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Foucault’s Lecture On Kant

Juergen Habermas

Foucault’s death came so unexpectedly and suddenly that one cancarcely resist thinking that its circumstantiality and brutal contingencylocument the life and teachings of the philosopher. Even from a

listance, the death of the 57-year old man seems an untimely event affir-ning the merciless power of time - the power of facticity, which,vithout sense or triumph, prevails over the painstakingly constructedneaning of each human life. For Foucault, the experience of finiteness)ecame a philosophical incitement. He viewed the power contingency,vhich he ultimately identified with power per se, more from a stoicalperspective than from the Christian frame of reference. And yet, inFoucault the stoic attitude of the observer who keeps his precise distance,obsessed with objectivity, was combined with the opposite element ofpassionate, self-consuming participation in the reality of the historicalnoment.

I met Foucault only last year, and perhaps I did not understand himNell. I can only relate what impressed me: the tension, which resists easy-ategorization, between the almost serene scientific reserve of the scholarthriving for objectivity on the one hand, and, on the other, the politicalritality of the vulnerable, subjectively excitable, morally sensitive in-ellectual. I imagine that Foucault dug through archives with the doggedenergy of a detective in hot pursuit of evidence. In March 1983, Foucault,uggested that we meet with some American colleagues for a private con-ference in 1984 to discuss Kant’s 200-year-old essay, &dquo;Answering the~uestion: What Is Enlightenment?&dquo; At the time I knew nothing of a lec-ure Foucault was preparing on this very subject. Naturally, I understoodiis invitation as a call for a discussion (together with Hubert Dreyfus,

5

Paul Rabinow, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor) of various inter-pretations of modernity - based on a text which, in a sense, initiatedmodern philosophical discourse. However, this was not exactlyFoucault’s intention in this proposal, as I only realized in May of thisyear, when an excerpt from his lecture was published.

Here we do not encounter the Kant familiar from Foucault’s TheOrder of Things, the epistemologist whose analysis of finiteness forcedopen the gateway to the age of anthropological thought and humansciences (Humanwissenschaften). In this lecture one meets a differentKant - Kant as the predecessor of the Young Hegelians, as the first tobreak seriously with the metaphysical heritage, withdrawing philosophyfrom the True and Eternal and instead concentrating on what philosophyuntil then had considered the meaningless and non-existent, the merelyaccidental and transitory. Foucault discovers in Kant the contemporarywho transforms esoteric philosophy into a critique of the present toanswer the challenge of the historical moment. Foucault sees in Kant’sanswer to the question &dquo;What is Enlightenment?&dquo; the origin of an &dquo;on-

tology of actuality&dquo; leading through Hegel, Nietzsche, and Max Weberto Horkheimer and Adorno. Surprisingly, in the last sentence of his lec-ture, Foucault adds himself to this tradition.

Foucault relates the text of 1784 to &dquo;The Dispute of the Faculties&dquo;(published fourteen years later), where Kant reflects on the events of theFrench Revolution. The dispute between the Faculty of Philosophy andthe Faculty of Law deals, of course, with the question of whether thehuman race is steadily progressing. In his Philosophy of Ethics(Rechtsphilosophie), Kant clarified the endpoint in relation to whichsuch progress could be measured. A republican constitution wouldguarantee the rule of law (Rechtzustand) internally as well as externally- the autonomy of citizens under self-made laws as well as the elimina-tion of war from the arena of international relations. Kant searches foran empirical foothold to ground these postulates of &dquo;pure practicalreason,&dquo; to show that they are actually supported by an historicallyobservable &dquo;moral tendency&dquo; of the human race. He seeks an &dquo;event ofour time&dquo; indicating a disposition of human nature toward moral im-provement ; and, as is well known, he finds this &dquo;historical indicator&dquo;not in the French Revolution itself, but, rather, in the openly expressedenthusiasm with which a broad public had fearlessly greeted these eventsas an attempt at a realization of principles of natural law. Such aphenomenon, Kant believes, cannot be forgotten, &dquo;for this event is too

great, too interwoven with the interests of mankind not to beremembered by the peoples of the world and not to stimulate renewed at-

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tempts of this kind whenever conditions are propitious.&dquo;Foucault cites the famous sentences not entirely without, on his own

part, &dquo;desire for doing moral good.&dquo; In the earlier text on the Enlighten-ment, Kant emphasized that revolution can never produce that &dquo;true

reform in thinking&dquo; which, as he asserts in &dquo;The Dispute of theFaculties,&dquo; emerges precisely in the enthusiasm for the revolution thathad since taken place. Foucault relates the two texts in such a way that asynopsis emerges. From this perspective, the question &dquo;What is

Enlightenment?&dquo; merges with the question &dquo;What does this revolutionmean for us?&dquo; Philosophy is successfully merged with thinkingstimulated by contemporary historical actuality. The outlook schooled ineternal truths submerges in the detail of the given moment, which is preg-nant with decision and bursting under the pressure of anticipatedpossibilities.

Thus, Foucault discovers Kant as the first philosopher, an archerwho aims his arrow at the heart of the most actual features of the presentand so opens the discourse of modernity. Kant leaves behind the classicaldispute over the exemplary preeminence of the ancients and the com-parable stature of the moderns. Instead he involves diagnostic thought -which acquires for him a new function - in that turbulent process ofself-assurance that forms the horizon of a new historical consciousnesswhich has kept modernity in constant motion until the present. A

philosophy now engaged with actuality is concerned with the &dquo;rapport’sagittal a propre actualite,&dquo;’ with the relationship of modernity toitself. Holderlin and the young Hegel, Marx and the Young Hegelians,Baudelaire and Nietzsche,, Bataille and the Surrealists, Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, the precursors of Western Marxism in general, and, not least ofall, Foucault himself all contribute to the honing of that modern con-sciousness of contemporary which made its appearance in philosophywith the question &dquo;What is Enlightenment?&dquo; The philosopher turns con-temporary ; he emerges out of the anonymity of an impersonal endeavourand reveals himself as a flesh-and-blood human being toward whomevery clinical investigation of each individual contemporary period thatconfronts him must be directed. Even in retrospect, the period ofEnlightenment is still presented by the description it gave itself: it

designates the entry into a kind of modernity which sees itself condemn-ed to creating its self-awareness and its norms out of itself.

If this is even a paraphrase of Foucault’s own train of thought, thequestion arises: how does such a singularly affirmative understanding ofmodern philosophizing, always directed to our own actuality and im-printed in the here-and-now, fit with Foucault’s unyielding criticism of

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modernity? How can Foucault’s self-understanding as a thinker in thetradition of the Enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakablecriticism of this very form of knowledge of modernity?

Kant’s philosophy of history, the speculation about a state of

freedom, about world-citizenship and eternal peace, the interpretation ofrevolutionary enthusiasm as a sign of historical &dquo;progress toward better-ment&dquo; - must not each line provoke the scorn of Foucault, the theoreti-cian of power? Hasn’t history, under the stoic gaze of the archaeologistFoucault, frozen into an iceberg covered with the crystals of arbitraryformations of discourse? (This, at least, is the view of his friend Paul

Veyne.) Doesn’t this iceberg, under what appears as the cynical gaze ofthe genealogist Foucault, have a much different dynamic than the ac-tualizing thinking of modernity cares to acknowledge - namely, asenseless back-and-forth of anonymous processes of subjugation inwhich power and nothing but power appears in ever-changing guises?Using Kant as an example, didn’t Foucault reveal in The Order of Thingsthe peculiar dynamic of that will to truth which is stimulated anew byeach frustration to an increased and in turn failed production ofknowledge? The form of knowledge of modernity is characterized by thefollowing aporia: the cognitive subject, having become self-referential,rises out of the ruins of metaphysics in order to take on, in full awarenessof its finite powers, a project that would demand unlimited power. AsFoucault demonstrates, Kant transforms this aporia into the structuralprinciple of his epistemology; he reinterprets the limits of our finite ap-paratus of cognition into the transcendental conditions for infinitely pro-gressing knowledge. A subject, thus structurally strained to the limits, isenmeshed in an anthropocentric mode of knowledge. And this wholefield is now occupied by the &dquo;sciences of man,&dquo; which Foucault

perceives as an insidiously operating disciplinary power. In any case,what it has achieved with its pretentious, in no way resolved, claims is adangerous facade of universally valid knowledge behind which in realityis hidden the facticity of domination of knowledge rooted in the will topower. Only in the wake of this boundless will to knowledge arise thesubjectivity and self-consciousness with which Kant begins.

If we return to the text of Foucault’s lecture with these considera-tions in mind, we note certain precautionary measures against all-too-striking contradictions. To be sure, the Enlightenment, which in-

augurates modernity, does not imply for us just an arbitrary period in thehistory of ideas. However, Foucault explicitly warns against the piousattitude of those who are out merely to preserve the remains of theEnlightenment. Foucault explicitly (if only parenthetically) establishes

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the connection to earlier analyses. Today, he notes, it can no longer beour task to maintain Enlightenment and revolution as ideal models.Much more important is an investigation into the particular historicalmotivating forces which have simultaneously prevailed and concealedthemselves in universalistic thought since the late eighteenth century.Foucault rejects those thinkers who, in pursuit of an abstract order, pro-ceed from Kant’s epistemological question, still in search of the universalconditions by which propositions can be really true or false, they are cap-tives of an &dquo;analysis (A nalytik) of truth.&dquo; Despite these precautions, oneis surprised that Foucault presents those subversive thinkers who try tointerpret their own contermporaneity as the legitimate heirs of Kantiancritique. They repeat that fundamental diagnostic question, first posedby Kant, of a modernity in search of self-assurance, under the alteredconditions of their own time. Foucault sees himself as carrying on thistradition. For Foucault, the challenge of the Kant texts he has chosen isto decode that will once contained in the enthusiasm for the FrenchRevolution, namely; the will to knowledge, which the &dquo;analysis oftruth&dquo; was unwilling to concede. Up to now, Foucault traced this will toknowledge in modern power-formations only to denounce it. Now,however, he presents it in a completely different light, as the critical im-pulse worthy of preservation and in need of renewal. Ths connects hisown thinking to the beginnings of modernity.

Within the circle of the philosophers of my generation who diagnoseour times, Foucault has most lastingly influenced the Zeitgeist, not leastof all because of the seriousness with which he perseveres under produc-tive contradictions. Only a complex thinking produces instructive con-tradictions. Kant entangled himself in an instructive contradiction whenhe declared revolutionary enthusiasm to be an historical indicator thatreveals an intelligible arrangement of mankind in the world of

phenomena. Equally instructive is another contradiction in whichFoucault becomes enmeshed. He contrasts his critique of power with the&dquo;analysis of truth&dquo; in such a fashion that the former becomes deprivedof the normative yardsticks that it would have to borrow from the latter.Perhaps the force of this contradiction caught up with Foucault in thislast of his texts, drawing him again into the circle of the philosophicaldiscourse of modernity which he thought he could explode.

Translated by Sigrid Brauner & Robert Brown,assisted by David Levin.