Abstract
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault calls Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ‘the threshold of our modernity’ and even says that it marks ‘a fundamental event — certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western thought’.1 Taken out of context, these remarks sound like high praise. They are, however, part of a sweeping criticism of the historical development that made ‘man’ the privileged object of the human sciences at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Foucault, it was Kant’s critique that allowed the human sciences to fall into the ‘anthropological sleep’ that remains ‘a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought’.2 For this reason, Foucault denounces Kant as the philosopher who had ‘stupefied Western thought, leaving it blind to its own modernity for nearly two hundred years’.3
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Notes
M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 220, 242.
It should be noted that Foucault blames ‘the Kantian enigma’ rather than Kant himself for stupefying and blinding Western thought. See M. Foucault, ‘Une histoire restée muette’, in Michel Foucault: Dits et Écrits (I:1954–1975), edited by D. Defert et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 574. See also
M. Djaballah, Kant, Foucault, and the Forms of Experience (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3.
See M. Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, in The Essential Foucault, translated by L. Hochroth, edited by P. Rabinow and N. Rose (New York: New Press, 1994), 268.
M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Essential Foucault, 53 (hereafter WE). This essay was presumably written for a conference at Boston College, where Foucault had invited Jürgen Habermas, Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor to discuss Kant’s essay. Unfortunately, Foucault died before this conference could take place. His essay was published posthumously by P. Rabinow (ed.), in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50.
J. Habermas, ‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?’, in The New Conservativism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, translated by S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 176.
M. Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason’, in J. D. Faubion (ed.), The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 3 (New York: New Press, 2000), 298.
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Axi (hereafter CPR).
QWE 17. Mary Gregor translates the famous first sentence of Kant’s essay (Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit) as ‘enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority’. Gregor’s decision to translate ‘der Ausgang’ as ‘emergence’ would have been problematic for Foucault, who emphasises that ‘Ausgang’ means ‘exit’ or ‘way out’ in his reflections on Kant’s essay. Yet ‘Ausgang’ can also refer to a beginning, a starting point or point of departure, as indicated by Gregor’s translation. The play of the various meanings of ‘Ausgang’ is important to the sense of Kant’s conception of enlightenment, which is not ‘wholly negative’ as Foucault sometimes claims. See WE 48. See also M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, translated by G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 27–28.
H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by R. Beiner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39.
Ibid., 39–40. For Arendt’s view of the difference between the perspectives of the citizen and the philosopher, see H. Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research, 57/1, 1990, 78–82.
K. Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 72.
‘A learned man,’ according to Kant, ‘is one whose learnedness is not grounded on common experience’ (Ein Gelahrter heißt, deßen Gelahrtsamkeit sich nicht auf gemeine Erfahrung gründet). The ‘learnedness’ (Gelahrtsamkeit) of a scholar or ‘learned man’ (Gelahrter) is instead based on the ‘universal cognitions of the understanding’, whose ‘universal rules’ constitute ‘science’ (Wissenschaft). This is to be contrasted with the common understanding that is ‘the understanding for judging according to laws of experience’. See, for example, I. Kant, Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by J. M. Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6–7, 11–12).
Many examples could be cited, because the narrative about Kant’s place in the history of modern philosophy has been institutionalised with amazing consistency. While this is no indication of the truth of that narrative, it is an important indication of how the history of philosophy is written. See, for example, R. Schacht, Classical Modern Philosophers: Descartes to Kant (New York: Routledge, 1984), 163–165;
F. Coplestone, A History of Philosophy, Volume VI: Modern Philosophy from the French Enlightenment to Kant (New York: Image Books, 1994), 211–212, 277–278; and
A. Kenney, A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume III: The Rise of Modern Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101–102.
The principles of the Transcendental Analytic are, according to Kant, ‘merely principles of the exposition of appearances and the proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general in a systematic doctrine (e.g., the principle of causality), must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding’. See CPR, A247/B303. While this passage is often read as a general substitution of transcendental philosophy for ontology, Karin de Boer has argued that Kant’s criticism of traditional ontology is more nuanced. See K. de Boer, ‘Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 63, 2011, 50–79.
I. Kant, ‘Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will be Able to Come Forward as a Science’, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, translated by G. Hatfield, edited by H. Allison and P. Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154.
See, for example, W. H. Walsh, ‘Philosophy and Psychology in Kant’s Critique’, Kant-Studien, 56, 1966, 191. See also
P. Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10.
CPR, Bxxiii. See also A. Nuzzo, Kant and the Unity of Reason (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 39.
M. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Or on Religious Power and Judaism, translated by A. Arkush (Hanover, PA: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 61.
For an important account of the ways in which Kant’s transcendental idealism and his moral philosophy might be consistent, see A. Nuzzo, Ideal Embodiment: Kant’s Theory of Sensibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 123–125.
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© 2012 Colin McQuillan
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McQuillan, C. (2012). Beyond the Limits of Reason: Kant, Critique and Enlightenment. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_5
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