Foucault’s Critique Of The Enlightenment Reason And Its Significance

Foucault is one of the most prestigious thinkers in the postmodernism. In the face of all kinds of drawbacks in the development of modern society, Foucault inherited the anti enlightenment thought which denies the equal relationship among reason, liberation and progress. Then he began to embark on the road of his criticism of the contemporary reason. In the process of reason create civilization, the society shows the phenomenon of departure from the original of reason development, which promoted Foucault to reflect the modern reason. During the process of reflection, Foucault saws the alienation of reason, then began to criticize it. As a result, Foucault has been dubbed the title of "rational critic". But his criticism on the reason expand a new critical path, In the past, most rational critics have criticized the reason from the macro aspect, but Foucault turned the core criticism of reason into the boundary of reason and the transcendent pursuit of reason-madness from a micro-perspective. This paper reveals Foucault’s criticism on reason, which based on the book of "The History of Madness in the Classical Age", his early work.In this book, Foucault traced the different styles of madness in different times with the method of archaeology and dug out the negative side of reason from the opposite of reason. Then, it strongly questioned the legality of the modern reason.The original of thought is an important factor to the Foucault’s rational criticism. In the theory of great influence on Foucault’s thought, Nietzsche’s subversion of traditional values, Heidegger’s heterogeneous thinking of challenging the traditional thinking, Frankfurt School’s critique of instrument reason, Max’s theory of alienation are the most important. However, Marxt’s critique on reason which based on the social historical reality is the most substantive among these theory. In addition, Foucault used the method of archaeology in his book of "the history of madness in the classical age", which is one of the significant method to his critique.This paper introduces Foucault’s exploration of the history of madness based on the sourse of Foucault’s criticism. The research on the history of madness is mainly discussed from three important periods, which reveals how madness declined into silence step by step and how reason rejected madness. Here, Foucault makes people see the tragic fate of madness, from dialogue to exclusion, and then to the absolute control. Madness, as the other in the eyes of the so called rational people, can no longer sound.This paper launches the evaluation of Foucault’s criticism on the reason after defining Foucaullt’s critique, which is the core content of this paper. First of all, it discusses Foucault and Marx’s critique on the rationality. And then evaluating Foucault’s criticism on the reason from the perspective of Marx’s philosophy. Finally revealing its contemporary value. Foucault’s theory is benefit to promoting people to reflect contemporary reason for the development of contemporary society, and it also opens up the microscopic visual threshold of reason criticism for us. This makes people pay attention to the microcosmic aspect of reason when makes macroscopic inspection. Then combining the macro perspective and micro perspective and treating modern reason with a dialectical thinking.