Foucault himself did not develop, possibly because of his premature death. One important consequence of such a revised genealogy of critique would be that reflexivity and being bound to truth-telling that became the dominant modes of subjectification through Christianity are not problematic in themselves. Rather, the problem lies in the specific naturalist and ahistorical forms they can take as "ethical violence". 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Philosophy

OPINION published: 20 October 2015 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01565 Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 October 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1565 Edited by: Peter J. Bex, Northeastern University, USA Reviewed by: Branka Spehar, University of New South Wales, Australia *Correspondence: Birgitta Dresp-Langley firstname.lastname@example.com Specialty section: This article was submitted to Perception Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 20 August 2015 Accepted: 28 September 2015 Published: 20 October 2015 Citation: Dresp-Langley B (2015) Principles of perceptual grouping: implications for image-guided surgery. Front. Psychol. 6:1565. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01565 Principles of perceptual grouping: implications for image-guided surgery Birgitta Dresp-Langley* ICube UMR 7357 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Keywords:Gestalt theory, law of good continuation, principle ofPrägnanz, collinear integration, border ownership, figure-ground, image-guided surgery The laws and principles which predict how perceptual qualities can be extracted from the most elementary visual signals were discovered by the Gestalt psychologists (e.g., Wertheimer, 1923; Metzger, 1930, translated and re-edited by Spillmann in 2009 and 2012, respectively). Their seminal work has inspired visual science ever since, and has led to exciting discoveries which have confirmed the Gestalt idea that the human brain would have an astonishing capacity for selecting and combining critical visual signals to generate output representations for decision making and action. This capacity of selection and integration enables the perception of form and space, and the correct estimation of relative positions, trajectories, and distances of objects represented in planar images. The Gestalt laws and principles were initially aimed at answering a single all-encompassing question: "Why does the world look the way it does." They have subsequently been made operational in experimental studies (for an illustration of on-going research see the international METHUSALEM project, coordinated by Johan Wagemans, at www.gestaltrevision.be) aimed at deepening our insights into the ways in which specific characteristics and qualities of visual configurations may determine perceptual organization and behavior at various levels of processing. Perceptual organization directly determines the ability of human observers to assess (1) which parts of an image belong together to form a unified visual object or shape, and (2) which parts should be nearer and which further away from the observer if the represented objects were seen in the real world. This opinion paper argues that the Gestalt principle of Prägnanz and the Gestalt law of good continuation address specific problems of perceptual organization with critical implications for visual interface design, and the design of image-guided surgery platforms in particular. The principle of Prägnanz relates to the general Gestalt postulate that objects in the visual field will produce the simplest and most complete perceptual solution possible under the conditions given. The Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, of which the law of good continuation is a particular example, describe the conditions under which specific perceptual solutions (groupings) are likely to occur. The question of how planar image structures are grouped into perceptual representations of figure and ground is one of the study grounds theGestalt laws have been designed for. Figure-ground representation is a perceptual solution that enables the observer to assess which objects in the image would be likely to be nearer and which objects would be likely to be further away in a real world configuration. It is mediated by specific image cues to shape and to relative distance, involving local signals of contrast and orientation to fill in specific regions of an image and thereby enabling the perception of surfaces. The associated perceptual sensations of local contrast enhancement make visual objects in the image appear to stand in front of other objects represented in the same plane. Such sensations are often deemed "illusory" because they have no physical origin, i.e., there is no objective difference in local luminance that would explain the resulting percepts (e.g., Heinemann, 1955; Hamada, 1985; O'Shea et al., 1994; De Weert and Spillmann, 1995; Grossberg, 1997; Dresp and Fischer, 2001; Dresp et al., 2002; Guibal and Dresp, 2004; Devinck et al., 2006; Pinna and Reeves, 2006; Dresp-Langley and Reeves, 2012, 2014). An essential aspect of this process of figure-ground segregation is the perceptual assignment of border ownership (see the review Dresp-Langley Perceptual grouping in image-guided surgery by von der Heydt on this topic). The Gestalt theorist Rubin (1921) was among the first to point out that a figure has distinct perceptual qualities that make it stand out against the rest of the visual field, which thereby acquires the perceptual quality of ground (or background). A figure occludes the ground and, therefore, owns the borders which separate it from the latter (Craft et al., 2007; Zhang and von der Heydt, 2010). Zhou et al. (2000) found neurons predominantly in V2 (but also V1) of the monkey that respond selectively to the location of borders in the visual field. Selective visual attention to the figure strengthens the neuronal responses to its borders (Qiu et al., 2007). The Gestalt psychologists also correctly presumed that, to recover a representation of a whole from parts, the brain must achieve the perceptual integration of visual information across collinear space (e.g., Wertheimer, 1923; Metzger, 1930). The visual integration of contrast information across collinear image space plays a crucial role in form vision under conditions of stimulus uncertainty and configurative ambiguity (e.g., Dresp, 1997; Grossberg, 1997). It is governed by the so-called law of good continuation, and reflected by interactive effects between co-axial stimuli in the visual field (Hubel and Wiesel, 1959, 1968; von der Heydt and Peterhans, 1989; Dresp and Bonnet, 1991; Peterhans von der Heydt, 1991; Kapadia et al., 2000; Craft et al., 2007). Specific response activities of visual cortical neurons are triggered by these co-axial interactions (cf. the first observations byNelson and Frost, 1978; von derHeydt et al., 1984 in monkey visual cortex), revealing the functional properties of brainmechanisms designed to complete physically discontinuous contrast input across collinear visual space. Collinear spatial integration is crucial for the detection of alignment, virtual trajectories, and shape borders in a world where most objects are seen incompletely. It enables a human observer to assess the continuity of image fragments under conditions of diminished visibility and heightened stimulus ambiguity. Experimental data on collinear visual integration have shown that the perceptual recovery of global representations of collinear space involves FIGURE 1 | An image configuration will produce the simplest and most complete perceptual solution possible under the conditions given (Gestalt principle of Prägnanz). In image-guided surgery, visual guidance is provided directly on the surgeon's view of the patient's anatomy by mixing real and virtual images. Understanding which image conditions produce geometric configurations that will satisfy the most essential laws of Gestalt and ensure optimal Prägnanz for decision will help increase the efficiency of rendered images (middle). The goal here is to facilitate interventional strategies with regard to specific regions of interest to the surgeon. Visual tracking of the tooltip trajectories is important for evaluating skill evolution, the positional accuracy of the tooltips being critical (left). Technology facilitating the positional accuracy of tool-tip movements by generating visual data for relative position, alignment, and trajectory anticipation (perceptual law of good continuation) is urgently needed. The real-time computational analysis of deviations from critical alignments during interventions (right) is currently the "holy grail" in this field of technological development. many levels of visual processing, not a single one, from the visual detection of local image detail to the perception of global association fields (e.g., Dresp, 1993; Field et al., 1993; Polat and Sagi, 1993, 1994; Kapadia et al., 1995; Polat and Norcia, 1996; Yu and Levi, 1997, 2000; Wehrhahn and Dresp, 1998; Chen et al., 2001; Chen and Tyler, 2001; Tzvetanov and Dresp, 2002; Dresp and Langley, 2005; Chen and Tyler, 2008; Huang et al., 2012). In complex images, some visible stimulus fragments appear clearly aligned, others do not. Specific phenomenal conditions of contour relatability (Kellman and Shipley, 1991; Shipley and Kellman, 1992, 2001) need to be satisfied to enable collinear interpolation in static 2D scenes. This process of interpolation constrains the spreading of surfaces across unspecified regions in the image. The contribution of past experience and perceptual learning to early mechanisms of interpolation and grouping needs to be taken into account given that specific memory data about objects (Kimchi and Hadad, 2002) and their most likely spatial configuration are likely to facilitate (or eventually interfere with, depending on conditions) ongoing visual processing of an image. Although the recovery of veridical object properties was not a major question in early Gestalt theory, its laws of perceptual organization have generated a conceptual framework for addressing it. Understanding which image conditions produce geometric configurations that will satisfy the most essential laws of Gestalt and ensure optimal Prägnanz for image based decision making is similar to understanding the grammar of well-formed sentences. Gestalt theory is as relevant as ever in the context of visual interface technology for image-guided surgery, for example. Image-guided surgery uses images taken before and/or during the procedure to help the surgeon navigate. The goal is to augment the surgeon's capacity for decisionmaking and action during the procedure (see Perrin et al., 2009, for review). In augmented reality, the guidance is provided directly on the surgeon's view of the patient by mixing real and virtual images (Figure 1). The perceptual qualities (color, brightness, Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2 October 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1565 Dresp-Langley Perceptual grouping in image-guided surgery salience e.a.) of the rendered images are essential for making specific regions of interest to the surgeon optimally perceptible. This includes the visual traceability of devices relative to the patient, the registration and alignment of the preoperative model, and optimized rendering and visualization of the preoperative data. Visualization in this context means translating image data into a graphic representation that is understandable by the user (the surgeon), as it conveys important information for assessing structure and function, and for making (the right!) decisions during an intervention. The field has evolved dramatically in recent years, yet, the most critical problem for image-guided surgery is still the one of task-centered user interface design. During a surgical intervention, the timing of the generation of image data is absolutely critical, and to facilitate navigation through large cavities with multiple potential obstacles, such as within the abdomen, complex displays have been designed to provide navigational aids. They combine surface renderings of anatomy (Figure 1, middle) from preoperative imaging with intra-operative visualization techniques. A common strategy here is representing volumetric data as 2D surfaces with varying opacity. The efficiency of renderings for facilitating decisions of the human user can be evaluated in terms of the perceptual salience of critical surfaces that represent regions of interest to the surgeon. Moreover, intra-operative imaging often provides further diagnostic information and permits assessing risks as well as perspectives of repair. In this context, image-guided instrument tracking is a major challenge for current research and development in this field (West and Maurer, 2004; Huang et al., 2007). A critical problem for the surgeon is detecting and keeping track of the relative positions of the surgical tools he/she is using during the intervention (Figure 1, right). Visual tracking of the tooltip trajectories is also a precious aid for evaluating skill evolution in trainee surgeons, the positional accuracy of the tooltips being critical during an intervention (e.g., Jiang et al., 2015). The development and testing of new visual aids to facilitate the detection of alignment, relative position and trajectories (perceptual law of good continuation) is urgently needed here. Ultimately, technology where the surgical tool itself will become a genuine visual navigation aid in imageguided surgery is to be developed in the near future and psychophysical testing should have a major impact on these developments. 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