WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?
BY: MICHEL FOUCAULT
"What is Enlightenment ?" ("Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ?"), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The
Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect
opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not
much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred
to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know
whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more
entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical,
Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ?
And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the
history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of
answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been
repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or
Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront
this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the
Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and
what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and
that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we
could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to
answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
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Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several reasons.
1.To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just
two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text when he wrote his. To
be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new
development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn
had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to
this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German
thought -- which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying
problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what
Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With
the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the
Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to
identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of
announcing the acceptance of a common destiny -- we now know to what drama that
was to lead.
2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses a
new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its
own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until
then taken three main forms.
---The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct
from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by
some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they
belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning
backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
---The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of
a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics
of which Augustine might provide an example.
---The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a
new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what
he sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for a few
great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ... radiant with such
humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human
life.' [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither
a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the
dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative
way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his other texts on history, Kant
occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical
process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality
alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a
future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today
introduce with respect to yesterday ?
3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear
despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to
me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of
the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is a
process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' he means
a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in
areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a
state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a
spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what
our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy
to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case,
Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will,
authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous
manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents
it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself
is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able
to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself.
Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch
is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and
it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What,
then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity,
to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men
participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men
are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process
to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men
decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word "mankind",
Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well
known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of
Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change
that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or
are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity
of human beings ? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here
again, Kant's answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its
appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its
immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical
and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of
reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant
invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; such is, according to
him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are
usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey,
but when men are told: 'Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We
must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used
in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which
reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning's sake. And
Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one's
taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation,
would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish
service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant,
since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases
so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another
distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between
the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in
its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the
opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use
of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of
reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play in society
and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a
civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds
himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular
rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and
foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these
determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in
view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one
is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is
reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and
public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see
their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the
universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can readily
see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the
subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use
may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it;
but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must
not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be
conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a
political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason
can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in
broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant,
in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract --
what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public
and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on
condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in
conformity with universal reason.
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Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable
of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think,
could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural
transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give
it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the
connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact
describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason
to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that
the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which
the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be
done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to
dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the
legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can
be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in
Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and the
other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the
internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving.
Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity's passage to its
adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its
basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each
individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the
crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on
the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a
philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But
it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way,
closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a
reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is
writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as
difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty
of this text appears to me to lie.
And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of
departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features
characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or
less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling
'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the
sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a
rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather
as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of relating to
contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of
thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time
marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what
the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the
'modern era' from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to
try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself
struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable
example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized
as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
1.Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of
time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing
moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines
modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2] But, for him, being
modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the
contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this
deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not
beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from
fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is
the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment.
Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to
'heroize' the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his
contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding
nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But
modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing
onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as
'the necessary costume of our time,' the one who knows how to make manifest, in the
fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains
with death. 'The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty,
which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an
expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes (mutes in
love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.'
[3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes
that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 'You have no
right to despise the present.'
2.This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat
the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly
does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be
what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling
spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a
storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of
modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this
solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great
human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general,
something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that
quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to
extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an
example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a
spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger wherever there can
be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a
passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display
themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the
depraved animal.' [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the
modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole world
is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration
does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of
what is real and the exercise of freedom; 'natural' things become 'more than natural,'
'beautiful' things become 'more than beautiful,' and individual objects appear
'endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude of
modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to
imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but
by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme
attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously
respects this reality and violates it.
3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the
present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The
deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern
is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take
oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the
vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known
passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on man's indispensable revolt against himself;
on the 'doctrine of elegance' which imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples'
a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the
asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and
passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the
man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man
who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it
compels him to face the task of producing himself.
4.Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this
transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self --
Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body
politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire
calls art.
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I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical
event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of
modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of
philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to
the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an
autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been
seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not
faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude
-- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of
our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
1.This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the
Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social,
institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a
privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the
progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a
philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried
to show with reference to Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of
philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even
means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form
of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and
remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by
some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the
Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be
seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by
introducing 'dialectical' nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad
elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically
determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series
of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be
oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential kernel of rationality' that can be found in
the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be
oriented toward the 'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not
or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions
between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and
complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of
European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of
political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and
practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if
many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that
seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection
concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that
have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes
always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well
as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical
principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that
presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a
Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the
nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward
science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism
has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when
people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when
the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with
humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too
diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least
since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to
lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics.
Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all
obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which
always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a
permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart
of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this
standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather
than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically
inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important
throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the
Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that
throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism
which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always
distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth
century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to
confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail
of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral
confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment.
An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be
a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to
the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more
positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what
we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not
talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and
reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits
knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question
today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal
necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and
the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique
conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the
form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced
in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical
investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize
ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this
criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics
possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.
Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify
the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek
to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many
historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not
deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know;
but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not
seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking
to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it
seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I
mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a
realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of
contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable,
and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the
historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be
global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the
system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another
society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has
led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last
twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking,
relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive
insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in
the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a
new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth
century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of
ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as
work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit
ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk
of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well
not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a
point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of
what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical
and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving
beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of
beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency.
The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its
stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of capacity
and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth
century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional
growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that
throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of
their singular historical destiny is located -- such a peculiar destiny, so different from
the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the
others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted
permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the
growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed.
And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by
various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or
institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication):
disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in
the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are
examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be
disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are taking
as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of
themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather
what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their
ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom
with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do,
modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic
side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus
ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic
side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things,
relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of
these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over
things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always
entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity
and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of
power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to
answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries
which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address
the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own
knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power
relations ? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they
always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and
discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we
derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to
our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or
sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations;
and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its
metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What
must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are
exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but
determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines
objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of
problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a
chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their
historically unique form.
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A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our
experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us
mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a
meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves
which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's
reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or
effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be
considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of
knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a
philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the
historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the
possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries.
These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and
genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of
rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in
the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations
to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical
coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to
the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the
critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task
requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for
liberty.
Notes------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G.
Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.
[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.
[3] Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, trans.
Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.
[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.
[5] Ibid., p. 12.
BY: MICHEL FOUCAULT
"What is Enlightenment ?" ("Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ?"), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The
Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect
opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not
much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred
to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know
whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more
entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical,
Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ?
And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the
history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of
answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been
repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or
Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront
this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the
Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and
what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and
that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we
could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to
answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
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Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several reasons.
1.To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just
two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text when he wrote his. To
be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new
development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn
had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to
this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German
thought -- which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying
problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what
Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With
the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the
Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to
identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of
announcing the acceptance of a common destiny -- we now know to what drama that
was to lead.
2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses a
new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its
own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until
then taken three main forms.
---The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct
from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by
some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they
belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning
backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
---The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of
a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics
of which Augustine might provide an example.
---The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a
new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what
he sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for a few
great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ... radiant with such
humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human
life.' [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither
a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the
dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative
way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his other texts on history, Kant
occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical
process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality
alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a
future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today
introduce with respect to yesterday ?
3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear
despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to
me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of
the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is a
process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' he means
a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in
areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a
state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a
spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what
our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy
to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case,
Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will,
authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous
manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents
it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself
is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able
to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself.
Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch
is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and
it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What,
then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity,
to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men
participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men
are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process
to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men
decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word "mankind",
Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well
known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of
Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change
that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or
are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity
of human beings ? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here
again, Kant's answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its
appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its
immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical
and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of
reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant
invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; such is, according to
him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are
usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey,
but when men are told: 'Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We
must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used
in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which
reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning's sake. And
Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one's
taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation,
would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish
service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant,
since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases
so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another
distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between
the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in
its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the
opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use
of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of
reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play in society
and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a
civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds
himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular
rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and
foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these
determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in
view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one
is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is
reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and
public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see
their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the
universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can readily
see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the
subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use
may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it;
but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must
not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be
conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a
political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason
can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in
broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant,
in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract --
what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public
and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on
condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in
conformity with universal reason.
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Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable
of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think,
could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural
transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give
it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the
connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact
describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason
to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that
the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which
the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be
done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to
dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the
legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can
be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in
Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and the
other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the
internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving.
Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity's passage to its
adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its
basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each
individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the
crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on
the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a
philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But
it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way,
closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a
reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is
writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as
difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty
of this text appears to me to lie.
And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of
departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features
characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or
less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling
'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the
sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a
rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather
as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of relating to
contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of
thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time
marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what
the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the
'modern era' from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to
try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself
struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable
example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized
as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
1.Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of
time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing
moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines
modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2] But, for him, being
modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the
contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this
deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not
beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from
fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is
the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment.
Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to
'heroize' the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his
contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding
nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But
modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing
onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as
'the necessary costume of our time,' the one who knows how to make manifest, in the
fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains
with death. 'The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty,
which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an
expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes (mutes in
love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.'
[3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes
that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 'You have no
right to despise the present.'
2.This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat
the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly
does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be
what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling
spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a
storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of
modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this
solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great
human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general,
something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that
quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to
extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an
example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a
spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger wherever there can
be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a
passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display
themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the
depraved animal.' [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the
modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole world
is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration
does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of
what is real and the exercise of freedom; 'natural' things become 'more than natural,'
'beautiful' things become 'more than beautiful,' and individual objects appear
'endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude of
modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to
imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but
by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme
attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously
respects this reality and violates it.
3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the
present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The
deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern
is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take
oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the
vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known
passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on man's indispensable revolt against himself;
on the 'doctrine of elegance' which imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples'
a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the
asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and
passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the
man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man
who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it
compels him to face the task of producing himself.
4.Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this
transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self --
Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body
politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire
calls art.
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I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical
event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of
modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of
philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to
the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an
autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been
seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not
faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude
-- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of
our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
1.This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the
Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social,
institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a
privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the
progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a
philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried
to show with reference to Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of
philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even
means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form
of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and
remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by
some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the
Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be
seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by
introducing 'dialectical' nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad
elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically
determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series
of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be
oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential kernel of rationality' that can be found in
the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be
oriented toward the 'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not
or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions
between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and
complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of
European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of
political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and
practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if
many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that
seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection
concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that
have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes
always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well
as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical
principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that
presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a
Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the
nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward
science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism
has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when
people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when
the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with
humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too
diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least
since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to
lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics.
Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all
obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which
always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a
permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart
of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this
standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather
than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically
inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important
throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the
Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that
throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism
which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always
distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth
century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to
confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail
of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral
confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment.
An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be
a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to
the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more
positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what
we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not
talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and
reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits
knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question
today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal
necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and
the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique
conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the
form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced
in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical
investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize
ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this
criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics
possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.
Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify
the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek
to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many
historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not
deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know;
but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not
seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking
to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it
seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I
mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a
realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of
contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable,
and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the
historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be
global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the
system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another
society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has
led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last
twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking,
relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive
insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in
the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a
new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth
century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of
ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as
work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit
ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk
of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well
not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a
point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of
what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical
and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving
beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of
beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency.
The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its
stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of capacity
and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth
century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional
growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that
throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of
their singular historical destiny is located -- such a peculiar destiny, so different from
the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the
others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted
permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the
growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed.
And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by
various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or
institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication):
disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in
the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are
examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be
disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are taking
as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of
themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather
what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their
ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom
with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do,
modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic
side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus
ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic
side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things,
relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of
these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over
things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always
entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity
and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of
power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to
answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries
which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address
the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own
knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power
relations ? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they
always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and
discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we
derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to
our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or
sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations;
and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its
metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What
must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are
exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but
determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines
objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of
problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a
chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their
historically unique form.
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A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our
experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us
mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a
meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves
which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's
reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or
effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be
considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of
knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a
philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the
historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the
possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries.
These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and
genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of
rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in
the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations
to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical
coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to
the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the
critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task
requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for
liberty.
Notes------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G.
Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.
[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.
[3] Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, trans.
Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.
[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.
[5] Ibid., p. 12.