Persistent Enlightenment

Michel Foucault began the first of his 1983 lectures on The Government of Self and Others with a few comments on the peculiar challenges of lecturing to a public with whom — given the nature of the Collège de France — he could have little direct contact, went on to offer a concise (and elegant) review of the line of research he had been pursuing, and closed with a few comments on the text he had chosen as his point of departure:

This week I would like to start with, how to put it, not exactly an excursus: a little epigraph (exergue). As epigraph, I would like to study a text which may not be situated exactly within the reference points I will choose for most of this year. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be very exactly in line with, and to formulate in rigorous terms, one of the important problems that I would like to talk about, which is precisely this relationship between the government of self and the government of others. And, on the other hand, it seems to me that it not only talks about this subject itself, but it does so in a way with which — without too much (or rather) with a little vanity — I can associate myself. It is a text which is something of a blazon, a fetish for me, which I have I already spoken about several times, and which I would like to examine a bit more closely today. This text, if you like, bears some relation to what I am talking about, and I would really like the way in which I talk about it to have some connection with it. The text is, of course, Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?¹

Of course? Well, yes, I suppose: by 1983, Foucault had already made a number of passing references to Kant’s answer to Zöllner’s question and, five years earlier, had delivered his lecture on the question “What is Critique?” to the Société française de philosophie. But if, at this point, it would be hardly surprising for Foucault to allude to Kant’s article, the presence of it at the start of a series of lectures on Greek texts on parrēsia — “frank speech,” for lack of a better translation — might seem a bit strange.

I’d like to close this series of posts on the so-called Foucault/Habermas Debate by trying to make sense of what Foucault found significant in Kant’s peculiar little article. I hope it’s clear by now that much of the literature on this “debate” — a debate that never was — has tended to be barking up the wrong tree: as I’ve noted in earlier posts, it has become increasingly apparent that the tendency to approach the debate from the standpoint of the critique of Foucault in Habermas’ Philosophical Discourse of Modernity does little to clarify what Foucault seems to have found significant in Kant’s essay. And it bears emphasizing that, as I’ve also noted in previous posts, Habermas himself recognized this. As he explained in the eulogy he wrote shortly after Foucault’s death, he’d assumed that Foucault’s invitation to join him in a discussion of Kant’s essay would be an opportunity to “debate various interpretations of modernity, using as a basis for discussion a text that in a certain sense initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity.” But, upon reading the version of Foucault’s discussion of Kant from his 1983 lectures that was published in Magazine littéraire, he came to realize that “this was not exactly Foucault’s intention.”²

So, what was Foucault’s intention? If, unlike Habermas, Foucault did not see Kant’s essay as having “initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity,” what did he think it was doing and why did this matter to him?

Identifying Friends

One place to start is with his off-hand, perhaps ironic, and somewhat self-effacing confession that he had come to treat Kant’s text as “something of a blazon, a fetish.” Foucault was not the only person to use Kant’s text as a fetish: its opening paragraph has been carefully situated at the entry way of countless studies of the Enlightenment, including the one that Foucault reviewed two decades earlier. His discussion of the French translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung closed by recalling how, at the moment when forces of nationalism were sweeping through Germany, Cassirer went into exile, leaving behind a book that traced the development of a culture that was European, rather than merely German, and showed the role that German thinkers played in creating that culture. For Foucault the peculiar force of the book Cassirer left behind lay in the way it revealed “the calm, irresistible, enveloping force of the theoretical universe” and, in revealing it, “founded the possibility of a new history of thought.” What made Cassirer’s book essential, Foucault concluded, was that it still offered a place from which we “can take our departure.”³ Perhaps there is one fetish that binds together the scattered members of the cosmopolitan Freemasonry of useless erudition: a belief in the magical power of books.

Foucault had nothing more to say about the fetish character of Kant’s essay, but he did discuss the function of blazons in the second hour of his opening lecture. Working his way through the opening paragraph of Kant’s essay, he noted how the final sentence shifts from a description of what Aufklärung is to an imperative that is directed at the reader.

The discourse is no longer descriptive, but prescriptive. Kant no longer describes what is happening but says: “Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding. That is the motto of Enlightenment.” … I said that this is a prescription, but it is a bit more complicated than that. Kant employs the word “Wahlspruch,” which is motto, blazon. The Wahlspruch is actually a maxim, precept, or order given to others and to oneself, but at the same time — and this is what makes the precept of the Wahlspruch a motto, a blazon — it is something by which one identifies oneself and enables one to distinguish oneself from others. The use of a maxim as a precept is therefore at once an order and a distinctive mark (28).

This explanation, which was carried over into the lecture he gave at Berkeley later that year, goes to the heart of what Kant may have been doing when he made Horace’s maxim his own. It is unclear whether Foucault was familiar with Franco Venturi’s history of Horace’s phrase prior to Kant’s use of it, but it would have helped to confirm the extent to which it had, by the time Kant used it, already become a blazon.⁴ For what is the medal struck by the Society of the Friends of Truth, which places Horace’s words above an image of Minerva, if not a blazon? And, in adopting their medal as my Gravatar and placing it on this blog, what am I doing if not deploying a heraldic device that identifies me, and allows me to be recognized by others?

Foucault, of course, lived before the days of Gravatars and blogs, but his repeated invocations of Kant’s essay had much the same effect. Against the widespread perception that he was, in one way or another, an “enemy of the Enlightenment,” it was a way of insisting that he, too, was in fact its friend. It was, after all, in these same essays that he insisted that his work belonged in that line of descent that led, through various pathways, from Kant through Hegel and Nietzsche and onward to the Frankfurt School. That his particular understanding of what enlightenment involved might differ from the way in which others might understand him hardly makes him a part of “the counter-Enlightenment” (assuming, for the moment, that there is such a thing). After all, friends of enlightenment have been disagreeing about what exactly enlightenment is at least since the days when the “Friends of Enlightenment” began discussing the question back in 1783.⁵

Enlightenment as “Singular Event” or “Permanent Process”

In addition to the (shall we say?) performative aspect of Foucault’s invocation of Kant’s essay, he also had significant points to make about its theoretical implications. In his postscript to Foucault’s lectures on The Government of Self and Others, Frédéric Gros has provided a concise summary of the differences between the way in which Foucault approached Kant’s text in his 1978 lecture to the Société française de philosophie and his treatment of it in the first of his 1983 lectures.

Despite surface repetitions, the difference between the commentaries is nonetheless clear. In 1978 Kant’s text was situated in the perspective of a “critical attitude” that Foucault dates from the beginning of the modern age and in opposition to the requirements of a pastoral governmentality (directing individuals’ conduct by the truth). Posing the question of Enlightenment involved rediscovering the question: how not to be governed in that way? The problem posed was that of a “desubjectification” in the framework of a “politics of truth.” Modernity was then defined as a privileged historical period for studying the subjecting/subjectifying forms of knowledge-power. In 1983 the question of Enlightenment will be thought of as the reinvestment of a requirement of truth-telling, of a courageous speaking the truth that appeared in the Greeks, and as giving rise to a different question: What government of self should be posited as both the foundation and limit of the government of others? The meaning of “modernity” also changes: it becomes a meta-historical attitude of thought itself (378-379).

Gros’ discussion goes a long way towards clarifying the differences between Foucault’s 1978 account of Kant’s essay — which would be echoed the next year at the start of his Tanner lectures⁶ — and his 1983 discussion. But, not surprisingly, the differences may not be quite as sharp as Gros suggests, especially if we, unlike Gros, focus on those “surface repetitions.” The difficulties (again not surprisingly) have to do with the relationship between “enlightenment”, “the Enlightenment,” and “modernity.”

As Gros notes, in the 1978 lecture and, more generally, in the account of “governmentality” in which it is situated, one way of understanding what was distinctive about “modern states” was that they rested on a “demonic” combination of two different conceptions of governance.

We can say that Christian pastorship has introduced a game that neither the Greeks nor the Hebrews imagined. A strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity; a game which seems to have nothing to do with the game of the city surviving through the sacrifice of the citizens. Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games – the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game – what we call the modern state (Omnes et Singulatim 239)

In the Tanner lectures, Foucault opted not to engage in the “sterile” exercise of “trying reason,” arguing that such attempts presupposed a juxtaposition of “reason” and “non-reason” that he characterized as “senseless” (presumably because the framing of this distinction already decides the outcome of the “trial”) and because it “would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist” (226). Likewise, he rejected the idea of conducting an inquiry into “this kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Enlightenment” — a line of inquiry he associated with the Frankfurt School — arguing that

Even if the Enlightenment has been a very important phase in our history, and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes (226).

It is not entirely clear how we can reconcile what he has to say about the Enlightenment in the Tanner lectures with his treatment of Kant’s essay the year before. In the lecture to the Société française de philosophie, “enlightenment” was presented as Kant’s way of summing up various attempts not to be governed (e.g., biblical criticism, natural law theories, critiques of dogmatism or ecclesiastical forms of rule, etc.). A year later, “the Enlightenment” was viewed as having played an “important role” in developing the “political technology” that would be the offspring of the “demonic” combination of the “shepherd-sheep game” with the “citizen-state game.” This ambivalence may have been intentional: as he argued in Discipline and Punish, “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciples.”⁷ But (at the risk of belaboring my particular hobby-horse) it also may have something to do with the tension between the particular period we call “the Enlightenment” and “enlightenment,” a name for a process that is not necessarily confined to “the Enlightenment” or to those thinkers we now associate with it.

This confusion surfaces with particular force at the one place in Foucault’s late discussions of  Kant’s essay that strikes me as most clearly misguided. In the first hour of his January 5, 1983 lecture, Foucault observes,

an interesting line to pursue in the study of the eighteenth century in general, but more precisely of what is called the Aufklärung, would seem to me to be the fact that the Aufklärung names itself the Aufklärung. That is to say we are dealing with an undoubtedly very singular cultural process which very quickly became aware of itself in a certain fashion, by naming itself and situating itself in relation to its past, future, and present, by giving the name of Aufklärung to the process, or rather to the operations that this movement itself must effectuate within its own present. After all, is not the Aufklärung the first epoch to name itself and which, instead of simply following the old custom or tradition of describing itself as a period of decadence, prosperity, or splendor, etcetera, gives itself the name of a particular event, the Aufklärung, which arises from a general history of thought, reason, and knowledge, and within which precisely the Aufklärung has its role to play? The Aufklärung is a period, it is a period which designates itself, formulates its own motto, its own precept, and says what it has to do, as much in relation to the general history of thought, reason, and knowledge as in relation to its own present and to the bodies and forms of knowledge, ignorance, illusion, and institutions, etcetera in which it can recognize its historical situation. Aufklärung is a name, a precept, and a motto. And this is precisely what we see in this text “What is Aufklärung?” (14)

What is misguided here is the notion that Kant was attempting to come up with a name — or even a definition — for the period in which he was living. He was answering a question about how to define a process, not how to define a period. Troubled by an article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift that suggested that “enlightened citizens” didn’t need to have clergy officiating a wedding ceremonies, Johann Friedrich Zöllner had written an article that (1) insisted that clergy were needed at weddings and (2) suggested that those who were tossing around the term Aufklärung really ought to define it. What followed were a series of articles trying to explain what the process of enlightenment involved. While Kant did, at the end of the essay, characterize his age as an “age of enlightenment” (as opposed to an “enlightened age”) it is hard to see this as evidence that “the Aufklärung names itself the Aufklärung.” First, like other friends of enlightenment, Kant was quite clear that there were “ages of enlightenment” prior to his and he hoped for even more enlightened ages in the future. The use of the term “die Aufklärung” as a designation for a specific historical period was a product of the nineteenth, rather than the eighteenth century.

Foucault is on much firmer ground when, in the second sentence in the passage quoted above, he notes that the period that we call “the Enlightenment” (and that he preferred to call “the Aufklärung”) had an intense interest in trying to clarify what processes, practices, and institutions might foster the activity that was denoted by the term Aufklärung. But what he failed to note (and as I’ve discussed in several earlier posts) was that there was considerable disagreement over which of these processes, practices, and institutions could properly be described as “enlightened” or, at least, “enlightening.” Hence the battles over the what constituted “true enlightenment” that would rage into the nineteenth century.

Foucault’s confusion on this point matters because it gets in the way of what (at least as I read him) he was trying to do. This becomes clearer if we look at how the discussion from his lectures was carried over into his article in Magazine littéraire. First, more or less word for word (unfortunately, I do not have the French texts with me at the moment to confirm this) we find the dubious claim about the Enlightenment naming itself:

Is not the Aufklärung, after all, the first epoch to name itself and, instead of simply characterizing itself, according to an old habit, as a period of decadence or prosperity, of splendor or misery, to name itself after a certain event that comes out of a general history of thought, reason and knowledge, and within which the epoch itself has to play its part? (The Politics of Truth 86-87)

And then, towards the close of the article, a somewhat more subtle formulation, taken from the close of the Collège de France lecture:

it very much seems to me that the Aufklärung, both as a singular event inaugurating European modernity and as the permanent process which manifests itself in the history of reason, in the development and the establishment of forms of rationality and techniques, the autonomy and the authority of knowledge, is not for us a mere episode in the history of ideas. It is a philosophical question, inscribed since the 18th century, in our thinking (93).

Much hangs on this tension between the Enlightenment as an “event” marking the beginning of “modernity” and enlightenment as a “permanent process” spanning the history of reason.

Foucault v. Habermas: Closing Arguments

For one thing, it may help us to understand where Habermas and Foucault diverged in their understanding of what was at stake in Kant’s essay. Recall Habermas’ characterization of it in his eulogy for Foucault: for him it was the “text that in a certain sense initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity.” It marks the place where modernity begins. There is much in Foucault’s discussions of Kant that agrees with this way of understanding the essay. The misguided assumption that “the Enlightenment” was the first period to name itself is bound with more general claims that Kant’s focus on what was happening at the moment marked a fundamental reorientation in how philosophy conceives of its task. One of the many reasons for regretting that the planned discussion between Foucault and Habermas never took place was that perhaps their discussion of just what it was that they saw this essay as inaugurating might have led to some interesting disagreements. But, I suppose, it might merely have led to an entrenching of the assumption that the close of the eighteenth century marked a sort of historical rupture, which separates we moderns from whatever it was that came before us.

My reason for putting “merely” in the previous sentence is that it seems to me that Foucault’s last works suggest a rather different way of thinking about the Enlightenment in general and Kant’s essay in particular. There is a striking moment in Foucault’s interview with Gérard Raulet when, in response to a question about the relationship between “modernity” and “post-modernity”, Foucault observed,

Here, I think, we are touching on one of the forms — perhaps we should call them habits — one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought, in modern thought even; at any rate, in post-Hegelian thought: the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who engages in philosophical discourse reflects on his own time strikes me as a flaw. I can say so all the more firmly since it is something I have done myself; and since, in someone like Nietzsche, we find this incessantly – or, at least, insistently enough. I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We must also have the modesty to say, on the other hand, that – even without the solemnity – the time we live in is very interesting; it needs to be analyzed and broken down, and that we would do well to ask ourselves, “What is today?” I wonder if one of the great roles of philosophical thought since the Kantian ”Was ist Aufklärung?” might not be characterized by saying that the task of philosophy is to describe the nature of the present, and of “ourselves in the present.” With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is one of total perdition, is the abyss or darkness, or a triumphant daybreak, etc. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time which is never quite like any other.⁸

While there are claims here that are worth questioning (aren’t there always?) this way of thinking about what Kant was doing helps clarify why Foucault might have wanted to open a series of lecture on ancient Greek philosophy with a discussion of an essay from the close of the eighteenth century. Once he realized that Kant was not trying to define a “singular event” but, instead, was making an intervention in a process that had a rather long history, it might have struck Foucault that it made sense to explore the ways in which the questions he was attempting to answer have a history that stretches back into Greek antiquity.

Max Horkheimer once observed that the process of enlightenment began with the first human thought — which suggests that every age is, and isn’t, an “age of enlightenment.” It may be useful to argue about the proportions of each and to consider what might be done to make ours more enlightened than it seems to be, but there would seem to be nothing gained by postulating fundamental breaks. Quoting Hegel, Horkheimer characterized enlightenment as “irresistible.” I’m inclined to call it “persistent.”

1. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 6-7. ↩
2. Jürgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge \[Mass.]: MIT Press, 1994), 149–150. ↩
3. Une histoire restée muette, La Quinzaine littéraire, n° 8, 1er-15 juillet, 1966, pp. 3-4.↩
4. See Venturi’s discussions in Europe Des Lumières. Recherches Sur Le 18e Siècle, Civilisations et Sociétés 23 (Paris: Mouton, 1971) and, more briefly, at the start of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge \[Eng.]: University Press, 1971).↩
5. Any confusion this sentence might cause can be clearer up by having a look at the first few essays translated in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩
6. Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’,” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling McMurrin, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 223–254 ↩
7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 222. This sentence deserves a good deal more attention than I am able to give it right now. ↩
8. Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” (1983 interview with Gérard Raulet, in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (The New Press, 1998). 449. ↩

My last post on the so-called “Foucault/Habermas Debate” focused on the eulogy JürgenHabermas wrote in the wake of Michel Foucault’s death. The main theoretical claim of the eulogy was that Foucault, the one-time critic of the “Enlightenment project” (a project that, for Habermas, is more or less identical with the “project of modernity”) came to realize that his theory of power ultimately undermined the normative foundations on which his critique of power relations rested. Habermas went on to argue that, in the face of this contradiction, Foucault found himself drawn “back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.”¹ The result was a rejection of the position that Foucault had once shared with fellow “young conservatives” such as George Bataille and Jacques Derrida who, following the path blazed by Nietzsche, had sought “to appropriate the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity” in order to “break out of the modern world altogether.”² As evidence for this shift, Habermas appealed to the article, drawn Foucault’s January 5, 1983 lecture at the Collège de France, that appeared in Magazine littéraire shortly before Foucault’s death.

Two passages in this article may have led Habermas to conclude that Foucault had, indeed, changed his stance:

1. Foucault’s concluding statement that he saw his own work as situated within a tradition that stretched “from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, through Nietzsche and Max Weber.”³
2. His characterization (and apparent endorsement) of the Kant’s account of philosophy (in his answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”) as “a discourse of and about modernity.”⁴

Finally, I noted that Habermas’ interpretation had the additional appeal of validating the general critique of Foucault’s work that had been developed in his yet unpublished Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. There was nothing in this critique that needed to be modified, aside from noting that Foucault himself had, shortly before his untimely death, come to agree with Habermas on the need for a significant revision of his account of modernity.

In this post I want to look more closely at some of the problems with Habermas’ interpretation of the two points noted above and argue (drawing, in part, on texts that would not have been available to Habermas when he wrote his eulogy) that he overstates the extent to which Foucault was moving towards a position that might have approximated his own.

A Fraternal Rapport with the Frankfurt School?

Foucault saved what, at the time, was the most surprising move in the Magazine littéraire for the close:

It seems to me that the philosophical choice with which we are confronted at present is this: we can opt for a critical philosophy which will present itself as an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or we can opt for a form of critical thought which will be an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the actuality. It is this form of philosophy that, from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, has founded the form of reflection within which I have attempted to work (95).

Foucault’s way of characterizing Foucault’s work must have seemed rather strange to Habermas — and, for that matter, not just to Habermas.

Throughout the 1960s and for much of the early 1970s, Foucault and Habermas inhabited different intellectual universes. Habermas’ earliest mention of Foucault that I have been able to find (I would be grateful to learn if there are earlier ones that I’ve missed) came in a 1977 interview, where he noted that Foucault’s “critique of the forms and norms of bourgeois rationality in medicine, law, and sexuality” had already been “anticipated” by the Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁵ A year later, he was more critical, arguing that

Foucault imagines that a bourgeois rationality was somehow imposed on all spheres of life in the eighteenth century, which must now be generically done away with. I’m not convinced by his undialectical negation. It is rather necessary to show that what Weber called “rationalization” in which Foucault as well explored in a very different way — in the field of culture, sexual relations, criminality and sanity — is dangerous because it is partial. For it is characterized by its universalization of a single fundamental form of irrationality — instrumental, economic and administrative reason. But we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and take flight in a new irrationalism. Foucault visibly falls into that danger.⁶

He took up this general line of interpretation two years later in his Adorno Prize lecture, which (famously or infamously, depending on the reader), which characterized Foucault as a “young conservative.”⁷

For his part, Foucault explained, in an interview with Duccio Trombadori conducted at the end of 1978, that he had first come into contact with the work of the Frankfurt School when he read Georg Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structures, a work that he discussed in Discipline and Punish (1975).⁸ He also made a few critical comments on Jos Van Ussel’s Marcuse-inspired Histoire de la répression sexuelle in his 1974-1975 lectures at the Collège de France.⁹ The same general critique (without mentioning either Marcuse or Van Ussel) would be central to the critique of the “repressive hypothesis” in La Volenté de savoir (1976).

While there was no explicit mention of Habermas in his interview with Trombadori, his comments go a long way to clarifying what he saw his own work as sharing with the earlier generation of Frankfurt theorists:

… the philosophers of that school raised problems we’re still laboring over today – in particular, that of the effects of power in their relation to a rationality that was defined historically and geographically, in the West, from the sixteenth century onward. The West wouldn’t have been able to achieve the economic and cultural results that characterize it without the exercise of that particular form of rationality. And, in fact, how can that rationality be separated from the mechanisms, procedures, techniques, and effects of power that accompany it and for which we express our distaste by describing them as the typical form of oppression of capitalist societies — and perhaps socialist societies as well? Couldn’t it be concluded that the Enlightenment’s promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has been turned upside down, resulting in a domination by reason itself, which increasingly usurps the place of freedom? This is a fundamental problem we’re all struggling with, which many people have in common, whether they are communist or not. And as we know, this problem was isolated, pointed out by Horkheimer before all the others; and it was the Frankfurt school that questioned the reference to Marx in terms of that hypothesis. Wasn’t it Horkheimer who maintained that in Marx there was the idea of a classless society that resembled an enormous factory? (273-274)

In a May 1978 lecture to the Société françaisse de Philosophie, which was first published in 1990 under the title “What is Critique?”, he offered an extended discussion of the legacy, both France and in Germany, of the question “What is Enlightenment?” and argued that taking up “the problem of Aufklärung … makes us brothers with the Frankfurt School.”¹⁰ Finally, in a 1983 interview with Gérard Raulet, he observed that “When I was a student, I can assure you that I never once heard the name of the Frankfurt School mentioned by any of my professors,” and then went on to offer this assessment of the relationship of the work of the Frankfurt School to his own work,

Now, obviously, if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt school, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many or the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path — when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt school.¹¹

It is clear, then, that Foucault’s situating of his own work within the broader context of a tradition of inquiry associated with the Frankfurt School was hardly confined to the article that prompted Habermas to suppose that Foucault was ready to make his peace the “philosophical discourse of modernity.”

But, even as he was drawing parallels between his own work and that of the Frankfurt School, Foucault also noted significant differences. For example, he began his 1979 Tanner lectures Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’ by asking “Shall we ‘try’ reason?”

To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the field has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Second, because it’s senseless to refer to ‘reason’ as the contrary entity to non-reason. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist.¹²

He followed this with a second question: “Shall we investigate this kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Enlightenment?” and went on to note,

I think that that was the way of some of the members of the Frankfurter Schule. My purpose is not to begin a discussion of their works – they are most important and valuable. I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalisation and power” (226)

The relationship of his work to that of the Frankfurt School came up again in his 1983 interview with Gérard Raulet. Raulet noted that “The prevailing idea in Critical Theory is the dialectical continuity of reason, and of a perversion that completely transformed it at a certain stage-which it now becomes a question of rectifying.” Foucault responded:

Yes, yes. I think the blackmail that has very often been at work in every critique of reason or every critical inquiry into the history of rationality (either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible, or as though a rational history of all the ramifications and all the bifurcations, a contingent history of reason, were impossible.¹³

The same formulation can be found in his 1983 lecture on the question “What is Enlightenment?”, where — after summarizing what he took to be the implications of Kant’s discussion, he stressed the need to reject what he termed “the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment.”

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 we 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.¹⁴

The last sentence suggests that Foucault’s identification with the broader aims of the Frankfurt School was not without significant differences. For what it questions is precisely the broader project that Habermas viewed as central to the “philosophical discourse of modernity”: the goal “of enlightening the Enlightenment about its narrow-mindedness.”¹⁵ To the extent that this was an effort Foucault was not inclined to join, it would seem that he remained, contra Habermas, outside the “philosophical discourse of modernity.”

Modernity, Time Consciousness, and Self-Assurance

In his discussion of Foucault’s Magazine littéraire article, Habermas maintained that Foucault’s recognition that his theory of power undermined the normative standards that could be used to criticize the functioning of power relations ultimately drew him

in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.

As I suggested in my last post, there was one particular passage in Foucault’s article that may have led Habermas to see Foucault as having altered his stance towards the “project of modernity,” a project that, for Habermas, had been “formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.”¹⁶

The passage comes at the close of a discussion of what Foucault sees as the novel relationship between philosophy and the present implied in Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”

If one agrees to envision philosophy as a form of discursive practice which has its own history, it seems to me that with this text on the Aufklärung … one sees philosophy problematize its own discursive actuality: an actuality that it questions as an event, as an event whose meaning, value, and philosophical singularity it has to express and in which it has to find both its own reason for being and the foundation for what it says. And in this way, one sees that for the philosopher to ask the question of how he belongs to this present is to no longer ask the question of how he belongs to a doctrine or a tradition. It will also no longer simply be a question of his belonging to a larger human community in general, but rather it will be a question of his belonging to a certain us, to an us that relates to a characteristic cultural ensemble of his own actuality.

No philosopher can go without examining his own participation in this us precisely because it is this us which is becoming the object of the philosopher’s own reflection. All this, philosophy as the problematization of an actuality and the philosopher’s questioning of this actuality to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to position himself, may very well characterize philosophy as a discourse of and about modernity. (85)

Let us, for the moment, set aside the question of whether this is a plausible interpretation of Kant’s essay and focus, instead, on the relationship between what Habermas calls “the philosophical discourse of modernity” and the way in which Foucault characterizes Kant’s notion of “philosophy as a discourse of and about modernity.”

It not difficult to see why Habermas, when he read this extract from Foucault’s 1983 lecture in the pages of the Magazine littéraire  in the summer of 1984, might well have sensed an affinity between this passage and the argument that he had himself developed in the four lectures he had given at the Collège de France in March 1983. In his eulogy, he summarized Foucault’s interpretation of Kant as follows:

Foucault discovers in Kant the first philosopher to take aim like an archer at the heart of a present that is concentrated in the significance of the contemporary moment, and thereby to inaugurate the discourse of modernity. Kant drops the classical dispute over the exemplary status of the ancients and the equal stature of the moderns; transforming thought into a diagnostic instrument, he entangles it in the restless process of self-reassurance that to this day has kept modernity in ceaseless motion within the horizon of a new historical consciousness (151-152).

Habermas gloss would seem to capture Foucault’s general point. But there are also a few differences worth noting.

The first involves the relationship of Kant to the “philosophical discourse of modernity.” Foucault saw Kant as inaugurating a new stance towards the present, a stance turned philosophy into a “discourse of and about modernity.” Kant does not, however, play quite the same role in Habermas’ narrative. Much depends on just how we understand the concerns of “the philosophical discourse of modernity.”

In the opening chapter of Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (and, presumably, in the first of his four lectures at the Collège de France), Habermas argued that the “discourse of modernity” was concerned, above all else, with the question of “self-reassurance” (Selbstvergewisserung), the same term that he used in his gloss of Foucault. But Philosophical Discourse of Modernity credits Hegel, rather than Kant, with having been “the first to raise to the level of a philosophical problem the process of detaching modernity from the suggestion of norms lying outside of itself in the past” (16)¹⁷ To the extent that Kant figures in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity it is via Hegel’s interpretation of his philosophy. The difference may appear trivial, but there are good reasons for insisting on it.

As Habermas noted in his Preface, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity picks up where his 1980 Adorno lecture left off.¹⁸ In the Adorno lecture, he argued that

The project of modernity as it was formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic.¹⁹

This same interpretation is offered as a characterization of Kant’s project early in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, with the addition of a nod to Weber’s younger colleague (and Georg Lukács’ teacher) Emil Lask (18-19). But it is only with Hegel’s appropriation of Kant that the “philosophical discourse of modernity” commences in earnest:

Hegel can understand Kant’s philosophy as the standard (or authoritative) self-interpretation of modernity; he thinks he sees what also remains unconceptualized in this most highly reflective expression of the age: Kant does not perceive as diremptions the differentiations within reason, the formal divisions within culture, and in general the fissures among all those spheres, Hence he ignores the need for unification that emerges with the separations evoked by the principle of subjectivity (19).

Hegel’s insistence that Kant’s differentiation of reason into theoretical, practical, and aesthetic standpoints is a fragmentation that must be overcome philosophically provides the paradigm for what Habermas characterizes as “the philosophical discourse of modernity.” As he argued in the published version of what would have been the third of the four lectures that he gave at the Collège de France.

In the discourse of modernity, the accusers raise an objection that has not substantially changed from Hegel and Marx down to Nietzsche and Heidegger, from Bataille and Lacan to Foucault and Derrida. The accusation is aimed against a reason grounded in the principle of subjectivity. And it states that this reason denounces and undermines all unconcealed forms of suppression and exploitation, degradation and alienation, only to set up in their place the unassailable domination of rationality. Because this regime of a subjectivity puffed up into a false absolute transforms the means of consciousness-raising and emancipation into just so many instruments of objectification and control, it fashions for itself an uncanny immunity in the form of a thoroughly concealed domination (55-56)

As readers of Philosophical Discourse of Modernity are no doubt aware, Habermas goes on to argue that “taking leave of modernity” exacts “a high price” that can be avoided only by replacing the “subject-centered” conception of reason with his proposed conception of “communicative reason.” Such a conception confirms the “normative content” of the “project of modernity” by showing that the differentiation of reason into empirical, normative, and aesthetic spheres — a differentiation that Hegel regarded as a “fragmentation” in need of overcoming — could, instead, be understood as grounded in the validity claims that are inherent in communicative interaction. In that sense, the “philosophical discourse of modernity” might be understood as a long series of poorly formulated solutions to a what, ultimately, turns out not have been a problem. Kant got it more or less right (but without giving an adequate explanation of why) and Hegel set philosophy off on a path that, while not uninteresting, has not been particularly productive.

It is far from clear, however, what any of this has to do with the particular focus of Foucault’s article: Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?”. Habermas’ account of modernity would appear to rest on two distinct claims:

1. Modernity is marked by a particular consciousness of time that (a) detaches it from “norms lying outside of itself in the past” and hence (b) stands in need of normative “self-assurance” — i.e., it needs to generate its own normative foundation.²⁰
2. The project of modernity (which was “formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment”) “consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic.”²¹

While the second of these claims is, as I have argued elsewhere, hardly typical of the Enlightenment as a whole, it is, of course, Kantian in its provenance. But it is emphatically not  how Kant himself went about answering the question “what is enlightenment?” The only thing approximating the “differentiation” invoked in the second feature Habermas associates with “modernity” that can be found in Kant’s article on that question is his distinction between “public” and “private” uses of reason.

Kant’s article of enlightenment does, however, have something to say about the first of these points: it is possible to read the famous opening paragraph as imploring individuals to (a) think for themselves (i.e., don’t rely on norms that are imposed from “outside”) and (b) don’t be so timid about thinking for yourself (i.e., overcome your “self-imposed immaturity.”) Taken together, this might pass for a reformulation of the two parts of Habermas’ first point. And this, in fact, seems to be all Foucault was inclined to claim for Kant’s essay.

It is not simply: what in the present situation can determine this or that philosophical decision? The question is about the present and is, at first, concerned with the determination of a certain element of the present that needs to be recognized, distinguished, deciphered among all others. What is it in the present that now makes sense for philosophical reflection?

In the answer that Kant attempts to give to this line of questioning, he attempts to show how this element of the present turns out to be the carrier and the sign of a process concerning thought, bodies of knowledge, and philosophy. Yet here it is a matter of showing specifically and in what ways the one who speaks as a thinker, a scientist, and a philosopher is himself a part of this process and (more than that) how he has a certain role to play in this process where he will therefore find himself both element and actor (84-85).

So, while Foucault sees Kant as inaugurating a new way of talking about the relationship of philosophy to its present, there would appear to be scant evidence here — and, for that matter, in any of Foucault’s other discussions of the essay — that he regards Kant as concerned either with what Habermas sees as the “Enlightenment Project/Project of Modernity” (i.e., the differentiation of value spheres) or with the “philosophical discourse of modernity” (i.e., the critique of the misfortunes that this differentiation of value spheres allegedly introduces into society). What Habermas thought he found in Foucault simply isn’t there to be found.

To be continued ….

1. Jürgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present:  On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 1994), 154.
   ↩
2. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity:  An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’ Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) 53. ↩
3. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (New York: Semiotexte, 1997) 95. ↩
4. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth 85. ↩
5. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews (London: Verso, 1986). 53. This is the earliest mention of Foucault in any of Habermas’ texts or interviews that I have been able to track down. I’d be grateful if anyone could point out an earlier one. ↩
6. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity 74. ↩
7. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity:  An Unfinished Project,”  38–55. ↩
8. Interview with Duccio Trombadori, in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New Press, 1997) 273; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 24-25, 54-57. For now, we can ignore the question of whether an affiliation with the Institute for Search Research is equivalent to membership in “the Frankfurt School,” but it is worth stressing that these terms do not designate the same thing.
   ↩
9. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador, 2004) 236-237. ↩
10. I quote from Kevin Paul Geiman’s translation in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 391. See also the translation in Foucault, The Politics of Truth, which renders the phrase as “shows out fellowship with the Frankfurt School (55).” The original French reads, “Je voudrais tout de suite, en abordant ce problème qui nous rend fraternels par rapport à l’École de Francfort ….” Foucault’s 1978 lecture is rather tough going and it is good to have a couple of translations of it available, especially since the translation in The Politics of Truth includes the brief question and answer period that followed the lecture. ↩
11. Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (The New Press, 1998) 440 ↩
12. Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’,” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling McMurrin, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 226. ↩
13. Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (The New Press, 1998) 441. ↩
14. Foucault, The Politics of Truth 109-110. ↩
15. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 57. See also his comments on “enlightenment about the Enlightenment” in “The New Intimacy between Politics and Culture: Theses on Enlightenment in Germany,” in Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989) 200-201. ↩
16. Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” 45. ↩
17. The original German is the sort of thing that reduces translators to tears: “Hegel is der erste, der den Prozess der Ablösung der Moderne von den ausserhalb ihrer liegenden Normsuggestionen der Vergangenheit zum philosophischen Problem erhebt.” The meaning is clear enough, but how to put it into readable English isn’t. ↩
18. See Philosophical Discourse of Modernity xix. ↩
19. Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” 45 ↩
20. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1-22. ↩
21. Habermas, “Modernity:  An Unfinished Project,” 45 ↩

As I discussed in my previous post, what has come to known as the “Foucault/Habermas Debate” has largely been the creation of parties other than Foucault and Habermas. They met only once, in March 1983, when Habermas visited Paris to deliver the lectures at the Collège de France that would later become the first four chapters of the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. They both gave subsequent accounts of their meeting: Foucault in an April 1983 interview; Habermas in a 1984 eulogy for Foucault. Foucault recalled Habermas’ discussion of the shock and disappointment he experienced upon discovering the Nazi past of one of his professors.¹ Habermas recalled being struck by the tension “between the almost serene scientific reserve of the scholar striving for objectivity” and the “political vitality of the vulnerable, subjectively excitable, morally sensitive intellectual ….”² We have a few other secondhand accounts of their conversation, but they cast little light on what Foucault and Habermas might have discussed.³ Maybe someone should call David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s agent and tell him to put the boys on the case.

The Debate that Wasn’t and the One That Was

This sets “Foucault/Habermas Debate” apart from Habermas’ previous engagements with Karl Popper, Hans Albert, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Niklas Luhmann, and John Rawls. Since there was no actual exchange between Foucault and Habermas, all that we have is a debate between “Habermasians” and “Foucaultians” (or, if you prefer, “Foucauldians” — my spell checker doesn’t like either one). The “Foucault/Habermas Debate” took its point of departure from a single text: the critique of Foucault’s work that Habermas offered in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. For this reason, the terms on which it has been conducted have been viewed by Foucault’s defenders as seriously flawed: hence the continued attempts at “recasting” it. I’m interested, not with the “debate” that we have wound up with, but with the one we didn’t get: the joint colloquium on Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” that, according to Habermas, Foucault proposed for the autumn of 1984.

In many ways, the Debate that Never Was is every bit as problematic as the one that was: Foucault and Habermas offered conflicting accounts of what they thought they were going to be doing. To summarize from last time:

• Habermas stated that the colloquium was (1) proposed by Foucault, (2) would focus on Kant’s essay, and (3) would also include Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor.
• Foucault stated that it was (1) organized by some “Americans,” (2) would focus on “modernism,” and (3) would involve “Habermas and myself.”

But, fortunately, it may be possible to remedy at least some of these confusions. I’ve pestered various people who were in a position to know something about what was being planned and a few of them have been kind enough to help clarify matters (one of the pleasant things about dealing with historical questions, rather than philosophical ones, is that they can sometimes be resolved by turning up evidence). Further, since the three participants mentioned by Habermas all went on to publish articles that, in one way or another, dealt with Kant’s essay, it might be possible to get some sense of what they might have been thinking about the question they were supposed to be discussing (more on this, perhaps, in a later post).⁴ Finally, we have a few texts by Foucault and Habermas on Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” and they provide some clues as to what they may have found significant about this famous little essay. Resolving the first and the third of these discrepancies requires finding something that would have to clarify what the people at Berkeley who were organizing the event might have had in mind (perhaps certain people might be interested in taking at look in their files?). On the other hand, resolving the second requires trying to make sense of what is going on in the pile of texts sitting on my desk. So I will focus on the second and hope that, someday, someone will help me out with the first and the third.

Habermas as Reagan, Foucault as Gorbachev

Here is how Habermas characterized his reaction to Foucault’s invitation to join him at Berkeley, in the autumn of 1984, for a discussion of Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”:

I had understood his invitation as a call to a discussion in which we, along with Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, would debate various interpretations of modernity, using as a basis for discussion a text that in a certain sense initiated the philosophical discourse of modernity (150).

He went on to explain that, a year later, upon reading the article in Magazine littéraire that had been extracted Foucault’s January 5, 1983 lecture at the Collège de France, he realized that “this was not exactly Foucault’s intention in his proposal.”

This account prompts two questions:

1. Why did Habermas assume that Foucault’s invitation to discuss Kant’s essay on enlightenment was equivalent to debating different interpretations of modernity?
2. What was it about Foucault’s article that made him recognize that he had misunderstood what Foucault was proposing?

The first question would appear to have a rather simple answer. The second is a bit trickier.

That Habermas would understand the invitation as an opportunity to “debate various interpretations of modernity” is hardly surprising. He was, after all, in Paris to deliver a series of lectures addressing that question and he seems to have assumed that Kant’s essay on enlightenment could serve as the point of departure for a consideration of philosophical accounts of “modernity.” Whether it is — or ought to be — natural for us to agree with this interpretation of the essay is something that, at some point, we will need to consider.

Because Habermas said little in the eulogy about how he understood Foucault’s proposal or what he thought Foucault’s intentions were in proposing it, it is unclear what it was that he subsequently realized he had misunderstood. All that we have to go on is his discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s essay itself and the problems he had in reconciling it with Foucault’s discussion of Kant in Les mots et les choses:

In Foucault’s lecture we do not meet the Kant familiar from the Order of Things, the epistemologist who thrust open the door to the age of anthropological thought and the human sciences with his analysis of finiteness. Instead we encounter a different Kant — the precursor of the Young Hegelians, the Kant who was the first to make a serious break with the metaphysical heritage, who turned philosophy away from the Eternal Verities and concentrated on what philosophers had until then considered to be without concept and nonexistent, merely contingent and transitory. In Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault sees the origin of an “ontology of contemporary reality” that leads through Hegel, Nietzsche, and Max Weber to Horkheimer and Adorno. Surprisingly, in the last sentence of his lecture Foucault includes himself in this tradition (150).

There is nothing here that speaks directly to what Habermas took Foucault’s intentions to have been or to what he misunderstood about them, but it does suggest what might have perplexed him (along with others) about Foucault’s article in the Magazine littéraire.

It is likely that he assumed, on the basis of Foucault’s account of Kant in Les mots et les choses that Foucault was a critic of Kant (one way of reading the book’s discussion of “Man and His Doubles” in was that it held Kant responsible for various dichotomies that have plagued the human sciences since the close of the eighteenth century century) and, more broadly, a critic of the Enlightenment. From here it would have been a short step to assuming that the point of the Berkeley colloquium would have been to stage a disputation between Habermas, the champion of the Enlightenment project, and Foucault, its critic. It is worth remembering that, just four years earlier, Habermas included him — along with Batialle and Derrida — in the ranks of those “young conservative” critics of the Enlightenment project who sought to

appropriate the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity, namely the revelation of a decentred subjectivity liberated from all the constraints of cognition and purposive action, from all the imperatives of labour and use value, and … break out of the modern world altogether.⁵

He did not intended this as a complement.

Despite the generally positive impression of Foucault that Habermas appears to have taken from their discussions, it is conceivable that when he left Paris still assumed that Foucault was a critic of the Enlightenment project and, hence, may have supposed that, at their planned meeting in Berkeley, they would debate its merits and, more generally, clarify their stances on the (to him related) question of “modernity.”

Although The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (a book whose argument, as Habermas explained in the Preface, was initially developed in seminars at Frankfurt in the summer of 1983 and during the winter of 1983-1984 and the lectures that he gave in the United States in 1984) no longer charged that Foucault was a “young conservative,” it still saw him as a post-modern critic of the Enlightenment project who, while perhpas prefereable to Heidegger or Derrida, was still no friend of the Enlightenment. But this was a characterization that would have been difficult to sustain in the face of Foucault’s discussion of Kant in Magazine littéraire, a discussion that concluded with Foucault’s declaration that he regarded himself as part of a tradition that stretched “from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, through Nietzsche and Max Weber.”⁶ Habermas could well have wondered what, if anything, he and Foucault were going to “debate” at Berkeley. It was as if Foucault had decided to do the same thing vis a vis Habermas that Gorbachev was in the process of doing vis a vis Reagan: denying him an enemy.

“A discourse of, and about, modernity”

If, like Reagan, Habermas was inclined to “trust but verify,” two passages in Foucault’s article could provide support for the idea that the old enemy was making amends. First, and most emphatically, there was the peculiar declaration of loyalties with which it closed. But Habermas also seems to have fastened onto a passage in the article that can be found at the conclusion of Foucault’s discussion of the way in which Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” conceived of the relationship of philosophy to the present. Foucault argued that the question Kant was attempting to answer

is not simply: what in the present situation can determine this or that philosophical decision? The question is about the present and is, at first, concerned with the determination of a certain element of the present that needs to be recognized, distinguished, deciphered among all others. What is it in the present that now makes sense for philosophical reflection?⁷

He went on to note that, in answering this question, Kant

attempts to show how this element of the present turns out to be the carrier and the sign of a process concerning thought, bodies of knowledge, and philosophy. Yet here it is a matter of showing specifically and in what ways the one who speaks as a thinker, a scientist, and a philosopher is himself a part of this process and (more than that) how he has a certain role to play in this process where he will therefore find himself both element and actor. (84-85)

From this, he concludes,

All this, philosophy as the problematization of an actuality and the philosopher’s questioning of this actuality to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to position himself, may very well characterize philosophy as a discourse of and about modernity. (85)

It would have been impossible for Habermas to have overlooked Foucault’s claim that, in Kant’s essay, philosophy had become “a discourse of and about modernity.”⁸ And, in fact, Habermas’ summary of Foucault’s argument in his eulogy highlighted this passage:

Foucault discovers in Kant the first philosopher to take aim like an archer at the heart of a present that is concentrated in the significance of the contemporary moment, and thereby to inaugurate the discourse of modernity. Kant drops the classical dispute over the exemplary status of the ancients and the equal stature of the moderns; transforming thought into a diagnostic instrument, he entangles it in the restless process of self-reassurance that to this day has kept modernity in ceaseless motion within the horizon of a new historical consciousness (151-152).

From here, the eulogy went on to make the case that, Foucault’s situating of his work within the tradition inaugurated by Kant amounted to a fundamental change in his stance towards the “philosophical discourse of modernity.”

Habermas begins by summarizing, once again, what he understands Foucault to be arguing in the text in Magazine littéraire

For a philosophy claimed by the significance of the contemporary moment, the issue is the relationship of modernity to itself. the “rapport ‘sagital’ á sa propre actualité.” Hölderlin and the young Hegel, Marx and the Young Hegelians, Baudelaire and Nietzsche, Bataille and the surrealists, Lukàcs, Merleau-Ponty, the precursors of Western Marxism in general, and not least, Foucault himself — all of them contribute to the sharpening of the modern time consciousness that made its entry into philosophy with the question “What is Enlightenment?” The philosopher becomes a contemporary; he steps out of the anonymity of an impersonal enterprise and identifies himself as a person of flesh and blood to whom every clinical investigation of a contemporary period confronting him must be directed. Even in retrospect, the period of the Enlightenment fits the description it gave of itself: it marks the entrance into a modernity that sees itself condemned to draw on itself for its consciousness of self and its norm.

For now, it may be enough to note how Habermas’ summary rocks back and forth between a faithful (and, at times, almost verbatim) summary of the argument of Foucault’s article (in the first and third sentences) and elaborations of this argument (in the second and fourth sentences) that go well beyond anything Foucault actually said in the article but do match up quite well with a few of Habermas’ long-standing concerns. The list of names in the second sentence merges thinkers who do figure in Foucault’s work (most obviously, Nietzsche and Bataille and, less obviously, Hölderlin) with ones who don’t, but did matter to Habermas (e.g., Lukács and Merleau-Ponty. In much the same way, the fourth sentence describes what Foucault takes to be the thrust of Kant’s essay in precisely the way that Habermas had framed the point of departure for the “philosophical discourse of modernity”: as modernity’s attempt “to create its normativity out of itself,” without borrowing its criteria from the models supplied by earier epochs (7).

Not Quite Paul

Having completed this peculiar mix of summary and redescription, Habermas posed the question of what would have moved Foucault, the former enemy of the Enlightenment, to defect to the ranks of its friends:

If this is even a paraphrase of Foucault’s own train of thought, the question arises how such an affirmative understanding of modern philosophizing, a philosophizing that is inscribed in our present and always directed to the relevance of our contemporary reality, fits with Foucault’s unyielding critique of modernity. How can Foucault’s self understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakable critique of precisely this form of knowledge, which is that of modernity?

The answer is that Foucault must have changed.

Whereas, however, Foucault had previously traced this will to knowledge in modern power formations only to denounce it, he now displays it in a completely different light: as the critical impulse that links his own thought with the beginnings of modernity, an impulse worthy of preservation and in need of renewal.

And, the reason for this change, Habermas proposes, was that Foucault must have found himself caught in “an instructive contradiction” that

opposes his critique of power, disabled by the relevance of the contemporary moment, to the analytic of the true in such a way that the former is deprived of the normative standard it would have to derive from the latter.

This amounts to a summary of one of the prongs of the critique that Habermas himself had made of Foucault’s work in the lectures he gave in the United States after his departure from Paris. But the central thrust of the eulogy is that it is not just Habermas who was aware of this contradiction. Foucault had recognized it as well, and it was

the force of this contradiction that drew Foucault, in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.

Not least among the appeals this interpretation might have had for Habermas was that it left intact the critique of Foucault’s work that was about to appear in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, while at the same time holding out the prospect that, had he not died — at the very moment when he had broken with the “young conservative” attempt to “blast open” the “philosophical discourse of modernity” — he would have returned to its “sphere of influence.” It was as if Saul, nearing Damascus, saw the light, was thrown from his horse, and died of a broken neck without ever becoming Paul.

Habermas, however, was well aware that what he was arguing hinges on a conditional: “If this is even a paraphrase of Foucault’s own train of thought ….” In my next post, I’d like to examine some of the problems with Habermas’ “paraphrase” and suggest that Foucault was not quite as close to Habermas’ position as the “paraphrase” would have us believe.

1. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 373-4. ↩
   
2. Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Michael Kelly, Critique and Power : Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994) 149-50. ↩
   
3. For one of the more extended discussions, see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) 334-339, which draws on a 1991 interview with Habermas.
   ↩
4. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “What Is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 109–123, Richard Rorty, “The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism’.” in Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? : a Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001) 19-36, and Charles Taylor, “The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Ronald Beiner and W. J. Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 583–603. Taylor has informed me that he does not recall this paper as having anything to do with the proposed 1984 discussions.
   ↩
5. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” trans. Nicholas Walker in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’ Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 53 ↩
6. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (New York: Semiotexte, 1997) 95. ↩
   
7. I am quoting from the translation in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (New York: Semiotexte, 1997) 84. ↩
   
8. It may be worth noting that this passage is present in the transcript of the lecture of January 5, 1983. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 13. ↩

Ernst Cassirer

It is unfortunate that no one has gotten around to translating Michel Foucault’s 1966 review of the French translation of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der Aufklärung.¹ Granted, it is a short text and – prior to its reprinting in Foucault’s Dits et Ecrits – finding it required some (though not much) digging. But it is a text worth knowing: sensitive to the political context of Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment and sympathetic to his general approach. Had it been more widely known, it might have complicated certain assumptions about Foucault’s stance towards the Enlightenment. All of this is more than enough to suggest that the editor of What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions was guilty of a significant lapse in judgment when he failed to include it in his collection. The accused is not inclined contest that verdict and will try to make amends in this brief discussion of a text that deserves to be better known.

Foucault, A Counter-Enlightener?

Foucault was (and, in some quarters, still is) viewed as a critic and perhaps an outright enemy of the Enlightenment. In his 1980 Adorno Prize lecture Jürgen Habermas infamously classified him, along with Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida, as a “young conservative.”² The political implications of the term, which initially puzzled Anglophone readers, would not have been lost on Habermas’ Frankfurt audience: it had been used to designate those Weimar “conservative revolutionaries” (including Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ludwig Klages, Ernst Niekisch, Oswald Spenger, Othmar Spann, and Carl Schmitt) who, drawing on an unstable mixture of cultural pessimism and biologistic vitalism, mounted an attack on liberalism that valorized myth, violence, and actionism and provided intellectual support for National Socialism. ³

Once Habermas had the opportunity to meet Foucault, he tempered his rhetoric. But though he no longer implied that Foucault was a proto-Fascist, he continued to have reservations about what he saw as Foucault’s Nietzschean-inspired tendency to reduce all moral valuations to questions of aesthetic taste. Hewing closely to Habermas’ general argument, Richard Wolin placed Foucault among the latter-day members of the “Counter-Enlightenment.”⁴ Foucault also figures in Graeme Garrard’s Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth-Century to the Present (despite my general reservations about Berlin’s misguided notion, Garrard’s use of the plural is encouraging: if, as J. G. A. Pocock has emphasized, there are a variety of enlightenments, then it follows that there ought to be a diversity of counter-enlightenments).⁵ Finally, Foucault puts in a brief appearance in Vincent Descombes’ Barometer of Modern Reason – though Descombes’ charge that Foucault’s political positions demonstrate the same hypocrisy that Reinhart Koselleck sees as fundamental to the Enlightenment would appear to make Foucault a disciple of the Enlightenment, rather than a critic.⁶ The list could easily be extended, but without much profit.

Foucault, A Kantian?

Matters became much more confusing when, shortly before his death, Foucault began to invoke Kant’s essay on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and eventually went so far as to suggest that he thought what he was doing had something in common both with the work of the Frankfurt School and with Kant.⁷ This left Habermas to wonder how “Foucault’s self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment can be compatible with his unmistakable critique of precisely this form of knowledge, which is that of modernity?”⁸

He conjectured that Foucault, having recognized that he was caught in a contradiction (a contradiction that Habermas had himself diagnosed in his lectures on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), had been driven to reassess his position.

Only complex thought produces instructive contradictions. Kant became entangled in an instructive contradiction of this kind when he explained revolutionary enthusiasm as a historical sign that allow an intelligible disposition in the human race to appear within the phenomenal world. Equally instructive is the contradiction in which Foucault becomes entangled when he opposes his critique of power, disabled by the relevance of the contemporary moment, to the analytic of the true in such a way that the former is deprived of the normative standard it would have to derive from the latter. Perhaps it is the force or this contradiction that drew Foucault, in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.⁹

This conjecture, as John Rajchman argued, is premised on Foucault’s actually attempting to do what Habermas claimed he was attempting to do and failing to do it.  This overlooks the possibility that Foucault was simply doing something else.¹⁰ Rajchman’s complaint has its merits: at a minimum, it might make sense to consider whether Habermas and Foucault might have been engaged in two different projects. That one project might seem more promising than the other hardly counts as evidence that the less promising project was attempting to do what the more promising one was doing, but failing.

More recently, Amy Allen has argued that those who, like Habermas, see Foucault’s final discussions of Kant as amounting to a repudiation of his earlier, more critical stance, have misinterpreted Foucault’s treatment of Kant in Les mots et les choses.¹¹ She sees Tom Wartenberg and me as having fallen into the same error in our contribution in Michael Kelly’s collection Critique and Power.¹² Her argument rests, in part, on an analysis of Foucault’s account of Kant in the unpublished introduction to his 1964 secondary thesis (a translation of Kant’s Anthropology), a work that helps to clarify the discussion of Kant in Les mots et les choses.¹³ Foucault’s review of Cassirer (which Allen does not discuss) would also seem to lend support to what I take to be the general thrust of her argument.

Foucault’s Cassirer

Foucault’s discussion begins by noting that, though Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment dates from the 1930s, it is very much a work of our own time, provided we learn how to hear its message through the “background noise” that it sought to oppose, but which quickly engulfed it. He goes on to clarify this enigmatic claim by discussing the particular historical circumstances in which the book was published – “the Nazis stood at the gates of the Chancellery” – and to note Cassirer’s subsequent flight to Sweden (where Foucault also spent some time in the 1950s). Fleeing Germany, Cassirer left behind a “vast scholarly work” that, in reality, was a “manifesto.” Lest readers underestimate the significance of Cassirer’s gesture, Foucault goes on to stress the importance of the German university system in shaping the “moral conscience” of the nation: 1933 marks what he sees as an “irreparable defeat” in this effort and Cassirer’s study played an honorable role in the “final combat.”

At this point, the review shifts its focus in a way that makes the relevance of Cassirer’s study for Foucault’s own work abundantly clear. What is at stake is the implication of the almost hackneyed characterization of Cassirer as a “neo-Kantian.” For Foucault, this familiar term amounts to something more than the name of a school of thought. Instead it signifies

the inability of Western thought to overcome the break (coupure) effected by Kant; neo-Kantianism (in this sense, we are all neo-Kantians) is the ever-repeated injunction to reiterate this break – both to recover its necessity and to take its measure.

Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment matters for Foucault, then, because in contrast to his other works it grapples with historical, rather than epistemological, questions, with those “fatalities of reflection and of knowledge” that Kant made possible and which have gone on to become fundamental for the constitution of modern thought.

Interrogation doubles back on itself: Kant asked how science could be possible, Cassirer asked how this Kantianism to which we appear to belong was possible.

This is, in many respects, a familiar, and not always charitable, way of reading Cassirer’s study: as Quentin Skinner once quipped, the book reads as if the entire Enlightenment had been struggling to make Kant possible. But, for Foucault, the proleptic character of Philosophy of the Enlightenment is not a weakness: it is the source of the book’s importance.

Medusa, Nietzsche, and Other Monstrosities

Kantianism, Foucault argues, stands as “the Medusa of western thought”: the modern world was born at the close of the eighteenth-century with the release of what he characterizes as a “double nostalgia”. The eighteenth-century closes with both a renewed nostalgia for the Greek world and a nostalgia for the certainties of the eighteenth century itself. The former gave rise to a series of reflections on the Hellenic legacy that runs from Hölderlin to Heidegger. The latter spawned the regime of the modern Aufklärer (a word that, like Aufklärung itself, Foucault consistently left in German), which runs “from Marx to Levi-Strauss.” Nietzsche – a “monstrosity” (in the sense in which the term was used in eighteenth-century natural philosophy) – belongs to both camps. This means that what Habermas would later dub the “philosophical discourse of modernity” was, for Foucault, defined by a fundamental dilemma:

Being Greek or Aufklärer, on the side of tragedy or the Encyclopédie, on the side of poetry or the well-made language, the side of the morning of being or the noon of representation, that is the dilemma that modern thought … could never escape.

In this reckoning Cassirer, of course, belongs to the party of the Aufklärer and there is an understandable tendency to assume that Foucault belongs with the Greeks. After all, he prefaced Folie et Déraison with the announcement that this massive and complex study would be:

only the first, and probably the easiest, in this long line of enquiry which, beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest, would confront the dialectics of history with the immobile structures of the tragic.

But it might be better to see Foucault, like Nietzsche, as a “monstrosity” with feet in both camps. Or, to dispense with the metaphors and speak more plainly (a skill that, as his lectures at the Collège de France demonstrate, Foucault would later master), confronting the “dialectics of history” with “the immobile structure of the tragic” is not necessarily the same thing as opting for the one instead of the other. The value of such confrontations may lie in their helping us to understand those things that escape the necessarily limited perspectives of the contestants.

With Cassirer, Contra Hazard, and Perhaps Alongside Habermas

Paul Hazard

For Foucault, then, what Cassirer was offering represented a useful corrective to the French tendency to accord too much prestige to psychology. Their approach to cultures and systems of thought was captive to the metaphor of “the individual,” with the result that epochs and civilizations were assumed to be individual subjects writ large:

an ‘age’ (siècle) has, like everything else, consciousness, opinions, anxieties, aspirations; Paul Hazard, in Cassirer’s time, described the crisis of the European consciousness.

Cassirer, in constrast, worked according to what Foucault characterized as a “fundamental abstraction.” He dispensed with any discussion of individual motivations, biographical accidents, and minor thinkers and, at the same time, suspended any discussion of economic and social determinants. This left him with “an inextricable web of discourse and thought, of concepts and words, of énoncés and affirmations,” which he then proceeded to analyze “in its own configuration.” His object of study was an “autonomous universe of ‘discours-pensée‘” that “isolates from all other histories the autonomous space of ‘the theoretical’.” In this way, Cassirer uncovered “a history that had remained silent.”

In studying the texts of the eighteenth century, Cassirer grasped, in the unity of its historical forms, the organization of the “discours-pensé” that characterizes a culture, defining the forms of its knowledge.

In short, the author of Les mots et les choses appears to have felt that the author of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung was very much a kindred spirit:  both were attempting to understand how cultures were shaped by an a priori that was historical, rather than transcendental.

While granting that Cassirer’s approach — particularly in the emphasis that it placed on philosophy — still betrayed the lingering influence of the “traditional history of ideas” (a problem that Foucault would attempt to remedy in his Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault nevertheless saw it as an approach that might serve as a model for current work, and not just because it avoided the use of concepts such as “the concrete,” “lived experience,” and “totality” — all of which belonged, in Foucault’s view, to “the realm of not-knowing.” What he saw Cassirer as providing was an account of the Enlightenment that did not limit it, as had been the tradition, to England and France and which steadfastly refused to play the game of looking “for missing pieces and warning signs of the future.” The great achievement of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was to have

restored the simultaneity and generality of all that was contemporary in the eighteenth century: atheism and deism, materialism and metaphysics, conception of morality and of beauty, multiple theories of morality and of the state, and shows how they belong together.

In the work of Cassirer, that great Kantian, Foucault found an understanding of the Enlightenment that might profitably have been brought into confrontation with the account of the “Project of Enlightenment” that Jürgen Habermas, marrying Kant and Max Weber, would sketch in the same lecture in which he misidentified Foucault as a “young conservative.” Fortunately, they would later discover that they had a good deal in common, including an interest in Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Sadly their discussion of this question would never take place.

1. Foucault, “Une histoire restée muette,” La Quinzaine littéraire n° 8, 1er-15 juillet, 1966, pp. 3- 4. ↩
2. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity:  An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’ Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 38–55. ↩
3. For discussions of the concept, see Hans-Jurgen Puhle, “Conservatism in Modern German History,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 4 (October 1978): 709-10 and Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) 154-5. ↩
4. Wolin’s most extensive account of Foucault is in his The Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). He also figures, in passing, in Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, which is launched by an Introduction that carries the title, “Answer to the Question: What is Counter-Enlightenment?” – as far as I can see, it doesn’t appear to give an answer. ↩
5. Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). ↩
6. Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason (New York: Oxford, 1993) 37-40. ↩
7. The relevant texts have been collected in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). ↩
8. Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Michael Kelly, ed.. Critique and Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 152. ↩
9. Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” 154 . ↩
10. John Rajchman, “Habermas’s Complaint.” New German Critique, no. 45 (1988): 163-191. I’ve attempted to elaborate this general argument in “Habermas on Foucault” in Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, editor, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). ↩
11. Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves : Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). ↩
12. I’m inclined to think that Tom and I weren’t quite as guilty as she suggests: the opening two paragraphs expressing skepticism about Foucault’s “Kantianism,” like the third paragraph, which discusses Foucault’s reputation as a critic of the Enlightenment, were intended as premises that we would be criticizing. Perhaps that could have been made clearer. I should mention, though, that thanks to discussions with Manfred Kuehn I now realize that what I said about Kant and maxims on p. 306 is just wrong (this idiocy was my doing, not Tom’s). ↩
13. Robert Louden has written a detailed critique of Foucault’s account of the Anthropology, which helps to clarify some of its misinterpretations (perhaps inevitable, given the time when it was written). It will be appearing in a Spanish translation in the journal Estudos Kantianos. One can only hope that it will be made available in English as well. ↩

I will take my leave from this series of posts on the translation of the first sentence of Kant’s answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” with a consideration of how translators have handled Ausgang,the word that characterizes the passage out of the state of selbtsverschuldeten Unmündigkeit in which human beings have found themselves. Unlike Unmündigkeit, the Ausgang has no legal or philosophical implications. My big Langenscheidt suggests exit, way out, egress, going out, outing (in the sense of picnics), time off, end, termination, close, result, issue, outcome, upshot, starting point, outgoing, termination, outlet, mouth, debouchment, denouement, entrance, output, and a few other words.

Here is how the eleven translations I’ve been considering deal with the word.

1. emergence
   John Richardson, in Kant, Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious, and Various Philosophical Subjects (London: William Richardson: 1798-99)
2. emerges
   Sarah Austin, Fragments from German Prose Writers (New York: Appleton, 1841)
3. advance
   Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant translated under the author’s supervision by J. Frederick Smith (London: MacMillan & Co. 1890)
4. leaving
   Carl Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant, (New York: Modern Library, 1949)
5. release
   Lewis White Beck, in Kant, On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)
6. emergence
   H. B. Nisbet in H. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
7. emergence
   Ted Humphrey in Kant,Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983)
8. release
   Leo Rauch and Lieselotte Anderson, in Kant, Foundations of Ethics (Millis MA: Agora Publications 1995)
9. exit
   James Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
10. emergence
    Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
11. emancipation
    David Colclasure and Pauline Kleingeld, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven, Yale 2006)

The clear favorite is “emergence”, which was first used by John Richardson, the first translator of the essay. If we include Austin’s “emerges” in our tally — Richardson’s choice was taken up in five other translations. After that, we have two uses of “release” and one for each of the others: “advance,” “leaving,” “exit,” and “emancipation.”

At first glance, it is not clear that much hangs on how the word is handled. Austin’s translation (“A man is enlightened when he emerges from a state of self-imposed pupilage”) is the most problematic of the lot, but for reasons that would appear to have little to do with her translation of Ausgang. As I mentioned in the second post in this series, her translation makes it appear as if “enlightenment” a state that one achieves, as opposed to an action that removes one from a condition (that of a selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit), but doesn’t specify the condition at which we arrive as a result of the activity known as “enlightenment.” It is worth recalling that later in the essay Kant poses the question as to whether we are now living in an “enlightened age”, to which he answers: “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” He also, in an important discussion in §40 of the book whose title is now translated as Critique of the Power of Judgment, defined Aufklärung in terms of “not being passive with his reason but always being legislative for himself …” and then went on to explain that this “merely negative manner of thinking” was rather difficult to maintain.¹ In other words, “enlightenment” is best thought of as an escape from something, rather than a particular destination.

But our understanding of how to characterize the condition at which we arrive as the result of our efforts at enlightenment may have implications for the translation of Ausgang, the term that characterizes the process that brings us to that condition. Since the opposite of Unmündigkeit is, of course Mündigkeit, we might be tempted to use that term as a way of specifying what “enlightenment” achieves. This suggests that, had Austin been consistent, she might have translated the opening sentence as “A man is enlightened when he is no longer in a state of pupilage.” But she didn’t and, indeed, couldn’t: the sort of Unmündigkeit on which enlightenment works is an Unmündigkeit that is selbstverschuldet, i.e., an “immaturity” for which the individual is in some way responsible. There are, then, a variety of different forms of “pupilage” and it is possible to leave some behind and still not be enlightened.

Kant goes on to note that the natural process of growing older removes us from our state of “natural immaturity” and thereby makes us “mature” in the natural and, perhaps, legal sense (Kant, following the legal conventions of his day, assumes that it doesn’t work that way for women). In these cases, we have achieved a state of Mündigkeit, but it is not at all clear that we are necessarily “enlightened”: Kant suggests that there are any number of adult males who are incapable of thinking for themselves. Achieving the particular state of Mündigkeit that is associated with having “achieved enlightenment” (assuming, for the moment, that this is a formulation that Kant permits) requires something more than attaining the condition of “natural majority” at which we arrive simply by checking off the required number of birthdays (few things are as passive as growing older: it’s not something we do, it’s something that happens to us). This suggests that the sort of Mündigkeit we are attempting to achieve through the process of enlightenment requires further specification. That further specification will need to take the form of a modifier that is the opposite of “selbstverschuldeten” — e.g., what we are trying to achieve would seem to be a state of maturity that we bring about, rather than one that is imposed on us by the natural process of growing older

Some Help from Habermas

We can get a sense of the sort of word we need by taking a look at what Habermas’ translators have done. The term Mündigkeit looms large in Jürgen Habermas’ writings from the 1960s. Indeed, in a famous passage from his Frankfurt Inaugural lecture, that sketched the outlines of the argument he was to present in his book Erkenntnis und Interesse (which, for reasons that once puzzled me, was translated into English as Knowledge and Human Interests²), he stated:

The human interest in Mündigkeit is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, Mündigkeit is posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Mündigkeit constitutes the only Idea that we possess a priori in the sense of the philosophical tradition.³

In his translation of Knowledge and Human Interests, Jeremy Shapiro employed the phrase “autonomy and responsibility”, a few years later, John Vietel used “mature autonomy” and offered the following explanation of Mündigkeit in his Translator’s Note:

literally “majority” in the sense of “legally of age.” For Kant mankind’s “majority” is the historical goal of enlightenment (in “What is Enlightenment?”). To preserve this developmental connotation I have generally preferred “mature autonomy.⁴

Solutions such as these are a bit more understandable in light of the difficulties of understanding what condition we are in when we have overcome a state of “self-incurred immaturity”: it would have to be a maturity for which we were ourselves responsible, a maturity that we brought about as a result of our having the courage to think for ourselves.

What to Do About Ausgang

Because Kant does not burden the concept of Mündigkeit with these sort of considerations (the burden, instead, falls on the concept of “autonomy” itself), he did not pose quite the same problem for his translators as Habermas did for his. As a result, none of the translations we have been looking at have to come up with a way of indicating that the maturity that we arrive at through the process of enlightenment is a maturity for which we ourselves are responsible. But this issue strikes me as having significant implications for the translation of Ausgang, implications that might not have been immediately apparent to the translators (and I suppose this is as good a place as any to confess that none of this occurred to me until I started writing these posts).

What troubles me about “emergence” is that it is too passive, a passivity that is only enhanced, in Austin’s case, by her use of “pupilage,” which set me to thinking about the pupa emerging from cocoons as butterflies: a nice image, perhaps, but not at all what Kant was after. “Release” and “emancipation” have much the same problem. We do talk about “releasing” ourselves from various external encumbrances (e.g., releasing seat-belts), but we also talk about people releasing us from certain obligations or, indeed, working with us to show us how we can free ourselves from certain impediments we might have. This does seem to be where Kant winds up when he moves on to emphasize the ways in which enlightenment is a collective undertaking, practiced by a “public.” But exploring that point (and talking about its possible tension with the opening paragraph) is beyond the limited scope of these posts, though I have touched on it in the brief discussion of Horace’s sapere aude that launched this blog and may have to revisit it in later discussions. “Emancipation” is, if anything, more problematic: unless I’m missing something (and that happens quite a bit), it is typically an act that others perform for those who have been subjugated (which explains why we need, in particular cases, to use the phrase “self-emancipation”). This leaves us with Carl Friedrich’s “leaving” and my “exit,” both of which strike me as avoiding the passivity that plague the other translations of Ausgang and convey, however weakly, the sense that enlightenment is an activity that we ourselves perform on ourselves.

Where Foucault Got it Right

In opting for “exit” I allowed my reason to be guided by one particular discussion of Kant’s essay: that of Michel Foucault. In his Berkeley lecture on the question “What is Enlightenment?” he argued that, for Kant, the concept of Aufklärung

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.”⁵

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there are a few minor problems with Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s essay. But they pale in comparison with how much he got right, which means that his lecture has much to tell us both about how to translate Ausgang and, more importantly, about how to think about the question Kant was trying to answer. And, while I’ve have (at last) finished thinking about how to translate the opening sentence of Kant’s little essay, I’m far from finished thinking about Kant’s essay. And I’ve come to think that the best account of why it is so difficult ever to be finished with thinking about the questions that Kant’s answer poses in the one that Foucault offered. I hope to say more about that in future posts.

1. AA 5:294 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 174 ↩
2. Tom MacCarthy once told me that the rationale for translating it this way was to stress that the “interests” that concerned Habermas were interests that were central to the reproduction of the species, as opposed to the various more specific interests that individuals may have. I suppose this makes sense, though I’ve come to wonder whether translating the title as Knowledge and Interests might have allowed English readers to see that this book was — perhaps unintentionally — inviting a contrast with several other famous books whose titles also included two nouns joined by the conjunction “and.” In any case, it’s a book that gets nowhere near enough love these days. ↩
3. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans; Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 19 ) 314 (translation modified). ↩
4. Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) viii. ↩
5. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Random House, 1984) 34. ↩