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Philosophical Haiku

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

by Terence Green

Dig into the past
Reason, madness, punishment
Knowledge disinterred

As a boy, the French philosopher Michel Foucault had a flair for Greek, Latin and history. As a young man, he had a flair for the macabre: his bedroom at his boarding school was adorned with images of torture and war, and he reportedly once chased a fellow student with a knife. For some reason, he had few friends.

When he wasn’t contemplating violence and death (including his own), Foucault was usually found reading works by Hegel, Marx, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.

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