Essay --

Foucault and Nietzsche challenge the hidden purposes of historians in their search for origins, demonstrating that an accurate understanding of hi invention rectifies atomic number 53 of any beliefs of moral origins. In this paper, I will elaborate what Foucault thinks an accurate understanding of history regarding punishment truly is. I am going to crystalize this concept by focusing on the first chapter of Foucaults book, Discipline and Punish. Foucault starts out the first chapter, The body of the condemned, by contrasting Damiens gruesome public strain with a detailed schedule of a prison that took place just eighty years later. Foucault is bringing the readers attention to the distinct turn in punishment put in place in less than a century. It gets the reader to start thinking about the differences between how society employ to punish people and the way that we do today. Foucault states that earlier in time the right to punish was directly connected to the authority of the King. Crimes committed during this time were non crimes against the public good, but a personal disrespect to the King himself. The public displays of torture and execution were public affirmations of the Kings authority to rule and to punish. It was after many years when the people subjected to torture suddenly became sympathized, especially if the punishment was too excessive for the crime committed. As a result, at the end of the eighteenth Century, Foucault mockingly tells the story of how our society became humane and the public cried out for punishment without torture. When the invention of prisons came about, most people chose to forget the disappearance of public executions. Foucault states Today we be rather inclined to ignore it perhaps in its time, it gave r... ...d essential at the moment of birth. The origin always precedes the Fall. It bangs before the body, before the world and time it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. (Fou cault, Page 79) This quote explains why we like to pin point an capricel origin and dispute the likelihood the idea of evolution. Ultimately, Foucault has shown that punishment does not have one origin that can be traced down in history but that it is a combination of a aeonian cycle. A few years from now, we will evolve and there will be another level of power in charge that will come along with different rules and punishment. We will look back and be astounded at the way that we punished people, and call that the new barbaric ways of our society. This shows how the revision in power is what determines the type of punishment we enforce and not by our morals.