Foucault On Kant.pdf

BETWEEN NIETZSCHE AND KANT:

MICHEL FOUCAULTÓS READING OF

ÒWHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?Ó

Maurizio Passerin dÓEntrves*

Abstract: This essay examines FoucaultÓs stance towards the Enlightenment as for-

mulated in three works he published in the last decade of his life. These works represent

a partial modification of FoucaultÓs attitude to the Enlightenment, rather than the

dramatic shift claimed by some commentators. In order to substantiate this claim, the

essay provides a reconstruction and critical assessment of three articles Foucault devoted

to Kant and the Enlightenment, namely, ÒQuÓest-ce que la critique?Ó (1978), ÒKant on

Enlightenment and RevolutionÓ (1983), and ÒWhat is Enlightenment?Ó (1984). It argues

that FoucaultÓs reformulation of Enlightenment ideals in terms of an ethos of transgres-

sion and an aesthetic of self-fashioning is much closer to NietzscheÓs vision of a

transvaluation of values than to KantÓs notion of maturity and responsibility

( Mndigkeit ).

Foucault saw himself as perpetuating the principle whereby philosophers

ÒenlightenÓ their present, which Kant introduced in his classic 1784 paper that

defines Enlightenment as an emancipation from self-imposed Òimmaturity.Ó

But while Foucault may have tried to enlighten our present, he was hardly a

figure of the Enlightenment. Indeed he is often taken as the great modern

counter-Enlightenment philosopher and historian. More precisely, FoucaultÓs

nominalism is directed against the universalism of the Enlightenment . . . In

reversing, dispersing, and criticizing what was taken to be universal, Foucault

attacks what, in the present, has come to be regarded as the Enlightenment. 1

One of the last writings Foucault was able to complete before his death in June

1984 was an essay entitled ÒWhat is Enlightenment?Ó. This was meant to be

delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1984 as part

of a seminar on modernity and the Enlightenment whose participants would

have included Jrgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus

and Paul Rabinow. The seminar never took place, due to FoucaultÓs death, and

the essay thus became a sort of testament of FoucaultÓs stance towards the

Enlightenment and, more specifically, towards KantÓs answer to the question

Ò Was ist Aufklrung? Ó formulated in 1784 in the pages of the Berlinische

Monatsschrift . But FoucaultÓs interest in KantÓs answer to the question ÒWhat

* Department of Government, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL.

1 John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York, 1985),

p. 59.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XX. No. 2. Summer 1999

338

M.P. DÓENTRçVES

is Enlightenment?Ó went back at least a decade. He had in fact composed an

article entitled ÒQuÓest-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklrung ]Ó, which was

delivered as a lecture before the Socit franaise de Philosophie in May 1978,

and devoted the opening lecture of a course at the Collge de France in 1983

to an assessment of KantÓs essay on the Enlightenment and his attitude to the

French Revolution. 2 In these essays Foucault presented what may be called a

qualified defence of the Enlightenment, in particular of its critical attitude to

the present, which he termed a Òphilosophical ethosÓ. In offering a qualified

endorsement of the Enlightenment ÒethosÓ of critique, Foucault appeared to

betray his earlier understanding of the Enlightenment as the age that paved the

way for the Òsciences of manÓ, i.e. the sciences of discipline and normalization,

of surveillance and control of bodies and souls, of marginalization and exclu-

sion of the deviant, the abnormal, the insane. ÒIn the history of the sciencesÓ,

he wrote,

it is a matter at bottom of examining a reason, the autonomy of whose

structures carries with it a history of dogmatism and despotism Ï a reason,

consequently, which can only have an effect of emancipation on condition

that it manages to liberate itself from itself . . . Two centuries later, the

Enlightenment returns: but not at all as a way for the West to take cognizance

of its present possibilities and of the liberties to which it can have access, but

as a way of interrogating it on its limits and on the powers which it has abused.

Reason as despotic enlightenment. 3

Judged against the tenor of this statement, FoucaultÓs later pronouncements

strike a discordant note. In his 1984 essay ÒWhat is Enlightenment?Ó he char-

acterizes it as a Òpermanent reactivation of an attitude Ï that is, of a philosophi-

cal ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical eraÓ. 4

Not surprisingly, a number of commentators have explored this tension or

contradiction in FoucaultÓs attitude towards the Enlightenment, and reached

fairly similar conclusions. Habermas, for instance, ends his brief eulogy of

Foucault with the following observation:

2 See J. Schmidt and T.E. Wartenberg, ÒFoucaultÓs Enlightenment: Critique, Revolu-

tion, and the Fashioning of the SelfÓ, in Critique and Power: Recasting the Fou-

cault/Habermas Debate , ed. M. Kelly (Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 283Î314. I am

indebted to this article for providing a reconstruction of FoucaultÓs 1978 essay on the

Enlightenment (ÒQuÓest-ce que la critique?Ó).

3 M. Foucault, ÒGeorges Canguilhem: Philosopher of ErrorÓ, trans. G. Burchell,

Ideology and Consciousness , 7 (Autumn 1980), pp. 51Î62, at p. 54. This essay was

written as an introduction to G. Canguilhem, Le Normal et la Pathologique (Paris, 1966).

A translation of the same essay is available in G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the

Pathological , trans. C. Fawcett (New York, 1989), pp. ixÎxx. A somewhat different

French version later appeared as ÒLa vie: lÓexprience et la scienceÓ, Revue de

mtaphysique et de morale , 90 (1985), pp. 3Î14.

4 M. Foucault, ÒWhat is Enlightenment?Ó, trans. C. Porter, in The Foucault Reader ,

ed. P. Rabinow (New York, 1984), pp. 32Î50, at p. 42.

FOUCAULTÓS READING OF ÒWHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?Ó 339

Only a complex thinking produces instructive contradictions . . . He contrasts

his critique of power with the Òanalytic of truthÓ in such a fashion that the

former becomes deprived of the normative yardsticks that it would have to

borrow from the latter. Perhaps the force of this contradiction caught up with

Foucault in this last of his texts, drawing him again into the circle of the

philosophical discourse of modernity which he thought he could explode. 5

Richard Bernstein claims that many responses are possible to FoucaultÓs con-

tradictory stance towards the Enlightenment, for example, that he changed his

mind, that he adopted a more conciliatory tone, that he was rewriting his own

history, and so on. Perhaps, he says, Òwe can give a different, more sympathetic

reading of what Foucault is doingÓ, a reading that enables us to get a better grasp

of his critical project, but that still leaves us with a number of unresolved

problems, chief among which is the lack of an adequate evaluative perspective

from which to specify what is uniquely dangerous about modernity and its

techniques of normalization. 6 Thomas McCarthy, for his part, recognizes that

FoucaultÓs Òbelated affirmationÓ of the philosophical ethos of the Enlightenment

Òsignals important changes in FoucaultÓs understanding of his critical projectÓ,

but claims that neither FoucaultÓs Òsocial ontology of powerÓ, nor his later

concern with techniques of Òself-fashioningÓ provide Òan adequate framework

for critical social inquiryÓ. 7

I would like in what follows to provide an equally critical but nuanced

perspective on FoucaultÓs attitude to the Enlightenment. For this purpose I will

offer a detailed examination and assessment of FoucaultÓs essays on Kant and

the Enlightenment, starting with his 1978 article ÒQuÓest-ce que la critique?Ó

Enlightenment versus Governmentality

The aim of this article is to examine the emergence in the early modern era of

a Òcritical attitudeÓ in response to the development of a system of power that

Foucault called ÒgovernmentalityÓ. In 1978 and 1979 Foucault had given a

number of lectures on the question of governmentality at the Collge de France

in which he analysed the development of a set of political strategies and

techniques that aimed at governing individuals in a continuous, regular and

permanent fashion. 8 These techniques and strategies of governmentality were

5 J. Habermas, ÒTaking Aim at the Heart of the PresentÓ, trans. S. Brauner and

R. Brown, in Foucault: A Critical Reader , ed. D.C. Hoy (Oxford, 1986), pp. 103Î8, at

pp. 107Î8.

6 R. Bernstein, ÒFoucault: Critique as a Philosophic EthosÓ, in Critique and Power:

Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate , ed. Kelly, pp. 211Î41, at pp. 222, 227.

7 T. McCarthy, ÒThe Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt SchoolÓ,

in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate , ed. Kelly, pp. 243Î82,

at pp. 259, 272.

8 M. Foucault, ÒOmnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ÒÒPolitical ReasonÓÓ Ó,

in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values , Vol. 2, ed. S. McMurrin (Salt Lake City, 1981),

340

M.P. DÓENTRçVES

the product of two different conceptions of political power: the Christian model

of pastoral rule and the Greek model of the self-determining polis. Out of these

two conceptions there arose the rationale underpinning the modern doctrine of

Òreason of stateÓ. 9 Such a rationale entrusted political authorities with a power

to survey, control and discipline individuals which had previously been the

prerogative of religious authorities. FoucaultÓs studies on governmentality of-

fered a historical genealogy of those techniques of political control and surveil-

lance that would eventually culminate in the modern forms of disciplinary

power so well documented in his pioneering book Discipline and Punish . But,

as we know from that book, each form of power generates its own form of

resistance, so FoucaultÓs account of the emergence of governmentality involves

at the same time an account of the emergence of the specific form of resistance

which this new form of power instigates or makes possible. The lecture ÒQuÓest-

ce que la critique?Ó is devoted precisely to providing an account of the distinc-

tive form of resistance to governmentality. In this lecture Foucault argues that

resistance to governmentality did not take the form of an absolute opposition.

The answer to the question Òhow to govern?Ó, which dominated political dis-

course in the early modern era, did not, in fact, take the form of Òhow not to be

governedÓ. Rather, it crystallized around a set of more specific issues, such as:

Òhow not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of principles such as

that, in view of such objectives and by the means of such proceduresÓ. 10 For

Foucault, this attempt to question or challenge the particular forms in which the

Òart of governanceÓ is exercised signals the emergence of the modern notion of

critique Ï which Foucault characterizes as Òthe art of not being governed in

such a mannerÓ. 11

This questioning or resistance to governmentality is directed both at the

spiritual authority of the church and at the temporal authority of civil rulers:

their claim to speak with authority is met with a resistance which takes the form

of a questioning of their power to define the truth for the subject. As Foucault

puts it, Òthe focus of critique is essentially the bundle of relations which tie . . .

pp. 225Î54. This essay is also included under the title ÒPolitics and ReasonÓ, in Michel

Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture , ed. L.D. Kritzman (New York, 1988), pp. 57Î85.

M. Foucault, ÒGovernmentalityÓ, trans. R. Braidotti, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in

Governmentality , ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Chicago, 1991), pp. 87Î104.

9 Foucault remarks: ÒOur societies proved to be really demonic, since they happened

to combine these two games Ï the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game Ï in

what we call the modern states.Ó Foucault, ÒOmnes et SingulatimÓ, p. 239.

10 M. Foucault, ÒQuÓest-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklrung ]Ó, Bulletin de la

Socit franaise de Philosophie , 84 (1990), pp. 35Î63, at pp. 37Î8; translated as ÒWhat

Is Critique?Ó, by K.P. Geiman, in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers

and Twentieth Century Questions , ed. J. Schmidt (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 382Î98. All

citations are from the original version.

11 Ibid. , p. 38.

FOUCAULTÓS READING OF ÒWHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?Ó 341

power, the truth, and the subjectÓ. 12 Thus, while governmentality subjects

individuals to a power that lays claim to truth, critique is Òthe movement by

which the subject gives itself the right to interrogate the truth with respect to

its effects of power and interrogate power with respect to its discourse of

truthÓ. 13 Critique is thus best characterized as Òthe art of voluntary inservitudeÓ

(an ironic and purposeful reversal of the title of Etienne de La BotieÓs political

tract of 1550, Le Discours de la Servitude Volontaire ), as Òa thoughtful indocil-

ityÓ which aims at ÒdesubjectificationÓ within the Òpolitics of truthÓ. 14

After having provided this account of the origins of the idea of critique,

Foucault turns to an examination of KantÓs definition of Enlightenment, a

definition that he considers very pertinent to the issue explored in the first part

of the lecture, namely the mutual implication of critique and governmentality.

KantÓs definition of Enlightenment is as follows:

Enlightenment is manÓs emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Imma-

turity is the inability to use oneÓs own understanding without the guidance of

another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of under-

standing, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of

another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude ! Have the

courage to use your own understanding! 15

Four aspects of KantÓs definition are seen as relevant to FoucaultÓs own discus-

sion of the intertwining of critique and governmentality. First, the Enlighten-

ment is defined as the opposite to a state of immaturity or tutelage. Second, this

state of immaturity is seen as the incapacity to use oneÓs own understanding

without the guidance of another (heteronomy). Third, Kant suggests a connec-

tion between an excess of authority on the one hand, and a lack of courage and

resolution on the other. Finally, the domains in which the contest between a

state of immaturity and one of enlightenment takes place are those highlighted

by Foucault in his discussion of the opposition of critique to governmentality,

namely religion, law and conscience.

KantÓs definition of Enlightenment thus bears a close affinity to the issues

raised in FoucaultÓs essay. Moreover, according to Foucault, KantÓs defence of

Enlightenment was not blind to the interplay between critique and power. The

EnlightenmentÓs motto: Ò Sapere aude !Ó Ï have the courage to use your own

reason Ï was counterbalanced by the injunction, attributed to Frederick the

Great: Ò Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey !Ó By

counterposing these two claims, and by accepting as legitimate the restrictions

imposed on the private use of reason, Kant seems to acknowledge the limits of

critique. The courage to know is at one and the same time the courage to

12 Ibid. , p. 39.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 I. Kant, ÒAn Answer to the Question: ÒÒWhat is Enlightenment?ÓÓ Ó, in KantÓs

Political Writings , ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 54Î60, at p. 54.

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