Michel Foucault. What is Enlightenment ?
"What is Enlightenment ?" ("Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ?"), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The
Foucault Reader,
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to
collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already;
there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth
century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet
have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective;
it was unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German
periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the
question: Was ist Aufklärung ? And the
respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the history of
thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering,
but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one
that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From
Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any
philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly.
What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has
determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift
still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern
philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised
so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for
several reasons.
1.
To this same question, Moses
Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant
had not seen Mendelssohn's text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of
the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture
does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads
for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had
been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought --
which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying
problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what
Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die
Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische
Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize
that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common
processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the
acceptance of a common destiny -- we now know to what drama that was to lead.
2.
But there is more. In itself
and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses a new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought
to reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that
this reflection had until then taken three main forms.
o
The present may be represented
as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from the others through
some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic
event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they
belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning
backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
o
The present may be
interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming
event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics of which
Augustine might provide an example.
o
The present may also be
analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. That is
what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he
sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for
a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ...
radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for
the happiness of human life.' [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely
different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose
signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an
almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In
his other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or
defines the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung,
he deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to
understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement.
He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with
respect to yesterday ?
3. I shall not go into detail here
concerning this text, which is not always very clear despite its brevity. I
should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to me
important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of
the present day.
Kant
indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is a
process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,'
he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's
authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives
three examples: we are in a state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place
of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our
conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note
in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even
though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is
defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority,
and the use of reason.
We must also
note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He
characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it
as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man
himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that
he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring
about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch:
now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by
which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction that one
gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction
? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity,
to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men
participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished
personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may
be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the
process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third
difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word
"mankind", Menschheit. The importance of this word in the
Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the
entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment
? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change
that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of
the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what
constitutes the humanity of human beings ? But the
question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant's answer
is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of
simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines
two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its immaturity.
And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and
political.
The first of
these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of
reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status,
Kant invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; such
is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political power,
and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity
when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: 'Obey, and you
will be able to reason as much as you like.' We must note that the German word
used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the Critiques does
not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has
no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning's sake.
And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance:
paying one's taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the
system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or again,
taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning
freely about religious dogmas.
We might
think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant, since
the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one
pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into
play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he
introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at
once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its
private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called
freedom of conscience.
But we must
be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason ? In what area is it
exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is 'a cog in
a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to
be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil
servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he
finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply
particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people
practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make
of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be
subjected to the particular ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free
use of reason.
On the other
hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one is
reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is
reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be
free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which
individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There
is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason
are superimposed on one another.
Now this
leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can readily
see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the
business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how
the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the
absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived
simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived
only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political
problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason
can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be
exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as
possible. And Kant, in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled
terms, a sort of contract -- what might be called the contract of rational
despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will
be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political
principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.
Let us leave
Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable of
constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I
think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and
cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless,
notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give it an
exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the
connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques.
Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to
put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it
is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is
that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in
order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.
Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy,
along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason
has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured.
The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in
Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also
necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and the
other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to
define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of
humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as
humanity's passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with
respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time,
it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain
way for that overall process.
The hypothesis
I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the
crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection
by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not
the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his
work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that
a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the
significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and
a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because
of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as difference in
history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of
this text appears to me to lie.
And, by
looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of
departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that
modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features
characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a
more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and
troubling 'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity
constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we
are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles
of the 18th century.
Thinking
back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as
an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of
relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in
the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that
at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a
task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently,
rather than seeking to distinguish the 'modern era' from the 'premodern' or
'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the
attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling
with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'
To
characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost
indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity
is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
1. Modernity is often characterized in
terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a
feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is
indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as 'the
ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2] But, for him,
being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement;
on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this
movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing
something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but
within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call
into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it
possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a
phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to 'heroize'
the present .
I shall
restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his
contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding
nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient
togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in
introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who
can show the dark frock-coat as 'the necessary costume of our time,' the one
who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential,
permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. 'The
dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an
expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an
expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes
(mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us
celebrating some funeral.' [3] To designate
this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is
highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 'You have
no right to despise the present.'
2. This heroization is ironical,
needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as
sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not
involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be
what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur, the
idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention
and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur,
Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, searching .... Be very sure that this man
... -- this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly
journeying across the great human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a
mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive
pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow
me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business
to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within
history.' As an example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin
Guys. In appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the
last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a
quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him,
wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange
beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.' [4]
But let us
make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the
modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole
world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His
transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult
interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom;
'natural' things become 'more than natural,' 'beautiful' things become 'more
than beautiful,' and individual objects appear 'endowed with an impulsive life
like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude
of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate
eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform
it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean
modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is
confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this
reality and violates it.
3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is
not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of
relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude
of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to
accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take
oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in
the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in
detail the well-known passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on man's
indispensable revolt against himself; on the 'doctrine of elegance' which
imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples' a discipline more despotic
than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the
dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very
existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes
off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who
tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own
being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.
4. Let me add just one final word. This
ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with
reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self -- Baudelaire does not imagine
that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can
only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.
I do not
pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical
event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the
attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the
last two centuries.
I have been
seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of
philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's
relation to the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution
of the self as an autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the
other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us
with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather
the permanent reactivation of an attitude -- that is, of a philosophical ethos
that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should
like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
1. This ethos implies, first, the
refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the Enlightenment. I think
that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional,
and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a
privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking
the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation,
it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I
think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant's text, that it
defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does
not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even means
precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the
form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the
Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is
considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a
reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from
its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad).
And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing 'dialectical'
nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have
been in the Enlightenment.
We must try
to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically
determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies
a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these
inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential kernel of
rationality' that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be
preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the 'contemporary limits
of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable
for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
2. This permanent critique of ourselves
has to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and
Enlightenment.
We must
never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex
historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of
European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation,
types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization
of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to
sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The
one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an
entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective
relation to the present.
Humanism is
something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have
reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes
always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content
as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a
critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a
humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in
general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more
theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism
hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its
hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism
and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values
represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they
were humanists.
From this we
must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to
be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too
diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact
that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always
been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion
science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of
man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.
Now in this
connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which always
depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a
permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at
the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself.
From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state
of tension rather than identity.
In any case
it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically
inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was
important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe
because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to
note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of
sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve
or Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the
Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency
to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.
In any case
I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of
being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and
moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the
Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last
two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring
some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of
our past.
B. Positively
Yet while
taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more positive
content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what
we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be
characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of
rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be
at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon
limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge
has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today
has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal
necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent
and the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point
in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary
limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible
transgression.
This entails
an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in
the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a
historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute
ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing,
thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its
goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its
design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not
transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal
structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to
treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as
so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense
that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for
us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has
made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking
what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics
that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far
and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
2. But if we are not to settle for the
affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this
historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this
work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of
historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of
contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and
desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This
means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all
projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that
the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce
the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another
culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most
dangerous traditions.
I prefer the
very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last
twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and
thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which
we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations
that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical
attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have
repeated throughout the twentieth century.
I shall thus
characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of
ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond,
and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
3. Still, the following objection would
no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit ourselves to this type of always
partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves
be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious,
and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two
responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point
of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of
what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the
theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the
possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are
always in the position of beginning again .
But that does
not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work
in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its
stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are
indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of capacity and
power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth
century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and
proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover,
we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is
perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located --
such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so
universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of
capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements.
Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy
are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been
able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies
(whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions
whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines,
both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in the
name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are
examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities
be disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads
to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are taking as
a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of
themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but
rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality
that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the
technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these
practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game,
up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these
practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus
ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their
strategic side.
(c) Systematicity
These
practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over
things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not
mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is
well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and
relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice
versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have
to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics.
In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves
has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number
of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but
which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we
constituted as subjects of our own knowledge ? How are we constituted as
subjects who exercise or submit to power relations ?
How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally,
these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that
they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and
discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which
we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to
recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between
sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem
of the role of sexual relations; and so on.
But by
evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in
its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be
pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the
forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it
of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain
form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of
relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what
is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus
the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique
form.
A brief
summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not
know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience
convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us
mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me
that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present
and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It
seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not
been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The
critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory,
a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it
has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the
critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of
the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of
going beyond them.
This
philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse
inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once
archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as
a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they
have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique
forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to
ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the
care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the
test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that
the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think
that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving
form to our impatience for liberty.
Copyrigth © http://foucault.info/documents/