The Norms of Thought, a Genealogical Sketch

According to Foucault, Descartes and then Locke would have created a sort of disenchantment, Entzauberung in Max Weber’s sense, of the value of truth. Before Descartes and Locke, theoretical wisdom went hand in hand with practical wisdom and virtue. After them, the norms of knowledge, or epistemic norms, can have all sorts of origins: they can be based on natural facts, or created by language, or even established by God; in any case they do not have any relationship with our moral virtue. Following Canguilhem, Foucault studied the way in which, especially in the XIX century, the old notion of norm (norma, square), formerly designing a rule governing conduct – how to act – eventually became associated with the notion of normality, which designs the regularity of conduct – how we act – especially in the field of medicine. Then Ian Hacking and others showed how the probability calculus and the statistical methods provided the theoretical and practical devices to this normalization of the norma and normalization tout court. After that, following this Foucauldian – and primarily Nietzschean – claim, the contemporary theory of knowledge would have marked a break, once and for all, between the domain of knowledge and the moral domain. So the followers of Michel Foucault and of Pierre Hadot would have been left with the mission of restoring the lost connection between ethics and logic, or morality and knowledge, coming back to our ancient wisdom, which in their opinion had never been really theoretical. However, if we look at the true story of it, from the XVIIth century till now, we see that things are far from being the way the Weberian and now Foucauldian slogan claims they are, namely that modern science would have disenchanted all values, including the values of