18-Foucault's Lecture on Kant

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Thesis Eleven

DOI: 10.1177/072551368601400102

1986; 14; 4Thesis ElevenJuergen Habermas

Foucault's Lecture On Kant

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Foucaults Lecture On Kant

Juergen Habermas

Foucaults death came so unexpectedly and suddenly that one can

carcely 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 constructed

neaning 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 stoical

perspective than from the Christian frame of reference.And yet, in

Foucault the stoic attitude of the observer who keeps his precise distance,obsessed with objectivity, was combined with the opposite element of

passionate, 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 scholar

thriving for objectivity on the one hand, and, on the other, the political

ritalityof the

vulnerable, subjectively excitable, morallysensitive 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 someAmerican colleagues for a private con-ference in 1984 to discuss Kants 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,

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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 exactlyFoucaults intention in this proposal, as I only realized in May of this

year, when an excerpt from his lecture was published.Here we do not encounter the Kant familiar from Foucaults The

Order of Things, the epistemologist whose analysis of finiteness forced

open 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 to

break 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 Kantsanswer 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 andAdorno. 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 which

such progress could be measured.A republican constitution would

guarantee 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 for

an 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 of

our time&dquo;indicating

a

dispositionof 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 a

phenomenon, Kant believes, cannot be forgotten, &dquo;for this event is too

great, too interwoven with the interests of mankind not to be

remembered 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;truereform in thinking&dquo; which, as he asserts in &dquo;The Dispute of the

Faculties,&dquo; emerges precisely in the enthusiasm for the revolution thathad since taken place. Foucault relates the two texts in such a way that a

synopsis emerges. From this perspective, the question &dquo;What isEnlightenment?&dquo; merges with the question &dquo;What does this revolution

mean 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 archer

who aims his arrow at the heart of the most actual features of the presentand so opens the discourse of modernity. Kant leaves behind the classical

dispute 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 of

self-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 of

all, 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 whom

every clinical investigation of each individual contemporary period that

confronts 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 Foucaults own train of thought, the

question 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 Foucaults unyielding criticism of



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

Kants philosophy of history, the speculation about a state of

freedom, about world-citizenship and eternal peace, the interpretation of

revolutionary 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? Hasnt 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.) Doesnt 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, a

senseless back-and-forth of anonymous processes of subjugation inwhich power and nothing but power appears in ever-changing guises?

Using Kant as an example, didnt 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 of

knowledge? The form of knowledge of modernity is characterized by the

following 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.As

Foucault demonstrates, Kant transforms this aporia into the structural

principle 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 whole

field 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 a

dangerous facade of universally valid knowledge behind which in realityis hidden the facticity of domination of knowledge rooted in the will to

power. Only in the wake of this boundless will to knowledge arise the

subjectivity and self-consciousness with which Kant begins.If we return to the text of Foucaults 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 the

history of ideas. However, Foucault explicitly warns against the piousattitude of those who are out merely to preserve the remains of the

Enlightenment. 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 historical

motivating forces which have simultaneously prevailed and concealedthemselves in universalistic thought since the late eighteenth century.Foucault

rejectsthose thinkers

who,in

pursuitof an abstract

order, pro-ceed from Kants 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 to

interpret their own contermporaneity as the legitimate heirs of Kantian

critique. 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 French

Revolution, namely; the will to knowledge, which the &dquo;analysis oftruth&dquo; was unwilling to concede. Up to now, Foucault traced this will to

knowledgein modern

power-formations onlyto 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 that

reveals 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;analysisof 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.


18-Foucault's Lecture on Kant

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